Nation’s top weather and climate service faces potential political storm

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• John Yang:

  North Carolina's historic rainfall this past week is the sort of extreme weather event that's become more frequent and more severe, according to the union representing its employees. By July, the National Weather Service had issued some 13,000 severe thunderstorm warnings, 2,000 tornado warnings and 1,800 flash flood warnings.

  Weather Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, are targeted for drastic changes in Project 2025, that's the roadmap for the next conservative president.

  Many of its authors are former Trump administration officials, although the former president has tried to distance himself from it.

  Rachel Cleetus is policy director in the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Rachel the section on NOAA in this Project 2025 is written by Thomas Gilman. He was in the Commerce Department in the Trump administration. He was an executive at Chrysler before that.

  The section says that NOAA has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry, and as such, is harmful to future us prosperity. It should be broken up and downsized. What do you say to that?

• Rachel Cleetus, Policy Director, Union Of Concerned Scientists:

  Well, that is an extremely damaging attack on an agency that is providing science that helps keep people safe, helps keep critical infrastructure and our economy safe.

  As you pointed out, NOAA's Weather Service is providing information that helps communities get prepared ahead of things like extreme heat waves, major storms and hurricanes, when we have these flooding events, when we have wildfires, this agency is crucial in providing the kind of information that helps first responders get out ahead, helps communities prepare and saves lives, frankly.

  So attacking this agency, attacking the science that it's doing is really damaging to the public. They would like the private sector to run rampant and not be fettered by any kind of guardrails. And we all know that the climate crisis is accelerating, getting worse, having an impact on our economy as well as the environment.

  We've seen homes get destroyed, infrastructure get destroyed. Insurance rates skyrocket. This is about our country's healthy future, our prosperity, our children's prosperity.

  So this document is just an incredible assault on science based policy making, and it will have a disproportionate impact on low income communities and communities of color who have long borne the brunt of pollution in our nation.

• John Yang:

  And it's more than just the Weather Service in the — in NOAA, when they talk about the National Hurricane Center and the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Office, they call it the source of much of NOAA's climate alarmism, and say that their data should be presented neutrally.

  What do those offices do? What do those agencies do? How does it relate to research on climate change? And what do you take of their saying that the data should be presented neutrally?

• Rachel Cleetus:

  Look, the reality is, climate change is a scientific fact, and we are seeing it in the impacts all around the country today, we've seen these extreme weather events. We're seeing billion dollar disasters mount around the country. We have seen incredible extreme heat waves. Just this year in our country, major wildfires, Hurricane Beryl, Hurricane Francine, that stalled out with major rainfall. This is the reality.

  This is not about climate alarmism or whatever that might mean. This is about climate reality. This is an agency that is not policy prescriptive. It's providing essential scientific facts that track both the day to day weather as well as the long term trends, including that caused by climate change, which is driven by fossil fuel emissions.

  The most recent NOAA data shows that the January to August period is the hottest in 175 years of tracking these records. So once again, we're seeing these record breaking years and then the trend, which is truly concerning this year, 100 percent of the U.S. population saw an extreme weather alert everywhere in the country. Wherever you live, you've been under one of these alerts, you've maybe experienced some of these damaging impacts.

• John Yang:

  And on the Weather Service, the Project 2025 notes that a lot of the forecasts people get are from private forecasting companies, and that they say that they're actually more reliable than the weather service, so they say that the weather service should fully commercialize its forecasting operations. What do you think about that?

• Rachel Cleetus:

  People may not realize that a lot of private companies that are providing you information are getting the underlying data from NOAA. So whether it's AccuWeather or your local TV forecaster, the data that they're relying on is coming from NOAA, and the fact that that data is freely and widely accessible is really important. You don't have to be rich. You don't have to be a wealthy community. You can access that information.

  The other piece of data that people may not be aware of is known as tide gage data, which is providing information all along our coastline of the impacts of accelerating sea level rise that's already causing sunny day flooding, even without extreme storms. So this is the kind of data that we're all relying on, and may not realize it.

• John Yang:

  If you had your own project 2025 laying out a roadmap for the next administration, whoever it is, what sort of things would you be prescribing for NOAA?

• Rachel Cleetus:

  Well, I think one thing we should all want is independent, scientific information that can help us get to better policy making so agencies like NOAA providing that information, that their scientific integrity is protected, that their scientists can provide the information and not be afraid of intimidation, and that that information can help guide policy makers, that can help us both in the near term as well as in the long term, prepare for the impacts of climate change.

  So having NOAA be an independent, well-resourced agency that can do its work, essential work that we depend on, that's what we should be looking for as a nation.

• John Yang:

  Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists, thank you very much.

• Rachel Cleetus:

  Thank you so much for having me.