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The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports | Project 2025 would all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/07/noaa-project-2025-weather/678987/?gift=ADN5ex8W_PaQmR-s5dSx2Do21FXUbb4d2XVoxOY40Vw

Project 2025 would all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11490832

NOAA also collects and analyzes key climate data

42 comments

xmunk

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It's completely fucking bonkers NOAA is an amazing organization and delivers so much value on such a small budget.

gAlienLifeform

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This is exactly why they need to destroy it, the "free" market can't compete with the economic efficiency of a well run government program

xmunk

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Are there any real private competitors though? The work that NOAA does is only valuable because of the extreme scale it's carried out by and replicating that would be quite expensive.

Wxfisch

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No, and there genuinely can’t be due to everything NOAA does. I used to work in the engineering group for NWS and there are so many parts to weather prediction and climate recording it’s not even funny. Sure there are satellites and radar, but there’s also over 200 weather balloons released each day across the US, there’s highly specialized software that fills the unique non-profit driven mission of the NWS, there’s advanced weather modeling run on super computers, there’s a whole network of thousands of volunteer observers that record temperature, dew point, soil temps, evaporation readings, and more to support agriculture, and then there’s the outreach both to places like schools but also to support things like amateur radio clubs and weather enthusiast clubs that all provide free observations and reports. Private industry consumes all of that data for free to repackage and sell as a product (they technically add value by tailoring it in many cases or use it to run proprietary models). All of that is just the NWS as well, NOAA does so much more that impacts everything from agriculture to fisheries and it’s so clear that the hard right pushing P2025 have no clue what they actually do. This single move would likely destroy the US position as a global breadbasket, and it’s just one tiny piece of P2025.

EleventhHour

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Holy shit

TunaLobster

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Oh it gets worse and still only in NWS area. All of the severe weather alerts from thunderstorms to hurricanes are also done by NWS. Not to mention the radio stations they broadcast all of that information on that are also used to help tune antennas and receivers.

This would kill thousands of people every year. And it's mostly red states that would feel the biggest burden of being hurt. It does not make any sense except to acknowledge that the people writing P2025 really do not give 2 flying shits about anyone but themselves.

Freefall

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It would hurt red states, you say? That happens to be something red states LOVE voting for!

enbyecho

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It amazes me that people do not seem to know this, so it bears repeating strenuously.

Without NWS there is effectively no weather data. Oh sure, you have Wunderground's handful of private weather stations with their dodgy uncalibrated data. But anything high quality and worth using in forecasting models comes from the gubmint.

No weather data means agriculture is seriously fucked. Aviation is even more fucked. Shipping is fucked. The electricity grid is fucked. Construction, mining, sports... the list of industries that depend on accurate data and forecasting is massive.

Pra

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Shout-out to all my nexrad tech homies out there 📡

silence7

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AccuWeather has been lobbying for this; Joe Bastardi knows he can't do as good a job so he wants to end the competition

enbyecho

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Accuweather doesn't compete with NWS, they rely on it's data.

doubletwist

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Both are true. And they want the data privatized so only they can profit from it.

enbyecho

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Both are true. And they want the data privatized so only they can profit from it.

I was glossing over the details. To clarify - and I think you mean this - they want the free data from NWS but they don't want that same data to be publicly available. Except that's not generally how federal government data works - by law in most cases it has to be made public. But that's kind of irrelevant in the context of "disband the NWS" at least in the sense that Accuweather very much wants the free ride to continue or failing that to get handed all the NWS resources, which isn't gonna fly not least because other providers would strongly object. IOW, this is all kind of DOA.

BossDj

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I'm sure the actual legislation would be a transition to privatisation. Suddenly musk and bezos et al a are demonstrating their weather satellites

Darkassassin07

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replicating that would be quite expensive.

Indeed. But; If you can eradicate the free market first, the private market can take over and use high running/development costs to justify high access fees.

CharlesDarwin

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They cannot stand the existence of a good example. They HATE it. This is why they seek to make worse, and then destroy, things like public schools, libraries, and the USPS.

chase_what_matters

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Their goal is to abstract people from the hard evidence being wielded against the most egregious environmental offenders. An educated populace is dangerous to the Republican Party.

mojofrododojo

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pay no attention to the flaming hellscape and electrical overloads, NOTHING IS HAPPENING OK? Look at the federal weather report - the comfort index is at 100%, there's no problem. Why do liberals have to make up a crisis?

Rapidcreek

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Living in hurricane country, I have a big problem with that.

MegaUltraChicken

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Don't worry we can redirect hurricanes with a sharpie pretty easily.

andyburke

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Do your neighbors? I am genuinely curious how things like this that seem so often to so negatively affect their constituents continue to be the GOP platform.

silence7

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A lot of this stuff is so awful that if you tell people about it, they don't believe it because nobody could be that evil

Asafum

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"It's really the Democrats that want to do that! You know how I know? Because the media says Republicans are doing that!"

billiam0202

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They don't believe it because they're goddamned morons.

These asshats have no fucking clue what good a government for the people has done. They take roads, electricity, water, mail, weather predictions, communications, etc. for granted. There are no libertarians when the road right outside your house is privatized and the owner doesn't want you to use it.

baronvonj

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It doesn't even have to be something important like "they're trying to kill public education." They wouldn't even believe the reporting on how much Trump golfed.

https://www.businessinsider.com/poll-trump-obama-golf-2017-4

riskable

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All ya need to track a hurricane is a sharpie!

Trump used a sharpie on a printed hurricane prediction map to pretend like he knew what he was talking about

HerrBeter

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God damned liberuls

memfree

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Tell people 2025 would do this. No federal weather means local counties would have to pay Big Business for tornado/hurricane warnings. We'd pay more for fish because fishermen can't get data unless they pay. Plane schedules become even less reliable AND cost more because the government stops tracking upper level wind speeds.

Look: we want people who get a salary for doing accurate work rather than people who get paid to say whatever the bossman want to hear. Ask people to imagine how it would work if Google, NBC, Amazon, and Fox each sunk the money for trying to replicate the existing infrastructure and then sold pieces of it to paying customers -- such as Allstate, CBS, and Delta Airlines. Everyone else would have to HOPE they were getting complete data and have to wonder what was missing. Noticing record highs and lows would become proprietary and forbidden from broadcast in a way akin to being disallowed from referencing "The Superbowl" unless you pay for a license. How's any of that going to make things better?

P.S. This article is posted to several communities, so I'm reiterating this post repeatedly.

halferect

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NOAA is awesome and with a cable dongle, some copper wires, a few open source programs you can listen to satellites and decode that to real images, it's real magic.

toiletobserver

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Who do they think the local weather people get their data from? Where do they think weather says comes from?

Vorticity

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They know who it comes from. They want to change that answer from "free from NOAA" to "on a subscriber basis from private companies like AccuWeather".

EmptySlime

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Doesn't AccuWeather also depend on NOAA data? I was under the impression that they basically just parse the stuff that NOAA/NWS puts out and make people pay to have convenient access to it. Am I misremembering something?

LMagicalus

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AccuWeather wants to buy the NOAA network, so they can have a monopoly

EmptySlime

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There it is. Yeah that tracks with the general Republican playbook. Sell off any and every part of government that business interests could even remotely squeeze money out of no matter how detrimental it would be for society.

Vorticity

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They get some, maybe most, of their info from NOAA, yes. I'm honestly not sure what AccuWeather's plan would be if NOAA were to be killed. They seem to have one given that they're one of the groups behind the push to privatize NOAA's work.

NuXCOM_90Percent

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For some reason this makes me think of rapidly deplaning and sheltering in place from ten tornadoes out in Chicago last night. Not sure why

bamboo

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noooooooaa

halferect

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Next I'm gonna find out the plan wants to get rid of emergency alerts and amber alerts unless you pay a subscription

JimSamtanko

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He has a sharpie marker. That’s all we need.

Mzpip

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These people are insane.

silence7

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The folks proposing it tend to be ones whose friends will profit from it, and the people voting for it don't believe that anybody could be that evil.

CharlesDarwin

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Privatize the planet!