MAGA regime rips out sea monitors, prefers profits
Towards the end of May, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that it was ending the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and pulling up four data gathering arrays consisting of hundreds of electronic instruments that gathered real time data, from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
A mooring used in the Ocean Observatories Initiative is recovered off the coast of Alaska.
The announcement followed the abrupt dismissal of the entire National Science Board, the advisory committee to the National Science Foundation.
These actions showed how the current MAGA regime in Washington is abandoning any priority for scientific tracking of changes in climate as it affects the oceans and humanity in general and instead is maintaining the priority of profits for private energy monopolies producing fossil fuels.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported in 2021 and 2022 that global warming was producing megastorms, heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, torrential precipitation, flooding, bleaching of coral reefs and destruction of kelp forests in the oceans, as well as the intense loss of biodiversity.
The great melting of Arctic sea ice accelerates global warming because dark open water absorbs the sun’s energy while ice reflects it. The presence of more and more freshwater from the melting of sea ice and glaciers changes the flows that bring warm waters to more temperate areas of the world.
The collapse of the Gulf Stream, the surface of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), would adversely affect tens of millions of people in western Europe and North America.
The increasing acidification of ocean waters makes animals, such as oysters, clams, sea urchins, corals and calcareous plankton, grow slower and become more vulnerable to predators. This is a major danger to the oceans’ ecosystems.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative has been collecting increasingly valuable oceanographic data since 2016 on these and many other issues. These data let scientists, fishers, weather forecasters, other marine workers and politicians understand and react to what is happening in the 70% of the world that is ocean.
The OOI is run by a consortium of universities and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
A real tragedy
Dr. Hilary Palevsky, a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College, made the following comment on the NSF decision to the New York Times: “One of the real tragedies here is that collecting data effectively was a huge engineering challenge, and it’s not the kind of thing where you can just leave your notes for the next person who comes in.” She added, “There’s a lot of expertise that has the potential to be lost.” (June 1)
It costs relatively little to run OOI, considering its important task. It was budgeted for $48 million a year, far less than the value of the data it collected.
But it collected data that disputed the deeply held, ignorant opinions of MAGA, that “global warming” is a hoax, that it’s a scam designed by the liberal elites to cost the economy money that would be better spent on fossil fuels. These opinions were clearly laid out in Trump’s 2025 speech to the U.N.’s General Assembly.
Two days after the NSF announced the end of OOI, the Trump administration proclaimed that it was going to spend $700 million on two new electricity generating plants fired by coal. These are the first new coal-fired plants built in the last 13 years.
