NOAA

Very quick post tonight as I don’t know what to write about. But I do want to mention, I have been seeing news articles with headlines about headcount cuts at the NOAA and even worse, commercializing its services, with the idea that it would be less expensive and have higher quality.

Less expensive to whom? It’s already free as a public life-saving service. Why do we have to turn everything into a profit-making machine? There are some things the government should provide free as a lifesaving service.

I know the climate deniers don’t like the NOAA because the weather scientists put out data strongly suggesting climate is changing and becoming more extreme. There is more flooding, more torrential rain, more dangerous tornadoes, more CAT 4 or 5 hurricanes…more, more, more.

The economic costs are getting so high that insurance companies are pulling out of some states. For example, Florida has multiple damaging hurricanes and California has ongoing wild fires. If the insurance companies find that the weather is becoming too extreme for them to insure, doesn’t that kind of signal that the weather is changing in ways not good?

It looks like no place is safe. I thought maybe the northern states along the border and Canada might be refuges in the future. But I’ve changed my mind because Canada also has fires and unhealthy smoke as a consequence.

There is no place safe.

Life is going to get precarious and very expensive. I don’t know how the future will pan out with three trends coming on the horizon: 1) authoritarian parties are rising, 2) weather is becoming more extreme, and 3) AI is flooding the workplace. These three trends are colliding to make the world more perilous and volatile.

I think we are heading into extremely dark times before we come out on the other side into a better world. Dawn is probably a couple of generations down the road.

We need NOAA to provide us safety warnings. NOAA provides useful information to weather stations who then interpret the computer graphics. It is a system that has worked and improved tremendously since I was a kid.

Commercializing it would be a travesty.