Weathering Denial: N.O.A.A. Built the Ark, Trump Pulled the Plug
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or N.O.A.A., was created in 1965 by the aggregation of other agencies, including the Weather Bureau, and coastal and US geographic and resource survey organizations, one dating as early as 1807. Intentionally or not, the organization’s name evokes the Old Testament prophet who anticipates the calamity of rising waters - the Great Flood.
The NOAA predicts weather and more, measuring the geosphere and anticipating how the natural world will change and its effects on daily life and centuries-long processes. Part of the US Department of Commerce, NOAA generates and preserves data on which businesses, governments, and the public at large depend. Users of NOAA weather data alone include the US military, insurers, civil engineers, architects, utilities, transportation planners, water authorities, farmers, airlines and pilots, public health leaders, disaster and fire workers, and the construction, recreation, resort, and retail industries. All US online ‘weather apps’ are just cheery front-end presentations of NOAA data.
“The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — the script written for Trump that he insisted he knew nothing about during the 2024 campaign, but which he seems to be implementing now — calls for NOAA to be ‘broken up and downsized’ so that it stops contributing to ‘the climate change alarm industry.’” NOAA’s statistics on billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, for example, reveal that recently these events have caused over 100 billion dollars more in damages than in the 1980s. Yet the biggest carbon curtailment law – the Inflation Reduction Act—costs only some $40 billion annually over 10 years, and Trump is doing his best to avoid spending even that.
Who could advocate for the neutering of the NOAA? The GOP and the Trump administration. Speculation on this administration’s motives is precarious. Three theories might explain the apparent hostility towards NOAA:
Theory 1: GOP+Big Oil’s denial of climate change endorses suppression of the scientific support around excess CO2 and other greenhouse gases as a primary cause. Meyers et.al., for example, document the importance of NOAA scientists in supporting the current consensus on climate change.
Theory 2: Trump’s grudge over Hurricane Dorian – Sharpie incident: Trump and the NOAA contradicted each other on the likely path of this destructive hurricane in September of 2019, much to the President’s annoyance. The mutual accusations of error continued over that week, in time proving Trump to be in error.
Theory 3: Musk-Doge team’s desire to shake up and eventually privatize all valuable ‘business units’ of the US Government. Over 1000 NOAA professionals have been laid off, with more to follow. The LA Times reports that US “Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently revealed a larger agenda… President Donald Trump’s overarching goal, Bessent said, is to ‘reprivatize the economy.’”
Regardless of why, the threats posed by watering down and casting off reliable predictions, sound scientific advice and comprehensive data collection, archiving and interpretation is that dozens of industries and millions of daily decisions will be made with less information, data, and guidance. These include where to fly, when to plant, where to build, when to prepare, and where to flee. NOAA’s predictions are to be denied because the Trump administration doesn’t want to hear about some flood.
If you would like to defend NOAA and other science-based programs, calling your Senators and Congresspeople and asking them to support NOAA and prevent its privatization would be good, as well as simply asking people to talk to friends, family, and neighbors about the importance of having accurate and timely weather and geographic data for free. Not only for us, planning our day to day lives, but for emergencies. And of course, for farmers, fishers, builders, planners, dam operators, streets departments and all those tv weather reporters.
RESOURCES
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-03-11/trump-noaa-national-weather-service
The time frame for this comparison is the last decade (2015-2024); vs. 1980 to 1989, which was $20 billion, 2015 to 2024: $140 billion. These are normalized for inflation (real dollars, deflated by the CPI).
“Consensus revisited: quantifying scientific agreement on climate change and climate expertise among Earth scientists 10 years later” Krista F Myers, Peter T Doran, John Cook, John E Kotcher and Teresa A Myers
Published 20 October 2021 • © 2021 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd, Krista F Myers et al 2021 Environ. Res. Lett. 16 104030DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ac2774 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2774/meta “We find that agreement on anthropogenic global warming is high (91% to 100%) and generally increases with expertise. Out of a group of 153 independently confirmed climate experts, 98.7% of those scientists indicated that the Earth is getting warmer mostly because of human activity, such as burning fossil fuels. Among those with the highest level of expertise (independently confirmed climate experts who each published 20+ peer-reviewed papers on climate change between 2015 and 2019), there was 100% agreement that the Earth is warming mostly because of human activity.”