Hide the information; that will solve the problem.
The Trump administration has announced it will dismantle a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring system that provides critical data on the world’s oceans. The decision is sparking alarm among experts that US is taking eyes off the oceans at a dangerous time of record-breaking sea temperatures, an imminent super El Niño and fears a critical system of ocean currents could collapse, ushering in global chaos.
Yeah yeah, blah blah, Trump knows what he’s doing so shut up.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative, or OOI, was set up in 2016 and is made up of around 900 instruments in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans specially designed to withstand the immense pressure and corrosive saltiness of the ocean depths. Moored equipment and underwater gliders continuously collect real-time data allowing scientists to monitor the health of the ocean, including shifts in ocean chemistry and changes to the powerful currents that shape global weather and climate.
The initiative was supposed to operate for three decades, but on May 21, the National Science Foundation, which funds the system, announced it would be “descoping” the network. Over the next 15 months, “in-water infrastructure” will be removed from arrays off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina and from the North Atlantic off southeast Greenland, the NSF said in a statement.
The decision “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio,” Mike England, head of media affairs at NSF, told CNN.
Ew. That’s not scientific language, it’s corporate-speak. Nimble, smart, portfolio – spoken like a true head of media affairs during the Trump reign.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration undoes climate protections and attempts to dismantle and defund climate science, at the same time as it pushes to start mining the deep sea for critical minerals. Scientists have expressed deep concerns that dismantling this ocean monitoring system undermines ocean science at a critical time, reduces US scientific leadership and is abandoning taxpayer-funded equipment already paid for and installed.
But installed without Trump’s permission, or when he wasn’t looking, or without the appropriate level of gilding. One of those.
“I’d call this penny wise, tons foolish,” said Rick Spinrad, an oceanographer who led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the Biden administration. “OOI is proving its value for a range of economic and social benefits: from fisheries management to weather forecasting, to protection from coastal flooding … Where’s the analysis of return on investment that shows that eliminating OOI is in the taxpayers’ best interest?”
Um…oh I know, it’s in that bathroom at Mar-a-Lago – nobody is allowed to go in there any more.
The global oceans are enduring a period of huge change — some of which remains largely unexplained. Ocean temperatures have been off the charts in some places, fueling more intense hurricanes, driving sea level rise and causing mass coral bleaching.
Sustained ocean monitoring is “how we detect emerging risks in real time,” said Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK. “Without them, we are effectively choosing to navigate an increasingly volatile ocean with diminishing visibility.”
But that costs money that could be spent on bullfights in the Rose Garden.
A huge area of concern is what the loss of monitoring will mean for our understanding of a crucial network of Atlantic Ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have used data from the OOI to help try to map the AMOC’s fate.
A growing body of research suggest the AMOC could be on course to collapse, potentially as early as this century, which would bring catastrophic consequences, including accelerated sea level rise along the US East Coast, a winter deep freeze in Europe and prolonged droughts across a swath of Africa.
Get yourself a good strong raft. Get yourself a top quality down jacket. Stay away from Africa. Problems solved!
Experts say the ripple effects of what is being lost will be wide. It will “create an irreparable blind spot for our country in predicting earthquakes, fishery health, storm forecasting, coastal flooding and more,” said Chris Robbins, associate director of scientific initiatives at Ocean Conservancy. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
It makes trumpsense though.
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