The Dangerous Trump Purge of Weather and Climate Expertise Begins
Trump's rejection of weather expertise has a dark precedent - in 1941
There’s an enormous, and justified surge of criticism from private-sector and academic meteorolgoists from across the political spectrum over the purge of expertise and supporting staff under way at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Weather Service.
You can learn more below about the precedent I allude to in the subheading. But first, let’s set the scene:
You may recall reading here in December that Ryan Maue, a seasoned meteorologist who worked for a time as a political appointee at NOAA in the first Trump administration, warned against a slash and burn approach a New York Times op-ed:
With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation…. NOAA is spread thin, with a backlog of maintenance and upgrades that will probably take years to get through without significantly more sustained budget support.
This morning, even before word of the mass firings began to spread, longtime severe weather meteorologist Mike Smith - a self-described conservative who has energentically criticized the Biden administration - blogged about a damaging impact of new Weather Service staff cuts in Arctic Alaska.
I’m reposting his piece here:
We have discussed that the NWS is so under-resourced that it cannot perform its core mission. Another domino fell today.
He pasted a clip from a public information release: “Effective immediately and until further notice, the National Weather Service is suspending weather balloon launches at Kotzebue Alaska due to a lack of WFO [weather forecast office] staffing.”
You might say, "Who cares, Alaska is a long way away." The problem is that the weather moves throughout the world.
Below is a current weather satellite image showing a storm moving into southeast Alaska and western Canada.
That storm is forecast to be over the middle of the nation in five days.
Already the NWS’s Storm Prediction Center is flagging the potential for significant tornadoes in the gold area for Tuesday and Tuesday night. I believe this is the 4th weather balloon station in the United States we have lost due to resource issues.
If we want to have any kind of accuracy in forecasts beyond about 2 days, we must have quality worldwide weather measurements.
Some of us have been pointing out these issues for years to no avail.
And then came the news of the mass cuts.
Late today, the UCLA climate scientist and popular “Weather West” blogger Daniel Swain posted the commentary below on X and elsewhere, along with this video version:
The mass firing of both new hires and recently promoted senior staff within NOAA, including mission-critical and life-saving roles at the National Weather Service (NWS), is profoundly alarming. It appears that NOAA staff fired today include meteorologists, data and computer scientists responsible for maintaining and upgrading weather predictive models, and technicians responsible for maintaining the nation's weather instrumentation network (among many others).
Housed within NOAA, the U.S. NWS is a truly world-class meteorological predictive service, perhaps singularly so. Its cost of operation is only $3-4/yr per taxpayer - equivalent to a single cup of coffee - and yields a truly remarkable return on investment (at least 10 to 1, and perhaps 100 to 1, depending on methods of estimation), NOAA and the NWS collectively offer tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year in net economic benefit through a combination of averted losses and efficiencies gained.
More importantly, the NWS (which is itself supported by auxiliary services and entities) saves countless lives by continuously issuing high-quality weather forecasts and extreme weather warnings; there have been multiple cases just in the past several years where NWS predictions and real-time emergency warnings saved hundreds (or even thousands of lives) in a single event.
Despite widespread discussion to the contrary, the fact of the matter is that the private sector, as it presently exists, simply cannot quickly spin up to fill any void left by substantial dismantling of NOAA and/or the NWS. I work extensively with weather and climate scientists who work in the private sector - all of whom do good and important work that I greatly respect - yet even within the private sector there is near unanimous agreement that NOAA and NWS are indispensable. In fact, though this is not widely known outside of weather and climate science circles, most or all of the private weather companies in the United States (including all of the weather forecasts that you see on the TV news or your favorite weather app) are built directly atop the backbone of taxpayer-funded instrumentation, data assimilation, predictive modeling, and forecasting services provided by NOAA/NWS. They could simply not exist, at all, if NOAA/NWS did not function as it presently does.
Further, even a temporary or partial interruption in NOAA/ NWS 24/7/365 lifesaving services -which are often used in an hour-by-hour (even minute-by-minute) context during extreme weather events and other emergencies - would be devastating. The NWS is a critical public utility, and it would be extremely difficult to rebuild if torn down. This is not, in short, an acceptable setting in which to “move fast and break things.”
I want to be clear: If there were to be large staffing reductions at NOAA and NWS – [as it] appears is now indeed underway with credible reports of much larger further cuts on the horizon - there will be people who die in extreme weather events and weather-related disasters who would not have otherwise. The American economy would also suffer. The now-confirmed and rumored additional cuts to come at NOAA/NWS ore spectacularly short-sighted, and ultimately will deal a major self-inflicted wound to the public safety of Americans and the resiliency of the American economy to weather and climate-related disasters.
Daniel l. Swain, Ph.D.
Climate Scientist
The dark precedent in 1941
The dismissive and dangerous assault of Trump and Elon Musk’s teams on scientific expertise in a host of agencies, but in this case particularly at NOAA, had me thinking today about another dictatorial elected leader who despised meteorology - and paid a price, in Russia's deadly winter blunder in 1941.
Read this excerpt from my 2018 book, Weather - An Illustrated History, from Cloud Atlases to Climate Change, to get the idea:
In his 2011 book, The Storm of War, historian Andrew Roberts recalled how, on December 20, 1941, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels appealed to German citizens for warm clothing to send to the front:
“Those at home will not deserve a single peaceful hour if even one soldier is exposed to the rigors of winter without adequate clothing.” It was too little, too late.
Hitler’s dismissive attitude toward his weather forecasters could well have contributed to the disastrous setback. In a monologue on meteorology recorded late on the night of October 14, 1941, he made his views clear: One can’t put any trust in the [meteorological service] forecasts. . . . Weather prediction is not a science that can be learnt mechanically. What we need are men gifted with a sixth sense, who live in nature and with nature—whether or not they know anything about isotherms and isobars. . . .
In his account, Roberts noted that Hitler’s library contained many books on Napoleon’s campaigns. With some irony, he added, “Yet he did not learn the most obvious lesson from his predecessor.”
Despite cartoonish comparisons, there remains a vast gap between Trump and Hitler. But the echoes around their attitudes toward weather expertise are hard to ignore.