Questions about Ocean Sensors destruction:

[littlemissmartypants]

According to 'Occupy Democrats'
(Who some say has a sketchy reputation, I don't know.)

BREAKING: ATTACK ON SCIENCE! Trump is ripping up $368 million worth of ocean sensors to blind America to climate change and the collapse of the Atlantic current.

Congress funded it. Scientists built it. Trump is tearing it up anyway.

The Trump administration is sending ships out in June to physically remove more than 900 deep-sea instruments from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that monitor things like ocean acidity and temperature — dismantling a $368 million monitoring network that took a decade to build and was designed to operate for 25 years.

It will be gone in 15 months.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is not redundant government bloat. It is the world's most advanced continuously operating ocean observation system — monitoring greenhouse gas absorption, marine heat waves, commercial fisheries, coastal flooding along the East Coast, and most critically, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, the massive global conveyor belt of water that some scientists fear is weakening due to climate change. A collapse of that current would trigger severe weather catastrophes across multiple continents.

The instruments measuring that current are anchored 9,200 feet below the surface of the Irminger Sea, between Greenland and Iceland, as part of an international scientific collaboration. They are now being pulled out of the water.

The Trump administration tried to cut the network's funding by 80 percent — twice. Congress restored the money both times. So, the administration is simply dismantling it anyway.

The annual operating cost was $48 million. That's less than four days of the Iran war. It's a rounding error on the $1.776 billion slush fund Trump created for his January 6th allies. It's less than half what Trump is spending to gold-plate four horse statues near the Lincoln Memorial.

"By dismantling such a system, we push the United States back yet again into a rear seat in global scientific leadership," said Craig McLean, former acting chief scientist at NOAA.

Scientists warn that decades of institutional knowledge and engineering expertise will be lost — the kind that can't be reconstructed from notes. Commercial fishing industries along the Pacific Northwest and East Coast will lose critical data. Coastal communities will lose flood prediction tools. The entire planet will lose visibility into one of the most consequential ocean systems on Earth.

The National Science Foundation called this decision "nimbler prioritization."

Scientists call it what it is: willful blindness to climate catastrophe, funded by your tax dollars and executed against the explicit wishes of Congress.

Please write your senators and representatives to urge them to stop the Trump administration’s foolish and ignorant attacks on climate science, and please like and share this post everywhere to spread the news of this catastrophic assault on environmental information.

Can't there be an emergency injunction filed on this? Does anyone have any updates on it?

It's ridiculously horrible and stupid. But what else isn't, right? I just don't want us to get numb to the horror.

❤️pants

[eppur_se_muova]

1. People need to start ignoring Trmp's orders. Just tell him "Yeah, we did that -- it's finished".

Kind of a Potemkin in reverse. How's he going to know ?

[LT Barclay]

4. I thought this would happen at the beginning of his term. I'm shocked at the people going along with it, especially the

military. I know many of them climb the ranks by bootlicking, but so many have crossed the line and Trump won't last long enough to protect them.
The only thing that frightens me about that conclusion is that a lot of them must be extremely confident that the Republicans aren't going to lose the next (or hold?) the next election.

[Zackzzzz]

2. Guaranteed, Everyday is a new shocking loss.

[cynical_idealist]

3. I guess their goal must be to accelerate human extinction

along with all the other life.

[LT Barclay]

5. The guys at Marvel comics knew. Watch Avengers Endgame. The wealthy apparently know 2 things: The world's problems

including global warming, habitat destruction, population growth, etc. are real. AND they could be fixed. But that would require sharing, so they've decided that most of us need to go. It also explains the stoking of racial hatred, and trying to run up inflation high enough that people start starving and/or revolting.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. You know who might be VERY annoyed about this ? THE NAY VEE, and the Intelligence communities.

These sensors provide info that can be used for a variety of purposes, but especially for monitoring weather and currents around the oceans so that ships sailing into any given area can know what conditions -- and dangers -- they are likely to encounter. They're not just dual-use technology, but multiple-use. And you can bet that the full range of sensors carried by these devices is not discussed publicly. Before the US gov't would spend million$$$$ on this technology, it would have canvassed every Dept. and Office in the gov't to ask "is there anything you would like to add to these abilities, and how much would it cost ?". Intel services and the Pentagon would have come up with a long list -- hydrophones, seismometers, magnetometers, mass detectors (the latter two items as specifically directional and sensitive as practical), wireless network monitors, etc. Any passing ship, even if observing strict radio silence, could be detected with the right equipment, and results from a network of detectors could effectively follow the ship's progress, to within a certain degree of accuracy depending on the type of detector. You have to wonder -- how many Russian ships pass close enough to this region to be detected ? Did Daddy Vlady tell Trmp he doesn't like the US peeking at his ships ?

As long as it's described as a tool for studying climate change, Trmp will hate it. Let him know the Navy wants it and he'll TACO again. Of course, the inebriated white supremacist and overgrown frat boy currently running our military won't question anything Trmp says or does, so he needs to be court-martialed or just thrown out ASAP.

The currently *acting* SECNAV was appointed by the former SECNAV to oversee unclassified IT systems, among other things, so maybe he has a little better understanding of the need for this technology than his predecessor. And it has to be better than Trmp's.

[littlemissmartypants]

7. Excellent point!! I can't imagine that the USCG or the Maritime Industry is too happy either.

But is anyone outside our fucked up government doing anything? That's my question.

The implications of the removal are definitely expansive, and replacement would be not just financially detrimental but time intensive.

Who ordered this nonsense? Do we actually have a king now? It sure seems like it!

[NNadir]

8. I'm not convinced he's going to destroy the instruments, so much as stop monitoring them. I don't know that...

...but I suspect this is the case. Even if they are "removed" I doubt there will be people smashing them to pieces with hammers.

It will cost money to "destroy" the system and will require the participation of people who know where the system is installed, presumably well trained engineers.

I've been involved with the movement of advanced scientific instruments in my career from lab to lab. They require calibration and maintenance to be restored to their place, but the are generally serviceable.

I may be overoptimistic, since this moron is taking a chainsaw to science, but I don't think the damage will be irreversible. We'll lose data points to be sure, just as we did at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory, this winter and spring, losing two weekly data points for the first time since 1975, but again, we can recover some of the information, if nothing else, by interpolation.