this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Would Trump privatize weather forecasting? What to know. (www.washingtonpost.com)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

Would Trump? Probably. Would Project 2025? Absolutely.

Per WaPo, Project 2025....

... calls for breaking up NOAA, whose climate research it calls “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” It suggests the Weather Service should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” because its data is already used widely by private companies.

The report bases that proposal on an assertion that “forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.”

... as if those forecasts didn't start with the government service and then build on it. And how much more would everything cost when everyone has to pay for weather information? Food? Planes? Fish?

Remember the AccuWeather issues in Trump's first term?

Lastly: do you want to HOPE that some private company has enough customers in your area for them to make your forecast? Maybe it is insurance companies worrying about tornadoes, but your area is a mix of several firms (Allstate, Gieco, State Farm, whomever) and they all concentrate their forecast for the regions they dominate.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The plan would break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency for the National Weather Service, describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”

Suppressing the analysis and collection of the symptoms of Climate Change is very backwards. Work to treat the actual problem instead.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

This is the same group that said covid would go away if we stopped measuring it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Noaa has some of my favorite websites to visit…they remind me of the internet I grew up with. Besides being incredibly useful and informative of course.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

The responsibility for meteorology would be bestowed on "Anyone With A Sharpie."

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I was under the impression that basically every commercial weather station just copied the NWS's homework, which is a decidedly Republican arrangement: have the taxpayer foot the bill for the actual work while private interest reaps the benefits.

If the NWS goes away, they'll have to do their own meteorology. Maybe there's some way to spin some profit from that situation that I'm not degenerate enough to see yet, but it seems like it's against their own interests.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

A private weather service would charge for API access to do research and can hide information that would cause embarrassment for the owner or their friends, such as climate change. Plus, weather is a funny thing in societies all over the world: of something unexpected happens anyone can just blame the random ess of weather. But if a forecast is buried and a tornado warning doesn't go out, the info for who made that decision is hidden too. The people who died to a tornado or flooding or weather event will get no justice to private negligence.

Private weather will also provide a long term block for detailed weather analysis and cause weather sciences to stumble, of not stop development entirely.

The right don't want scientists, they want technicians who adjust readouts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

It's similar in the UK. The UK has a public weather service (the Met Office) and there are also private services that use the data from the Met Office. The private services cut corners with their forecasting software and have lower-skilled forecasters, and as a result, provide measurably worse forecasts. If you're making life-and-limb decisions based on forecasts such as which roads to close due to ice, you'd better have access to the best possible forecasts that exist, otherwise people will die.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

"Would Trump make the worst possible decision for the country?" I'm sorry, were you just unfrozen!? He would...