I'm glad someone managed to save the data that we all payed for.
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.
The site wasn't (isn't) about the data. It's about articles that contextualize the data. The money raised has allowed them to stand up a new site with all the old articles (which truth be told were all still nominally accessible via the internet archive) and will help fund them to create new ones. So it will stay relevant by paying the people who in the past worked for NOAA to creation the content, to now create the content paid for by donation.
Partisan politics aside, frankly, anything data the government publishes like this should be public domain by virtue of it being published by the government.
How can the government "for the people by the people" claim propriety/intellectual-property over anything?
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/product/image/video?
> Yes! Any content dated prior to June 30, 2025 and credited to NOAA Climate.gov is in the public domain can be freely re-used with proper attribution.
> Any content after June 30, 2025 and credited to Climate.us, is under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
> 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.
What if government websites were distributed & archived as a default, from the beginning? Think IPFS as a first target for publication, "normal web" only as a mirror.
Is it feasible?
Should we push for this default?
First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.
It's difficult to make money if you have to spend all the money on defense lawyers.
Once Trump dies of natural causes I assume some intrepid journalists will go through the mountain of evidence and dig out some exciting snippets of what went on behind closed doors. Maybe a few more people will have to resign because of it.
I'd be interested to hear the contrast between what the Trump Presidential Library considers his greatest accomplishments and what, say, Bob Woodward writes.
Honestly, if anything the library of congress should be operating a system similar to the way back machine. Isn't preserving historical information one of its objectives? And what libraries do in general?
But I'm very in favor of maintaining "the record", as it were, for government websites. If we can have changelogs on bills then we should elsewhere. It informs the citizens of the actions of our government. What has changed and "who done it". That can go both ways and I hope it would incentivize those trying to actually do good and not just treated as a liability.
Hell, if the NSA can just gobble up all the Internet traffic and store it on servers in Utah then the least we can do is make public records accessible. The archival work has already been done and we've already paid for it
Its called legal or mandatory deposit. In some countries their national library is required to crawl the open internet within their language, besides collecting regular published materials. In the US laws on legal deposit has not been extended to non printed materials.
Your argument assumes the Trump admin wants to actually help the citizens it is supposed to represent. They do not care about most citizens, their words and actions have proven this over and over again.
This admin absolutely will never take any steps towards transparency, education, sharing, or even simple kindness. Any hope of implementing something like this will have to come later.
1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
Their donors. In the USA members of congress spend an embarrassingly large amount of their time on the phone to their donors ensuring they are happy enough to fund their next run.
> A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work.
> Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.
Agreed that money should be virtually eliminated from the system. That said, people actually tend to be pretty satisfied with their representatives. It's the other Congresspeople who suck.
I bet you'll find that more people don't approve of what their representative is doing than do approve.
Low voter turnout allows for bullshit to slip through the cracks by targeting very small blocs of voters.
I genuinely believe that most problems in government would be fixed if voluntary voter turnout was around 99%, and that low rates, especially during midterms, is the largest threat to democracy in the United States as we know it to date.
This snide response would be a lot better if climate.gov had actually been taken down by those representatives you mention, rather than illegally destroyed by one man.
No no, the snide response works because this shutdown was a violation of aforementioned system. Downstream discussions on “oh hurrr ummm how do we decide what’s worth spending money on?!” are irrelevant. We already have a system to do that, and that system has decided to fund climate.gov
Gerrymandering means that the house is a skewed representation of the people. The senate is a skewed representation of the people in its intentional structure.
Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.
They are doing the gag where they just describe representative democracy like it is a novel idea.
Practically we also need expert organizations and agencies to help advise the representative and implement their ideas, but I wouldn’t describe glossing over that sort of detail as “failing civics 101.”
You kind of exemplify that drawing on this very topic where a bunch of people sit in a boat that is sinking stern first and the people in the bow section are expressing zero concern because their end isn’t under water.
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
That is the understanding that you've been presented with, likely by people looking to mislead you, but that's not at all what our actual budget reflects. The social safety nets that we supposedly don't have take up around 2/3rds of our federal budget.
It's like 50% if you also count the stuff I pay for that is a direct benefit to me at retirement (as does anyone who pays into social security).
So it might be a little nitpicky, and your point still stands. A lot of money is spent on defense and business, but not as much as the before portrays.
Where businesses benefit is in not paying the tax, instead of receiving payments. That's definitely a problem, but it's a different thing.
As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.
Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
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 war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
It makes me feel a little crazy seeing the constitutional architecture post-civil war used to diffuse responsibility away from the federal government and divide the people against each other working in action. People act like this isn't a country with very definite choices being made or that if something is bad over there, it doesn't matter over here. The wealthy, the corporations, the army, and the central government all deal with this place as a unified entity with various domestic fractures to exploit for their own purposes.
Social Security and Medicare have a separate, capped tax though. They're funded through that tax. Federal tax is effectively uncapped. Where does it go?
I agree with parent, the full quote is: "The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for."
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.
I'm not aware of any private company that has a contract with NOAA or the NWS to privately disseminate the agency's weather data (either acquired itself or purchased commercially).
You do understand how this isn't an example of what I'm asking for, right?
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"?
Operating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?
Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".
That sounds like the arrangement you said we have. The government provides data to private companies who then mass distribute it in various forms because those costs and needs vary.
The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
They get it for free from the government. They offer it as a paid service to the general public. Then they try to ban the government from giving it away for free to any potential competition.
> The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
In general, they aren't.
The sole example I can think of that even skirts with this was specifically an attempt by AccuWeather in the 2000's, coordinating with then-Senator Rick Santorum's office. And that was universally decried by the entire weather enterprise.
Project 2025 called for downsizing the weather service and have them focus on just data gathering and it should "fully commercialize its forecasting operations".
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 EPIC and the commitment to the UFS).
NOAA is helmed by veterans of the weather enterprise. Do you see the American Meteorological Society issuing statements decrying the commercialization of the NWS or NOAA? Honestly, because NOAA is a Department of Commerce agency and the head of that cabinet department - Lutnick - has no interest whatsoever in weather or climate, there really isn't any ongoing concern that NOAA will be massively torn apart.
As mentioned they've already implemented many of the recommendations related to NOAA in the document. If anything they've gone even further in many of the cuts as they've cut the budgets so much a lot of balloon launches haven't happened vastly reducing the ground truth needed to keep models and forecasts accurate.
Instead, they've moved such things to... drumroll...private corporations.
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 Congress. Yes, NOAA and NWS employees were caught up in the DOGE probationary purges back in early 2025, but in many cases (a) they were hired back, and (b) the NWS is aggressively hiring at all levels to replace churn.
2. "Note: Private companies are now gathering weather data for NOAA; administration is "readying plans" to transfer National Center for Atmospheric Research work to private companies." NOAA has purchased data from the private sector for 30 years. The explosion in commercial earth observation has dramatically increased the available data that can be directly used in numerical weather modeling, and NOAA has operated a Commercial Data Program for over a decade to supplement its own investments. This is an expected evolution of the weather enterprise that was predicted and urged as far back as the National Academies' "Fair Weather" report in 2003 [2]. Furthermore - NCAR is part of the NSF, not NOAA, which really calls into question WTF your website is talking about.
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 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.
When the regional climate offices went offline, do you think it was just incompetence, or testing the waters about letting such programs just die?
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?
It's like you refuse to see the obvious reality immediately in your face and choose to believe a convicted fraudster.
> 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 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.
> 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 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!
Before I rebut, I want to make very clear - I'm correcting the record because _in the future_ there could be serious threats to NOAA. Crying wolf today when things are tenuous but steady actively harms the community's preparation for when the knives _do_ come out for NOAA. As they have done so many times before, the slashers will point to these episodes of crying wolf as a smokescreen. It's literally their only play.
> 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.
As long as it’s properly addressed to avoid abuse, I don’t have a problem with private companies and individual citizens both benefiting. You could easily put rate limits if you think it’s a major issue while still maintaining the free service for smaller users. I personally don’t like the privatization of profits while also maintaining the narrative that companies don’t benefit from public works.
Google uses barely any weather data. Perhaps some tornado and wildfire tracking for its datacenters, but that's about it. The vast majority of its potential use comes from Android users, which is... the general public.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
So, research that you pay for with tax dollars, it's results should be published through a private entity?
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
Making the data available is non-trivial no matter who does it. There were many, many exabytes of this data a decade ago and countless petabytes of new data is generated every day. How to manage this has been an open question for a long time.
In practice access has always been restricted to this "public" data because there is not remotely enough bandwidth, either network or storage, to give everyone a copy of the data that may want it. They often don't even have enough capacity for internal users. A lot of it also sits in offline or near-line archival formats due to the scale of the data.
This is a general problem for data models of this type. You need to compute on the data in-situ or it won't scale but virtually no one can build that type of infrastructure at the scale required for these data models. It would also be extremely expensive to build and operate.
There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.
Let's have the government collect the data and private companies can engage in that as well if they wish - both parties can call the other out if there's a discrepancy.
IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.
1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.
Making money requires accurate information about the world. For example I was just learning about how farmers hire scientists to grade chicken feed. They are incentived by their own profit to get good information about grain quality they wish to purchase.
> Making money requires accurate information about the world.
A company may have accurate information that their product causes cancer, but they aren't going to tell you that. They'll outright lie and say it doesn't, hire scientists to create fake research to "prove" that it's safe, and harass, threaten, and discredit anyone who tries to tell the public the truth.
This is probably an inopportune time to make that argument with Polymarket openly lying about their "truth telling machine" and paying influencers under the table to drive engagement.
Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function, even for the most ardent pro-market believers out there.
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
> Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function
Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years!
I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.
I'd argue is is absolutely within the mandate of government to collect, store, and publish weather and climate data at scale, as this work cannot be left to private companies or charity. It is fundamentally a collective action problem that will span generations and administrations, and one where there should be no incentive to profit or misinform. Citizens can only make sound decisions, both individually and collectively, if they have durable access to reliable facts.
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This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?
To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists.
This was my thought on the issue as well. How does moving it to private companies benefit anyone except the companies (who can now legally price gouge)? This is a centralized service, and just like healthcare, the numbers show that integrity goes out the window once financialized.
do you care about climate data? then pay. or else you dont actually care enough to be inconvenienced. put up or shut up. i care, so I'll start. will make a $15 donation (as soon as i figure out how)
Great, and through your effort you can raise a total of 100, maybe even 1000 dollars.
Meanwhile while you are willing to give $15 for good data, Koch is willing to spend $15 million for a guy with a degree in fine arts to tell us he's a scientist and actually CO2 is super healthy and awesome.
We elect officials and tax not just for the climate data most people will care about, but also for random things like sewage data that people might not be thinking about but is also important to public health. Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
is there like a list of things that government is responsible for, or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
> Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
> is there like a list of things that government is responsible for
Why yes, there is. Here's an example of that list for the federal government [1]. States and cities also have similar lists though they may not be as accessible to the general public (a problem to be sure).
> or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
Not really vibes, it's spelt out in statute. In some cases that responsibility can be pretty wide and in all cases the president can chose heads of office that don't care to or ignore the duties of those statutes. The remedy if you feel like that's happening too much is voting.
> how is that not rife for abuse?
Abuse can certainly happen. However, the US does have some inordinate amounts of oversight over federally ran programs precisely because a lot of people worry about abuses. Where the abuse tends to happen is when the US is funding private institutions rather than running the programs themselves.
I have family that currently works for the US gov writing software. As they tell it, it takes 3 weeks to bring in a new version of a library due to the mandatory review process in the statutes. Meanwhile, they can hire a contractor who can use any library they like (but also who can bill whatever they like and are often friends with senators).
> it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
It used to be much more open ended. It has, however gotten worse and it's about to get much worse. Exactly because of concerns for abuse and waste. The system from clinton to trump wasn't great but it was somewhat functional. We are about to enter a new era, however, where funding for grants can be axed while the research is in flight if the administration decides that they don't like what's being researched. That's the abuse and waste I'm actually worried about.
The only reason we have good weather data is because the government maintains stations in remote places all over the country. Who else would maintain that?
There are many large projects to collect this information ranging from extremely specialized satellites to networks of ocean buoys. It turns out that weather is a global phenomenon and warming seas on the other side of the planet affect wherever you are.
You're not wrong, but I would like to point out that there is also the Civilian Weather Observer Program (CWOP) that is fed by a lot of private weather stations (the kind you can buy at Walmart of Amazon and put at your house). I believe the data is aggregated and averaged to account for variations in installation deficiencies, and used to inform/enhance the government maintained data feeds.
I respect cynicism and questioning stuff but this is misplaced. You have to trust the government since they are potentially the least partisan source here. Yes the data can be misconstrued by legislators but the truth of the data cannot be in question. It’s healthy to question it but the solution is to require proof of non-sabotage. It takes a lot of money and resources to pull this data together. It’s compiled by organizations across the world and being the trustworthy anchor is the most efficient way to achieve this. With that the government agency has every incentive to be non partisan and operate with integrity.
I agree with your feelings but 'activists and independent scientists' do not have the resources to maintain that sort of infrastructure over the long term and will also be continually fending off attacks on their credibility. Institutions exist because volunteering has limitations.
Hard disagree. Public funds are absolutely for funding research into things that affect the public on a large scale. That's the whole point. What could be more "general welfare", as envisioned in the constitution, than making sure we are not screwing up our collective home?
"The courts" writ large are doing just fine. SCOTUS in particular is a cesspool, but that is not the typical situation at all.
And in any case, an imperfect adversarial judicial system is dramatically better than whatever la-la-land "government has no data of its own" dystopia GP is imagining.
This notion of "the government" is the wrong premise. The US government is (supposed to be, I should say) an elaborate system of checks and balances to enable self-correction mechanisms. The Trump administration has turned that into a travesty, obviously, but the system itself is explicitly set up to be split into three branches that keep each other in check, and thus supervising itself.
Congress abdicated the majority of their authority to the executive over time by creating executive agencies. Now everybody is upset because the executive is actually using the power that Congress gave to it. The primary check on government growth is the three branches contending for power. No branch wants another branch to become more powerful and make their branch irrelevant. So, to fix the current issue, Congress can remove the power it has given to the executive and restore balance.
Disagree. The primary check on the government is consequences for violating the law and the constitution. That's just all gone out the window.
Power without oversight, no matter how distributed, will tend towards either complete chaos or tyranny (or both, if such a thing is possible). Giving three mutually distrustful criminals guns will not cause law and order to spring out of nothing.
An informed, angry and unforgiving citizenry is the only check on government, and we ain't go that.
Yes, sadly, several decades ago, one of the parties started running on the platform of "the government is broken" and to help the electability of said platform, they kept breaking the government.
Look, I vote blue too, but you can't ignore that the Democrats have also pushed the slider further and further toward executive power every chance they get. Well, I guess I can't tell you what to do, so I suppose you can.
All agencies are ultimately accountable to the public via democratically elected leaders as the Supreme Court recently upheld. No part of the government is independent body, it’s in one of the 3 branches.
Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.
And I don’t think that’s wrong. But let’s clarify. Either we trust the process to elect leaders who actually hold power or we think voting is broken and we need a body of leadership which exists independently of the democratic process.
> Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.
No that's not what I said. The courts can hold someone in the executive branch accountable. They're the check on their power.
Except the president, because of that one ruling.
So if the president commits fraud as part of an official act he's immune? No other person in the executive branch has this immunity. And it was given to the most powerful person.
The president just tried to operate an executive order and it got shut down by the courts.
The specific ruling is about the president being immune from criminal charges while in office. And yeah, you can’t be taking George Washington to court (or jail) while he is leading the revolution. It’s essential for the nation to have a functioning leader, especially among the fog of war.
The Bible story of David and Saul presents another example of this principle.
To bring it back though… what you’re telling me is we can’t trust a democracy to elect an executive.
With the amount of gerrymandering and campaign finance going on, there's a question of whether this is a democracy in the first place. If it is, it's clear it can't be trusted to elect an executive who follows the laws.
Ah yes, we can't trust that our elected officials understand their duty well enough just fund Science and find out stuff works, so better throw up our hands and let the "market" do it.
Your view isn't controversial because it's daring, it's just plain nihilistic. It's just anti-government dogma which is cultivated by an incredibly cynical media atmosphere.
> CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too
That's not true lol. There is a gigantic supervisory apparatus constantly breathing down the IC's neck, including but not limited to your very own elected Congressperson's investigative powers.
Yes! We could pool our efforts though, in a larger organization (let's call it a democratic republic), vote on who should preside over it, be on the "board" and hire some people to run the day-to operations of the whole thing.
If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution.
The end result? Judges being elected that nobody knows. Some even running unopposed. Yet, they all are 'elected'.
No. I don't think Americans can elect more people. I would be shocked if over 10% formed their own opinion on which judge to pick for example. If you're lucky they did that for the ballot measures...
I think this falls under "least worst option". I confess that I (and most others) don't have the time or focus to properly evaluate judicial candidates, so I turn to "trusted resources" to help guide my vote.
It's easier to vote on higher level issues, like ballot propositions or state/federal representation.
That said, the fact that a significant portion of the voting public voted in a man who epitomizes the most unqualified and inappropriate person into the US presidency has shaken my faith in democracy.
This makes no sense to me. National governments have no moral or legal responsibility to monitor the environment, because they also regulate pollution? Is this a joke?
Only private companies with some fantastical profit motive to install satellite and sensor networks all over and above the globe should do it, not the government?
> To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists
Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.
I would like to see climate research funded, but it needs to be de-politicized and stop being used to push fear propaganda and sinister policies.
They used it to flat out destroy the economies in much of Europe, while somehow China and India were ignored despite being orders of magnitude bigger problems, according to their own narrative.
If any of the above were honest, there would have been blanket trade restrictions and sanctions on China and India so quickly it would make your head spin.
Nope. The main cost of the old climate.gov was the salaries of the folks writing the articles and pulling together the resources. They were not getting paid exorbitantly and are quite interested in still getting paid. Source: I am one of those people.
Strangle funding to a public service, complain that public service isn't performing, use the consequences of their own actions to justify eliminating the public service indefinitely.
I'm glad someone managed to save the data that we all payed for.
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.
Climate.gov was not the centralized and only storage spot for climate data. There's petabytes of it all over the place.
You want data? https://www.noaa.gov/data or https://api.weather.gov/ or https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data are a good place to start.
That only makes my question even more applicable... just with a wider scope.
As for your question: I personally don't want data, I want a service backed by sound data and expert validation+analysis.
Sounds grand, but it is not in scope.
Instead, each citizen has a volition and a voice and a vote—with exceptions, and at personal expense.
And as a humanitarian with reservations, I say tax the bots for UBI.
>As for your question: I personally don't want data, I want a service backed by sound data and expert validation+analysis.
Don't expect to find it in the US.
The site wasn't (isn't) about the data. It's about articles that contextualize the data. The money raised has allowed them to stand up a new site with all the old articles (which truth be told were all still nominally accessible via the internet archive) and will help fund them to create new ones. So it will stay relevant by paying the people who in the past worked for NOAA to creation the content, to now create the content paid for by donation.
YCombinator has enough smarts to figure this out.
How can we use a bucket of mostly useless data to enrich ourselves by building more VC-funded apps? I'm asking the important questions.
Why would you say it’s useless data?
Partisan politics aside, frankly, anything data the government publishes like this should be public domain by virtue of it being published by the government.
How can the government "for the people by the people" claim propriety/intellectual-property over anything?
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/product/image/video?
> Yes! Any content dated prior to June 30, 2025 and credited to NOAA Climate.gov is in the public domain can be freely re-used with proper attribution.
> Any content after June 30, 2025 and credited to Climate.us, is under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
[0] https://www.climate.us/faqs
> 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?
Yeah, that is odd. Maybe a mistake?
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...
What if government websites were distributed & archived as a default, from the beginning? Think IPFS as a first target for publication, "normal web" only as a mirror.
Is it feasible?
Should we push for this default?
First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.
What if pedophiles were sent to jail instead of elected.
Technical tricks like IPFS can’t prevent even 1% of the damage caused by giving criminals this much power over society.
The media in the US is utterly feckless and broken.
It's difficult to make money if you have to spend all the money on defense lawyers.
Once Trump dies of natural causes I assume some intrepid journalists will go through the mountain of evidence and dig out some exciting snippets of what went on behind closed doors. Maybe a few more people will have to resign because of it.
I'd be interested to hear the contrast between what the Trump Presidential Library considers his greatest accomplishments and what, say, Bob Woodward writes.
It is owned by capital and doing what they bought it to do. Working as designed.
Honestly, if anything the library of congress should be operating a system similar to the way back machine. Isn't preserving historical information one of its objectives? And what libraries do in general?
But I'm very in favor of maintaining "the record", as it were, for government websites. If we can have changelogs on bills then we should elsewhere. It informs the citizens of the actions of our government. What has changed and "who done it". That can go both ways and I hope it would incentivize those trying to actually do good and not just treated as a liability.
Hell, if the NSA can just gobble up all the Internet traffic and store it on servers in Utah then the least we can do is make public records accessible. The archival work has already been done and we've already paid for it
The Library of Congress runs Webrecorder's Python Wayback for their web archive replay and has an extensive collection of over 35,000 web archives each comprising multiple pages: https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2025/01/beta-release-of-libr...
That's awesome. Thanks for letting me know. It's a great start
Its called legal or mandatory deposit. In some countries their national library is required to crawl the open internet within their language, besides collecting regular published materials. In the US laws on legal deposit has not been extended to non printed materials.
Your argument assumes the Trump admin wants to actually help the citizens it is supposed to represent. They do not care about most citizens, their words and actions have proven this over and over again.
This admin absolutely will never take any steps towards transparency, education, sharing, or even simple kindness. Any hope of implementing something like this will have to come later.
A similar thing happened back in Australia years back.
We had the Climate Commission, which did alot of great work. It was a government department and fully funded by the government.
Then a conservative, climate denying government came to power and shut it down.
Literally within 48 hours, they obtained alternative funding from private sources, then rebirthed the organization as the independent Climate Council.
Many of the fired workers were re hired and the new organization does similar work to the previous one. It's still in operation today.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/
> The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for.
Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
Which part? I interpret it as:
1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
I suspect the intent is to minimize return on investment. The returns from climate data are returns that the current administration does not want.
What's not accurate?
They’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service.
But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.
> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
Would be amazing if the reps actually did what we wanted instead of what they are paid by outside entities to do. We should try that!
What do you mean by outside entities? Foreign governments?
Their donors. In the USA members of congress spend an embarrassingly large amount of their time on the phone to their donors ensuring they are happy enough to fund their next run.
January 2013: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/call-time-congressional-fundr...
> A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work.
April 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-are-members-of-congr...
> Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.
Agreed that money should be virtually eliminated from the system. That said, people actually tend to be pretty satisfied with their representatives. It's the other Congresspeople who suck.
Certainly could be more transparent and more equitably shared. Life is tough for people, corporate entities have interests but never actual pain.
Hard disagree, my rep is an idiot
Data be damned then! Good point.
I bet you'll find that more people don't approve of what their representative is doing than do approve.
Low voter turnout allows for bullshit to slip through the cracks by targeting very small blocs of voters.
I genuinely believe that most problems in government would be fixed if voluntary voter turnout was around 99%, and that low rates, especially during midterms, is the largest threat to democracy in the United States as we know it to date.
What data? I've never seen data showing people approve of their Congressperson. Especially if that person is a Democrat.
This snide response would be a lot better if climate.gov had actually been taken down by those representatives you mention, rather than illegally destroyed by one man.
No no, the snide response works because this shutdown was a violation of aforementioned system. Downstream discussions on “oh hurrr ummm how do we decide what’s worth spending money on?!” are irrelevant. We already have a system to do that, and that system has decided to fund climate.gov
Gerrymandering means that the house is a skewed representation of the people. The senate is a skewed representation of the people in its intentional structure.
Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.
You are skipping a few layers here. Like those who know stuff like «crumbling asbestos air ducts in schools may be a bad idea».
Why do so many grown-ups fail civics 101 so blatantly?
They are doing the gag where they just describe representative democracy like it is a novel idea.
Practically we also need expert organizations and agencies to help advise the representative and implement their ideas, but I wouldn’t describe glossing over that sort of detail as “failing civics 101.”
I can't understand what you're trying to say.
You kind of exemplify that drawing on this very topic where a bunch of people sit in a boat that is sinking stern first and the people in the bow section are expressing zero concern because their end isn’t under water.
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
Quick question, what is your mental model of the climate?
From my understanding of USA as a foreigner, tax dollars are for corporate bailouts and military.
That is the understanding that you've been presented with, likely by people looking to mislead you, but that's not at all what our actual budget reflects. The social safety nets that we supposedly don't have take up around 2/3rds of our federal budget.
It's like 50% if you also count the stuff I pay for that is a direct benefit to me at retirement (as does anyone who pays into social security).
So it might be a little nitpicky, and your point still stands. A lot of money is spent on defense and business, but not as much as the before portrays.
Where businesses benefit is in not paying the tax, instead of receiving payments. That's definitely a problem, but it's a different thing.
As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.
Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
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 war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
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.
It makes me feel a little crazy seeing the constitutional architecture post-civil war used to diffuse responsibility away from the federal government and divide the people against each other working in action. People act like this isn't a country with very definite choices being made or that if something is bad over there, it doesn't matter over here. The wealthy, the corporations, the army, and the central government all deal with this place as a unified entity with various domestic fractures to exploit for their own purposes.
66% of Federal spending is on entitlements.
Social Security and Medicare have a separate, capped tax though. They're funded through that tax. Federal tax is effectively uncapped. Where does it go?
I agree with parent, the full quote is: "The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for."
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.
I'm not aware of any private company that has a contract with NOAA or the NWS to privately disseminate the agency's weather data (either acquired itself or purchased commercially).
The government already does that.
etc etc etcI think the point is that there has been a push to move away from this data continuing to be available from these sources.
There has not.
Attempts have been made starting back in 2005 https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/senate-bill/786...
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...
You do understand how this isn't an example of what I'm asking for, right?
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"?
Operating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?
I don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.
So then we are subsidizing Google’s outsized usage of that API?
Is this really an expensive problem to solve?
Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".
That sounds like the arrangement you said we have. The government provides data to private companies who then mass distribute it in various forms because those costs and needs vary.
The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
They get it for free from the government. They offer it as a paid service to the general public. Then they try to ban the government from giving it away for free to any potential competition.
> The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
In general, they aren't.
The sole example I can think of that even skirts with this was specifically an attempt by AccuWeather in the 2000's, coordinating with then-Senator Rick Santorum's office. And that was universally decried by the entire weather enterprise.
Project 2025 called for downsizing the weather service and have them focus on just data gathering and it should "fully commercialize its forecasting operations".
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
And that literally isn't happening.
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 EPIC and the commitment to the UFS).
NOAA is helmed by veterans of the weather enterprise. Do you see the American Meteorological Society issuing statements decrying the commercialization of the NWS or NOAA? Honestly, because NOAA is a Department of Commerce agency and the head of that cabinet department - Lutnick - has no interest whatsoever in weather or climate, there really isn't any ongoing concern that NOAA will be massively torn apart.
This is a conspiracy theory.
How so?
They've already implemented over half of the policies suggested in it.
https://www.project2025.observer/en
As mentioned they've already implemented many of the recommendations related to NOAA in the document. If anything they've gone even further in many of the cuts as they've cut the budgets so much a lot of balloon launches haven't happened vastly reducing the ground truth needed to keep models and forecasts accurate.
Instead, they've moved such things to... drumroll...private corporations.
https://www.wired.com/story/private-companies-step-up-to-gat...
Tell me again how this is conspiracy theory?
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 Congress. Yes, NOAA and NWS employees were caught up in the DOGE probationary purges back in early 2025, but in many cases (a) they were hired back, and (b) the NWS is aggressively hiring at all levels to replace churn.
2. "Note: Private companies are now gathering weather data for NOAA; administration is "readying plans" to transfer National Center for Atmospheric Research work to private companies." NOAA has purchased data from the private sector for 30 years. The explosion in commercial earth observation has dramatically increased the available data that can be directly used in numerical weather modeling, and NOAA has operated a Commercial Data Program for over a decade to supplement its own investments. This is an expected evolution of the weather enterprise that was predicted and urged as far back as the National Academies' "Fair Weather" report in 2003 [2]. Furthermore - NCAR is part of the NSF, not NOAA, which really calls into question WTF your website is talking about.
[1] https://www.project2025.observer/en?search=noaa [2] https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/10610
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 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.
When the regional climate offices went offline, do you think it was just incompetence, or testing the waters about letting such programs just die?
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?
It's like you refuse to see the obvious reality immediately in your face and choose to believe a convicted fraudster.
> 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 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.
> 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 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!
Before I rebut, I want to make very clear - I'm correcting the record because _in the future_ there could be serious threats to NOAA. Crying wolf today when things are tenuous but steady actively harms the community's preparation for when the knives _do_ come out for NOAA. As they have done so many times before, the slashers will point to these episodes of crying wolf as a smokescreen. It's literally their only play.
> 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.
I agree that anti-competitive coercion of access is bad.
As long as it’s properly addressed to avoid abuse, I don’t have a problem with private companies and individual citizens both benefiting. You could easily put rate limits if you think it’s a major issue while still maintaining the free service for smaller users. I personally don’t like the privatization of profits while also maintaining the narrative that companies don’t benefit from public works.
Sure, why not. No problem.
That's a good example of how government open data can support both people and business.
Google uses barely any weather data. Perhaps some tornado and wildfire tracking for its datacenters, but that's about it. The vast majority of its potential use comes from Android users, which is... the general public.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
So, research that you pay for with tax dollars, it's results should be published through a private entity?
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
But why?
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
Making the data available is non-trivial no matter who does it. There were many, many exabytes of this data a decade ago and countless petabytes of new data is generated every day. How to manage this has been an open question for a long time.
In practice access has always been restricted to this "public" data because there is not remotely enough bandwidth, either network or storage, to give everyone a copy of the data that may want it. They often don't even have enough capacity for internal users. A lot of it also sits in offline or near-line archival formats due to the scale of the data.
This is a general problem for data models of this type. You need to compute on the data in-situ or it won't scale but virtually no one can build that type of infrastructure at the scale required for these data models. It would also be extremely expensive to build and operate.
Doing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.
Biased about what?
There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
Companies spend a lot of money to remove and repair the idiosyncratic bias that already exists in this data.
Private companies don’t care about having accurate data?
Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?
They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.
And governments don’t face bad incentives that would cause them to hide information?
Let's have the government collect the data and private companies can engage in that as well if they wish - both parties can call the other out if there's a discrepancy.
IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.
1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.
I would characterize it as the things the government would lie about are different than the things a company would lie about.
They do. Often for different kinds of things. It’s not “government good, private bad” or the other way around. Both are facile views.
Agreed. Different organizations with different incentives. Neither of them have the privileged or an unbiased view.
Depends if the accuracy is counter to profit. Not to say governments don’t have their own biased incentives, but they tend to be of a different kind.
Private companies care way more about making money.
Private companies care ONLY about making money.
Making money requires accurate information about the world. For example I was just learning about how farmers hire scientists to grade chicken feed. They are incentived by their own profit to get good information about grain quality they wish to purchase.
You can make even more money if you make sure you have accurate data while your competitors do not.
> Making money requires accurate information about the world.
A company may have accurate information that their product causes cancer, but they aren't going to tell you that. They'll outright lie and say it doesn't, hire scientists to create fake research to "prove" that it's safe, and harass, threaten, and discredit anyone who tries to tell the public the truth.
This is probably an inopportune time to make that argument with Polymarket openly lying about their "truth telling machine" and paying influencers under the table to drive engagement.
Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function, even for the most ardent pro-market believers out there.
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
> Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function
Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years!
I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.
I'd argue is is absolutely within the mandate of government to collect, store, and publish weather and climate data at scale, as this work cannot be left to private companies or charity. It is fundamentally a collective action problem that will span generations and administrations, and one where there should be no incentive to profit or misinform. Citizens can only make sound decisions, both individually and collectively, if they have durable access to reliable facts.
Blog post from a few weeks ago: https://www.climate.us/news-features/feed/climateus-launches... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48689182)
With the AI rush, it all makes sense why suddenly all Silicon Valley became pro Trump and anti climate overnight.
I'm pretty sure all they care about is $$$. The political winds don't matter which way they are blowing.
They just feel less pressure to green wash their products now.
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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
Very reasonable I just wonder if you've ever pretty please asked the Oligarch slushfunded bots and troll farms to tone it down a bit.
HN is for curious conversation between humans and we have clear guidelines. That’s been unchanged for two decades. Bots, trolls and any other actors using HN in ways that breach the guidelines are banned, often automatically by our software, or failing that, by moderators, and in such cases we don’t “ask” first.
If you see evidence of abuse, please flag their posts or email us. This is what helpful participants on HN have always done.
This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?
To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists.
Who is going to pay for the data collection? If we can't trust the government, what are we paying taxes for?
This was my thought on the issue as well. How does moving it to private companies benefit anyone except the companies (who can now legally price gouge)? This is a centralized service, and just like healthcare, the numbers show that integrity goes out the window once financialized.
To stay out of jail, mostly.
do you care about climate data? then pay. or else you dont actually care enough to be inconvenienced. put up or shut up. i care, so I'll start. will make a $15 donation (as soon as i figure out how)
Great, and through your effort you can raise a total of 100, maybe even 1000 dollars.
Meanwhile while you are willing to give $15 for good data, Koch is willing to spend $15 million for a guy with a degree in fine arts to tell us he's a scientist and actually CO2 is super healthy and awesome.
We elect officials and tax not just for the climate data most people will care about, but also for random things like sewage data that people might not be thinking about but is also important to public health. Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
is there like a list of things that government is responsible for, or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
> Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
> is there like a list of things that government is responsible for
Why yes, there is. Here's an example of that list for the federal government [1]. States and cities also have similar lists though they may not be as accessible to the general public (a problem to be sure).
> or is it just vibes? if not, how is that not rife for abuse?
Not really vibes, it's spelt out in statute. In some cases that responsibility can be pretty wide and in all cases the president can chose heads of office that don't care to or ignore the duties of those statutes. The remedy if you feel like that's happening too much is voting.
> how is that not rife for abuse?
Abuse can certainly happen. However, the US does have some inordinate amounts of oversight over federally ran programs precisely because a lot of people worry about abuses. Where the abuse tends to happen is when the US is funding private institutions rather than running the programs themselves.
I have family that currently works for the US gov writing software. As they tell it, it takes 3 weeks to bring in a new version of a library due to the mandatory review process in the statutes. Meanwhile, they can hire a contractor who can use any library they like (but also who can bill whatever they like and are often friends with senators).
> it was already the case, even with tons of funding. (in case you don't know, i have a phd in chemical biology)
It used to be much more open ended. It has, however gotten worse and it's about to get much worse. Exactly because of concerns for abuse and waste. The system from clinton to trump wasn't great but it was somewhat functional. We are about to enter a new era, however, where funding for grants can be axed while the research is in flight if the administration decides that they don't like what's being researched. That's the abuse and waste I'm actually worried about.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text
Can we do the same thing for military funding? Default its budget to zero, and if anyone cares, let them donate a few bucks?
update: it turns out the parent org hasn't set up donations for this sub org, so i donated to climate action instead (also under the parent org)
I care that the data is out there and helps with weather forecasting. My taxes pay for that.
Do you care about roads, schools, fire stations and police too? Please donate to those please.
The only reason we have good weather data is because the government maintains stations in remote places all over the country. Who else would maintain that?
> stations in remote places all over the country
s/country/world/
There are many large projects to collect this information ranging from extremely specialized satellites to networks of ocean buoys. It turns out that weather is a global phenomenon and warming seas on the other side of the planet affect wherever you are.
You're not wrong, but I would like to point out that there is also the Civilian Weather Observer Program (CWOP) that is fed by a lot of private weather stations (the kind you can buy at Walmart of Amazon and put at your house). I believe the data is aggregated and averaged to account for variations in installation deficiencies, and used to inform/enhance the government maintained data feeds.
I respect cynicism and questioning stuff but this is misplaced. You have to trust the government since they are potentially the least partisan source here. Yes the data can be misconstrued by legislators but the truth of the data cannot be in question. It’s healthy to question it but the solution is to require proof of non-sabotage. It takes a lot of money and resources to pull this data together. It’s compiled by organizations across the world and being the trustworthy anchor is the most efficient way to achieve this. With that the government agency has every incentive to be non partisan and operate with integrity.
I agree with your feelings but 'activists and independent scientists' do not have the resources to maintain that sort of infrastructure over the long term and will also be continually fending off attacks on their credibility. Institutions exist because volunteering has limitations.
Hard disagree. Public funds are absolutely for funding research into things that affect the public on a large scale. That's the whole point. What could be more "general welfare", as envisioned in the constitution, than making sure we are not screwing up our collective home?
Private companies can pay for their own data collection and if they have a dispute with the government's analysis, they can go to court.
Who exactly is going to pay for these non-governmental independent data collection/analysis efforts?
How about taxpayers pay for one analysis, private parties pay for theirs, courtrooms can resolve inconsistencies on a case-by-case basis.
That would be great if the courts were actually neutral arbitrators and not captured political entities.
"The courts" writ large are doing just fine. SCOTUS in particular is a cesspool, but that is not the typical situation at all.
And in any case, an imperfect adversarial judicial system is dramatically better than whatever la-la-land "government has no data of its own" dystopia GP is imagining.
This notion of "the government" is the wrong premise. The US government is (supposed to be, I should say) an elaborate system of checks and balances to enable self-correction mechanisms. The Trump administration has turned that into a travesty, obviously, but the system itself is explicitly set up to be split into three branches that keep each other in check, and thus supervising itself.
Congress abdicated the majority of their authority to the executive over time by creating executive agencies. Now everybody is upset because the executive is actually using the power that Congress gave to it. The primary check on government growth is the three branches contending for power. No branch wants another branch to become more powerful and make their branch irrelevant. So, to fix the current issue, Congress can remove the power it has given to the executive and restore balance.
> The primary check on government growth
Disagree. The primary check on the government is consequences for violating the law and the constitution. That's just all gone out the window.
Power without oversight, no matter how distributed, will tend towards either complete chaos or tyranny (or both, if such a thing is possible). Giving three mutually distrustful criminals guns will not cause law and order to spring out of nothing.
An informed, angry and unforgiving citizenry is the only check on government, and we ain't go that.
These checks and balances failed long before Trump started abusing the system
Not to this extent!
Yes, sadly, several decades ago, one of the parties started running on the platform of "the government is broken" and to help the electability of said platform, they kept breaking the government.
indeed.
cause the problem then complain the problem exists. that’s been their intentional platform for years and years.
Look, I vote blue too, but you can't ignore that the Democrats have also pushed the slider further and further toward executive power every chance they get. Well, I guess I can't tell you what to do, so I suppose you can.
You misspelled "self-corruption"
> how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient?
Glad you asked. That's actually the job of the Inspectors General. One of the first groups of people Trump completely eliminated.
It was their job to stop things like corruption, waste, and fraud in the federal government.
All agencies are ultimately accountable to the public via democratically elected leaders as the Supreme Court recently upheld. No part of the government is independent body, it’s in one of the 3 branches.
Ignoring the guy who's there now. How accountable is the president really, especially in their second term.
And do consider that the supreme court has ruled that they're immune for anything that's an 'official act'.
Accountability of the executive left the room in 2024
Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.
And I don’t think that’s wrong. But let’s clarify. Either we trust the process to elect leaders who actually hold power or we think voting is broken and we need a body of leadership which exists independently of the democratic process.
> Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.
No that's not what I said. The courts can hold someone in the executive branch accountable. They're the check on their power.
Except the president, because of that one ruling.
So if the president commits fraud as part of an official act he's immune? No other person in the executive branch has this immunity. And it was given to the most powerful person.
The president just tried to operate an executive order and it got shut down by the courts.
The specific ruling is about the president being immune from criminal charges while in office. And yeah, you can’t be taking George Washington to court (or jail) while he is leading the revolution. It’s essential for the nation to have a functioning leader, especially among the fog of war.
The Bible story of David and Saul presents another example of this principle.
To bring it back though… what you’re telling me is we can’t trust a democracy to elect an executive.
With the amount of gerrymandering and campaign finance going on, there's a question of whether this is a democracy in the first place. If it is, it's clear it can't be trusted to elect an executive who follows the laws.
Except the Federal Reserve for some reason.
Look at the recent ruling on this topic.
Ah yes, we can't trust that our elected officials understand their duty well enough just fund Science and find out stuff works, so better throw up our hands and let the "market" do it.
Your view isn't controversial because it's daring, it's just plain nihilistic. It's just anti-government dogma which is cultivated by an incredibly cynical media atmosphere.
That doesn't seem controversial to me.
I wish the same were true of all federal organizations though. For example, CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too.
Other orgs do it too. I don't think they do it well.
> CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too
That's not true lol. There is a gigantic supervisory apparatus constantly breathing down the IC's neck, including but not limited to your very own elected Congressperson's investigative powers.
Ah ok. Well I don't see it limiting their misconduct and behavior, do you?
Yes, I do.
Perhaps you mean to say: I don't see it eliminating their misconduct and behavior.
No I meant limit.
Well then unfortunately you just have no clue what you’re talking about.
The notion that the CIA is “not limited” by checks and balances is beyond laughable.
How many people have you met who work there? Ever talked with someone about the limitations (or lack thereof) on their work?
I will bet the answers are zero and no. Am I wrong?
Yes! We could pool our efforts though, in a larger organization (let's call it a democratic republic), vote on who should preside over it, be on the "board" and hire some people to run the day-to operations of the whole thing.
If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution.
Edit: another suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48898415&goto=item%3Fi...
This is the American way.
The end result? Judges being elected that nobody knows. Some even running unopposed. Yet, they all are 'elected'.
No. I don't think Americans can elect more people. I would be shocked if over 10% formed their own opinion on which judge to pick for example. If you're lucky they did that for the ballot measures...
> Judges being elected that nobody knows.
I think this falls under "least worst option". I confess that I (and most others) don't have the time or focus to properly evaluate judicial candidates, so I turn to "trusted resources" to help guide my vote.
It's easier to vote on higher level issues, like ballot propositions or state/federal representation.
That said, the fact that a significant portion of the voting public voted in a man who epitomizes the most unqualified and inappropriate person into the US presidency has shaken my faith in democracy.
This makes no sense to me. National governments have no moral or legal responsibility to monitor the environment, because they also regulate pollution? Is this a joke?
Only private companies with some fantastical profit motive to install satellite and sensor networks all over and above the globe should do it, not the government?
> To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists
Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.
They may have, unfortunately, proved DOGE's point. The new climate.gov probably costs a fraction of the old one.
Simply hosting the website wasn't costing that much
That's easy to do. No one has expectations of this one.
As soon as a government website is down, it's an outrage.
I'm sure money could've been saved. But the cost of this site really isn't the hosting, it's the data being gatherd with all the research
I would like to see climate research funded, but it needs to be de-politicized and stop being used to push fear propaganda and sinister policies.
They used it to flat out destroy the economies in much of Europe, while somehow China and India were ignored despite being orders of magnitude bigger problems, according to their own narrative.
If any of the above were honest, there would have been blanket trade restrictions and sanctions on China and India so quickly it would make your head spin.
Nope. The main cost of the old climate.gov was the salaries of the folks writing the articles and pulling together the resources. They were not getting paid exorbitantly and are quite interested in still getting paid. Source: I am one of those people.
That's the Republican M.O.
Strangle funding to a public service, complain that public service isn't performing, use the consequences of their own actions to justify eliminating the public service indefinitely.