The polar vortex is hitting the brakes

Yes, an official agency communication would have to go through deliberations and consensus finding from ~all parts of NOAA, most blog posts will only have the input of those experts. While that will mostly not lead to significant deviations since all of the discussed areas are subject to scientific rigour there is always the human nature of all actors.

Back in university we would publish news entries for all our publications without any input from the university. But for some papers there was also an official press release by the university. That came both with additional restrictions (length, language level, flashiness) but also with additional reach (getting picked up by newspapers directly). I assume that pre-Trump this would have been a similar setup. No guess as to now though

That's not what the poorly written article actually says. They are launching one baloon a day instead of two. You might think the article is being intentionally misleading with working like, "NWS issued a public information statement announcing that is is temporarily suspending the frequency of weather balloon launches at some of Weather Forecast Offices".

Most of those people are silent quitting or refusing to go back to work.

This applies across the board to these firings/rehirings. Why would anyone go back to work for real when you know you're just gonna be fired again?

To be fair there have been a bunch of headlines about a great many things, like office closures without mentioning the minor detail that the offices haven’t been used in years, the workforce is remote, and there is no impact on service delivery or staffing. Doesn’t stop journalists from dancing around the implication if it makes the orange man and mars man look bad though.

It's absolutely the goal. There has been a push from places like weather.com to privatize much of NOAA for years.

Noaa's free information is really good so it makes the playing field a bit too level for private companies. They don't really offer a substantially better product than NOAA so it makes their product less valuable.

A few years ago we had a company reach out to us saying they could give us hyper-localized forecasts for our ultra endurance events. After our first event using them I checked their data against NOAA. Surprise, their data was far less accurate than weather.gov.

Every private weather service is using NOAA's dataset and then tweaking it or adding their own data. All of them.

US science will go down big time. Big Corp (oil, pharma,.. ) will get richer

sorry - the US Federal Forest Science has been a dumpster fire in the Sierra and other areas.. arrogant, wealthy, immovable and it turns out, dangerously misguided plus very willing to enforce their worldview.

In another comment there are bitter words about the nature of Monarchy, but it appears that it does not require a Monarchy to get things badly, seriously wrong.

That has been touted around before, but what does the military do? I assume they are extremely aware of their supply chain and would not want to source weather from a commercial entity.

Will NORAD start doing clandestine weather modelling to be able to plan troop/ship movements?

There is no way private weather forecasting will be profitable enough to keep the required equipment running, at least at the quality we have had.

Yeah it'll be interesting if they privatize weather forecasting in the US

FWIW, there is already a massive industry of private weather forecasting.

I know personally, or have met, at least six fully trained meteorologists who don't work for the government. Most are in the oil industry, but one is in aquaculture, and another in shipping.

Most big energy, aviation, and logistics companies employ meteorologists. Probably other industries, too.

That said, the loss of the NWS would be a national tragedy, and one of the worst mistakes in American government history.

All private/paid weather forecasts still rely on NOAA’s infrastructure, so we may not have any reliable forecasting anymore.

I'm surprised they aren't privatizing GPS actually... seems to be a similarly helpful public service. While it does help subsidize future Korean airliners... it unfairly harms aircraft manufacturers. /s

Why would "they" privatize the weather? How dramatic.

-40 is the actual convergence point.

Incorrect. You are thinking of -40.

Are those quantities in imperial Newtons or nautical Newtons?

That's the beauty of the current chaos-driven model. No explicit marching orders required. Just let it be known that inconvenient facts/actions can be punished at any time. Self-censorship takes care of the rest.

Is the author still employed?

Fahrenheit and Celsius are defined perfectly with one another so are as easy to convert as using a different number base though. And both were originally defined at arbitrary points making neither one better suited than the other at really anything.

If they used an absolute scale like Kelvin, then sure it would be an objectively better standard, but Celsius has been defined via the Kelvin scale for over 70 years now, the same as Fahrenheit.

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The base units of the metric system are often not very ergonomic. Why is a meter so damn big? And why is a gram so damn small? I can barely detect a gram. And a meter is frickin huge, causing people to usually divide it into hundredths of a meter, which you can hardly picture in your mind unless you already know what it looks like, especially arbitrary counts of cm. Metric's only real advantage is that it shares the same radix as our counting system.

What we really need is a new system of units...

I grew up during the F to C transition in the UK and F is not intuitive.

0 = ice 100 = steam

That is pretty intuitive if you ask me. And for gravy comfortable room temp is about 25

This is false. I frequently find myself annoyed at my AC because it only has settings of 72°F and 74°F, and they are a little too cold and a little too warm for me. I want 73°F. When it's around room temperature, you can absolutely tell the difference.

The further away from room temperature, the less we can distinguish. All our senses work logarithmically like that.

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My problem isn't remembering the scale, it's that Fahrenheit offers me double the effective resolution and descriptive accuracy without awkward decimal points in the numbers used.

I like my room at 73F, not 72F or 74F, and I can feel the difference. That's 22.77C. :-/

Okay. Or, hear me out.

On a scale from 0-100, you have very cold and very hot.

Or you’ve got from 0-45. Where 0 is “meh” cold and 45 is incredibly warm.

So you’ve got a nice little 0-100 scale that all humans are going to experience just living that goes from very cold to very hot.

Or you’ve got a useless 0-100 scale that the bottom just means freezing, and ignores every pain point of being really cold below that, and anything really greater than 50C only has practical applications in cooking.

Perceiving temperature involves dew point and relative humidity, not just temperature.

Cool yeah let's compress the entire scale to 0-35 and waste the other 65 up to 100 lol yeah what a great scale

0°F was the outside temperature with 40 mph winds (60mph gusts) the time I had to venture to the middle of an empty field to break the ice on water tank with a hatchet so cows could get water.

It’s cold.

Exactly. Where I live we have temps from -20F to 110F, which is -30 to 43C. Idk, seems to me the hottest normal temp being 90ish and coldest normalish temp at 0 is a decent scale.

?

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If you are used to Celsius, sure. But the point the op was making is Fahrenheit was designed with humans in mind and Celsius with the changes of the state of water. Your average person didn't really care what temperature water boils at, just that it is hot.

Who needs 2x the effective resolution at human temperature scales? Or useful temperatures without significant digits beyond the decimal?

0 is cold as fuck, 100 is hot as fuck. Perfect human scale. Stay jelly

Agreed, there's a reason most of the world uses it.

There wouldn't be a single factor driving it but a combination of many factors. Loss of coastline (and cities built along it) including greater susceptibility to storms for unaffected areas will obviously have economic costs, highly increased weather and storm variability will be significant (think monsoon rains, "atmospheric river," etc.), increased drought in some areas due to both temperature and weather pattern changes (see western US water rights among the states as the civil portion of this), mass movements of refugees (sure the US can close the southern border, but what happens if you get 50,000 migrants all deciding to come over at once in one area? Are you simply going to shoot all of them?).

Human extinction seems very unlikely, but the collapse of the infrastructure that allows creation of the infrastructure that allows modern life? That could be much more likely, particularly when you factor in military conflicts as well as purely climate-based changes and losses.

The equator contains billions of people.

It's quite hot around there. Wet bulb temperatures often near the edge of survivability outdoors.

It's worse now with 1-1.5C warming. If we don't stop, and we get to 3-5C warming, this could lead to large scale migration to Europe in pursuit of liveable climate. And warming won't stop unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases.

it all started with the invention of Ice9

Because it's the one green solution that actually works as base load (other than hydroelectricity, but that's terrain-dependent), works 24/7 without any other affordances, and doesn't open you up to dependence on other nations to anywhere near the same degree.

Solar and wind are only cheap because a foreign nation makes the parts (if they were made domestically they wouldn't be cost-competitive, obviously). So in 20 years, when your PV panels are degrading and your turbines are wearing out, that foreign country's going to be able to charge you a lot more to replace it.

And if you want to see the results of cheap industrial inputs becoming expensive one only need look at the post-Nordstream German/European economic forecast. Even the poor should be able to afford to keep the lights on and the A/C running once the sun has set.

Because solar and wind are extremely inefficient and dangerous when compared with nuclear. Nuclear and enhanced geothermal are both closing in on their dream forms (fusion and supercritical fluids), and are already sufficient as they are.

It’s not necessarily “over” them, it’s that it will get tons of attention because that level of power generation would take wayyyyy too long to build out and take wayyyy too much space before even getting into the fact that neither solution can work anywhere at any time.

Nuclear got a bad rap, but it is way too essential to ignore in this problem we’re facing. When the focus shifts, you can tell people are getting serious. Simple as that.

Edit: I did not realize this had somehow become a conservative viewpoint? I am a leftist.

There are no "unsolved problems" for nuclear (because the safe storage of fissile waste for 10k years isn't a problem we need to solve, apparently). By contrast, getting solar+wind fully up and running requires totally solving the storage problem. Plus the libs love it. Hence ... nuclear.

There seems to be a delusional part of the Internet that is convinced that nuclear is the only future, and solar and wind aren’t. To settle this, you basically need to look at what China is doing —- which is to build a lot of nuclear and then exponentially more solar and wind. We’re a huge percentage of the way down the slide to a mostly renewable world with storage, and some nuclear at the edges.

But it isn’t a competition. I’d be just as happy if things were going the other way. Having a clear mental model of the world is just useful. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la...

I don't understand why people think a diversity of power generation options is somehow not something you would desperately want in the first world.

Your fashion sense is awesome; however, this is engineering, and we need as many options as we can get. There is zero sense in playing favorites here.

I think you're confusing environmentalists with NIMBYs who use (among others) environmental arguments to argue against projects they don't like.

Environmentalists have been pushing wind, solar, etc. for the last half century. There are a few shortsighted people who oppose wind farms but they represent a large, complex multinational movement in the same way that any one of us represents the tech industry, which is to say not at all.

In many cases, if you look at the complainants it’s also reasonable to question whether they’re fully honest about their motivations. For example, the big Martha’s Vineyard project was backed by the biggest environmental group in the area but by the opposition were people like commercial fishermen and various rich cranks like RFK Jr. and the Kochs who thought the change in view would affect their property values but do not otherwise live lives full of obvious strong environmentalist views.

Have you ever lived near wind turbines?

They take quite a toll on both wild life and people living in the area.

And are often abandoned as soon as they don't generate enough profits/are too expensive to maintain, with no one wanting to pay for cleaning up the area.

Palantir seems to be chugging along just fine.

What would you cut? I don’t know what I would, but I do know that the United States is heading for a financial apocalypse unless drastic measures are taken now.

I know there’s a lot of hysteria around this, but I’m still at the place where I can be optimistic that the US will come out ahead. At least they’re doing something besides spending more money and acting like everything‘s OK. From a long-term financial stability standpoint it’s really not.