Andy Newman/AP Photo
Hurricane specialist Robbie Berg, left, and Ed Rappaport, the acting director of the National Hurricane Center, participate in a coordinating conference call for a Hurricane Irma forecast package, September 9, 2017, at the hurricane center in Miami.
Reading the “Remnants of John” public advisory on the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Tuesday night, one could almost feel the sigh of relief spreading across Mexico’s southern Pacific coast. Once a major hurricane that had already killed two people, the storm didn’t seem to have much left. The government of Mexico, the National Hurricane Center (NHC)/Central Pacific Hurricane Center reported, had discontinued its tropical storm warnings. But the storm had more in store. By Wednesday, John had reinvented itself as a tropical storm with sheets of rain and high winds; by Friday, it could turn into a hurricane again affecting coastal Mexican towns and inland areas.
Over in the Atlantic Basin, Hurricane Helene had bulked up. By the time it makes landfall Thursday, it may have strengthened to a Category 4 storm with winds between 130 and 156 miles per hour on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The NHC gave Floridians a dire warning early Thursday morning: “Helene strengthening and expected to bring catastrophic winds and storm surge to the northeastern Gulf Coast. Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.” Another potential hurricane, Isaac, was on the move in the open Atlantic.
Anyone in Mexico or Florida or elsewhere around the world could study pages of warnings, data, and tools like radar and satellite images, and two storms that very quickly turned into major threats. Why have such storms grown more powerful and frequent in recent decades? Climate scientists say that warming oceans could be leading to the rapid intensification of hurricanes. For its part, the federal agency hedges its bets: The NOAA scientists who have looked at climate change and the rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean over the past 40 years admit the research is “unsettled.”
But unsettled research and a site full of free data and other public education tools adds up to climate alarmism for the authors of Project 2025, the road map for a possible second Trump administration. The Project’s Chapter 21, which looks at Commerce Department agencies including NOAA and the National Weather Service (NWS), finds that NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” as if its data and reports were a repository of monopolistic malfeasance. Project 2025’s solution is to get rid of these troublesome agencies.
When Project 2025 looks at them, it sees only misspent public dollars. The big problem with NOAA appears to be that it consumes slightly more than half of the Commerce Department’s $12 billion budget. The chapter intones that NOAA’s “mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.” It’s a remarkable admission that might surprise the insurers of homes and human lives, as if engaging in any planning and preparation for, say, a Category 5 hurricane or extreme heat waves or climate change is somehow more lethal than doing nothing.
Breaking up NOAA and the National Weather Service has long been on the far-right conservative agenda.
Project 2025 is right in one respect: Prediction and management do cost billions of dollars. The reality is, like most government agencies, it’s NOAA that is resource-deprived. In August, NOAA Fisheries received only $34 million to upgrade its data and infrastructure capabilities and workforce to support the multibillion-dollar fishing industry and monitor marine species and environmental impacts.
The Project 2025 remedy is to turn the National Weather Service into a literal private-sector data farm. Right now, all NWS data, the severe weather advisories, the satellite and radar images, and other educational resources are free to the public. NOAA prides itself on being an open source for the vast amount of data that it produces with the help of public-private partnerships that facilitate public access.
Project 2025 would end all of these collaborations. The agency would be “dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” Then, unfortunately, the private weather forecasting companies could pass on their costs to businesses and consumers (those not already paying for their services) in the form of subscriptions.
Monetizing goods and services that used to be free or almost free is the great swindle of the 21st century. After all, private entertainment conglomerates managed to turn “television” into a beehive of cable and then streaming services, somehow convincing consumers that it is better to pay hundreds of dollars per month or more for an extraordinary assortment of choices that many people don’t have the time or interest to watch.
Breaking up NOAA and NWS has long been on the far-right conservative agenda. Since private weather forecasters use NWS data as the entry point for their own beefed-up forecasts, how might such companies operate under a pay-for scenario? They might offer all sorts of phone apps, from a basic free daily weather is-it-going-to-rain-tomorrow app to progressively more detailed, expensive forecasts that might plot out hurricane paths and specify when a storm surge could hit the town center. Don’t have the money for a souped-up hurricane-tornado-blizzard app? Or a subscription-only site—like weather.gov—that NOAA once produced for free? Tough. The cities and towns, which already use private weather forecasting services to cater to their unique needs—since NWS is too underresourced to provide those kinds of services—would likely see steep increases in their rates.
When Politico’s E&E News reached out to Chapter 21’s author, Thomas Gilman, a former auto industry executive and Commerce Department official during the Trump years, he declined to comment.
Why is there so much energy propelled into a NOAA breakup scenario? Beyond the strident climate deniers and for-profit maximizers, there’s the possible retribution campaign for President Trump’s inability to persuade the Senate to confirm his 2017 nominee to head NOAA: Barry Myers, then CEO of AccuWeather, one of the world’s largest private weather forecasters.
AccuWeather has prided itself on metrics like getting forecasts out before NWS and views NWS as an unworthy, overresourced competitor—with satellites, planes, and sophisticated computer systems—that cuts into its profit margins. It essentially would prefer to see the agency become subservient—to itself. (A furor erupted among weather forecasters earlier this year after the social media platform X decided to label AccuWeather’s Hurricane Beryl forecast “misinformation.” For X, surprisingly, the NHC was the only legitimate source of storm forecasts.)
But Myers did not pass muster in the Senate. He lacked the requisite scientific background and didn’t measure up to previous NOAA administrators. His nomination never made it to the floor. Myers abandoned his quest for the job at the end of 2019. Myers’s failed nomination was one more grievance that Republicans appended to their wars on science and the “deep state.” The attempts to undermine NOAA’s data research and climate science continued into the Biden administration as a quartet of Republicans accused the agency of “faking data” in a quest to dial up climate threats.
Trump’s personal campaign for “retribution” against climate scientists was doubtless heightened in September of 2019, when he announced that Hurricane Dorian, which had already mangled the Bahamas, would hit Florida and churn westward toward Alabama. He presented an NWS “cone of probability” map that had been altered with a black Sharpie to show that the storm would hit Alabama, an episode that became known as Sharpiegate. The Birmingham NWS office forecasters then posted on Twitter (now X) that there was no threat to the state.
Their correction prompted Trump to double down on his Alabama forecast track. He forced the NOAA officials to publicly contradict the local NWS forecasters. The agency’s employees erupted. People threatened to quit, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross threatened to axe officials, and Democratic senators demanded to know how the Commerce inspector general planned to respond to the travesty. But essentially, the president’s statement stood and the department’s demands prevailed. (One year later, the Commerce IG issued a report that concluded that NOAA officials compromised public safety and should not have criticized the Birmingham forecasters.)
NOAA has been known as a science-based organization that does not modify scientific products of any kind as a result of political pressure. But the 2019 episode showed how susceptible federal agencies and their employees are to political pressure and politicians who want to force-feed Americans junk science and risk lives in the process. The one thing NOAA has going for it is that most Americans are obsessive about the weather, so the agency wouldn’t go quietly.
If Project 2025 comes into existence, its architects would gut the agency beyond recognition just in time for the next hurricane season. In the meantime, along with the three hurricanes, NWS forecasts that another disturbance in the Atlantic Ocean has an 80 percent possibility of developing into a tropical cyclone. Now read those free forecasts and imagine that NWS did not exist.
