181–190 of 227 posts
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Well your interpretation is both rude and wrong but I've learned to expect this level of hubris here.
What exactly was hubristic about the comment? A young account with "See you at the bottom of the thread where the cool people hang out." and "down weighted" as it's descriptor? I could go with ad hom. I accept rude. It was rude.
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A lot of the recommendations for NOAA cuts in Project 2025 have been happening, so it's probably more of a "hasn't happened yet " kind of thing. There's little reason to believe that isn't still the goal.
There have been no signs whatsoever that these types of changes would be happening. The only noticeable changes at NOAA - and anyone who works in the world of meteorology in the United States - have been a doubling down on existing, vetted programs for commercial data acquisition (all of which target supplemental capability, not backbone replacement) and a doubling down on existing modeling R&D (namely the re-up of E…
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This is kind of a strange take. Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for w…
This is kind of a strange take. > Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff My state has completely state-funded healthcare, and a renowned state-funded university system. USA is a nation of states and those states (mostly) make their own way. I live in one of the good ones.
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Please don't post like this on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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If you see evidence of abuse, please flag their posts or email us. This is what helpful participants on HN have always done.
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Anything the US government publishes directly is in the public domain, including the contents of climate.gov, when it was online. One of the reasons the migration could happen without legal repercussions is precisely because the information was public domain. From the article: > This is possible because US government data is public domain by law. From the FAQ on the new climate.us [0]: > Can I re-use this data/produc…
> Any content dated prior to June 30, 2025 and credited to NOAA Climate.gov is in the public domain [and] can be freely re-used with proper attribution. What a bizarre thing to say. It's in the public domain. Why would you need attribution?
I don't think this is what's going on here but CC0 was expressly created because not every jurisdiction had a concept of "public domain", so a special license was needed to make sure it acted as if it were in the public domain for those cases.
From a CC0 FAQ [0]:
> Do I have to attribute the person who applied CC0 to their work?
> No, there is no legal requirement that you attribute the affirmer ...
From a Berlin Universities Publishing FAQ [1]:
> ... Since a waiver of copyright protection is not possible under German copyright law, CC0 is equivalent to a waiver of all possible rights and legal claims by the creator.
But, regardless, public domain or CC0 doesn't need attribution whether it's in the US or Germany.
[0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_the_di...
[1] https://www.berlin-universities-publishing.de/en/beratung/li...
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I don't know who runs that website, but it has flat out falsehoods on it. If you search for "NOAA", two items come up with notes [1]: 1. "Note: The administration is firing NOAA employees and closing NOAA offices; reconciliation bill rescinds some NOAA funds." Uh, no - there have not been any NOAA office closures. The President's FY26 budget eviscerated NOAA OAR, but those cuts were almost entirely rolled back by Con…
So you start off saying they aren't commercializing forecasting and that there's no evidence of them wanting to downsize. Meanwhile you fully acknowledge they attempted to radically downsize twice in less than two years and acknowledge they've massively expanded the existing forecast commercialization. "No signs whatsoever" while you point obvious signs. NOAA's budgets may have been approved by Congress, but they sti…
Uh, no. The CDP has moved forward at nearly the same rate it's been trudging along. There's a broad consensus across the weather enterprise that the CDP should _grow_ to better allow NOAA to access new data coming online from commercial sources - data which is already being acquired by competitor agencies such as the UK Met Office and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting.
Furthermore, it's ridiculous to conflate the bumbling executive actions like DOGE with earnest, deliberate restructuring of NOAA.
> NOAA's budgets may have been approved by Congress, but they still face massive staffing shortages. The Trump administration has made it clear they don't care about impoundments and choosing to not spend money allotted by Congress.
That's embellishing quite a bit. Define "massive" staffing shortages, will you? All those roles being actively filled by the National Weather Service? I can't go a single day without seeing someone in my extended network on LinkedIn announcing that they've been hired for a NWS forecaster role!
The one thing I'll give you is that there has been significant churn across OAR and EMC - but that's more due to the huge amount of money flowing into AI/ML ventures into weather/climate and more lucrative private sector opportunities than we've seen for a very long time.
> When the regional climate offices went offline, do you think it was just incompetence, or testing the waters about letting such programs just die?
You mean Regional Climate Centers? Despite the same set of challenges that virtually any institution that leveraged federal funds has seen, none of these have been "shut down."
> Sounds like they just haven't been fully successful at implementing their obvious policy goals. If they didn't want to do it, why write the budget that way? Why authorize those DOGE cuts? Isn't the expansion of commercialization in the plans of increasing commercialization?
Sounds like they _aren't implementing those goals_. You're mistaking the chaos of 2025 with actual policy coherence.
> It's like you refuse to see the obvious reality immediately in your face and choose to believe a convicted fraudster.
I don't believe anything other than what I see with my own eyes and do with my own hands, day-in and day-out working in the weather enterprise.
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So you start off saying they aren't commercializing forecasting and that there's no evidence of them wanting to downsize. Meanwhile you fully acknowledge they attempted to radically downsize twice in less than two years and acknowledge they've massively expanded the existing forecast commercialization. "No signs whatsoever" while you point obvious signs. NOAA's budgets may have been approved by Congress, but they sti…
> Meanwhile you fully acknowledge they attempted to radically downsize twice in less than two years and acknowledge they've massively expanded the existing forecast commercialization. "No signs whatsoever" while you point obvious signs. Uh, no. The CDP has moved forward at nearly the same rate it's been trudging along. There's a broad consensus across the weather enterprise that the CDP should _grow_ to better allow…
This is obvious evidence of them trying to fill the shortfall. If they were so well-staffed, would they be hiring so much? They have so many openings because they have a shortfall!
> none of these have been "shut down."
They were, temporarily.
> Furthermore, it's ridiculous to conflate the bumbling executive actions like DOGE with earnest, deliberate restructuring of NOAA.
This bumbling executive action is the Trump administration's attempt at restructuring. The budget proposal is the attempt at restructuring. Why do you continue to bury your head in the sand and hand-wave their actions while saying they never would try to do these things when they're actively and openly trying to do these things? Who do you blame for the DOGE cuts of not the Trump administration?
> The CDP has moved forward at nearly the same rate it's been trudging along.
This is probably untrue. They've publicly announced more spending in 2025 than what they spent total in 2024 and that's just in big headline contracts. They haven't bothered reporting actuals in the 2025 CDP spend like they have for the previous decade. Huh I wonder why.
> I don't believe anything other than what I see with my own eyes
So go read their budget proposals. Go see AMS' own worries about what the administration will do. Go see them talking about staffing shortages. See the fact the NWS isn't launching as many balloons. See the lack of staffing in Oklahoma during tornado season. See the elimination of public datasets at climate.gov, see those staffers who were laid off and never had those positions backfilled.
They would never do the things they continue to say they want to do and attempted to do several times!
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And I dare you to find another attempt in the intervening 20 years. Santorum's bill was laughed out of Washington. It stands alone.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/07/noaa-pro...
In 20 years worth of history - you can't identify a single piece of legislation or a single executive action to demonstrate an ongoing threat to NOAA? You have to immediately jump to the tautology of "Project 2025 is dismantling NOAA because an article two years ago said Project 2025 was going to dismantle NOAA"?
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> Meanwhile you fully acknowledge they attempted to radically downsize twice in less than two years and acknowledge they've massively expanded the existing forecast commercialization. "No signs whatsoever" while you point obvious signs. Uh, no. The CDP has moved forward at nearly the same rate it's been trudging along. There's a broad consensus across the weather enterprise that the CDP should _grow_ to better allow…
> I can't go a single day without seeing someone in my extended network on LinkedIn announcing that they've been hired for a NWS forecaster role! This is obvious evidence of them trying to fill the shortfall. If they were so well-staffed, would they be hiring so much? They have so many openings because they have a shortfall! > none of these have been "shut down." They were, temporarily. > Furthermore, it's ridiculous…
> This is obvious evidence of them trying to fill the shortfall. If they were so well-staffed, would they be hiring so much? They have so many openings because they have a shortfall!
You do realize that the NWS was understaffed _before_ the administration and the DOGE cuts, right? We're also riding the crest of a retirement wave from the major restructuring that happened in the early 90's.
> They were, temporarily.
Because of funding lapses during the _government shutdown_. Like many _other_ agencies and offices. Geeze.
> This bumbling executive action is the Trump administration's attempt at restructuring...
It really isn't. Anyone who has been around the public-private nexus surrounding NOAA knows the folks who have been itching to overhaul NOAA, and they're not particularly subtle about it. Notably, none of them were brought into any administrative or leadership positions that could actually effect structural change at NOAA.
The reality is that despite its section in Project 2025, conservatives don't actually care about NOAA; they care about climate change and have used scalpels to excise key government programs relating to it. But NOAA has been shielded because of any executive agency, NOAA and the NWS have extremely favorable ratings from the public and are actively and vigorously defended by a bipartisan coalition in Congress.
> This is probably untrue. They've publicly announced more spending in 2025 than what they spent total in 2024 and that's just in big headline contracts. They haven't bothered reporting actuals in the 2025 CDP spend like they have for the previous decade. Huh I wonder why.
Everyone expected the CDP to grow following the success of EPIC and the maturation and adoption of JEDI has the next-generation data assimilation framework for our modeling ecosystem. Hell - part of NOAA's last major action plans in the early 2020's explicitly called for it to grow in scope!
The reason you don't see actuals from CDP spend is because (a) the government is dysfunctional and Congress is ignoring its oversight to actual make sure these numbers are published in a timely manner, and (b) very few awards have actually been given out. It took what, 4 years for the first microwave sounding data purchase to happen, and it was only a 1-year award to Tomorrow and OMS?
> So go read their budget proposals. Go see AMS' own worries about what the administration will do. Go see them talking about staffing shortages. See the fact the NWS isn't launching as many balloons. See the lack of staffing in Oklahoma during tornado season. See the elimination of public datasets at climate.gov, see those staffers who were laid off and never had those positions backfilled.
I do read the proposals. I spend time on Capitol Hill working through these budgets with offices in both chambers and from both political parties. I also spend time with the House Science and the Senate SST committee staff.
Yes, there are real issues that NOAA and the NWS face. And I would absolutely fault the federal government for not being _as aggressive_ at remediating these issues.
But you're cherry-picking issues to paint a significantly more sinister story than what is actually happening.