As it was foretold: the Trump regime gutted the NOAA and now weather forecasts are less accurate. An atmospheric scientist: “The forecasts I’m able to offer you are less accurate than they would otherwise be.”
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Comments 4
liars gotta defund non-liars or something sad face
My coauthors and I published a paper a couple months ago (open access here) on the role that forecast improvements could play in reducing heat-related mortality as the climate warms. For the paper, we interviewed a bunch of operational meteorologists, and the thing they said over and over again is that we have to keep improving weather data gathering if we want better forecasts. It's been sad to see things go the other way instead.
For a long time, and still to some extent, the UK's official weather forecasting organisation was part of the Ministry of Defence. That's because good weather forecasts are famously critical to military operations (there's about to be a movie about the most famous example of this).
So the Trumpists are actively working to damage the US's armed forces: to directly weaken the US as a military power.
It's hard to see them as anything but a death cult, frankly.
I'm a scientist working in risk, disaster and resilience, more specifically in wildfire and catastrophe modelling. It's interdisciplinary, and I work with atmospheric physicists, climatologists, meteorologists, ecologists etc. You can never have enough data and there can always be better data but I don't think we ever thought we'd be dealing with these acts of vandalism. I was so relieved when the OOI decision was reversed - that too has a functional role in severe weather forecasting.
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