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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    61
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    8 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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        8 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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      23
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

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

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        16
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        8 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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 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