Did you have a newly reelected Trump administration ending your local weather forecasts on your Project 2025 bingo card? Well, they are planning to do just that.
When more intense and frequent climate change-enhanced natural disasters strike the country this summer, and they will, be sure to let your family and friends know where they can place their anger, anxiety, and terror.
In the aftermath of catastrophic situations, it is not uncommon for people to place the blame on whoever is in power. Let’s not let the GQP get away with it; most of them have fought tooth and nail to kill the planet for decades.
Let nobody forget that the Supreme Court has also declared itself the final word on atmospheric and oceanic science, weather, and terrestrial climate science. Talk about being boned by these know-nothings.
There is *nothing* you care about that survives a 6-3 Republican court for a generation. Nothing. I don’t know how many times the Court has to prove that to people before liberals unify and act. Elie Mystal.If you understand anything about our predicament, let it be this.
When we have a million people die from a wet bulb event or something horrific of that nature, you’ll see all the media jump into emergency mode. You need to hold them to account. They’ve enabled this disaster by both siding it,downplaying it, portraying the climate crisis like it’s a natural thing that just happens - rather than the most deadly crime ever committed. Matthew ToddWhat Hansen's team tells us in "Global Warming in the Pipeline" is that evaluation of evidence from prehistory shows current modeling of equilibrium warming is understated. Equilibrium warming, or warming in the pipeline, is the ultimate temperature of Earth when our ocean and terrestrial systems come into balance with the excess greenhouse gases in our atmosphere today — with no further emissions. Even more simply put, we have emitted so many greenhouse gases so much faster than they are emitted naturally, that our oceans, soils and forests are way behind in absorbing the excess and it will take them centuries to catch up. During this "catch up" period, we continue to warm as the cool oceans and ice sheets gradually warm to balance out with atmospheric warming. Hansen's team's new findings show that if we were to magically halt all emissions today, and hold everything else stable, equilibrium warming in the pipeline in several hundred years is 10 degrees C (18 F) above normal, and in 100 years it is 6 to 7 C (11 to 13 F).
The Atlantic’s reporting is GQP insanity on steroids,
Zoë Schlanger writes in The Atlantic: (No paywall.)
In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasts are a freely accessible government amenity. The National Weather Service issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio, or newspaper can know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, whether a hurricane is heading toward their town, or if a drought has been forecast for the next season. Even if they get that news from a privately owned app or TV station, much of the underlying weather data are courtesy of meteorologists working for the federal government.
Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but given that it was largely written by veterans of his first administration, the document is widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.
NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” Project 2025 reads. The proposals roughly amount to two main avenues of attack. First, it suggests that the NWS should eliminate its public-facing forecasts, focus on data gathering, and otherwise “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which the authors of the plan imply will improve, not limit, forecasts for all Americans. Then, NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave (and which the document calls “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”), should be aggressively shrunk. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s.
The U.S. is, without question, experiencing a summer of brutal weather. In just the past week, a record-breaking hurricane brought major flooding and power outages to Texas amid an extreme-heat advisory. More than a dozen tornadoes ripped through multiple states. Catastrophic flash flooding barreled through wildfire burn scars in New Mexico. Large parts of the West roasted in life-threatening temperatures. Facing any of this without the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be mayhem. And future years are likely to be worse.
For further reading, see Meteor Blades' diary: How about a diary on the nightmare Project 2025 for each one on Biden dropping or not dropping out?
Republicans are incapable of governing.
The stupidity burns.