Government To Replace Hurricane Forecasts With Prayer, Good Luck Everyone!

This is fine.

We like hurricane forecasting. Perhaps it is our upbringing in an area that got unpleasantly surprised by multiple hurricanes over the decades before weather satellites existed. Perhaps it is all the horrible news about possible missed warnings before the awful flooding in Texas this weekend. Perhaps it is that we are right this instant looking out our window at clouds from the edges of what was Tropical Storm Chantal as they prepare to drop an inch or two of rain on our heads and allow us to take “water the geraniums” off our weekly to-do list.

Or perhaps it is just our common fucking sense telling us that if humans can forecast these things with reliable methods and data, there is no good reason not to.

On this issue, however, the fascist chucklefucks in charge of America’s federal government apparently disagree. They have been angling to carry out Project 2025’s stated goal of eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and cutting the National Weather Service (NWS) to the bone because both organizations are part of the “climate change alarm industry.” Well, we certainly wouldn’t want any alarmism while people are drowning in more frequent and devastating floods, would we?

All of this is to say that it makes sense — in the way that anything does these days — that the US Department of Defense recently announced that it would stop sharing satellite weather data with hurricane forecasters right in the middle of hurricane season.

The best part of this is that DOD announced a few weeks ago that it would stop sharing this data at the end of June. There was a bit of an outcry. So DOD said, Whoops, our bad, we meant we’ll stop sharing at the end of July instead.

Which, given that hurricane season runs through the end of November, does not really help!

Leave it to a scientist to, in that dry and straightforward scientist manner, understate how fucking dumb this is:

“I was surprised, given how important it is for forecasting hurricanes and monitoring important features like sea ice,” says Brian Tang, a hurricane researcher at the University at Albany.

“Surprised” is one way you can react. Another way is to ask if the DOD is out of its damn mind. Then you recall that our Defense Secretary is perpetually one keg stand away from a beer coma, and you think this is par for the stupid course.

What else is here that we can slap our own foreheads over?

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Well, the Defense Department does not appear to be shutting down the satellites or letting their orbits decay until they burn up in the atmosphere. The satellites will still be there doing their thing, so the data is still being collected. Is this because of all the massive funding cuts? Does ICE need to re-task the satellites to find more Home Depot parking lots where migrants might have gathered to seek work?

“It's not an issue of funding cuts,” says Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, a federally funded research center in Colorado that has relied on the soon-to-be-terminated Defense Department data to track sea ice since 1979. “There are cybersecurity concerns. That's what we're being told.”

The government could address those cybersecurity concerns, or it could shut down weather forecasting. This latter course is a bit like someone saying, Honey, I’ve got a headache tonight, so we will not be having sex ever again. So naturally it is the course the government has chosen.

We’re guessing that the real problem is that sharing weather data with civilians does not fit into Pete Hegseth’s vision of the military as being solely focused on “lethality” and “warfighting” and whatever other dumb buzzwords his dumb brain spits out of his dumb mouth that make no sense.

No, really, we suspect that might actually be it:

The Navy did not respond to questions about what those specific concerns might be. In a statement, a Navy spokesperson wrote only that, “the program no longer meets our information technology modernization requirements.”

What does that even mean? It’s bureaucrat babble, gibberish that says a decision has been made and no, you can’t know why, you dumbass.

Namby-pamby scientists, wanting to distract the Navy from its real mission of being the kickass military force Hegseth dreamed of when he was playing with his GI Joe toys in the fourth grade, which is the point where his brain stopped its emotional development.

Nothing To Do But Pray, Say Exact Republicans Who Could Have F*cking Done Something

All of this is made even more bitter because rescue workers are still finding bodies scattered across Kerr County in Texas and probably will be for a while.

The incredible amounts of rain that caused the Guadalupe River to flood and are the reason those rescue workers are needed today were a result of Tropical Storm Barry, which hit Mexico last week. A meteorologist told Wired that any tropical system is “just pumping moisture northward” and that sets the stage for “heavy rainfall events.” Again, there’s some of that dry scientist lingo that we would translate as Hey Noah, there’s a giant fucking flood coming, you might want to hurry up with that ark.

Whether the National Weather Service was on the ball here and got its job done or whether DOGE’s budget cuts and staffing cuts and key roles unfilled meant communication to the local authorities wasn’t yelling loud enough — either way, we still need the damn data.

Or we can pray, we guess, as Mike Johnson and Ted Cruz and the other Republicans call us to do so that they won’t have to make any hard decisions about funding priorities. To which we respond:

OPEN THREAD.

[NPR / Wired]

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