Suzanne Harrington: Orange alert — is the US about to privatise the weather?
Pic: iStock/NASA
Events in the US currently embody a kind of insanity buffet sponsored by The Muppet Show high on bad mushrooms. A smorgasbord of mental.
From the elderly white guy getting crucial names mixed up, to the elderly orange guy appearing at a political convention with a pantyliner stuck to his ear, to the centre-staging of a former hillbilly who previously called the orange guy “America’s Hitler” but now wants to be his right-hand man while in the same breath referring to the UK as an “Islamist state”, suggesting Israel should “finish the job” in Palestine, and stating that Ukraine “doesn’t matter” - it’s enough to make your prefrontal cortex melt and dribble out your ear.
Amidst this McFlurry of WTFery comes news that, while lacking the clickbait slap-bang-wallop of senile egos colliding on the world’s stage, is still quite terrifying.
It’s the proposed defunding and dissolution of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the US equivalent of Met Eireann – and the proposed abolition of free weather reports.
Which sounds niche and nerdy, except it isn’t. The American right want to politicise the weather.
Project 2025 is a policy document from the MAGA camp which dislikes what it calls NOAA’s “climate alarmism”.
It thinks “climate change research should be disbanded”, and views on climate change should be “wholly in sync” with Trump’s views, which are that it doesn’t exist.
The National Weather Service - which warns Americans about impending hurricanes, tornados, droughts, extreme heat and flooding, should be privatised. They’d like to “fully commercialise its forecasting operations.”
Project 2025, funded in part by the fossil fuel industry, literally want to privatise the weather.
This could result in flood warnings being sponsored by sand bag manufacturers, extreme heat warnings being sponsored by air-con companies, tornado alerts being sponsored by whatever you’re supposed to buy when a tornado is coming. Even someone with the IQ of a house brick can see the conflict of interest here.
Worse than privatising the weather is politicising the weather. Weather doesn’t recognise political borders; if a storm is making its way across an ocean, meteorologists from elsewhere tend to phone ahead and share information.
This is human co-operation at its purest, its most ant-like; working together irrespective of man-made nationalities.
When Hurricane Sandy was ripping towards the US east coast in 2012, American meteorologists forecasted that it would swerve back to sea; the Europeans realised it was heading straight for land, and warned their colleagues, who in turned warned New Jersey to batten down.
Project 25 – a 900 page document full of right-wing policy ideas from a conservative think tank – would like to dismantle this kind of co-operation.
The NOAA also has a vast collection of climate data, shared with climate scientists globally. Letting the MAGA lot get at this would be the science equivalent of letting the Taliban blow up the Bamiyan Buddhas.
So while these flailing old men distract us with their demented entitlement, climate science is having a panic attack. And it’s not on the news. It’s never on the news.
