Flying Blindfolded into The Future

The old FEMA director was a combat medic and Navy SEAL. The new FEMA director recently told a “joke” that he didn’t know there was a season for hurricanes. That’s the world we live in now. Wait, there’s more.

For years, the NOAA has released a report on the total annual cost of climate disasters. It’s an important barometer.

At least, it was.

But now the agency is retiring the database “in alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.” Now, unless you want to spend countless hours calculating it yourself, we won’t really know how much worse the climate disasters are getting, at least in a financial sense. It’s a big change, but just one of many aimed at blindfolding us to the future.

According to a piece in Mother Jones, the Trump administration has fired 2,000 NOAA staff this year in an effort to gut their budget by 30 percent. As the piece says, it’s having an impact on weather forecasts, and we’re “losing the data that informs these predictions and the scientists who produce them.” Heading into a hurricane season that’s predicted to be above normal, local meteorologists have already warned their viewers that they’re having trouble predicting the weather, thanks to these cuts. And the current head of FEMA apparently doesn’t know what hurricane season is.

One day, your emergency weather radio might just…

Stop broadcasting.