This past week, I’ve been going to the National Hurricane Center’s website about twice a day to look at the orange blob that was covering most of Florida on the seven-day tropical weather map. A blob that turned an alarming red on Thursday but was drifting west.
Not a hurricane path but a pre-hurricane wave that by Friday had a good chance of being upgraded from a blob to a cone of concern, complete with a Christian name attached.
Nervously clicking on the nhc.noaa.gov website for the hurricane outlook is part of my August-September morning routine: Eat cereal, make coffee, call up the new hurricane map.
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I’m grateful for the online hurricane maps. I’m old enough to remember when we’d have paper maps and listen when the radio and TV weather reports would announce hurricane coordinates in longitude and latitude. Publix used to print maps on paper grocery bags in August and September, and hefty Sunday newspapers included hurricane map inserts. Now you can see what’s on the way at a glance and not have to draw the line yourself. You can even be aware of the pre-storm. During the 2004 Year of the Hurricanes, the weather service’s site received 9 billion hits. And that was back when a billion hits meant something.
Not everyone appreciates the National Weather Service, its websites and record-keeping like I do. The same people who view libraries, parks and Medicare as dangerous creeping socialism also put the weather service in that category.
So it was no surprise that when the Heritage Foundation released its hefty things-to-do list should Donald Trump return to the presidency, privatizing weather service functions made the list. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025’s 922-page wish list has a lot of perennial conservative and culture war recommendations — get rid of the Department of Education, end Head Start, defund public broadcasting, and return to the good old days of drill-baby-drill energy policy.
The Heritage report says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Weather Service’s parent agency, “is one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” and, therefore, needs to be dismantled.
Stop issuing those disturbing statistics and studies and this global warming stuff won’t bother people anymore. Messenger silenced. Problem solved.
But it’s an alarming prospect to imagine a day when you’d be looking for the usual hurricane map and instead encounter a pop-up that says, “A hurricane is about to hit Florida! To find out where, subscribe now at the double-platinum membership level for only $30 a month! This week only.”
This is a worry that makes this an unpopular idea that stands out even within Project 2025’s Russian-novel-sized directory of unpopular ideas.
It’s kind of a tradition that unpopular policy ideas are floated after an election, not before. But this is a think tank full of people who have been systematically measuring White House drapes for some time. You can hardly blame them for jumping the gun.
This has forced Trump to claim he never heard of that report or the people who compiled it. Just random people who used to work for his administration and advised him politically. Nothing to see here.
And AccuWeather, whose former CEO had urged privatization of the weather service, also made a point of distancing itself from Project 2025. “AccuWeather does not agree with the view, and AccuWeather has not suggested, that the National Weather Service (NWS) should fully commercialize its operations,” AccuWeather CEO Steven R. Smith said in a company statement.
For now, we can still watch red blobs and concerning cones throughout hurricane summers as a free-to-use government benefit. It is reassuring to see the speed with which Republicans have distanced themselves from Project 2025’s dreams of dismantling worthwhile government services. They did not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Hopefully, the backlash the project sparked will discourage further attacks on the weather service’s science and fine work. And the orange blobs of August 2025 will appear right on schedule.
Mark Lane is a News-Journal columnist. His email is [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Project 2025 wants to get rid of the NOAA, National Weather Service
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