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Read the article, but I'm still not seeing why the U.S. is pulling these sensors. Anyone have any insight?
The current administration doesn’t care about climate change, or believes it’s a hoax. Given this, they see no need to fund research and data gathering that tells them otherwise.
Honestly, at this point, having natural disasters with destruction and death is probably the only way to make people care.
And unfortunately SCOTUS made it harder for private groups to sue over impounding. And seems to argue only the GAOs comptroller can sue under the impoundments control act (ICA). GAO is the part of Congress that investigates when executive branch isn’t enforcing the law / spending funds. But have themselves limited ability to enforce anything.
It’s another post watergate reform eroded by Trump II. The ICA was created to stop these sorts of impoundments that happens with Nixon and earlier.
Notably members of Congress are working to pause the dismantling
https://apnews.com/article/ocean-observatories-initiative-tr...
> Starting this week, the Ocean Observatories Initiative will lose a network of more than 900 ocean sensors from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland. > By 2027, the National Science Foundation will have dismantled most of the system, which had been slated to run another 15 to 20 years. > Scientists had seen warning signs as the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget included a 55%…
Why not just sell them to some other country? Surely Canada would buy the in-place sensors and take them over.
I’m sure that the same will apply to the weather satellites above.
As a physical oceanographer, the destruction of these observing systems is horrific. It is hard to stress enough how intentionally OMB is trying to disassemble American science. The new (proposed) OMB guidelines prohibit international collaboration without pre approval for example. They also codify a political grant approval process. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/the-office-of-manage... Additionally, OMB is…
It’s a White House office run by Russell Vought, highly ideological maga institutionalist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just sell them to some other country? Surely Canada would buy the in-place sensors and take them over.
You think this is done to save costs? NO! This is costing more money to actively dismantle them than it would be to just abandon them. The administration is intentionally and specifically trying to destroy scientific evidence of climate change. If they just abandoned them, the next administration could reactivate and repair them.
And that’s the charitable interpretation.
Perhaps EU or China could build their own network of sensors to track this stuff? It's dangerous for so much science to be dependent on a country run by anti-science idiots. I sincerely hope that China wins the AI race, for the sake of myself and my children. The Chinese Communist party might be evil, but at least they accept fundamental natural sciences, and are actively investing in technologies that help avoiding…
The scales of money at play always seem so strange. Oh a few hundred million for ocean sensors, or about what a few OpenAI / Cursor employees or a few hundred FAANG employees could personally fund if they desired to do so.
It’s nothing to do with money, that’s always the libertarian excuse, and HN laps it up far more than the rest of the word.