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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

We have other ways to measure atmospheric CO2 that don’t require maintaining a telescope in Hawaii.

I don’t know why the funding cut is being made, but this article is leaping to a conclusion.

The telescope is studying the sun. Solar events have non negligible effects of the weather. Mauna Loa produces meteorological reports used by sailors and pilots all around the world daily.

This observatory is the first one to show CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and their analyses have been cornerstone to the climate discussion since it's inception.

Unless it's shown that the observatory is burning millions, it's nonsensical to shut it down. It's not free to set up another equivalent lab.

And locations similar to Mauna Loa are not very common, to be clear. It's not gonna be cheaper to set up an equivalent.

Well, at least you’re bothering to have the argument that the article didn’t, but you’re also just speculating about the cost/benefit.

There are good reasons to shut down telescopes, including age, outdated technology, and deprecation.

But it's not a telescope that's measuring the CO2.

Exactly! You want to continue measuring CO2 from the same spot? Much easier and less expensive ways to do it.

No, you're the one speaking about the telescope, while it's not really the point.

Meteorologist have been working there since the 1960s. I'm sure you have some understanding of the conplexity of weather and the precision problems with chaotic systems.

Mauna Loa has been producing quality data since the 60s and has the means (including telescopes) to gather quality data to do quality analysis.

We didn't just strap a telescope to a building - the people in the observatory are not looking at a thermometer, a CO2 meter and then checking out asteroids by the by. Everything they do is to have quality analysis.

The works had been refined over all this time. That's why theres a telescope. Because it's pertinent.

And indeed there are good reasons to do so - many of the observatories were decommissioned starting in 2010 I believe, a long process - care to share anything that would show that's the case here?

To me this is a state of the art meteorological observatory. Unless proven otherwise, we should keep it going.

It's not a telescope[0]; it's a spectrometer that takes in local air samples. It's far more useful if it's at high elevation (else you're drowning in local/regional effects as noise), which is why it happens to be colocated with several astronomy experiments—but they are not the same equipment.

> "We have other ways to measure atmospheric CO2"

It's destroying the continuity of the world's highest-quality and longest-running dataset.

edit: Also, this CO2 observatory closure reflects the entire NOAA climate observation budget being zero'd out[1], so I don't know what where else you'd like us to look instead.

[0] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/climate/budget-cuts-clima... ("But President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would put an end to Mauna Loa, along with three other key observatories and almost all the climate research being done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.")

The thing they’re talking about is a telescope. They incidentally have a CO2 meter there.

Running just the CO2 meter is something that could be done remotely, without the need for a telescope, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

It's not a cheap CO2 room sensor you got off aliexpress.

I didn’t say it was. It’s still orders of magnitude cheaper than maintaining an entire telescope complex on top of a Hawaiian island.

I think you’re thinking of the complex on Mauna Kea (which has several individual sites and has funding from several countries).

Mauna Loa has a telescope that studies the Sun in order to help understand better how that contributes to changing weather patterns on Earth. It is a relatively small site but very important.

The reason that telescopes are often in high up, hard to reach places is because that is the most efficient, cost-effective place for them to be.

I think you are just fundamentally confused. There are two separate entities with similar names. There's the Mauna Loa Observatory, which is what's being discussed here, and there are the Mauna Kea Observatories. The latter one has the telescopes. The Mauna Loa Observatory monitors the atmosphere. It has other types of sensors that are useful for atmospheric science. It isn't an astronomical observatory that just happens to have a CO2 sensor. It was specifically set up in the 1950s to study the atmosphere because of the advantages of being at that specific location. It just happens to have a name that's similar to an institution that does have telescopes.

Perhaps you should have some basic familiarity with what they do before deciding that they shouldn't be doing it. https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/programs.html

It literally says close the facility in the budget.

It's a little shed on top of the mountain. Here's a picture: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mauna-loa-...

Maintaining just the co2 station is probably inexpensive enough that people who care could scrounge for coins under their cushions and keep it alive. I'd happily chip in let's say $50/yr.

No need to scrounge! What if just a tiny bit of our taxes went to this?

what if we all paid for things that made the world better out of our own pockets? or do we not believe in those things if it's inconvenient to us?

I think taxes are simply one way for us all to collectively pay for important things like basic research, education, healthcare, and transportation.

> maintaining a telescope in Hawaii

Why does this seem so idiomatically ridiculous? It is not just the italics, but they do reinforce the statement.

The center of the Pacific is not interchangeable with many other places, to observe the atmosphere. Like maintaining a telescope in Seattle would be so much more practical?

It’s in italics because, if the telescope is outdated or otherwise worth shutting down, keeping it around because it also makes a CO2 measurement is dumb.

I don’t know why they’re cutting it, but the article is just wildly speculating.

it is being shut down exactly and entirely because it is a station that performs climate research, as per the White House 2026 budget proposal:

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/11/nx-s1-5361366/major-budget-cu...

That article doesn’t say what you’re asserting. It says that they’re cutting OAR, National Marine Fisheries Service, and some other things. The writer then goes on to say that OAR, in particular, does climate research. But it’s the research arm of NOAA, so that’s to be expected.

To go from this to “being shut down exactly and entirely because it is a station that performs climate research” is not a defensible statement.

I’m not saying that it’s inconceivable that the current administration is cutting funding that affects Mauna Loa because of climate ideology; I’m saying that without evidence, you’re leaping to conclusions that may or may not be justified.

I think there is more than enough evidence and that article covers it well enough, but here’s another one.

‘[Current OMB director Russ] Vought wrote in Project 2025 that NOAA should be disassembled because it is the “source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and said the “preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”’

It was one of the stated goals of Project 2025, explicitly for the reasons stated, and now one of the proposers of that specific goal is in charge of executing it, and it is being executed in precisely the way outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/11/white-house-plan-gu...

> I’m not saying that it’s inconceivable that the current administration is cutting funding that affects Mauna Loa because of climate ideology; I’m saying that without evidence, you’re leaping to conclusions that may or may not be justified.

Okay, but if I had to make an assumption, I, and any reasonable person on Earth, would assume it's because of the extremist ideology of this administration.

They're anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-oil. Explicitly. I'm not saying this, they're bragging about it. And then things like this keep happening.

Hmm. Now if I were naive and stupid, I might say that it's just a coincidence. Luckily I am not, and I'm confident in say that yes, almost certainly the current administration and political climate has something to do with this.

It's an atmospheric monitoring station and a solar telescope. I've been there. it's basically a shipping container full of sensors and computers and two people huddled there keeping it running.

The big telescopes are on Mauna Kea.

In addition to the high altitude and the isolation from human CO2 sources, they also have decades of data from that location, and having long time-series data is helpful.

The Trump administration is cutting many worthy science projects, often for arbitrary or political reasons.

You always have ways to not invest in science and research. To break liberal and scientific work and data lineages.

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