Why Is the Trump Administration Politicizing Weather?
Climate change is real. Dismantling our federal weather agency won’t change that
The Trump Administration is trying to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service. Hundreds of employees have lost their jobs as part of the Project 2025 push to reduce the size of the federal government.
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In the predawn hours of Tuesday, March 4, a massive storm system spit out two tornadoes, spurred straight-line winds of up to 95 miles per hour and dropped driving sheets of rain where I live. When the sun rose, we scrambled as a 60-year-old American elm, snapped at its base, had fallen precariously onto my neighbor’s fence and the roof of my garage. Hours later, I watched the remaining high winds blow a couch cushion down a street and turn the sky orange with dust.
By midday, hearing about caved-in buildings, small planes flipped over, and trucks on their sides on nearby freeways, I was beginning to understand the damage from something becoming more commonplace across the U.S.: severe weather.
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So why is the Trump administration targeting this vital source of information? Because to them, climate change is the inconvenient truth hobbling their greed. According to the “Project 2025” Trump administration playbook, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that houses the NWS is “a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” Prosperity, based on the oil industry interests that bankrolled Trump’s campaign. These interests want NWS and NOAA our climate crisis, because anything we do to curb our thirst for energy affects their profit margin. And for all the talk of making government smaller, the people wielding these axes aren’t really interested in getting rid of these services. They want to privatize them, or in the case of de facto DOGE chief Elon Musk, get an even bigger piece of the satellite pie he already dominates.
One of the things that NOAA does a lot of is research through modeling. Weather, climate, a lot of what we understand and use to predict what will happen in the future comes from computer models. Scientists use data to model complex things that happen on Earth. They change one parameter, say the temperature of the ocean, and see what happens to everything else in the model: the land, the air, the fish. In general tax dollars pay for this work.
So what happens when this is privatized? Take weather forecasting for example. One of the people who lost his job at NOAA in late February was working on models to better predict severe weather, like the storm that felled my tree. If Project 2025 gets its way, and all NWS does is collect data, the models that companies create from it are more than likely going to be proprietary. We won’t really know what goes into them. Other scientists won’t be able to easily validate them, use them or make sure they really work.
This prospect parallels a big complaint about artificial intelligence right now: the black box conundrum. We have little-to-no idea how these systems that affect so many aspects of our lives actually work. So when something goes wrong, it’s incredibly hard to figure out why. There is no accountability. There is no recourse. This would be the same for weather forecasting.
Not to mention that we are then paying for information we have basically already paid for.
The cities and towns that once worked cooperatively with NWS will instead have to devote budget to private forecasting, if they can. Then imagine what happens when, like this week, a big storm approaches. One town has contracted with Company A. One with Company B. The news station in town chose Company C. The owners of these companies get richer. But none of the models quite agree. Another town nearby couldn’t afford a forecast. The storm arrives. One town is staffed up based on their forecast provider, another isn’t, and the third had no time. The storm turns out to be extremely destructive. Then, in the aftermath, Company A refuses to share how it developed its model. Lawsuits happen. And no one in these towns is any safer.
Of course, federal agencies can fail us. But, when it comes to the kind of science, the kind of research, that helps us all plan a little better for the extreme disasters that continue to happen in the U.S., the ones that cost billions per year to recover from, I fail to see how making that work less accessible, less standardized, less accountable, will help the general public.
As climate scientist Daniel Swain has said, what NWS does costs the average taxpayer $4 per year. What NOAA does in general, including tracking the kind of space weather that affects Musk’s Starlink satellites, is safeguard the multitrillion-dollar economy that runs on water, air, land and space. As the U.S. DOGE Service, which President Trump says Musk runs (even while the administration denies that in court), has run riot over federal agencies, purportedly vacuuming up data it doesn’t appear to have any legal right to, would Musk then make a bid to own or operate the 18 satellites NOAA owns? It’s not a lot, as there are roughly 7,000 Starlink satellites, but as has been asked repeatedly since Musk started razing federal agencies, what is he going to do with the information his minions get access to, and how might he use it to unfair advantage with his own company?
In contrast to Project 2025’s hyperbolic proclamation of the NOAA climate charge alarm industry, the work that the agency does to understand climate change is scientific. Pretending climate change doesn’t exist and trying to dismantle the agency is what’s political. The work that NWS does is a public good, and one that is critical as much of the U.S. goes into tornado season, as wildfires continue to sweep across the nation, as year after year is warmer than the one before. This year could be the third in a row with 25 or more $1 billion disasters. What is happening to this agency is another billion-dollar-plus disaster and one that, if not stopped soon, could also take decades to restore to normal.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Megha Satyanarayana is chief opinion editor at Scientific American, where she writes the column Cross Currents. She is a former scientist who has worked at several news outlets, including the Detroit Free Press and STAT. She was a Knight-Wallace Fellow, a cohort member of Poynter’s Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media and a Maynard 200 Fellow.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com