cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11490832
NOAA also collects and analyzes key climate data
It’s completely fucking bonkers NOAA is an amazing organization and delivers so much value on such a small budget.
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
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.
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.
AccuWeather has been lobbying for this; Joe Bastardi knows he can’t do as good a job so he wants to end the competition
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.
Living in hurricane country, I have a big problem with that.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Who do they think the local weather people get their data from? Where do they think weather says comes from?
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”.
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?
