Hurricane Helene has passed by now, leaving wreckage in its wake.
If you suffered any losses, you know how you can fix it? Close your eyes! Project 2025 wants to close the National Hurricane Center and NOAA because they keep telling people about these kinds of natural disasters.
“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated,” reads the introduction to Project 2025’s chapter on proposals for the Department of Commerce (of which NOAA is an agency). It goes on to simply say “Break up NOAA” as the first sentence in the section covering that agency.
Project 2025 calls NOAA and the National Weather Service “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” and “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
See, the damage due to Helene was simply alarmism. If you don’t know about it, it didn’t happen.
Their idea of prosperity, though, is to privatize and commercialize weather forecasting. Make people pay for their warnings and safety.
Oliver also unearthed a 2018 interview with AccuWeather’s Founder and Executive Chairman Joel Myers, describing what he felt was a success story for privatized-weather forecasting, but which actually stands as a cautionary tale:
“Union Pacific: We told them that a tornado was heading to a spot. Two trains stopped two miles apart, they watched the tornado go between. Then unfortunately it went into a town that didn’t have our service and a couple dozen people were killed. But the railroad did not lose anything,” Myers said.
Success: a couple dozen people died, but the railroad company didn’t lose any money.
AccuWeather’s Founder and Executive Chairman Joel Myers is no relation, and if he is, I disown him.
It sounds like privatized weather forecasting will work every bit as well as our for-profit health care system.
Science and capitalism don’t really work. It is not just the situation that you have described (asking people to pay for information – meaning that information can’t either be spread nor checked), the problem is covering up errors that will end up costing the company money. For science to work, it needs to be non-profit and transparent.
I get the 2025 point, but the story is not a Cat 4 hit Florida.
The story is a tropical storm hit Asheville, NC with flooding damage as far north as Ohio.
The “cat” number is no longer the real predictor of damage and risk.
“Then unfortunately it went into a town that didn’t have our service and a couple dozen people were killed.”
If the town had their service, would the tornado stop or would the town move out of the way?
I call BS. You can’t predict where a tornado will go with that degree of precision.
I’m sure Project 2025 is just getting started here, abolishing the National Weather Service and NOAA. That will undoubtedly totally fix the Climate Change Problem and the Hurricane and Tornado problems.
Next up.
1. Abolish the U.S. Geological Survey, the federal department in charge of earthquake preparedness. That will fix the earthquakes and tidal waves problems.
2. Abolish NIH, NIAID, and the CDC. No more infectious diseases. Especially pandemics. Without those organizations, the Covid-19 virus pandemic would never have happened.
3. Abolish the Forest Service and the BLM. No more forest fires. Open range for all.
4. Abolish the FDA. Let the free market decide which drugs are worth taking and which can be useless or fatal.
5. Abolish the EPA. No more environmental problems or pollution of soil, air, and water.
6. Abolish the Department of Education. No more education, no more educated citizens to figure out they are living in a New Dark Age run by cuckoo, hate filled xians.
This isn’t even all sarcasm.
Project 2025 actually does want to abolish the EPA and the Department of Education. Their other big target is of course, the CDC. The CDC openly discriminates against their friends the pathogens such as HIV, Covid-19 virus, bird flu, Mpox, Hepatitis A,B, C. etc..
If you pretend infectious disease organisms don’t exist, no one ever gets sick and dies from them.
From Heather Cox Richardson this morning:
Also noted:
So much for prayer and fasting.
Per some news, Helene hit Perry, Florida first. My dad’s brother lived in Perry, working at the giant paper mill that eliminated the neighboring town of Foley. His son still lives there. I feel some small connection to the place as a childhood memory. This is the third big storm to plow through the town in a year.
I’m going to echo Reginald at #5 here.
This sounds like a lie.
Anywhere in tornado country has the National Weather Service with their Real Time Tornado warnings and also Tornado warning sirens.
What is the name of this imaginary town and why was the death toll so high? Even without warning sirens, people can see tornadoes coming. Even I saw one once, not moving anywhere though.
Somewhere a town gets hit all the time by tornadoes. While property damage can be high, fatalities are usually low. People know how to take shelter.
I get warnings all the time from the National Weather Service. Wildfire dangers and heavy rain storms with localized flooding. Rarely funnel clouds. Sometimes fog alerts. Air quality alerts.
accuweather derives all of its products in the US from data and reports that the national weather service collects and produces. most of these products have little value added to them; they’re just covered with accuweather’s brand and redistributed. if the nws goes away, then accuweather has to pay for the infrastructure and expertise that currently costs them nearly nothing. what a hilarious turn of fate it would be for noaa to be dismantled and accuweather to be no longer profitable because they can’t get weather data and reports for free anymore.
Robro €. #7
So prayer to prevent hurricane damage and death works as well as it does in preventing school shootings and mass murder
Go figure.
These neoliberal Reaganist/Thatcherite free enterprise fundamentalists should go to Argentina and see how well their ideas work. Their chain-saw wielding kook president is abolishing whole departments left and right.
And, how well is it working? Don’t leave us hanging here.
Brownback in Kansas did something similar a decade ago.
The governor of Kansas cut taxes by a huge amount. Supply Side economics claims those tax cuts will pay for themselves because of magic. The magic never works.
So, then they cut services to balance the budget.
So, lower taxes, no services.
For states that means no schools. Around half the budget of states is…education.
Well, so what. They hate public education and kids anyway.
Trump when he became president actually nominated Barry Myers, younger brother of Joel Myers, to be head of NOAA. Many senators were skeptical of the conflicts and the nomination languished for years until Barry finally withdrew, and NOAA never did have a confirmed head under Trump.
(continuation of my above comment)
After Barry Myers withdrew, Trump nominated for NOAA head Neil Jacobs, who alas (figuratively) beshat himself during the Sharpiegate fiasco, and the Senate opted to not take it up before it became moot when Biden was elected.
So, how many weather satellites does Accuweather have? How many hurricane hunter planes? Radar stations?
Back when he was in office, Trump said he wanted to get rid of the national weather service’s civilian outreach websites. the government weather services should make their data available only to corporations, that could sell it to the public!
Of course, we civilians already pay for that weather forecasting, so that would be making us pay for it twice, but hey, the important thing is, poor people are getting even more fleeced!
Please let this idiot never come into power again.
Not saying that Germany is doing great at the moment, but after the Ahrtal flooding with lots of preventable deaths, we really ramped up our warning systems and emergency coordination. The US seems to head into the opposite direction. Next step, make showing the damage a felony.
It’s like Ankh-Morpork’s answer to weather services. “Nice town you got here. Be a shame if a tornado hit it.”
“See, the damage due to Helene was simply alarmism. If you don’t know about it, it didn’t happen.”
Very similar to Dumb Idiot Ken Ham’s horrible teaching materials which teaches that if no one was there to witness anything happening, then it didn’t happen at all. Never mind the credible evidence confirming that whatever event no one saw happened in the past did occur. Case in point: No one was there to see a woman being raped, but her underwear shows the assailant’s urine and sperm stains, indicating that the incident did occur.
@ 7 & 10
Evidently, Christian god wasn’t in a giving vein despite all of his worshippers asking.
Speaking of project 2025, it is written as if by a child. It amounts to whining: “Mommy! He said a bad thing about me! Make him stop!”
What are the “threats” to AMERICA? Claims of collusion with Russia, and Hunter Biden’s laptop! The project returns to these horrors again and again. For example, the FBI is “a threat to the Republic” (p. 548), and it’s “completely out of control.” (p. 549) Why? Because it didn’t take Hunter Biden’s laptop seriously! (p. 546 and 548.) What about the FBI’s investigation of Hillary’s server, including its last minute revival, which eked out the last few electoral votes for Trump in 2016, even when he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes!
And the “politicization” of the intelligence community risks “undermining our democratic system,” no less. Again, it’s because of “claims of Trump–Russia collusion” and Hunter Biden’s laptop! (p. 212, and p. 213)
As for Big Tech, “The dominant internet platforms have disrupted democratic deliberation, as is evidenced by the Hunter Biden laptop story.” (p. 878) How about storming the capitol and threatening to hang the VP, would that disrupt “democratic deliberation?”
And when they aren’t whining, they’re boring. It’s mostly boilerplate, droning on about combining various agencies whose names suggest that they do related stuff. Maybe it would save some taxpayers money, or maybe it would just add another layer of bureaucracy. Like Project 2025 would know!
Some “project!” It’s a wish list of far Right idealogues who have never held power, and for good reasons. They have never done anything, because no one would ever let them, and so they don’t know how anything works.
The town was Greensburg, KS in 2007, and AES (AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions Inc.) touted its ability to save the trains in this article.
https://www.cjonline.com/story/business/2016/08/06/accuweather-helps-businesses-plan-dangerous-weather/16578612007/
Helene’s center apparently passed by about 100 miles from my house, Thursday; I only got electricity back Monday evening.
An odd thing: TS-force winds were forecast to hit this county about 2 pm on Thursday, and the NOAA maps duly showed the TS zone reaching from the Gulf across the state and well out into the Atlantic – but we had only mild breezes. The storm winds finally arrived about 10 pm, and local electric lines went down at 10:23.
A while after that, I walked outside and watched the treetops whipping violently back and forth – but on the ground, felt only zephyrs: I could have carried a lit candle and not had it blow out. Shortly after I went back inside, the winds tore an oak tree in half and dropped the top part where I had been standing. (I spent a good part of the aftermath disassembling said top with a chainsaw – still have a lot of it to go.)
The cable company got my internet access working when the juice came back – but then stopped functioning most of the day, blaming their electricity supply. Now (obvsly) I’m online again, but haven’t found anything to explain why the forecasts and real-time maps apparently got it so wrong.