The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Trump’s Threat to Climate and Weather Data
Dear Diary. This is where a big election that has gone south hits home. Once Trump and his administration takes power in January, climate and weather data could be on the chopping block. Trump has threatened to privatize the Weather Service. The biggest threat to science as I alluded to a few days ago might be the loss of climate data and the ability to glean that from NCEI and NOAA programs.
This would be an insidious move, blinding climate scientists as far as measuring temperature trends mainly across the U.S. Personally, I might lose the NCEI records tool I use to see trends in association with extreme temperatures not only across the U.S. but worldwide. Trump has stated that anthropogenic climate change is not occurring, and by blinding federal organizations and cutting off funding for research, he can continue to at least try to make that claim.
Here are more details about this growing threat from the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/climate/trump-noaa-climate-data-weather.html
Could Trump’s Return Pose a Threat to Climate and Weather Data?
Project 2025, the conservative playbook, calls for breaking up the federal agency that maintains weather data and collects climate change information.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offices in Silver Spring, Md., an agency that the conservative Project 2025 said “should be broken up and downsized. “Credit…Matt Roth for The New York Times
Nov. 14, 2024
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration might not be a household name, but the federal agency is ubiquitous in homes and businesses across the U.S.
That’s because this federal office of scientific research, and its more familiar arm, the National Weather Service, stores a mind-boggling amount of data that we use everyday. Data from the Weather Service powers many weather forecasts as well as the emergency alerts that ping to our smart devices, helping us decide what to wear, where to go and how to protect ourselves and our families from extreme weather events becoming more frequent under climate change.
In the 2018 book “The Fifth Risk,” which details efforts to shrink the federal government under Donald Trump’s first presidential administration, the author Michael Lewis described what it would mean to lose NOAA information. “Without that data and the Weather Service to make sense of it,” Lewis wrote, “no plane would fly, no bridge would be built and no war would be fought — at least not well.”
But the agency that oversees that omnipresent data could now be under threat by a second Trump administration.
That’s according to Project 2025, the policy framework put together by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The authors of the nearly 900 page document wrote that NOAA “should be broken up and downsized,” calling the agency that employs 12,000 workers across the world “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”
“Climate data is absolutely at risk with Project 2025’s call to dissolve the agency,” said Gretchen Gehrke, cofounder of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a small group formed in 2016 to back up climate information.
Trump has called climate change a hoax and said he would rollback climate regulations, and, according to Lewis’s book, officials in the Trump White House did not know that NOAA existed or what it did when Trump took office in 2017.
In 2017, Trump nominated Barry Lee Myers, then the chief executive of the for-profit weather company AccuWeather, to run NOAA even though Myers had spent decades pushing to privatize the Weather Service. After his appointment stalled in the Senate for two years, Myers withdrew his nomination, citing medical issues.
The Heritage Foundation said in an email that it would not comment on questions about Project 2025 and climate data.
Trump, for his part, disavowed Project 2025 during his campaign, and his transition team spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in an email that “no policy should be deemed official unless it comes directly from President Trump.”
While climate data did not disappear under the first Trump administration, climate scientists said they expected the second Trump administration to be more organized and strategic. The Trump transition team did not comment on questions about the maintenance or retention of climate data.
A flight with NOAA’s Hurricane Hunter flight team through Tropical Storm Helene over the Gulf of Mexico in September.Credit…Zack Wittman for The New York Times
What NOAA does
NOAA, which was formed in 1970, is a mishmash of federal offices that is housed under the Commerce Department and tasked with understanding and protecting the nation’s natural resources, a broad assignment that has evolved to cover everything from marine research to storm alerts.
“The data we archive now can be used to solve problems we cannot currently fathom,” John Bateman, a NOAA spokesman, said.
The agency’s data and scientific expertise help predict deadly heat waves, increasingly powerful storms and threats from wildfires, floods and hurricanes. These dangers have only grown as climate change has intensified, and as carbon emissions have hit record levels.
NOAA’s data is archived every month at four offices across the country called the National Centers for Environmental Information. Older agencies under NOAA’s umbrella have been collecting data for almost 200 years, from paper and film records, satellites, buoys, radars and weather stations. NOAA now stores more than 65 million gigabytes of data, or roughly the capacity of four million smartphones.
But those centers are vulnerable to the very climate they’re collecting data on. Hurricane Helene, which was rainier and windier because of climate change, knocked out one of these offices in Asheville, N.C. this fall, which led to a delay in global climate reports and a loss of observational data that “might eventually be unrecoverable,” the agency said.
Other threats to NOAA data
In the wake of the 2016 election and perceived threats to federal climate and environmental agencies, grassroots efforts sprung up to protect the data. The Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project, a group of volunteer data wonks, raised more than $20,000 on Kickstarter to store about 30 terabytes of climate data. Other groups at university campuses and libraries hosted more than 50 hackathons for volunteers to download and store even more.
While some groups like Azimuth have shuttered — though its data from 2017 still exists on a private server — the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative has continued over the past eight years. Dr. Gehrke said the group planned to download data, save federal webpages and record interviews with federal employees, regardless of any actions Trump might take.
But not everyone thinks this pre-emptive work is necessary.
NOAA is required by law to gather and hold climate data, and deleting it would be illegal, Craig McLean, who was chief scientist at NOAA under both Trump and President Biden, told my colleague Christopher Flavelle. McLean said he would be “really surprised” if the new Trump administration tried to delete any data.
“Changing where we store the backups is related to changes in technology, not in administrations,” Bateman said in an email.
But activists and climate scientists worry that even if NOAA isn’t shuttered or data isn’t illegally deleted, the threat of defunding the federal agency could limit its capacity to collect and maintain climate data.
“Even if it’s not explicitly targeting the deletion of data,” Dr. Gehrke said, “defunding agencies will lead to the destruction of data.”
Here are more “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is more brand-new October 2024 climatology (More can be found on each past archived daily November post.):
Here is More Climate News from Friday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)