You must log in or # to comment.
All these scientists and employees will be gone, permanently, leaving the US unable to operate services critical to national security. Climatology and meteorology are vital to agriculture. Food bills will skyrocket if harvests are blown or even reduced. And saving a few billion on the budget is nothing compared to the economic damage of the Atlantic coast and Gulf states being shredded by hurricanes unpredictably. Like, it’s not even climate mitigation, it’s tornado sirens telling you to get out of the area.
And it would take 3x what is saved to retrain a workforce and rebuild/repair the infrastructure.
Collapse of empire and accelerated collapse of Earth’s biosphere, wonderful!
Time for the American century of humiliation. Fires? Hurricanes? Wet bulb heat waves? Floods? We don’t know how or why it happened. If it affects you it’s your problem
Supply Side Jesus did it because the people did not give enough of their money to the bourgeois.
Worth pointing out that those gov budget tables use the number in thousands so what you’re looking at is millions and millions being slashed at NOAA. All while weather is getting visibly more insane year to year. This is one that I’ve never been able to fully understand—I know they’re trying to erase climate change as a concept, but all of the other important function that is getting destroyed… I guess they figured no way to talk about bad storms and heat domes without mentioning climate change, so just shut it all down except what you need for military operation and private jets and such…
And didn’t the DoD put out a report a few years back detailing how climate change will be an existential threat to america? Or at least the military?
Yes, without climate mitigation infrastructure, much of America’s industrial, agricultural, shipping, etc capacity will be destroyed. Additionally, land lost to sea level rise is gone unless far, far more money and labor is spent on reclamation. Most of America’s major cities are on coasts.
i think they really thing they’re going to have general AI and a fully automated workforce any second now so they are just preparing to cull everyone except a population of chosen pets
even if the more technocratic types wanted to deal with it the ruling class has just decided climate change is too big to deal with
so just shrink everything down to robots, auto-factories in a few city-states in the far north
Yeah they have been pretty clear eyed about the potential threat in climate change. Even Trump 1 had a report that was good about climate change, they ignored it of course.
Also, all these line items, whole climate and ocean research and observations cost taxpayers $740 million per year. For comparison, ICE already has budget of $10 billion per year and slated for +10% increase in FY26. So if you defund ICE for just one year, you can fund NOAA research and state-of-the-art monitoring for the next 14 years
Real “stop testing and the cases will go down” hours
To be fair though, climate science is a direct threat to our sponsors from the fossil fuel industry and how will they be able to afford putting us in office if the public force them to reduce extraction really we need to think about profits first because corporations are people and
Me living in the gulf coast
Just to dispel a little bit of fearmongering, the National Weather Service, who is responsible for weather forecast after significant pushback actually got their budget slightly increased compared to last year. So hurricane and severe weather warning will mostly be OK (discounting tons of people who got fired and retire early this spring). What is truly dire currently is the research division (“Ocean and Atmospheric Research”, OAR) at NOAA slated for complete annihilation, which would results in thousands of actual scientists losing their jobs, massive lost of institutional knowledge and gaps/shutdown in long-term observations (e.g., CO2 levels at Mauna Loa).
Isn’t there also some issues around the Trump admin revoking crucial data access from a satellite? My understanding is that the satellite was nearing EOL anyway but the fact that nothing was done to replace that up til now seems like a major fumble on the part of the government. A lot of meteorologists I follow online seem pretty concerned about accuracy in their models as a result of it
Yes, you’re thinking about this guy https://apnews.com/article/climate-hurricane-forecasting-noaa-satellites-74ab96aecbca46162e08341fd0941fbe
Rip
Deeply unserious country.
The problem with climate change is that people expect it to be a series of major events with catastrophic results all at once. The reality is a “boiling frog” scenario where the groundwork slowly gets built up over time until it’s too late by the time catastrophe hits.
In many ways it reminds me of those videos simulating the titanic sinking in real time.
“We need to save money, cut a few billion from science”
gives military 1 trillion dollars with no declared war occurring
In this particular case, the whole operational yearly budget for NOAA Ocean and Atmospheric Research division is even less than 1$bn. Meanwhile, the annual defense budget is literally $1 trillion.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
this would kill a large number of people if it were dropped entirely
more likely a state like California picks up the budget to protect it’s agriculture. Or it just gets privatized idk
