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

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.

  • Blaster MEnglish
    5•8 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.

    • @[email protected]
      2•8 months ago

      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.