Republican Weirdos Want To End The Weather Service, Charge People For Weather Alerts – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Today, we take the National Weather Service for granted. Its data is always available for anyone to use. In many cases, we get it indirectly through third parties, like news stations, weather apps, and cable TV channels, but the work of getting the forecasts put together largely happens at NWS. It’s hard to imagine not being able to check the weather, see radar, and get alerts for severe weather, including tornados.

There are people who imagine getting rid of these vital services, hoping that private companies will pick up the work instead. This would mean charging for not only forecast access, but access to services like tornado alerts. And the latest of these attempts is buried in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

An Uncontroversial History

To imagine life without the National Weather Service, we don’t have to imagine very hard. Prior to 1870, there was no weather service. It really wouldn’t have made sense at all before the nineteenth century, because there would have been no way to get weather reports out to people prior to the invention of telegraphs. Plus, the science of predicting weather and understanding the climate wasn’t great. People used to rely on sayings and superstitions, like “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning” and “Dew on the grass, no rain will pass” so that they could predict the weather. Understanding of climate was even worse, as some people believed that “rain follows the plow,” staking their futures trying to plant fields in places where there just wasn’t water for it.

In those days, people sometimes got majorly screwed by bad weather. Major storms, especially around the Great Lakes, could ravage industry and agriculture, sink ships, and endanger the livelihoods of millions of people. So, when the first telegraph wires started to show up in most towns, the first calls for a weather service happened. In 1869, Cleveland Abbe started sending out weather predictions, and businessmen funded his work because they knew it was important. But getting funding for widespread forecasting just wasn’t in the cards.

Seeing the importance of getting forecasts and warnings out there, Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant started the first Weather Bureau, putting it inside the Department of War (we’re gentler and call it the Department of Defense now). Abbe became the Bureau’s first chief, and he successfully convinced the Department of War to fund further study of meteorology.

Later, the agency got moved to the Department of Agriculture, and services included flood warnings, fire weather forecasts, and even weather maps. Warnings for hurricanes started in this time, too.

Since that time, the weather service pioneered many new technologies as understanding of weather and climate improved. Tornado warnings, radar, weather balloons, and even satellites all became part of daily life for Americans and people overseas as other countries started offering weather services and exchanging information. Today, people rely on weather forecasts for everything from planning picnics and deciding whether to ride a bike to life-saving services like wildland firefighting.

Attempts To Privatize The Weather Service

There are people who question whether the government should be involved in weather services, or how much it should be involved. Critics say that government spending should be reduced or that there’s no constitutional authorization for the creation of a weather service at the federal level.

In the 1980s, Reagan-appointed NOAA administrator John V. Byrne proposed selling off all of the agency’s weather satellites so that a private company could operate them and sell the data to the National Weather Service. This would have been accompanied by as much as 30% layoffs at the service, along with the elimination of many types of specialized forecasting. On top of that, basically anything that could be sold or contracted out would have been removed from government.

But even Reagan couldn’t get this proposal through Congress, and parts of the plan that were in the purview of presidential authority were too controversial to be followed through on.

Another attempt was made to cut back on the National Weather Service in 2005, led by Senator Rick Santorum (yes, the guy whose name became a term for something nasty that happens in gay men’s bedrooms after he himself was even more nasty about gay rights). His proposal would have prohibited the service from distributing weather data, depriving the public from everything we receive today. Weather companies/channels, pilots, and many others came out against the bill, which then received no cosponsors and died in committee.

Project 2025’s Plan For Ending The National Weather Service

Just because people like Santorum didn’t have any luck 20 years ago trying to get rid of the NWS doesn’t mean the idiotic idea has gone away. Weirdos who think gay people should be put in prison and want to abolish the National Weather Service might have their political careers bomb out, but they never really go away. People like that just get hired up by “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation, where they plan and scheme ways to resurrect the proposals later.

Seeing how unpopular many of their ideas are, these strange people decided they’d bypass the democratic processes that have kept normal people in charge. The proposal to get rid of the National Weather Service, among many other things that are just as bizarre and unpopular, are contained in a 900-page plan made for the next president, called Project 2025.

The plan aims to use Unitary Executive Theory to give the next Republican president vast amounts of power without the normal checks and balances we’ve come to expect. This power, in turn, would be used to ram through as many unpopular proposals (like abusing gay people or ending the National Weather Service) as possible.

An article at the Los Angeles Times details the plan’s ideas for the National Weather Service, which it thinks is part of a conspiracy to push climate change lies on the public. Instead, Republicans think that companies like Accuweather could take it over and save taxpayers significant money. But, when asked about the proposal, Accuweather’s CEO, Steven R. Smith, points out that the company relies on NWS data, along with other sources, to produce their own forecasts.

“AccuWeather is extremely proud of our track record of superior accuracy, but it has never been our goal to take over the provision of all weather information,” he told the Times.

With all of the companies and other government agencies at the national, state, and local levels relying on NWS data, disrupting that data in some ridiculous attempt to stifle awareness of climate change would be a disaster. Letting the people who would suggest this anywhere near the Oval Office would be a mistake.

Featured image: a screenshot from the National Weather Service website showing some of the products and services we’d miss out on under the proposal.