Scientists at the National Weather Service Provided Life-Saving Information During Iowa Tornados on Tuesday

If Donald Trump is elected, the NWS will be dismantled and privatized...

May 23, 2024

If you are like me, you were glued to the broadcast media Tuesday afternoon and evening as numerous tornadoes hit Iowa. We all share our sympathies with the towns and families who were hit hard by the tornadoes. As I was finishing the final draft of this last night it was released that there were four fatalities and at least 35 injuries in the Greenfield tornado.

As a trained storm spotter who used to work in radio, I understand the importance of broadcast news, and during the storms Tuesday I streamed the radio station I used to work for, KNIA/KRLS in Knoxville/Pella/Indianola on my computer, and on the TV I switched back and forth from KCCI-TV and WHO-TV while wandering in and out of the house to check the skies. Here in Bussey, we were between two storm systems and didn’t get much damage, but at the Leonard household, we did lose an old tree. That’s OK, we knew it would come down sooner than later. If we lived in town, we would have felt pressure to cut it down long ago. Out here in the country, we call it habitat.

I loved chasing the storms while I worked in radio, knowing I was possibly helping save lives doing live reports. More than one person told me that when I was on the radio telling them to head to the basement, they did. I always tried to remain calm and collected whenever I was reporting, even when a tornado was heading directly toward me. When the tornado hit Vermeer in Pella in 2018 I was doing live reports following the tornado into town on the heels of a Marion County Deputy who was a buddy of mine. When a tornado hit Attica in 2008, I was in the sheriff’s dispatch office at about 5:30 am when the 911 calls started coming in. I followed the Emergency Management Coordinator into Attica and was soon doing live reports. When the August 2020 derecho passed through Monroe on its way to destroy so many homes in Cedar Rapids, I was on a bridge over Highway 163 shooting video. When the derecho hit me, it almost knocked me over, and I scuttled to my truck for safety. I don’t know how many severe weather systems I covered in nearly 20 years in radio, but it was many. But as far as I remember, we had no severe weather-related deaths in the county during that time.

After hazardous weather events, whether it was flooding, tornadoes, or straight-line winds, I loved putting people on air. After an extreme weather event, everyone wants to share. Perhaps my favorite story was after the Attica tornado. I spoke to a woman who lived in a double-wide trailer with a pond behind it. Her husband had already left for work, and she and her two elementary school-aged sons were sleeping when the tornado lifted her doublewide off the slab it was bolted to and dropped it into the pond. She woke up underwater and swam to find her sons. She found one of them underwater with her, and pulled him to safety. She found her other son 100 yards away, hanging from a fence with a broken collar bone. Everyone recovered. I also spoke to an elderly couple who told me they were tossed around in their trailer like socks in a clothes drier.

I have lots of stories like this, and so do most broadcast news radio guys and gals. While I’m biased toward the immediacy of broadcasting, I’ll also say the Des Moines Register did a great job covering the storm Tuesday, even though newspapers can’t do live coverage like the broadcast media.

Every one of these news organizations, and every one of them across the country relies on the excellent forecasts of the National Weather Service which operates under the authority of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The National Weather Service has its roots in the ideas of our founding fathers, and according to Wikipedia:

Calls for the creation of a government weather bureau began as early as 1844 when the electrical telegraph was introduced. In 1869, Cleveland Abbe began developing probabilistic forecasts using daily weather data sent via telegraph by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce and Western Union, which he convinced to back the collection of such information. Meanwhile, Increase A. Lapham of Wisconsin lobbied Congress to create such a service, having witnessed the destructive power of storms in the Great Lakes region…In 1870, the Weather Bureau of the United States was established through a joint resolution of Congress signed by President Ulysses S. Grant.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a shorter, but also distinguished, history. According to Wikipedia:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is a US scientific and regulatory agency charged with forecasting weather, monitoring oceanic and atmospheric conditions, charting the seas, conducting deep-sea exploration, and managing fishing and protecting marine mammals and endangered species.

NOAA traces its history back to multiple agencies some of which were among the oldest in the federal government: the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, formed in 1807, the Weather Bureau of the United States, formed in 1870, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, formed in 1871, and the Coast and Geodetic Survey Corps, formed in 1917.

Enjoy those weather reports on Tuesday? Did you feel safer because of the expertise and the journalistic integrity of the news organizations involved? And do you value the accurate scientific data the experts of the National Weather provided? I certainly did.

If Donald Trump gets a second term both organizations will be dismantled and privatized.

Yes, Donald Trump, the guy who altered the predicted path of Hurricane Doria with a Sharpie in 2019 to suit his narrative is going to bust up NOAA and the NWS.

The Guardian has important reporting on the issue. One headline is, “Trump will dismantle key US weather and science agency, climate experts fear: plan to break up NOAA claims its research is ‘climate alarmism’ and calls for commercializing forecasts, weakening forecasts.”

The plan to “break up NOAA is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the rightwing Heritage Foundation which has ties to the fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.

According to the Guardian:

Thomas Gilman, a former Chrysler executive who during Trump’s presidency was chief financial officer for NOAA’s parent body, the commerce department says NOAA is a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity”.

Gilman writes that one of NOAA’s six main offices, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, should be “disbanded” because it issues “theoretical” science and is “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”.

But NOAA’s research and data are “largely neutral right now”, said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “It in fact basically reports the science as the scientific evidence accumulates and has been quite cautious about reporting climate effects,” he said. “It’s not pushing some agenda.”

The claims come amid years of attempts from US conservatives to help private companies enter the forecasting arena – proposals that are “nonsense”, said Rosenberg.

Right now, all people can access high-quality forecasts for free through the NWS. But if forecasts were conducted only by private companies that have a profit motive, crucial programming might no longer be available to those in whom business executives don’t see value, said Rosenberg.

Rosenberg adds:

“What about air-quality forecasts in underserved communities? What about forecasts available to farmers that aren’t wealthy farmers? Storm-surge forecasts in communities that aren’t wealthy?” he said. “The frontlines of most of climate change are Black and brown communities that have less resources. Are they going to be getting the same service?”

Republicans are now calling the data NOAA and the NWS “junk science.”

This is a classic Republican move. Undermine, dismantle, and privatize public institutions to get as much public money as possible into private hands. Here in Iowa, they have done it with privatized Medicaid, putting public money into private schools, with Area Education Agencies, and more. Now they want to do it with NOAA and the NWS.

The goal of private companies isn’t the public good. The goal is to make money. The larger the company, the less they care about the public good.

Just think about it. If the goal of modern agriculture were to feed the hungry people of the world, we could do it. Instead, the goal is to maximize profits for multinational companies. If the goal of pharmaceutical companies were to heal us, we would have affordable prescriptions. If the goal of the insurance industry were to protect us, we would all have honest, affordable policies. Instead, the goal of all of these industries and more is profit over everything else. And don’t get me started on the defense industry that uses terrible wars to juice profits.

Conservatives want global warming to go away, so we shouldn’t talk about it. They want a NWS that is more “business-friendly.” What’s more business-friendly than the most accurate weather science available?

The founding of weather forecasting itself showcases the danger of giving profit-driven companies control, said Rosenberg. When British V Adm Robert FitzRoy first introduced Britain to the concept of forecasts during Victorian times, he was often bitterly attacked by business interests. The reason: workers were unwilling to risk their lives when they knew dangerous weather was on the horizon.

“The ship owners said, well, that means maybe I lost a day’s income because the fishermen wouldn’t go out and risk their lives when there was a forecast that was really bad, so they didn’t want a forecast that would give them a day’s warning,” Rosenberg said. “The profit motive ended up trying to push people to do things that were dangerous … there’s a lesson there.”

What if NASCAR wanted a slightly better weather forecast for a race in Kansas City? Would it be possible to buy a better forecast to get more fans in the seats? What if Cargill wanted to tip the scale on weather forecasts to move global grain markets? What if municipalities had to pay to be part of forecasts, and the Greenfields of the future couldn’t afford it? Imagine even a couple of county-wide gaps on the forecast maps. What would that mean? More death and destruction.

I suspect the scientists with integrity would leave NOAA and the NWS in droves, providing openings for unqualified people to assume those positions that would do what they were told. Which is what Trump wants. Useful fools.

I believe that public money should be used for the public good. If Trump is elected, and likely every Republican alternative who might serve in the future, not only will the taxpayer likely continue to fund the operations of NOAA and the NWS, but we will then have to pay private companies to use the data we already paid for. I’m sure the corporate executives can’t believe how stupid we are.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Writing a couple of years ago, I was always worried that my interpretations of what the conservatives propping up Trump were doing were prone to exaggeration, and hyperbole. I feared I was becoming cynical. Overreacting.

I’m not. The effort to control NOAA and the NWS is just a small part of the fascism the MAGA movement is bringing to the United States. Most of us don’t recognize it, and think that it can’t happen here while we are sleepwalking toward it.

Don’t believe me. Listen to what they tell us they are going to do. It’s clear. I know it seems crazy, outlandish, and will never happen. Again, listen to what they say they are going to do. It will happen.

“It Can't Happen Here” is a 1935 dystopian political novel by American author Sinclair Lewis. Set in the fictionalized version of the 1930s United States, it follows an American politician, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who quickly rises to power to become the country's first outright dictator (in allusion to Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Nazi Germany) and Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor who sees Windrip's fascist policies for what they are ahead of time and who becomes Windrip's most ardent critic.

It can happen here. It’s happening before our eyes, and if you are a patriot who believes in America and our democracy, we must stop it.

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