Plan to break up Noaa claims its research is ‘climate alarmism’ and calls for commercializing forecasts, weakening forecasts

Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.

Joe Biden’s presidency has increased theprofile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.

The plan to “break up Noaa is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.

The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.

That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This isn’t a Putin thing, this is an ideology and corporatism thing. They hate the NOAA because it dares to present the very apparent evidence that climate change is happening without doing much editorializing about it, but they also hate it because the National Weather Service is public and AccuWeather is private. They want AccuWeather to predict our nation’s weather. Which is a huge problem.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AccuWeather#Criticisms

        • snooggums
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          7 months ago

          Just like social security, the post office, medicaid/medicare, welfare, and every other public service the government provides that the Republicans are dismantling.

          Yet they convinced the people who benefit from all of those things the most to vote for them.

      • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Coincidentally, climate denial and more power to the private sector is exactly what Putin wants.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Maybe so, but their climate change denial pre-dates Putin’s leadership by as long time and is entirely about corporatism.

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        If the world warms and the tundra thaws guess who’s the new breadbasket of the world?

        Yeah it’s shortsighted but the motherfuckers invaded Ukraine and act like no one should care

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      and help putin

      This is old school Grover Norquist

      I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

      bureaucratic abolitionism.

      • eran_morad@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Please. This isn’t about small gummint, those fucking asshole traitors could fuck off out of our private lives and doctors’ offices. They’re perfectly happy to expand gummint reach when it serves to oppress Americans.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Norquist was an absolutist, and would have probably been very happy if every aspect of the state - from the Post Office to the Pentagon - was run by a corporate entity.

          There are definitely different interpretations of his anti-government philosophy. But if you were going to name a Russian who has influenced the current state of affairs, I’d point to Ayn Rand long before I called out Vladimir.

    • trebuchet@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      This is a new one on me. Never seen people trying to tie Putin to climate change before. Might as well can him the boogeymonster at this point with the way everything bad is attributed to him online.

      Is there any evidence Putin is pro-global climate change or is this one of those “it just makes sense” sort of things?

      Are we presuming the heads of Exxon and the other big corporations that have been destroying the planet with actual leaked documents receipts to prove they’ve been behind the suppression of the science and lobbying the Republicans on this also on Russia’s payroll?

      • dhork@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Russia’s main exports are oil and natural gas. If the world reduces its reliance on fossil fuels, and demand appreciably shrinks, Russia loses economic power.

        So it’s not so much that Putin is against climate change, as it is that Russia benefits directly if the effects of climate change is de-emphasized, and the world continues to burn fossil fuels.

        • trebuchet@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          So there’s no evidence whatsoever then.

          This conspiracy theory makes as much sense as claiming the reason Republicans are against global warming is Saudi Arabia.

          People on this site lose their minds when the word Russia or Putin appears in a sentence. We don’t need dehumanized foreign bad guys to explain away and play cover for the actual bad guys we have domestically in the United States. We have the receipts. It’s Exxon and other big corps, not Russia.

          • RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            While I agree that it’s not right to tie this specific issue to Russia. It’s perfectly reasonable to think Putin wants more climate change. They ALSO want more continuous shipping of their fossil fuels out of the North Sea, which climate change benefits. They also have expanded growing regions and seasons in a warmer world.