White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA | Hacker News Reader

White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA

washingtonpost.com

283 pointsmolecule209 comments

http://weather.gov (run by NOAA and the national weather service) is my go to weather site.

No ads, no hyperbole.

I found out about it when some senator wanted to stop them from posting weather online because it competed with "private sector" weather companies.

A couple times I've seen that tv news weather leaves the site up on their monitors during newscasts.

I've used weather.gov for years and love the service. Every person I've talked to who complains about the crap coverage by the weather companies in the US that I've shown it to uses it exclusively as well. It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition. I know this isn't always the case but it certainly is here.

I don't agree with lots of things our government spends money on but stuff like this I absolutely support.

Is the logic here that by slashing NOAA funding, no real claims of climate change will be made and Trump will prevail?

I'm afraid this might be the wrong place to look for logic.

However, at least it looks like they were able to finish modernizing their website before the budget got the ax:

https://forecast-v3.weather.gov/documentation?redirect=legac...

That's probably a part of it, but the budget cuts across the government (outside of defense and law enforcement) are also a realization of goal of at least the Bannon faction of the Trump White House to basically burn the whole system of government to the ground.

If this is true, why are they not removing all funding entirely?

Because its not (yet, at any rate) a dictatorship, and they need something that even Republicans in Congress will vote for, for one thing.

And probably also because by removing one hair at a time you can eventually make someone bald without he even noticing.

> It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition

There is no better product because it's not commercially viable to compete against the free money that NOAA receives. If NOAA didn't exist, others would try to compete commercially in that space.

In the UK the Met Office is notionally a part of the Ministry of Defence[0] but is required to be profit generating, so basically operates as a commercial enterprise. Whilst they provide free weather forecasting and alerts for the public, commercial users have to pay for data ( raw and processed ).

After 93 years the BBC decided to change from the Met Office to another source, the free market at work. The Met Office has to improve its product and / or reduce its costs to keep competing; NOAA has no such incentives towards efficiency or improvement.

[0] Correction: transferred to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2011

> the free money

It's not free. It's what patriots pay their taxes for.

and how would competitors get funding? by making each member of the public individually pay for a subscription?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

Same. A lot of weather sites just pull the free NWS data and wrap it in ads.

Some use higher-resolution grids or better models (check http://forecastadvisor.com/ for your area), but they're almost always at least based on the free NWS data. Also, only weather.gov lets you click around on a map to get their model results for any square on the grid, not just towns and cities.

What is wrong with these people?!

EDIT: Weird. "Its satellite data division would lose $513 million, or 22 percent, of its current funding under the proposal... National Weather Service would be fortunate by comparison, facing only 5 percent cuts." I doubt slashing the satellite budget would improve forecasts, which tend to rely upon data.

It's very easy to look at this and conclude that the White House has serious problems with studying climate change. I'm sure sticking our heads in the sand will fix the environment.

You are confusing your goals with their goals. Their goal is to stop environmentalism from interfering with near-term business performance, not "fix the environment".

I started using windytv.com after seeing it mentioned here. It uses the European ECMWF weather model, which is well known in the meteorological community to be more accurate than the NOAA GFS: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/06/us-numerical-weather-p.... With this budget cut, it looks like that will continue.

In particular, as a non-hydrostatic model, the ECMWF gives much better forecasts in mountainous regions like the Eastern Sierra (where I live).

Heh, I believe we may share some common interests.

Thanks for reminding me of windytv. A friend showed it to me, but I was put off by the garish animated UI, then forgot the URL. The UI still sucks, but I appreciate the ECMWF data, so maybe I'll give it another go.

That was Rick Santorum pandering to his pals at Accuweather.

My guess is that vendors with bigger pockets and a better track record of buying influence (IBM, Monsanto) wants to leverage its own weather property)

IBM makes millions of dollars selling supercomputers to NOAA.

But doesn't even Accuweather, at least on some level, get their source data from government sources? If they generate their own forecasts using NWP models they still need initial conditions which usually come from from coarse-grid weather forecasts provided by the governments.

If the quality of these coarse-grid forecasts is degraded it's going to have an effect on all downstream processing/forecasts.

They wanted to consume the data for free, but prohibit you from doing so.

NOAA is also the only source for river flood predictions:

https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=rev&gage=...

https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=fgf&gage=...

The really absurd part is that they still wanted that data provided to these private companies from the NWS, just not available to the public.

Almost all of these companies simply regurgitate NWS information pretending it's their own anyway.

Forecasts are fuzzy enough that they may play in that area; but serious things like severe weather warnings only come from the NWS.

A friend of mine was an intern at CNN. One of his jobs was to look at all the NWS weather alerts and forecasts. They would prepare it for the reporters to read and report about. He had to get to work at 4am every morning to complete it before the morning shows.

Since it's a `.gov`, its days are probably numbered as well.

Enjoy while it lasts.

The NWS regional twitter accounts are also a great source and many will even talk and answer questions. The Portland team is really on their game, especially that last ice/snow storm we had.

> senator wanted to stop them from posting weather online because it competed with "private sector" weather companies.

I wish more voters knew and understood this. Amazing public services have been constantly under attack long before trump so particular rich people can get richer.

Ah, yes, the Accuweather Protection Act. I remember.

I have boycotted Accuweather since then.

Of course they are.

NOAA does nothing which panders to populist sentiment. NOAA can't put steel workers to work. NOAA is not the grit of honest American labor, or the power of military conquest, or the gold of a halcyon age.

NOAA cannot Make America Great Again, but a new fleet of aircraft carriers can.

So it goes. Tie a rock to a string and hang it outside your window to see which way the wind is blowing.

17 trillion in debt, time to cut back

Have you actually read the White House's plan? They themselves (I'm not strawmanning here) have said that overall spending and the debt is going to increase, most of that going to the military. No "cutting back" is happening.

Yes, we need to make room for the the trillions of dollars in new spending Trump has already proposed.

And statues. Many, many statues, wrought from American steel.

Not sure if you're sarcastic or trolling .

Cut back on by far the largest and most expensive military in the world then.

NOAA budget 2016: $5.8 billion

US military budget: $600 billion

And they're proposing a $54 billion increase.

You could probably trim 10 NOAAs from the military industrial complex and nothing would be lost.

With the proviso that US military support and materiel has been used as trade goods for alliance-making with other countries for most of the last century. A large portion of the US military budget is "being the substitute military for US allies."

The key question of decreasing US government spending is how to get other countries to pony up for the "renting" of the US military forces that they're already doing (because the alternative is that the US withdraws military support from those countries—and then those countries build back up their own militaries. Which, undoubtedly, would put us in a very different world than the one we're in right now...)

I think this is a good point, and I'm not sure why it's been downvoted.

It's important to consider the sometimes positive externalities of the current levels of defense spending. Even more so, it's important to consider where we or others have come to rely on those positive externalities.

For example, I'd be perfectly happy with the US withdrawing from many parts of the world and closing foreign bases. However, I do imagine there would be sometimes not so subtle consequences to doing so. Is the current balance of global power sufficient to prevent large scale and disastrous conflict? Do we risk tipping that balancing in one direction at some point?

Does the US lending both hands to fucking up the Middle East make anything more stable? What stability was achieved by Vietnam, or all that stuff in South America? Not disastrous enough for you? Would you swap with even just ONE of the millions of people affected by some of the more insane atrocities this knight in shining armor committed? Thought so.

Another fact that is generally completely omitted is that best, soldiers defend against other soldiers (and in practice, they kill a lot of civilians because war is tough), so in a way those people justifying war machineries in other countries are not the excuse, they are the counterparts. It's an axis of sociopaths and conformists against humans, and this rift goes through all nations, even some families. The root causes for these rationalizations matter, not so much the rationalizations, those always shift. A child kicking a dog and Abu Ghraib differ in scale but not principle, as does looking on to either. Those onlookers love to use "we", but there is no "we" here, speak strictly for yourself.

Not seeing what you're trying to argue. Lots of appeal to emotion here. I'll make it simple for you:

1. Me: High levels of defense spending has easily identifiable consequences. But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.

2. You: The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.

I don't disagree with you, but you're not rebutting my point.

And why would any positives matter, if there weren't actual people and their lives, and suffering inflicted or avoided, involved down the line? Lots of appeal to robots here. I'm not a robot.

> But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.

Yes, and then you need to circle back and consider both, in context, including opportunity costs.

> The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.

Respond to what I said or don't, but don't appeal to a 3 year old you're not talking with.

>And why would any positives matter, if there weren't actual people and their lives, and suffering inflicted or avoided

That's implied. You're either missing the point or not arguing in good faith. Have a good day.

You should take a look at world military budgets... actually look at the countries that are spending the money.

$1.7T/year in total military spending worldwide.

China at 200B, Russia at 70B.

Iran? 22nd largest military budget at $10B.

The rest of the big spenders are our friends and allies. I'm not going to count up every country, but roughly 1.3T to 1.4T is spent by the US + allies + friendly countries.

Who are we preparing for war with?

Who are we preparing for war with?

Our own citizens, of course.

One of the scenarios that concern the EU is Russia invading and occupying EU states before Nato or the US can respond, present them with a kind of fait accompi and hoping the political will to respond won't be there. So the US needs the ability to convincingly be able to take on entrenched Russian occupation of multiple other countries and take them back.

The US Military leadership has publicly lobbied against raising military spending at the expense of other government activities. They know that national security depends on a comprehensive international relations investments.

The White House is pandering to their populist base and contravening the advice of their own military experts

The military is 60 percent of the budget.

It's not. Defense comes in at 15% of federal spending. Social security and medicare combined come in at 4x that amount.

Source:http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/120/2017-Estimate

Better link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_Sta...

Those are non discretionary and funded by totally separate channels.

And?

Mandatory spending is more than twice that of discretionary. Of discretionary, defense makes up less than 50%.

I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers: care to elaborate?

This[0] directly contradicts you:

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...

Here: http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/120/2017-Estimate

Mandatory: 2.56T Discretionary: 1.08T

Lumping social security in with taxes? You must be very good with numbers.

I'll ignore the ad hominem.

Minus SS, it's still less than 21% of total federal spending.

If you're going to concede that point (ss) then the same applies to Medicare. This completely destroying your argument coincidentally.

It doesn't. Defense spending is not 60% of the "budget". Further, it's not a large component of the total federal budget.

    > I'll ignore the ad hominem

Insulting someone's intelligence is not an example of the ad hominem fallacy.

Yeah and they take a very specific tax out of everyone's paycheck to pay for those two programs.

If you want to have an argument about them that's fine but they have separate budgets and should be discussed separately.

They are both taxes. All else equal, taxpayers would happily pay 1pts more income tax and 2pt less social security, or vice versa. All my tax dollars are the same color.

> The military is 60 percent of the budget.

50% of the discretionary budget. You were embarrassingly close.

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...

I prefer to include veteran benefits.

Sure, but its products help keep those populists alive—or at least give them a fighting chance.

I bet everyone in Alabama at the time remembers April 27, 2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak

Also, isn't accurate weather information and prediction essential for forecasting in industries such as Energy, Agriculture, Transportation, Construction, etc.?

There's a 2002 paper by NOAA which outlines some of their estimates (http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/worldsummit/pdfs/economics...) regarding economic impact.

I have a doubt that keeping those populists alive is a goal here in lieu of, say, money or at least profit -- regardless of long-term "if no populous, no tax or consumer basis" outlook.

> The biggest single cut proposed by the passback document comes from NOAA’s satellite division, .... Researchers there were behind a study suggesting that there has been no recent slowdown in the rate of climate change — research that drew the ire of Republicans in Congress.

Yes, let's shoot the messenger.

When you "know" the message is wrong but the messenger won't shut up about it, these things start to sound like a good idea.

If you spend too long trying to convince someone there's a problem, then you are the problem.

This is one of those comments that sounds profound if you give it a cursory glance, but actually makes no sense whatsoever.

Oh come on, sure it makes sense.

It means that you failed to communicate effectively. Or that communicating to them was not an effective strategy.

Or the person you are communicating to has a conflict of interest and has a strong incentive to feign ignorance. Usually referred to as being "corrupt" for short.

In that case, "communicating to them was not an effective strategy".

"Their strategy is not effective" is quite different from "they are the problem."

Anyway, what would you propose that they do?

If B is ignoring A, for whatever reason, then A can talk to others. Or more generally, do whatever it takes to workaround B.

A does talk to others. It still hasn't worked, and now B is trying really hard to make A stop telling everybody about this stuff.

So A has to get rid of B, or make them irrelevant.

How? B has all the power. It's easy to say "get rid of them" but how do you actually do it?

Maybe B has overwhelming power now. But if B's position is untenable, that will eventually become apparent. And yes, that may take far too long to be of any good.

But if B's position is untenable, that will eventually become apparent.

Sure. That's why B is investing heavily in its military.

I thought that this subthread was about US politics. That's so knife-edge that it could flip in four years. But yes, if the US goes full-moron, and takes a military approach to climate mitigation, all bets are off :(

I may have butchered the quote a little bit (not a famous quote, just something told to me once).

"If you spend too long convincing someone of a problem they can't see, they start to see you as the problem" gets the meaning better. It doesn't mean to give up, it just means that you are making yourself their enemy and thus probably making it harder to get your message across (look at the studies on showing scientific evidence to anti-vaxxers).

If I'm not mistaken than the vast majority globally is convinced of man made climate change being an issue. The holdouts primarily seem to be a subset of US Americans. There is disagreement on what a fair solution would look like but the vast majority agrees on the problem.

Let us be honest: no they are not convinced. If they were legitimately terrified of existential disaster >400ppm, they would be IMMEDIATELY limiting industrial production and investing MASSIVELY into carbon sequestration and renewables. The fact that ALL NATIONS take half-hearted and half-assed measures to confront what the pro-AGW crowd paints as an extinction risk demonstrably contradicts your claim that "the vast majority globally is convinced".

Collective action problems are not that easy to solve, no matter how dire the consequences of failure.

Did collective action not work for solving the hitler problem?

Taking down Hitler just needed one force to take down Hitler. We didn't need to convince the majority that Hitler needs to be taken down and agree on how to do it. There also was no competitive advantage to be won by preventing this from happening. If I keep my pollution deregulated on there other hand I have a big competitive advantage over everyone who does. Very different problem.

Not until it was almost too late.

No that's not true, and it's another tiresome argument based on first order armchair logic sans application of actual subject related experience/knowledge.

Environmental diplomacy is hard, and made much harder by the fact that most tools to stop pollution require such massive cuts to industrialization (and western pollution first) that most countries can't afford to enact what is needed.

So we have had the weak predecessor of Kyoto, and then the even weaker Kyoto protocol. Which has been followed by nothing.

This just means that people are willing to play the game of lying to their populations and voters, who can't care or understand the issues because they have other existential problems to deal with.

Distributed responsibility is another name for "not my problem".

The fact that ALL NATIONS take half-hearted and half-assed measures to confront what the pro-AGW crowd paints as an extinction risk

That's part of the problem. There is no "extinction risk," at least with regard to human life, and anyone who says differently is either misinformed or lying. In the latter case, it's easy to argue that they have an economic agenda that has nothing to do with climate.

Either way, such absurd exaggerations make it hard to sell the real truth, which is that AGW appears to be a legitimate problem that demands action.

>The fact that ALL NATIONS take half-hearted and half-assed measures to confront what the pro-AGW crowd paints as an extinction risk demonstrably contradicts your claim that "the vast majority globally is convinced".

Its actually not; even if it is an extinction risk, if a meaningful difference in risk can't be made absent collective action, you have a massive tragedy of the common problem in which individual states are incentivized to do as little as possible, except what is necessary to signal that they would be open to serious action if there was an agreement on collective action.

But close the loop - the reason US Americans don't believe in climate change is because energy companies have paid politicians and fringe scientists to deny climate change. Why do energy companies care? Because climate change mitigation would cost them a lot of money.

It's not just that. There's a religious component to it (only God can alter the Earth so dramatically, or Jesus is returning soon so it doesn't matter, or similar) as well as an ideological component (mitigating climate change can't be done with laissez-faire approaches).

At this point, it's self-reinforcing. One of our two major political parties has climate change denial as a fundamental part of its identity. Lots of people vote for that party because they share that belief. Those who benefit from that party's success are then motivated to spread that belief even further just to recruit more voters to the cause. And as that belief solidifies among their voters, the party becomes unable to change its position no matter how convincing the facts become.

That does seem to be the case. So I wonder what will happen when facts render their position entirely untenable. It reminds me of the fight to regulate tobacco companies. That took decades of solid evidence.

This here is indeed the real problem - corporations who are so unethical that they would damage the entire world in order to make some cash.

These are the people who Trump wants to set free of all regulation.

I see this was taken quite negatively. The point isn't that you _actually are_ the problem, the point is that you need to realize that they start to _see_ you as a problem.

It means you have to consider what the other person is thinking and not just think "If I just keep telling them and showing them the facts, they'll see the light and come around to my side." Studies have shown that when you show scientific evidence to anti-vaxxers, they reject it and become more entrenched in their beliefs.

I understood the comment as saying that if you can't get your point across after a certain amount of time, it's your own fault. Thanks for clarifying, it makes much more sense now.

When on Earth did anti science trolls take such a prominent role in HN? It's not hard for me to imagine a misinformation campaign run against HN, because I can't really understand how someone technical could countenance anti climate change ideas.

You can come up with reasons to justify anything, once you're motivated by ideology. Being "more technical" sadly really only means that the justifications you come up with are more technical-sounding.

mikeash was being sarcastic.

If you've done any sort of computer modeling, it's pretty easy to understand why technical people would have doubts. It's pretty easy to do it wrong and it's pretty easy to make it look right. Anyway, questioning is science and the debate is more about whether the sky is falling, whether man is primarily responsible, and if so what the next steps should be. So you can acknowledge that deforestation contributes to global warming as an example while being skeptical of the claims and modeling the environmentalists make.

This also doesn't help ease concerns with those that are skeptical of many reports and models:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/climate-chang...

> “Gradually, in the months after [the report] came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’ — in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets — in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy,” Mr. Bates said Saturday on Climate Etc.

> “What John Bates has done is to expose this culture based not on robust science, but on promoting an agenda,” Mr. Pielke said in a comment on Climate Etc. “Regardless of one’s views on policies, the scientific method should not be hijacked as they have done.”

It's an allegation base on evidence and report with no source.

The news article if you can call that, sources the Daily UK Mail as a source.

> Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus,

There is no smoking gun. It's a hear say from one person or two.

Bates is an insider source as is Roger Pielke. We'll find out more as the investigation unfolds. There's more to this lack of discipline to scientific methods as they push for policy changes and their own agenda.

> Another prominent climate scientist, the University of Colorado’s Roger A. Pielke Sr., said Mr. Bates‘ experience was “consistent with my experiences” with Mr. Karl on the Climate Change Science Program in 2005.

These modeling are base statistic which takes into account random errors.

Just cause you did computer modeling doesn't grant you magic power to understand machine learning or the vast swarth of area in statistic, mathematical modeling, etc...

And it certainly doesn't give you power over the dozen of experts in different fields that spend their whole lives in it and saying global warming is a thing.

If you're so skeptic about "computer modeling", then why google, apple, and many other are banking on Machine Learnin such as Neural Network?

The foundation of data science, some argue, is computational statistic. Which falls under this so call computer modeling you're bringing up.

I never said it grants you magic power to understand machine learning. You're putting that in my mouth.

What I was putting forth was an understanding on why some techies may be skeptical of the computer modeling which is the evidence of AGW and the near immediate doom and gloom. Machine learning is not infallible. We're very much in the infancy. And all of a sudden scientists are experts at modeling the sun, earth, moon, currents, etc? This is not social network / ad network / ecommerce optimization we are talking about.

Of course the models account for random errors but they also include a lot of assumptions. You can doctor any model to fit your agenda.

Computer models and neural networks have incredible potential and application, but to suggest that everyone should accept these models of the universe from scientists as if they are infallible makes no sense.

I'm fairly certain he was being sarcastic.

Yikes. But unfortunately not unsurprising.

I live in Boulder and drive past the NOAA (and NIST, and I think parts of CIRES) offices every day. I've had family and countless professors that have done joint research with them, and very, very good friends and colleagues that have started their careers there. Part of how I wound up here (in the tech sector, posting to HN) was on an eighth grade field trip there asking how they drove 'Science on a Sphere' (7 RHEL machines).

It'd obviously be terrible globally if this were to go through, but it'd be pretty awful locally too. Every year around budget approval season, most NOAA folks I know would be insanely worried...Guess that comes a little early this year.

EDIT: I guess as a follow up, I anticipate pretty substantial(proposed, at least) cuts to UCAR/NCAR and NREL as well. "We don't need no stinkin' climate research!"

Yep. I'm in Boulder too. NOAA, NCAR, and NIST have always been fixtures (almost cultural, not just scientific institutions) of this town. It's sad to hear this news and just serves to reinforce the sense of helplessness I feel when faced with climate science doubters. There really couldn't be a more important issue facing the planet right now. But, alas, humans mostly don't care.

> But, alas, humans mostly don't care.

Humans mostly do. But not all humans get to vote in the US elections.

Cutting their satellite programs would be a loss for the whole world: some years ago we[1] used it to find gas flares in Nigeria and estimate their environmental damage and the amount of energy wasted by flaring it instead of power generation for the population of the Niger Delta:

http://gasflaretracker.ng/

[1] I built the application working as freelancer for http://www.stakeholderdemocracy.org/

While processing their raw data I got a small discrepancy and they very kindly replied my questions with the exact formulas and constants they used: the cause was that they used the density of methane at 20°C instead of 25°C as I had done.

Getting that kind of data from similar agencies in other countries, even Western European ones, is immensely more difficult even when it exists.

The cuts are gonna kill a ton of jobs. Blue collar ones too. And some of the US competitive advantage.

Science has been driving our economy for years.

They are also proposing cutting funding for clean water in the Great Lakes region 97%. Largest source of fresh water in the world and we are gonna cut almost all of the funding?

They've also announced eliminating the budget to control Asian carp... billions and billions in economic activity are going to be lost, not to mention so much biological diversity in the Great Lakes. Just an absolute catastrophe.

Is that also a budget action?

This describes it as an administrative action to preserve certain business activities in Illinois:

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/03/trump_admin...

To be clear, I prefer the plan that protects the lakes.

Yep, the overall program cut by 95%+ in the Trump budget.

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2017/03/trump_great_lake...

WTF is wrong with this administration and data? Honestly.

Well, it's easier to lie about things when there's not any hard data available, and they do seem to lie a lot.

They do it even when there's data available, they don't care either way I think.

Without data, folks can't prove they are lying, though.

It's easy. This administration and the current GOP are beholden to the very rich and to corporations.

Energy companies have made a business decision to use marketing and PR to deny climate change. Denying climate change protects energy companies' profits.

This is all very expected once you realize who funds the GOP.

I don't really get why most media stories on climate change don't explain the motivations behind climate change denial.

This administration and the current GOP?

This isn't a partisan problem, it's a systemic one. Every recent administration and both major parties are beholden to powerful special interests.

The normal course of things the US went through since the seventies. The US is all in all an insane country with tons of nukes.

Let's hope he stops at just destroying the US alone and not start a World War.

Those of use who care about these things are a bit screwed, in that the mid-terms put so many more Democratic seats in play than Republican.

And the Republican majority knows it owes a significant part of its current position to Trump -- and his acive base.

Nonetheless, if you don't want science and reason and at least a best-effort at environmental and resource management to go out the window, NOW is the time to communicate this to your representatives. Whatever your political affiliation as well as that of your representatives.

There are reasonable differences on how to manage as well as measure and report resources and the environment. Most rational people, regardless of their position, don't want to throw the science and scientific endeavors out the window.

And as for "conservative" and "business" value in this: I believe agri-business -- at whatever scale -- derives significant value from the likes of NOAA surveying, evaluating, and reporting on weather and climate.

Something I find annoying about these... "government-science-divestment" attitudes and agendas. These programs don't nor even primarily support "tree huggers". They've grown up, exist, and maintain support because the provide significant value to business and commerce.

> Those of use who care about these things are a bit screwed, in that the mid-terms put so many more Democratic seats in play than Republican.

Maybe in the Senate, but not in the House! Get out there and find some Democrats in tight districts to support!

I had heard that Trump/Republican the plan to kill NASA's climate research, was actually going to be to shunt it over to NOAA. This might be the other shoe dropping - defund NOAA (especially the satellite division) so that they can't keep the climate research going.

Makes sense when the powers that be think climate change is made up, in fact maybe they think the climate is made up. Why fund an agency that spends money on something that does not exist?

Certainly they believe that weather exists? Cuts to NOAA won't just affect climate change research but will affect weather forecasts, hurricane forecasts, severe weather forecasts, etc.

Mr. Trump is a pathetic excuse for a president.

"They can't predict the weather worth a damn, so what use are they!"

(Nevermind that forecasting has improved tremendously in the last 20 years, thanks in large part to NOAA research)

>Certainly they believe that weather exists?

Exists? Sure. What it actually is? Not really.

"Trump also misrepresented what happened to the weather during his swearing in. He said he felt a few drops of rain as he started delivering his address, but then, “God looked down and, and he said we’re not going to let it rain on your speech.. . .The truth is it stopped immediately.”

Light rain continued to fall through the first few minutes of the speech — and VIP’s at the dais took out ponchos, including former president George W. Bush — and then quit. Trump said there was a downpour right after he finished, which did not occur." - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-in-cia-visit-a...

    > Certainly they believe that
    > weather exists

This administration does not appear to reward such assumptions.

They don't think that climate change is made up. They're just trying to stuff their piggy banks before the bill is presented.

No, I think they do think it is made up.

Everyone knows about weather and climate, but NOAA also does a lot of ocean exploration:

http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/explorations.html

This is really bad. NOAA also covers oceans. This talk mentions how it was underfunded already 9 years ago.

https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_ballard_on_exploring_the_oc...

Someday perhaps we can return to those wonderful bygone era when we had no weather satellites and no one knew the hurricane was coming and thousands of people die and billions of dollars is lost. But the important thing is we bought more carriers.

"according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post."

Why not share that memo with the public since they have it? How is the public interest served by not sharing it?

The White House is desperately trying to crack down on leaks: https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2017/03/03/us/politics/03reu..., to the point of demanding aides hand over their phone to check that Signal is not installed. It's entirely possible the Post and/or whoever leaked the memo is suspicious of custom "fingerprinted" versions that could be traced back to the source.

Because it could endanger their source. Sometimes different versions of a document are given to different people to try to figure out who's leaking. And having people in the White House who are willing to leak important information to the public is in the public interest.

Nature now requires public data for articles, maybe The Washington Post should do the same with its sources. http://www.nature.com/news/announcement-where-are-the-data-1...

Just playing devil's advocate can someone articulate what kind of value we will lose as a society?

NOAA plays a critical role in monitoring and predicting weather and sea patterns.

Lol....hurricane prediction?

Multiple sectors of the economy, especially agriculture, rely critically on accurate weather forecasting, which is provided by NOAA.

If you read the article you will see it involves cuts to measurement areas like satellites and temperature monitoring, which will make weather and climate science shittier for everyone.

Just to extend this. Climate science may seem like an abstract and alarmist thing now, but as the earth warms the human cost of all this will become much more pronounced, and without accurate science and monitoring, we're pretty much totally fucked.

"[...]eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs, including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and “coastal resilience,” which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas."

Every single commercial airline flight in the US relies on NOAA forecasting. Without reliable forecasting I would suspect the airline industry would crumble under delays, wasted fuel, diversions, and overall customer dissatisfaction.

This isn't to say a third party couldn't pick up the slack but then you have a very clear conflict of interest. If the airlines get to make their own forecast they can skimp on fuel and push pilots to fly into weather that they magically deem legal. The margins of safety are significantly higher with an unbiased third party.

>airline flight in the US relies on NOAA forecasting

Sure but is that what is actually going to be cut? You do realize that one common way that unelected bureaucrats defend their spending is to launder unpopular/dubious spending in very popular spending?

Is there any evidence at all that this happens with NOAA? If not, why suggest it?

Sure, here's some evidence of dubious spending:

"And that shared mindset is frustration. Senator Mikulski was quoted by E&E Publishing’s ClimateWire as saying “We have said time and time and time and again to NOAA, ‘Get your act together’”… “Continual cost overruns are eating up NOAA’s budget, and quite frankly, eating up the budget and goodwill of this committee.”

Note that Sen. Mikulski is a liberal from Maryland, where NOAA headquarters is.

http://www.livingontherealworld.org/?p=633

The satellite data division would lose almost a quarter of its funding. Satellite data is highly important in creating accurate forecasts. I imagine the target is climate change data, but climate change and weather forecasting start with the same sorts of raw data, so I don't think you can hit one without the other in this case.

Can you see numbers being put on maritime vessels? Human life? Hurricane prediction matters to both. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantome_(schooner)

Off the top of my head, comercial and general aviation rely critically on NOAA's services.

NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration[1] provides scientific support for oil spills, chemical accidents, and other emergencies in coastal areas.

Though if we want to talk numbers, here's one: $18.7 billion. NOAA legal assisted DoJ (and others) with BP's Deepwater Horizon civil settlement.[2]

[1] http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about [2] http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/agreement-p...

I live in Dixie Alley [0], a place prone to incredibly violent tornadoes. The National Weather Service, part on NOAA, has saved many lives here. If you follow along on a weather enthusiast forum like TalkWeather [1], you'll see just some of the protection that NWS provides us. The prediction and modeling alone are amazing. The thought of not having those people looking out for me is terrifying.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Alley

[1] http://talkweather.com/index.php

Is it the federal governments job to invest in protecting people that knowingly live in dangerous areas though? Not saying you shouldn't live there, but if you have a known risk and your local government and citizens cannot manage that risk - why should other citizens across the country pay for that? I understand those services were being delivered and now there might be a gap which is worrisome, but can it be solved at the state level? Or perhaps a coalition of states in the area? Is the NWS the only capable source of safety related weather information?

Did you ask for an example for honest debate, or to have a straw man you could pick apart? Because it seems like it's the latter. You're arguing his example and ignoring the larger point (likely intentionally).

Honest. I was pretty clear that I think it's a state issue but was interested in hearing whether it's feasible for the states to handle. If it isn't, then I could see that being a valid justification as a federal investment which is undergoing cuts that may affect the service.

Every state has weather that can be devastating; also weather does not usually confine itself to state boundaries.

I'm not sure what your point is. Is it that since every state benefits from NOAA data it's a sensible investment federally? What if a state requires 5x as many resources as another state? We already have a scenario where southern states draw a lot more than they contribute. We enable states to avoid managing their own citizen's welfare. A lot of people don't want to pay for other people to live in known tornado alleys, just like those people wouldn't want to pay for people to live on fault lines overlooking the ocean or in flood plains.

Let me put it to you this way:

There is no place to live that is totally safe from bad weather. It is in the best interest of every citizen of the United States to pay for climate and weather modeling as disastrous weather can have massive impact on the economy. Also, from a moral standpoint, I personally don't mind shelling out some money to try and keep people safe.

As to your point about people living in areas where weather tends to be statistically more dangerous: If the government came to your house and forced you to leave, how would you feel about that?

Is the NOAA the only entity that could provide this data?

Nobody is suggesting forcing people to leave, but there are people that knowingly live in places that are drastically more dangerous just like there are a ton of people that decide to not take responsibility for their own health which creates a burden on everyone. I'm just suggesting that those local governments should take more responsibility. Or people pay extra for insurance. Some areas are so risky you can't even buy insurance to protect your home. So maybe those states should come up with a strategy rather than let the whole country pay.

My stock response to libertarians: "I'm glad that things have worked out great for you". Before you propose dismantling an existing arrangement that seems to be working just fine, you first have to tell us why the existing arrangement is faulty in a real practical sense. If you can not do that, then leave it the hell alone. We have enough ideologues fucking with things already.

If you cannot see why people knowingly living in dangerous areas that have local governments that aren't accountable for preparing for these disasters and then relying on a federal government is faulty then you're not looking at it objectively.

We've seen it unfold before where the federal government is too late and more people die than should have given the circumstances. It enables states to defer the safety of their own people it depends on to function.

Most things should be at the state level. And you're wrong about libertarians. It's not about things "went well for me screw everyone else". It's about pushing responsibility to the states where it's supposed to be which is what I was proposing. Your rude stock response just means you aren't open to a discussion and are consumed by your own biases.

> also weather does not usually confine itself to state boundaries.

This is a very good point. During the height of the 2011 Super Outbreak [0], April 27th, many of the strongest tornadoes crossed state lines. Taken as a whole, the event lasted four days and spawned tornadoes as far north as New York, south to Florida, east to Arkansas and west to the Carolinas.

Here's the thing: thanks to NWS forecasting and climate modeling, we had DAYS of warning that this was probably going to be a very bad storm. Obviously, they can't tell you X tornado is going to hit Y neighborhood, but from a standpoint of getting pre-warning out, we had lots of notice that things were going to be tough.

Historically, the deadliest tornado in American history was the Tri-State tornado [1], that started in Missouri and ended in Indiana.

None of these could be taken individually as they were all part of the same large mesoscale system. Lots of ingredients go into a good climate model, from which good predictions can be made.

On an "average" severe weather event, from where I live (Huntsville, northern part of Alabama just south of the Tennessee border), storms usually fire up across central Mississippi, move rapidly northeast across Alabama and dissipate or weaken as they move into eastern Tennessee.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Tornado

The people who live in Manhattan know that they are a prime target for terrorists. Is it the government's job to invest in protecting those people because it was their choice to live and work in Manhattan? /s

I was talking to someone who worked as an engineer for NASA for decades. He said the work he was proudest of was on the GOES satellites, because they save lives every year by providing data on extreme weather. It looks like weather satellite operations are going to be hardest hit by these cuts.

Yep, these satellites are very important to weather forcasting. The GOES-R (now GOES-16) satellite launched recently, here are a couple of videos taken by it over the last few days:

https://twitter.com/wxlada/status/837417069423513601 https://twitter.com/wxbrad/status/837508892611465216

and a full disk picture: https://twitter.com/NOAASatellites/status/835240421647347713

Weather predictions rely on satellite data, and those predictions underlie warnings and watches for both direct weather hazards (high wind, tornado, etc., warnings) and hazardous consequences of weather (flood/flash flood warnings, etc.)

These, in turn, enable people to take informed actions to protect lives, property, and economic assets.

Next up: disbanding firefighters, parametics and police. Not to be outdone by shutting down the electric grid.

You joke but I know plenty of self professed libertarians who want nothing more than to see those very services privatized. I know someone who genuinely believes a privatized police force would be the end of police violence because "then we'd at least be able to fight back." Sadly this is actually how a lot of people think.

Yeah that's overboard and I don't think common services should be profitable enterprises, but the notion that you'd have an entity with serious repercussions for doing wrong to the people they swore to protect is not unfound. As it stands now, they are self-preserving entities and collect pensions when they screw up. So while that suggestion you shared is not sensible, we do need a better checks and balance on the police. Something outside of internal affairs, like a BBB at the top of the state department.

> You joke but I know plenty of self professed libertarians who want nothing more than to see those very services privatized.

Perhaps, but the Trump Administration doesn't even pretend to be libertarian (pro-business, especially big business, yes, but not libertarian.)

Only the first two; defense and law enforcement are the things this administration wants government to do more of.

Cuts to any good science will be sad.

Imagine the free market purists get their way -- all funds are cut for NOAA and weather prediction is now left to private industry to provide as a service.

It is an article of faith among many that the free market always produces a better, even optimal, solution. That may be true, but what it is optimizing is profit, which is not a direct measure of the accuracy of the service.

For certain market segments, such as farming, there is probably a pretty strong alignment. But what about for, say, answering questions about whether climate change is real? Will we see a market for conservative-aligned weather information providers which delivers the product which the right wants to see? Likewise, will there be markets to provide what the left wants to see? I have a hard time seeing how that is an improvement over what we currently have.

When they fire you, come to EU for a bit. It will blow over.

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Steve Bannon has a thing for shipyards.

Someone should tell him what the NOAA does for merchant shipping.

Worse forecasts -> more dangerous shipping -> more ships lost at sea -> more business for shipyards.

And then more ships built quicker to lesser safety standards (we don't need no stinkin' regulations) which will in turn busy tbe shipyards even more, until we end up with a maritime version of the "Spruce Goose"!

Or maybe it's just late and I've turned hyperbole up a smidgen.

sigh...

Hey, he's just following through on campaign promises. How can you fault him on that?

In a decade or two, this will probably be laughable. But if he cuts back on foreign intervention, I'm happy to cut him lots of slack.

If he cuts back on foreign intervention, this extraordinary emphasis on "rebuilding" our military (whatever that means given the relative size of our military) makes even less sense.

If you're hanging your hat on the idea that he'll be less interventionist, I'd ask you to consider the evidence mounting to the contrary.

Damn, if he doesn't trigger WWIII, I'll be happy.

That's a very different bar than you set just a post up.

Different in degree, yes. But part of a continuum.

Right, and we've already established it's one we'll likely breach in a Trump admin. The margin is just wiggle room.

So do you think that he'll intervene more than Clinton would have done?

It would be purely speculative. I'm not sure what that has to do with this specific discussion.

He said since the beginning of the primaries that he believe in "Peace through Strength", and repeated it many times. If you believe he wants to invade the world, you may be a low-information voter, with all due respect. (note: I don't like military spending).

The idea that the US is weak and needs to increase its military budget to achieve "Peace through Strength" is laughable.

The US's military budget is already nearly 3x higher than the next highest country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...).

> The idea that the US is weak and needs to increase its military budget to achieve "Peace through Strength" is laughable.

Who are you arguing with? You haven't read my comment, clearly.

Ad hominem, strawman and passive aggressiveness in a single sentence. Impressive.

We have - by any objective measure but ground troops and total warheads - the largest on the planet. "Peace through Strength" is nothing but a platitude. If it means anything, it's "Biggest Military." We didn't need Donald Trump for that.

The notion that we must "rebuild" what is already a gigantic military is perplexing. Our military challenges are not coming to us from nations who are emboldened that our massive military is not 10% more massive. I'm not going to call you a low-information voter, but I'm going to ask that you be a little more critical and analytical if this is as deep as you're going at present.

Where did I argue we have to rebuild the military? Are you even replying to the right comment? Is your first sentence projection?

I think you perhaps should read my post again, I made no claim about you making that argument.

Then what is your post replying to? A poster above said that Trump's military spending shows he's a warmonger, and I said it's well known to anyone who even remotely followed the election that he believes in "peace through strength", so his military spending doesn't prove he's a warmonger.

The only strawman was yours.

I didn't reply to the warmonger post. I'm not responsible for contextually connecting every one of my posts to every other in a thread.

Although I see that by not doing so it gives you the opportunity to reply with this sort of non reply.

> to every other in a thread

You're misrepresenting.

You: If he cuts back on foreign intervention, this extraordinary emphasis on "rebuilding" our military (whatever that means given the relative size of our military) makes even less sense.

Me: Yes it does, "Peace through Strength"

Followed by your hyper-aggressive, completely off-topic comment right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789479

Why did I need to write the above up?

Though I'm not sure you're arguing in good faith ...

Peace through strength is not something that requires additional military resources. I'm not sure why you're being obtuse about this.

He promised during the campaign to cut the debt; his proposed budget would do the opposite.

"Peace Through Strength" is, again, a platitude, but even if we take it at face value we have strength at 4x+ and other nation.

> If he cuts back on foreign intervention, this extraordinary emphasis on "rebuilding" our military (whatever that means given the relative size of our military) makes even less sense.

If you take some of his false statements as statements of future intent, it makes perfect sense. For instance, the description of deportation efforts as "a military operation".

> he's just following through on campaign promises. How can you fault him on that?

It's easy - his campaign promises were short-sighted and pandering to idiots.

I agree. But it did get him elected.

And I suspect that it will get worse.

Sorry to hear about anyone losing jobs.

The NOAA has been suspected of doctoring the record[1], of all varieties including the satellites once they got control of them[2]. there will be more insider stories of how some conspired to fake AGW data [3]

so I think it likely that the revisions and corrections will be challenged soon and we will see that the revisions had no factual basis. Many will resign, probably jumping before pushed. The cuts are unfortunately prejudging the outcome.

[1] https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/noa...

[2] https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/rss-satellite-tem...

[3] https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/02/12/boo...

From the first link:

"Note how a huge swathe of South America has been labelled as “record warmest”. And what is this based on? In fact, there is virtually no temperature data available at all for that particular area, including nearly all of Brazil. The so-called record temperatures in Brazil and neighbouring countries are pure fabrication."

That seems like a pretty bold charge, how does someone who knows nothing about this tell who's telling the truth? Anyone care to weigh in?

EDIT: Seems you're downvoted to grey already, hopefully someone can still add some commentary.

that was just one of many many charges of tampering[1].

honestly this cristicism of the NOAA, NASA is pretty unwelcome by most HN people, so im not proposing everyone accept this immediately.

but the facts are out there and slowly if what i am saying is correct ( time will tell ) the the tampering will start being rolled back.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11367272/Climategate-the-...

Here is an analysis from a data-driven organization dedicated to listing, understanding and reducing biases in science records. They have covered the National Climate Data Center data (which apparently GISS uses).

http://berkeleyearth.org/understanding-adjustments-temperatu...

Edit: this discussion does focus on the U.S. network, where some of the articles you listed referred to data from Africa and South America, but assumedly the corrective techniques are similar.

I recently read a very convincing (to me at least) debunking of that first link, but unfortunately I'm not able to find it right now. But from memory:

The claim is that the temperature data in the first map is made up because some of its data isn't present in the second map (just look at Africa, South America, and the oceans). HOWEVER:

The first map shows a combination of two data sets. The second map only shows one of the data sets used in the first map. Not surprisingly, this means that the second map has less data.

The two graphs are also covering different time periods. The second graph covers a smaller time period, so presumably that lets them be more specific about where the temperatures are recorded. The ERSST data in the first graph goes back more than 100 years, so they don't have quite the same precision and consistency in terms of where the measurements came from. The bigger grid squares in the first map reflect that some of the data is interpolated as weather stations moved from city to city, new weather stations start coming into play halfway through the dataset, etc.

EDIT: Apparently the debunking I read was on Stackoverflow of all places. I must've fallen down that rabbit hole while looking up something totally unrelated. Here's the link: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/37119/did-noaa-p...

From the stackoverflow comments its clear that theoretical models have been proposed to infer the temperature on land from the ocean database.

the main concern is that the models are pure junk science.

so saying "our models say it is so" is precisely the problem

Are there any specific concerns with the methodology? I didn't see any mention of that in the first link.

> according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post.

So somebody in the NOAA is leaking internal memos to the press. Is it so bad to cut funding to rebellious agencies?

It could be a good way to catch leakers: Distribute to every agency head a memo mentioning upcoming budget cuts, and see which self-righteous agencies try to stir up trouble. Instruct the agency heads to make minor changes to the details, to see if they surface.

I don't have an opinion on the NOAA itself, although it doesn't look like they're being targeted:

> NOAA is part of the Commerce Department, which would be hit by an overall 18 percent budget reduction from its current funding level.

"Is it so bad to cut funding to rebellious agencies?"

If the agency provides a vital service to the country, I'd say it is bad to punish the country by cutting their funding just because an employee in that agency leaked a document.

The budget cut memo by itself is not that important. The memo was probably forwarded to every manager in the department, and all it takes is one disgruntled underling expecting his job to be cut.

But if it's a consistent pattern, there's risk in having the government be staffed with people who feel justified in breaking the law to preserve their jobs, even if they feel their jobs are important.

> It could be a good way to catch leakers, too

That's what we need, to catch those darn leakers, no matter the cost to our society's future.

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