cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/11490832
NOAA also collects and analyzes key climate data
This is exactly why they need to destroy it, the “free” market can’t compete with the economic efficiency of a well run government program
Are there any real private competitors though? The work that NOAA does is only valuable because of the extreme scale it’s carried out by and replicating that would be quite expensive.
No, and there genuinely can’t be due to everything NOAA does. I used to work in the engineering group for NWS and there are so many parts to weather prediction and climate recording it’s not even funny. Sure there are satellites and radar, but there’s also over 200 weather balloons released each day across the US, there’s highly specialized software that fills the unique non-profit driven mission of the NWS, there’s advanced weather modeling run on super computers, there’s a whole network of thousands of volunteer observers that record temperature, dew point, soil temps, evaporation readings, and more to support agriculture, and then there’s the outreach both to places like schools but also to support things like amateur radio clubs and weather enthusiast clubs that all provide free observations and reports. Private industry consumes all of that data for free to repackage and sell as a product (they technically add value by tailoring it in many cases or use it to run proprietary models). All of that is just the NWS as well, NOAA does so much more that impacts everything from agriculture to fisheries and it’s so clear that the hard right pushing P2025 have no clue what they actually do. This single move would likely destroy the US position as a global breadbasket, and it’s just one tiny piece of P2025.
It amazes me that people do not seem to know this, so it bears repeating strenuously.
Without NWS there is effectively no weather data. Oh sure, you have Wunderground’s handful of private weather stations with their dodgy uncalibrated data. But anything high quality and worth using in forecasting models comes from the gubmint.
No weather data means agriculture is seriously fucked. Aviation is even more fucked. Shipping is fucked. The electricity grid is fucked. Construction, mining, sports… the list of industries that depend on accurate data and forecasting is massive.
AccuWeather has been lobbying for this; Joe Bastardi knows he can’t do as good a job so he wants to end the competition