Might Be a Bad Time to Wreck NOAA and America’s Weather Service

Just as we are accelerating into an age of superstorms, let’s dismantle our ability to predict and adapt to the new reality. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Ryan Maue is a former NOAA official in the Trump administration, not well regarded by mainstream climate scientists, but even he thinks Project 2025’s plan to destroy one of the Crown Jewels of American science, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric administration, is nutty. We’ll have to be taking sanity whenever we can get it in coming years.

Ryan Maue in the New York Times:

For people who care about weather and climate, one of the most concerning proposals on the table is to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The authors of Project 2025, a blueprint for the administration crafted by conservative organizations, claim erroneously that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and should be “broken down and downsized.” An arm of Mr. Trump’s team, the Department of Government Efficiency, to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, wants to eliminate $500 billion in spending by cutting programs whose funding has expired. That could include NOAA.

With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation. This would not only help Americans better prepare for and survive extreme weather but also keep NOAA from falling further behind similar agencies in Europe. While the incoming administration may want to take a sledgehammer to the federal government, there is broad, bipartisan support for NOAA in Congress. It is the job of the incoming Republican-controlled Congress to invest in its future.

NOAA was established via executive order in 1970 by President Richard Nixon as an agency within the Department of Commerce. Currently its mission is to understand and predict changes in the climate, weather, ocean and coasts. It conducts basic research; provides authoritative services like weather forecasts, climate monitoring and marine resource management; and supports industries like energy, agriculture, fishing, tourism and transportation.

The best-known part of NOAA, touching all of our daily lives, is the National Weather Service. This is where daily forecasts and timely warning of severe storms, hurricanes and blizzards come from. Using satellites, balloon launches, ships, aircraft and weather stations, NOAA and its offices around the country provide vital services like clockwork, free of charge — services that cannot be adequately replaced by the private sector in part because they wouldn’t necessarily be profitable.
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As we enter a new world of artificial intelligence, NOAA needs significantly more computational resources to improve weather models rapidly. Otherwise, the United States risks becoming more dependent on similar institutions in Europe. Plain and simple, NOAA weather modeling and climate analysis efforts do not have the funding in the current institutional structure to keep up with our European friends. And because the military relies on NOAA’s infrastructure, the risks of and damage from extreme weather and climate events are a national security concern as much as an economic one. With a bigger budget, NOAA could offer increased value for taxpayers and boost the entire U.S. economy. What would that look like?

First, we need to have a serious conversation about further upgrading the agency’s aging systems like radars; observations, including balloons and buoys; research aircraft; satellites; and supercomputers. There is also an opportunity to build a state-of-the-art weather and climate prediction capability for the nation. That would involve modernizing emergency communication systems for future disasters instead of reacting to the most recent one. Though accurate weather forecasts, combined with effective watches and warnings, have reduced human deaths from extreme weather, still too many Americans are seemingly caught off guard by weather disasters. NOAA could help fix this.
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We are in a golden age of technological advancement in understanding and predicting what is happening in the atmosphere and the oceans, and NOAA is uniquely well positioned to lead the way. Instead of jettisoning decades of expertise, we need an all-hands-on-deck NOAA modernization strategy to meet a rapidly changing climate. Building a weather-ready nation for the future will require hard work, but Americans of all political stripes should back NOAA to lead the way.

DesmogBlog:

Maue was previously an adjunct scholar at the Libertarian Cato Institute where he worked with Patrick Michaels, who has stated the “best solution is to do nothing” regarding climate change. The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Charles Koch and has continued to be a large recipient of Koch dollars with $22,843,008 coming from Koch-related foundations between 1986 and 2018.^8 9

Maue and Michaels have regularly co-published commentary about climate change and weather at the Cato Institute. Both Michaels and Maue formerly worked at the Cato Institute’s “Center for the Study of Science.” The center was a program overseen by Michaels and “sought to raise uncertainty about climate science.” It was quietly shut down after Michaels left Cato in 2019.^10 11

Before joining the Cato Institute as an adjunct scholar in 2017, Maue worked as a meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics, LLC—the same company where noted climate change denier Joseph Bastardi serves as chief forecaster. Bastardi works alongside Joseph D’Aleo, founder of ICECAP, a group that promotes skeptical climate change material and has suggested CO2 is not a driver of climate change.^12 13