What Might Be a Way Forward?
Floods, tornadoes, fires, and a rough patch at the National Weather Service
(No. 82, an ±08 minute read)
Pessimism and political will — can non-MAGA Americans (75.8 million Harris and Stein voters allied with whatever number of disillusioned Trump voters and those who did not vote but aren’t buying Trump’s bill of goods) see a way forward under Trump amidst climate-influenced disasters like the Los Angeles firestorms, April’s flooding, and May’s tornadoes; the Trump/Musk administration’s agency, policy, and personnel blitzkrieging; and the political scapegoating rising from the retrograde fantasizing of the tech and corporate super-rich?1
This is a question that has been much on my mind lately. And especially so after a number of consequential changes were announced at the National Weather Service.
On May 8 it was announced that the NWS will cease tallying billion dollar weather disasters. This NWS work is invaluable to the market at the insurance industry level — that part of the market that enables the market itself to exist by underwriting risk. In addition, the data that comes as a part of this NWS accounting is relied upon by policy makers, researchers, and journalists. I have availed myself of it reporting on the fires on Maui and in Paradise.
I reached out for comment to the NWS. This was their response:
In alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) will no longer be updating the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product.
Cut the tracking of billion dollar weather disasters — are they just too common and no longer noteworthy? Or contributing to so-called climate fear allowing “SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS” to nanny-state Real Americans into oblivion? Hard saying, not knowing, but that “evolving priority” bit leads me to think orders at the NWS from on high might favor the latter.2
But fear not, on May 12 the NWS announced it would soon stop providing data to end users from the Polar Operational Environmental Satellites (POES). A reasonable person might ask what the POES system does. I’ll let the NWS answer that:
Data from the POES supports a broad range of environmental monitoring applications including weather analysis and forecasting, climate research and prediction, global sea surface temperature measurements, atmospheric soundings of temperature and humidity, ocean dynamics research, volcanic eruption monitoring, forest fire detection, global vegetation analysis, and search and rescue.
But that’s okay, because back on May 9, a day after the billion dollar disaster logging announcement, the NWS posted to its Notice of Changes Page that it would no longer be supplying the Satellite Analysis Branch’s Manual Dvorak Estimates in the South Indian and South Atlantic Ocean. What are those, one might ask? The Dvorak Technique, and I’ll let Penn State have this one, “In a nutshell …is an analysis procedure for estimating the intensity of tropical cyclones based on cloud patterns on satellite imagery. The technique is named after Vernon Dvorak, who pioneered the technique with his research in the 1970's and early 1980's.”
What could go wrong? I know that I reported that last year’s hurricane season saw every storm jump a point on the Saffir-Simpson scale, but this year’s forecast is somewhat better than last year’s — although still giving us a 60% chance of a higher storm count than ordinary. Lighting never strikes twice, right? It is depressing, but probably worth keeping tabs on the NWS Notice of Changes page.
Project 2025 advocated drastic NWS cuts and that the NWS “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.” Private forecasters rely on NWS data to make their profits. And where does that data come from? Well, satellite constellations like POES and satellite data analysis like the Manual Dvorak estimates provided by the NWS. Fortunately Project 2025 understood that private companies relied on critical NWS data and it said that the NWS “should focus on its data gathering services.” It also said:
Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.
Huh!
These NWS changes will cost; lives, livelihoods, communities. The Trump/Musk administration wants to bury any global warming discussion or response that might cause climate anxiety but can’t bury the evidence, and consequences, piling up on its watch — St. Louis, Missouri; Laurel County, Kentucky; Los Angeles, California. All will likely be multi-billion dollar disasters with global warming’s fingerprints on them, refer again to attribution information in footnote One.
Believe in global warming or not, Americans believe in the weather, and fire, when it is bearing down on them. And they get pissed when they are not warned — I saw it firsthand in Lāhainā and the mayor of St. Louis is seeing it there now. These warnings failed with NWS data coming in, and forecasts being made in a timely manner. What of when that isn’t the case?
It all makes perfect sense, these NWS cuts, for someone so concerned with surface and superficiality as Donald J. Trump. Guild that turd and turn a buck.
But what does the Donald hate more than anything? Losing. Not losing seems to be driving Trump’s eagerness for rare earth minerals in Greenland, Ukraine, and elsewhere — but for what? Green power and transportation? Yeah, right. Pure power, China leads the world in rare earth minerals production and refining and he can’t stand to lose even as he perhaps misapprehends the reason for the need — to win or for the damned minerals. Or worse, he sees only the need that A.I. graphics processors require thanks to Elon’s whispering in his ear. In any case it is zero-sum and China is eating America’s lunch on the rare earth front, or as our Dear Leader put it to Newsweek, “No rare earths mean no digital revolution, no tech billionaires, no military technological edge, no artificial intelligence, no smartphones—no selfies with friends on a night out.”
No tech billionaires?!
Fuuuuuuck. They hate losing as much as Trump, thus their monarchical leanings. And here, for me, lies the rub. Losing comes in all flavors — sometimes at the polls, sometimes in Congress, sometimes in the streets. Ende Gelände, from the photo above, has organized phenomenal actions to stop mining of lignite. (Really, watch that linked video.) 4,000 activists at once taking action from within a German population of 83 million to shut down a coal mine and its power plant. Has Ende Gelände been successful in its campaign to stop Germany burning coal? Hard to say, exactly, but five years after the group began mounting these large actions in 2015 the German government passed a coal exit law.3
Among the U.S.’ 340 million people what sort of desperation might cause this sort of organized defiance? The understanding that Medicaid is vanishing for 1.6 million next year should the “Big Beautiful Bill Act” pass? (And 10.3 million losing Medicaid coverage by 2034 according to the Congressional Budget Office.) Perhaps. The weather disaster to end all weather disasters? Maybe. An as yet unrealized success by Stephen Miller’s deportation corps in booting one million people from the U.S. this year — that’s the number being bandied about behind the scenes according to the Washington Post. If each of those deportees, say, knows five citizens left behind that really care about them….
There is much this administration seems to be taking for granted in the American overwhelm facing its Machiavellian project. My bailiwick is global warming and the environment, I concede that most Americans have more immediate concerns in their lives. I don’t see Ende Gelände-type activism happening here, as remarkable as it is, and as important as what they are fighting for might be. (I might note that they are fighting for all of us, just on the German front.) I just don’t think we are that organized, we Americans, about anything.
I do see a possibility that the Trump/Musk administration pushing too far could drive an inward-looking issue revolt; health care loss, a substantial failure to aid as after Katrina, too many friends and extended family in miserable private concentration camps prior to deportation. And where Ende Gelände has led a non-violent revolt against coal I fear that non-violence is less in the American DNA than in the German Left’s. This would be losing for Trump, another, more extreme Black Lives Matter-type period of national unrest. I can see its possibility ahead.
And that, that is where my question in the lede leads me — to widespread unrest because the American camel has been loaded with one too many Trumpian straws. A real loss for Donald, and hopefully not a loss for all of us.
• • •A couple of things since last time you might have missed but worth reading/knowing about:
–Bad news, I know, but this is a good accounting of Trump climate denialism.
–It’s not the NWS but NOAA is stopping its monthly climate press briefings. The information will still be published, but without the careful conveyance, and explanation of significance, to journalists much of it will be lost in the flood of, well everything from this administration.
Los Angeles’ fires, like those of Paradise and Lāhainā, were exacerbated by record-low moisture and rainfall levels drying fuel to extreme levels. The fires’ devastation is proving to be equally influenced by global warming and the ordinary La Niña cycle. Global warming will continue to escalate the effects of La Niña and El Niño as we move ahead into our heating future. World Weather Attribution has found that the deadly storms that struck Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and adjacent states were 40% more likely than they might have been in a world without human-caused global warming and that the storms’ rainfall intensity was 9% greater than might have been without our having warmed the atmosphere.
And a note about the photo’s caption, since I am not allowed to footnote there: Germany uses lignite, with its high sulfur content, principally to power electrical generation at the site of a mine and transmitted into the national grid. Lignite is so energy poor it does not make economical sense to ship it from a mine site. Source links here.
This from our Dear Leader’s Memorial Day greeting to American citizens considering the sacrifice of veterans and perhaps losses in their families. It’s worth quoting in full, I think, “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THEM BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE, THROUGH AN OPEN BORDER THAT ONLY AN INCOMPETENT PRESIDENT WOULD APPROVE, AND THROUGH JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER, AND RAPE AGAIN — ALL PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY.” There you have it, I hope you had a lovely, if sober Decoration Day.