Plan to break up Noaa claims its research is ‘climate alarmism’ and calls for commercializing forecasts, weakening forecasts

Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.

Joe Biden’s presidency has increased theprofile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.

The plan to “break up Noaa is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.

The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.

That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming.

  • thesystemisdown@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The headline gives far too much attention to Trump and buries the lede. If there is another Republican president, they will be expected to toe the line. This is the initiative of Project 2025. This is the Republican playbook.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      This isn’t a Putin thing, this is an ideology and corporatism thing. They hate the NOAA because it dares to present the very apparent evidence that climate change is happening without doing much editorializing about it, but they also hate it because the National Weather Service is public and AccuWeather is private. They want AccuWeather to predict our nation’s weather. Which is a huge problem.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AccuWeather#Criticisms

        • snooggums@midwest.social
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          6 months ago

          Just like social security, the post office, medicaid/medicare, welfare, and every other public service the government provides that the Republicans are dismantling.

          Yet they convinced the people who benefit from all of those things the most to vote for them.

      • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Coincidentally, climate denial and more power to the private sector is exactly what Putin wants.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Maybe so, but their climate change denial pre-dates Putin’s leadership by as long time and is entirely about corporatism.

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        If the world warms and the tundra thaws guess who’s the new breadbasket of the world?

        Yeah it’s shortsighted but the motherfuckers invaded Ukraine and act like no one should care

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      and help putin

      This is old school Grover Norquist

      I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

      bureaucratic abolitionism.

      • eran_morad@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Please. This isn’t about small gummint, those fucking asshole traitors could fuck off out of our private lives and doctors’ offices. They’re perfectly happy to expand gummint reach when it serves to oppress Americans.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Norquist was an absolutist, and would have probably been very happy if every aspect of the state - from the Post Office to the Pentagon - was run by a corporate entity.

          There are definitely different interpretations of his anti-government philosophy. But if you were going to name a Russian who has influenced the current state of affairs, I’d point to Ayn Rand long before I called out Vladimir.

    • trebuchet@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      This is a new one on me. Never seen people trying to tie Putin to climate change before. Might as well can him the boogeymonster at this point with the way everything bad is attributed to him online.

      Is there any evidence Putin is pro-global climate change or is this one of those “it just makes sense” sort of things?

      Are we presuming the heads of Exxon and the other big corporations that have been destroying the planet with actual leaked documents receipts to prove they’ve been behind the suppression of the science and lobbying the Republicans on this also on Russia’s payroll?

      • dhork@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Russia’s main exports are oil and natural gas. If the world reduces its reliance on fossil fuels, and demand appreciably shrinks, Russia loses economic power.

        So it’s not so much that Putin is against climate change, as it is that Russia benefits directly if the effects of climate change is de-emphasized, and the world continues to burn fossil fuels.

        • trebuchet@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          So there’s no evidence whatsoever then.

          This conspiracy theory makes as much sense as claiming the reason Republicans are against global warming is Saudi Arabia.

          People on this site lose their minds when the word Russia or Putin appears in a sentence. We don’t need dehumanized foreign bad guys to explain away and play cover for the actual bad guys we have domestically in the United States. We have the receipts. It’s Exxon and other big corps, not Russia.

          • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            While I agree that it’s not right to tie this specific issue to Russia. It’s perfectly reasonable to think Putin wants more climate change. They ALSO want more continuous shipping of their fossil fuels out of the North Sea, which climate change benefits. They also have expanded growing regions and seasons in a warmer world.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Good. We need to predict the weather like Jesus intended us to: the feeling in grandpa’s bad knee that rain is a-comin’.

    • DBT@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      It sounds silly, but this is actually a thing when you get old for some stupid reason.

        • DBT@lemmy.world
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          I was speaking from experience. My old tendinitis injury seems to return briefly whenever a cold rain is about to happen.

          Edit:

          lol. I’ll have to pay more attention in the future. I swear it’s true tho.

          Does research matter when you have personal experience?

          That’s a fair question. And it’s something I’ve even heard in TV commercials about headache medicines: “I don’t care about the research. I just know what works for me.” But it’s worth remembering that humans have a remarkable tendency to remember when two things occur or change together (such as wet, gloomy weather and joint pain), but remember less when things do not occur together. That rainy day when you felt no better or worse is unlikely to be so notable that you remember it. If you rely solely on memory rather than on more rigorous, data-based evidence, it’s easy to conclude a link exists where, in fact, none does.

  • dhork@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    He’s just mad at the hurricanes for not doing what his sharpie told them to

      • dhork@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Haven’t you heard? He has total immunity for everything, as long as either a majority of the House or 34 Senators are willing to let him do it.

        He can totally grab that hurricane by the pussy if he wants to.

    • Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Exactly. He’s that fucking petty that no other motivation is needed to explain this. There isn’t any long term scheme here. It’s simply that he got embarrassed and has to get revenge.

  • snekerpimp@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Can’t wait for these old farts to suffer the consequences of their actions……. Oh wait, they won’t

    • prole@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      And even if they did, they’d find a way to blame it on someone else. Probably Democrats.

  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Dismantling NOAA is surrendering our military capability. We’re the world’s premiere air and sea power. That’s why we have an entire longstanding government agency for monitoring the ocean and atmosphere. It helps with farming and policy and emergency response sure, but don’t kid yourself, NOAA exists to ensure we never lose a major military asset to weather without taking a calculated risk.

  • Asafum@feddit.nl
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    6 months ago

    It’s making me very upset to find that I seem to have an endless capacity for hate when it comes to these fucking parasites.

    I like to think of myself as a compassionate person, but then I find myself somehow even more angry at these sorry excuses for human beings.

    I can’t fucking believe they’re going to win and just how much we stand to lose…

    “Woke” “climate terrorists” “communism” “Christian persecution”

    These are the fucking things that are driving people to vote for Republicans and it’s working. …I just can’t even anymore…

    • Delusional@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      It’s times like these that I like to remind myself that humans are just stupid animals on this planet and eventually everything perishes.

      Now back to spending most of my life working for shit wages at a company that doesn’t care about it’s employees.

  • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    After thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that climate change is actually completely in the far right’s advantage:

    -It’ll make the poor poorer and the rich richer

    -It can be used as a “demon” to scare people into submission, or the other way around, by denying it

    -It can be used to divide the populace further along the lines of race, age, education… (and not along class lines, as it should be)

    -It will exacerbate current issues and divides between well-off nations and poor ones

    It’s win/win for them. The other political side actually has to be able to prove things somewhat in order to use climate change as something to garner votes. For the far right, it suffices to either pretend it doesn’t exist or to laugh at it.

    • Mog_fanatic@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      This polarizing aspect of the whole thing has really confused me for this very reason as well as a few others. I think about it a lot like flat earth. In both cases the opponents or “deniers” for lack of a better term point largely to this like conglomerate corpo science-y entity that has a rooted financial interest in spreading these lies all for monetary gain. This idea that “big science” genuinely wants people to believe in a fake scenario of the earth’s clomate getting fucked by humans is so strange. And this works politically too.

      Like I don’t have any research to back this up but I’d bet my left ass cheek that the large majority of climate scientists AS WELL as climate progressive politicians would absolutely love there to be completely no issue with climate change. Given the choice, not having to worry at all about that for the present and future would just be a big load off every one’s plate. Now I’m sure there are some people that have a lot of their eggs in the renewable, green energy basket and could stand to gain prosperity from society moving in a green energy direction. There’s no doubt. But something tells me that they are more or less cancelled out by the amount of people who are already profiting or stand to profit more from petroleum based energy means.

      I just don’t get the whole realistic motive behind scientists and politicians pushing an agenda that they know to be false. Do people really think scientists don’t have anything better to do than just make stuff up? Genuinely? And it’s not like just a few of them. We’re talking well over 90% are pushing this fake agenda. That is complete and utter market saturation lol. I just can’t fathom how that would work. Just like the flat earth thing, what is there to gain from this for the large majority of these people? Like why?

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    calls for commercializing forecasts

    As usual, the hyperpartisan bullshit (climate change denial) is the cover, while corporate handouts/regulatory capture (in this case, to Accuweather) is the grift behind the grift.

  • rayyy@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The GOP today has no interest in climate truth, honesty, integrity, compassion or intelligence, only self-serving greed and power. Of course the “poorly educated” and Russian propagandized class go right along with it.

  • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    dismantling NOAA would likely kill a lot of people as they provide tools to predict flooding etc. It would probably be as disasterous as dismantling USGS

  • ekZepp@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    That alone wouldn’t be so bad… If Reality would actually give a shit about politics agendas, i mean.

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Actually, dismantling the agency that tells people when there’s a hurricane coming without a profit motive that might affect forecasts IS pretty damn bad in and of itself!

  • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The fuck? The science established for weather tracking has gotten so good so fast, trusting the weatherman went from being a meme to being prophetic almost overnight. I get notifications about weather phenomena akin to the future segment in back to the future 2.

  • Blaster M@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Team Red has it in their heads that all the temperature and climate measuring tools are all bunk data because they were installed in areas that have since urbanised, causing an artificial shift in temperatures.

    So they haven’t countered yet when I mention that satellite rangefinding equipment can accurately measure the average sea level and its rise… and that an erroneous reading due to something like periodic heat from a barbecue or whatever doesn’t affect the average in any significant way.

    • trebuchet@lemmy.ml
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      Team Red doesn’t actually have anything of the sort in their heads. They already decided on the conclusion, which is that climate change is fake, and then they grasp on whatever the flavor du jour is for the rationalization on why it’s true. That might happen to be this thing you’re saying about measuring tools in urbanized areas, but if you cut that down they’ll just switch to some other rationalization.

      You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t arrive at with reason in the first place.