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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue we're going to have is that at some point someone else will be in charge, and the science will resume, but there will be a big hole in the data, because this current administration is no longer funding the collection of critical data for climate models. We won't even really feel the effects of this for probably a decade or more, when the models finally see the effects of the lack of data.

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It's kind of brilliant, in a perverse way.

In 2028, there will be strong indicators of continued climate change. But denialists will be able to say "well we can't say for sure, there's this huge gap in data from 2016-2024, we need to have at least 16 years of solid data in order to say for sure."

Climate scientists seem pretty sure already that climate change is happening. In 2028 when the effects should be even more obvious do you think there will still be denialists? There's reason to believe the bottom third of Florida will be underwater by 2030 [0], if a significant fraction of the US is still denying it by then it might be time to give up hope in our nation's continued presence on Earth.

[0]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/how-long-all-f...

> when the effects should be even more obvious do you think there will still be denialists?

If you think there won't be, I'd say you're far too optimistic.

That's definitely a big issue.

But I think a bigger issue is that we're going to spend 4-8 years making little progress actually fixing climate change. Any changes we do have greater impact the earlier we do them. It was a smoldering fire in a wastepaper basket 30 years ago. Now one bedroom is on fire. We're going to spend another 2-6 years doing nothing while the fire continues to spread. Hopefully we'll still be able to put it out once we get an adult into office.

I think that's the biggest issue.

Up until three years ago there was "an adult in office" and not all that much was actually being done. Sure, more than now, but it's not like they had plans for shutting down all coal plants or something of the sort

Not to mention the loss of experience and knowledge as people in the affected programs move on to other, potentially more stable, and potentially more lucrative, employment.

Who is not collecting data?

Budgets are being slashed across the admin, but NOAA is prime example. They've said multiple times they can no longer meet all of their priorities because of the lack of budget. It came to head during the government shutdown, when they simply stopped doing any work for a month.

Godless untrustworthy liberals, duh.

If we discover how to read historic climate data from carbon atoms, like we do with radioactive decay, do you see all the money we spent so far as a waste?

No, to the contrary, the data we collect now would be used to verify that we are reading the carbon atoms correctly.

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