U.S. pulling ocean sensors a 'shock' for Canadian research as El Niño nears(timescolonist.com) |
U.S. pulling ocean sensors a 'shock' for Canadian research as El Niño nears(timescolonist.com) |
> "The decision to de-scope aligns with NSF's wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart life cycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio."
Seems like even if we want to understand the justifications, the people making these decisions don't care to share them with us.
I sincerely hope that China wins the AI race, for the sake of myself and my children. The Chinese Communist party might be evil, but at least they accept fundamental natural sciences, and are actively investing in technologies that help avoiding worst climate scenarios. Buying anything American instead of EU or Chinese alternatives has become deeply unethical to me.
already do, the EU is in particular collects a ton of oceanographic data through for example the Copernicus Marine Service, but these particular sensors are in waters close to Oregon, Washington and Alaska, not really anything the EU or China could replace.
In its region the US is naturally not really replaceable, it's simply a big blow to research.
To help themselves to be able to track the movements of US nuclear submarines anywhere in waters close to Oregon, Washington or Alaska (Or to move their own submarines freely by the area without telling to anybody except them).
Dismantling sensors around Alaska helps Russia on an hypothetical future attempt to retake the area; and doing it around "51 state" or Greenland is the same thing for US.
Why ? It was good to rely on Big Brother for decades and sleep well. /s
ChatGPT?
It is hard to stress enough how intentionally OMB is trying to disassemble American science. The new (proposed) OMB guidelines prohibit international collaboration without pre approval for example. They also codify a political grant approval process. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/the-office-of-manage...
Additionally, OMB is not releasing the congressional appropriated funds that they are required to. This is currently tanking the post-doctoral researcher market and eventually will wipe out a generation of researchers if it isn’t stopped. https://grant-witness.us/funding_curves_nsf.html
Please call your elected representatives! It is so so important! https://5calls.org/issue/federal-financial-assistance-scienc...
Science has flourished in the US precisely because it could proceed without whimsical political picking and choosing, entire areas of science have flourished that would never have happened otherwise.
That's not to say that politics is completely out of science, Congress has done things like ban any research money for gun safety, for example. But that had to make it through Congress, a vote across party lines, instead of just being the political whim of some bureaucrat that can cancel whatever they want whenever they want.
For every issue you read about here on HN, there are about 10 other policy changes designed to destroy the US's scientific infrastructure. It doesn't get much attention because of all the other chaos going on, and scientists tend to be pretty quiet and try to stay apolitical, but it is truly a full-on crisis in the scientific research community right now. You won't see immediate effects, but in 10-20 years when China zooms ahead of the US on all research fronts and the US is left out of key technology and science directions, we will feel it then.
The very _fact_ that this is a policy is disrupting research, even if specific grants haven't been cancelled. Some universities are stepping in to backstop, but it's a powerful chilling effect.
Please don't take this as a defense of the Trump administration pulling these ocean sensors, but the previous administration also had political demands on grants. One of the better articles about this I've found is "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge" - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-an...
This ended up getting grants cancelled because they'd throw in a line so the DEI checkbox would get checked, and then Cruz went through with a hacksaw and cancelled the grant for it, as Scott Alexander found - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w...
It’s a White House office run by Russell Vought, highly ideological maga institutionalist.
I get the part about old school corruption where your cronies get to steal from the government (hello Big Coal/Big Oil), but to figuratively shit on the people of the world out of spite takes it to a whole new level...of evil.
these are foreign interests, and it's 100% clear who is behind it.
This started as an Aristocracy with well meaning participants but its evolved into an Oligarchy just as anacyclosis[1] predicts. The next stage is Democracy and then that, eventually, crumbles into mob rule (Ochlocracy).
That is the goal.
The essential weakness that the powerful elites have is that they are, by definition, outnumbered. So in order to consolidate and maintain power, they need to disturb any system that the masses can use to coordinate and form collective action.
(It's a kid's movie, but Hopper's speech in "A Bug's Life" captures this very well: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1hfo90u/hoppers_jus...)
Reality has a strong consensus-creating effect. We all live in the same material world, so simply by understanding it better and sharing that understanding, we will automatically trend towards having more common ground and more agreement.
That's a threat to elite power, so authoritarian governments have always been anti-science. They may pay it lip service, or attempt to harness it to their own ends, but they never want an entire populace that it well-educated and grounded in reality, because well-informed masses are harder to divide and conquer.
It's a general trend across all authoritarian regimes; it's harder to be authoritarian with lots of international connections, with lots of strength and partnerships.
Autarky, authoritarianism, isolation, all go together (along with weak economies, etc., but the goal isn't to have the biggest amount of pie, the goal is to be able to control all the pie slices and take the biggest portion, even if the pie is far smaller.)
Take for example the Wikipedia article for Liz Peek[1]:
> Peek spent more than 20 years on Wall Street as a research analyst focused on the oil industry. She began working for Wertheim & Company in 1975 and in 1983, was one of the first women to become partner at a Wall Street investment firm.
> Peek was the first woman elected president of the National Association of Petroleum Investment Analysts and was also a member of Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts.
> She has written for The Fiscal Times, Fox News, the New York Sun, The Wall Street Journal, Alternate Universe, the Motley Fool, and Women on the Web and has appeared on Fox Business with Neil Cavuto and Fox & Friends. Peek contributes opinion pieces to The Hill.
> Their son, Andrew Peek, studied at Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas at Austin, is a veteran of the US Army, and has worked for the Heritage Foundation and for two Republican US Senators and one Republican Congressman. He briefly served in each of the Trump administrations; as part of the State Department during Trump's first term, and as an advisor at the NSC during Trump's second term.
Just read her opinion pieces and you’ll experience her worldview firsthand, which I can only presume comes from a foolish sense of self-righteousness for making a career out of enabling and exacerbating the fossil fuel crisis. Don’t think she would be able to sleep at night if she actually gave a shit about even learning about the potential impacts of climate change.
And she’s a drop in the bucket - all of these people are like this.
At some point the baby's going to be thrown out with the bath water until the course is corrected.
If you did call you may get a response from one of your representative's staff, the number which are granted is based on the population of your state.
https://www.energy.gov/newsroom
Lots of them related to coal and LNG.
Most prominently: https://www.energy.gov/articles/energy-department-invest-350...
The policy of the federal government is anti renewable energy and pro coal, pro oil.
Oil executives are profiting from the situation with Iran. These guys don't want us to have cheap renewable energy. They want us to keep paying their tolls and they don't want anyone to have access to evidence that could continue exposing the damage they've done to the environment.
I’m sure that the same will apply to the weather satellites above.
Europe will find proxy measurements to confirm that, thanks in no small part to US politicians, pour climate will be even more FUed than expected.
We won't send flowers, but, hey, that's your country, and you got lower taxes and better return on your cryptos, so "the rest of the world" can go to hell, I suppose ?
This too shall pass, but it can't pass fast enough.
I don't understand how that has led to the sensor network being dismantled. Surely it would have been cheaper to leave it in place and stop maintaining it?
Afaik, either a few traditional red states turn blue and make it clear there is a limit to what's politically possible, or you're a dictatorship.
And unfortunately SCOTUS made it harder for private groups to sue over impounding. And seems to argue only the GAOs comptroller can sue under the impoundments control act (ICA). GAO is the part of Congress that investigates when executive branch isn’t enforcing the law / spending funds. But have themselves limited ability to enforce anything.
It’s another post watergate reform eroded by Trump II. The ICA was created to stop these sorts of impoundments that happens with Nixon and earlier.
Notably members of Congress are working to pause the dismantling
https://apnews.com/article/ocean-observatories-initiative-tr...
It's honestly a shame that this happened, but I hope they can use it to give a compelling argument for more funding in the future to expand the network (and make up the loss of data)
When you don’t care about that thing anymore you stop measuring it.
The anti climate change angle and the pain inflicted to "liberal" climate scientists is a nice to have but maybe not main reason for this move.
https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-change...
As Professor Ed Dever said, after ten years we are only now beginning to get 'some hints,' yet they present it as if no solution has been offered. But this kind of data is long term time series data. If some of it gets damaged, it would take decades of operation again.
The value being undermined in the United States is enormous. They withdraw this simply because their supporters don't believe in climate change, for the sake of approval ratings. But this damages trust in long term research projects in the US, and America's leadership in the R&D world. If the cost is that high, why did they go to war with Iran?
There are so many things I don't understand. Why, while calling themselves a consumer nation, are they destroying the hegemony they themselves built?
True dominance requires the consent of the governed. America's status as the strongest superpower was a product of the consent of surrounding subordinate nations. That's what Antonio Gramsci talked about.
Things the US scaled back, like USAID, also created a favorable image of American imperialism. So even though the US invaded and destroyed South American countries in reality, it played a role in making people believe it was truly about freedom and progress. That is symbolic capital. But what Trump is doing now is beyond comprehension.
From a third party perspective, Trump administration policies make it look like they imagine a feudal system built on top of America as the supreme state. They are destroying long term leadership and the trust the US has built.
Some might call the Trump administration's actions 'unpretentious honesty.' But this is not honesty. It's just greed. The Trump administration seems to have created America's bankruptcy. In my view, Trump always wins. It's just not America's victory
> By 2027, the National Science Foundation will have dismantled most of the system, which had been slated to run another 15 to 20 years.
> Scientists had seen warning signs as the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget included a 55% cut to the science foundation. Official word to begin shutting down arrived in early May.
Defunding science is embarassing and sad.
Maybe you could part it out to a number of orgs and governments, but I doubt the US government has much interest in putting in the labour to facilitate that. This entire project seems like it's designed to be offensive as it is to be anything else.
It's an enormous shame.
North Korea behaves better.
IIRC, Project 2025 argued that private companies provided more accurate weather forecasts, and thus one can just dismantle gov. agencies like NOAA and the market for such services will take care of itself.
What I’m “shocked” about is that this is news to anyone.
Instead, we're paying money to pull the sensors out of the water. We're actively spending money to blind ourselves to things we know are growing areas of concern.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/lawmakers-fight-to-stop...
But that just seems like par for the course for the current administration, whether it's tariffs or ballrooms or ocean sensors - do the illegal thing ASAP, let the courts argue for months or years, and maaaaaybe get a slap on the wrist sometime way in the future.
The new budget proposal is $1.5T
And we're about to pay over a third of that to Iran?
The entire debt ceiling bullshit is political theatre and always has been. We didn't even have a debt ceiling for the majority of our existence as a nation, and since it's creation by right wingers, it has been used as a bludgeon by right wingers to kneecap anything that stood to benefit the civil good of our country. Austerity politics have been deployed here and elsewhere to great effect to destroy social programs, demonize those who need them, and reallocate trillions of dollars to the private sector to provide the same services the public sector did, but worse, and while enriching greedy assholes the entire way. And the whole way it has been done by an enthusiastic and approving portion of the public who can be persuaded to feel outrage that seventy cents of their yearly taxes are going to some program in some far off part of the country they'll never see.
Meanwhile the actual national debt soars, and under who? Yep, fucking right wingers again. And every time we want to do something science and evidence backed like give the homeless somewhere to live, we're met with a chorus of WHO'S GONNA PAY FOR IT, but every goddamn time there's another country full of brown kids to blow the fuck off the face of the Earth, we always, always have money for that.
It's disgusting and I hate it here.
^ Literally the beliefs of the most influential part of the political base of the administration.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/...
Honestly, at this point, having natural disasters with destruction and death is probably the only way to make people care.
There are massive gaps in our current climate models because we have almost no data about subsurface ocean dynamics. Many of the assumptions about the oceanic environment in climate models were demonstrated to not match empirical measurement a few decades ago but we don't have enough oceanic data to come up with a coherent model for the observed dynamics. Without a plausible model for these dynamics, any predictions made from climate models have a high probability of being significantly incorrect.
These sensor networks were the first step toward collecting some data that would allow us to develop a plausible model for subsurface ocean dynamics. To be clear, we are probably still a couple decades out from this in any case but removing these sensor networks from operation definitely won't help. There are very few efforts to collect this data at scale, I believe this was one of the largest.
Most people don't realize how critical subsurface sensor networks are to building accurate climate models.
Specifically, their plan calls for downsizing the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025, p. 676), and breaking up NOAA (p. 674), because they view these agencies as a source of "climate alarmism" and that "the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded."
Because it damages USA. As other thousands of nonsensical choices in the last years, America always, consistently, ends scammed milked, and holding the shorter straw. Everything in this government is designed specifically to the inch to humiliate and destroy US. Acting exactly like foreign enemy agents for fun and profit.
Or maybe because it could be used (in theory) to register submarine's position.
Or maybe somebody expects to benefit from the climate change in some way, and couldn't care less if half of the planet became inhabitable in the process. There aren't many other reasonable explanations.
Also Accuweather paid a lot of money for this president and they are very interested in not having the US government compete against them with free, high-quality weather forecasting.
Perhaps naively I thought these scientists would want to do science and would be unwilling to steer funds away from whichever projects they liked in order to fund the removal of some sensors.
I guess maybe the scientists who make these decisions are also partisan and happy to do as the administration asks.
They have power, but it’s not actually legal. Congress has mandated funds for this array, the administration wants to cripple it beyond repair before any legal action can catch up.
The malicious belief would be that it's to ensure that the system can't be easily reactivated and that a non-profit couldn't offer to take over the running costs, there's also the possible "benefit" of redirecting funding that has already been allocated for marine science that would be harder to not dispense rather than arguably use it for this.
You summed it up perfectly right there. It's not about anything good for America or really anything good at all. It's pure greed. It's doing the bidding of whoever is paying him the most. It's destroying America on purpose for the benefit of foreign and international interests. I honestly believe they are trying to engineer the most possible death and destruction so that they can swoop in an take what's left for themselves. Destroy the economy and buy everything up at bargain sale prices. Starve the people and deny them any relief. Make homelessness illegal so you can legally enslave them. Those that don't starve to death will work in the camps.
Silicon Valley is filled with people, at the top echelons of the most valuable companies in the world, who genuinely believe they have invented divine intelligence by making a mathematical model of human speech.
Utah is for all intents and purposes a religious enclave.
We’re just like this - I don’t know what else to say. I guess we were better at hiding it when we felt we had something to lose.
To be fair, the other party that matters has dropped the ball on too many occasions, or been complicit, so there's some reason for all the apathy. That plus winner-takes all elections leaves a lot of people feeling like their vote doesn't matter.
All that's now been reduced to a single kill switch at the very top, and they're trying to change all the non-political positions into political appointees so that they have control not only with a veto at the top, but control of every single decision along the entire way, without any of that pesky scientific merit getting in the way.
If it also contains a sensor network to detect adversary ships and submarines, it would be bad if someone else can use it to track US submarines. Or the sensors are too old and their resolution can't detect modern mini submarines or autonomous drone ships such as the ones the Ukraine is using in the black sea, so they need to be upgraded.
These people are PR professionals and have been doing propaganda since generations. If Trump speaks about Greenland he does not mean the country but he uses it to bury another Greenland entity that he does not want to be associated with. Same with Canada the country vs. Cañada the Spanish word. Bonus is if they can ragebait their political opponents because then nobody will ever again be able to find the original story with these keywords.
And to me this kind of story and easy anti-climate-change narrative checks all the boxes.
And that’s the charitable interpretation.
The sensors in question here are crucial to monitor the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
They don't want that monitored because it is currently breaking down. Not some arbitrary far away time, now.
The science of this gets astroturfed into some nonsense "we don't really know". We do.
But conveniently, now the data to show this to the incredulous won't exist.
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/11/nx-s1-5807995/some-researcher...
There's not even any political angle to pursue here, it is just lighting knowledge on fire with no grander purpose.
Fucking with people who are capable of reading and writing is the political angle. Pol Pot took this sort of logic a few steps further in Cambodia a few decades ago.
MAGA, meanwhile, is only 'considering' suspending things like habeas corpus.
don't forget that the courts have already decided that anything this president does is legally okay because he's immune from punishment for breaking any law as long as they decide the illegal activity was an "official act".
why not find alternate funding mechanisms?
because we know who these people are, and what their motives are. they show us time and and time again.
empathy is something to be used against us.
What’s so important about these particular sensors that any change in resourcing is a categorical evil?
Exactly. If the people on the right cared at all about government spending they'd never vote republican again, which just shows us that they don't actually care about government spending. They don't seem to want to talk about the things they really do care about too loudly though.
However since ~2005 their percentage of the total has gone from ~25% to <1% as computers became less of a hobby and a way to make money.
Records of environmental data are a huge pain in the ass for those invested in fossil energy and adjacent industries.
The truth is hurting business and they seem to be going on a rampage actively killing it at the roots. Stop collecting and recording data, destroy and hide the existing data and close the institutions.
they are intentionally making it difficult for the next administration to flip the switch back on to monitoring again; it would now require $100s of millions to reconstruct the system, money that may not be easy to get congress/taxpayers to agree to
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/nx-s1-5855734/census-bureau-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
Often phrased as "science progresses one funeral at a time"
..applies here. Each time a Big Oil executive or one of their conspirators eats it, green tech progresses.
They worked to build today's fossil-dependent world. 20-somethings work to build a world that does without fossils (and imho they're doing ok there).
It creates a sense of entitlement, as well as enforces a certain type of world view that justifies their actions. How would you feel if your entire career was being invalidated by those who you consider intellectually and culturally inferior political enemies?
Disagree on the first. It wasn't as crude, but the politicization was absolutely there.
I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which funding to these is being cut because climate scientists have historically been politically opposed to certain large republican donors that make their fortunes burning fossil fuels.
All totalitarians eliminate any other source of truth, power, or influence except themselves.
I don't think they are really even trying to hide it. Project 2025 was pretty obvious road map.
destroying the professional class and reducing everyone to serfs has been an active ongoing never-closed plot against America that has never been snuffed out, and that is having it's day. the Business Plot people walk among us, and here, 93 years latter, they are getting the hollowing out of the state and any possible upstanding world anchored in anything good that they've worked for. these people, these people, these people.
If you're wondering why they don't at least vote for someone who cares about climate change, I don't know. But claiming people don't care at all is not true and is self-defeating, because it makes people who do care think "I guess I'm in the minority, there's no point in trying".
People are single-issue voters on pointless shit like abortion and bathrooms. Where are all the single-issue climate change voters?
Thats exactly how it is.
Look at the current politics discourse. Even now, in the presence of ordinary people, there can be a conservative who supports Trump, but you are supposed to be "nice" to them, because its all just political opinions, and those ordinary people are removed from the real destruction of lives that the current administration carried out for many people.
Same with global warming. People are far removed from the real effects, so most people just don't actually care.
And in the same way that all the anti vaxxers who got covid and urged others to take the vaccine before they died, people need to get hit over the head with reality before they start to care.
The only way forward that doesn't involve mass famine/death is some low level societal control that forces people to behave for fear of real consequences.
We already have them. People just claim they're chance effects with no connection to climate change.
The problem with refuting it is that they are chance events, there's no way to definitively say "this was caused by climate change", because it's always possible it would have happened anyways. It's the upwards trend in frequency and severity that we can definitively point and say "that's caused by climate change", but that's too abstract for most people to understand.
In fact, Trump had authorised more than Obama did. Trump had just stopped the reporting of the drone strikes.
They do.
Source: They raised me.
I grew up experiencing things like getting an earful any time a nature show said something that contradicted young Earth creationism.
“He urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ,” the NCO wrote in the email. “He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.’" - https://www.military.com/daily-news/2026/03/06/lawmakers-wan...
[1] https://biomedical-sciences.uq.edu.au/article/2024/04/rise-o...
https://www.wgal.com/article/new-world-screwworm-pennsylvani...
I am still trying to figure out how being against science, higher education, new energy, skilled South Korean workers, and for tariff-of-the-day lotteries, crypto grifts, Chinese-made "American-manufactured" phones, random wars and red hats is pro-manufacturing, pro-domestic investment and balancing the budget.
It's the "new math" of economics. I can't keep up.
The reality is that reactionaries often describe "useless" scientific endeavors like "condoms for worms" that end up being the only thing stopping parasitic screwworms from infesting the US cattle herd, which will end up costing us hundreds of millions of dollars to resolve- and spike the already-high cost of beef for decades.
Could you explain what's wrong with monitoring the oceans surrounding the US? Take any angle (moral, scientific, public interest, economic p.o.v.)
Hint: in the greater scheme of things, science projects like this are ridiculously cheap.
Is that about right?
There are many made-up scenarios, but not many real examples of what you are using to justify the weakening of the entire nation.
And the fact that you had to fabricate something is literally proof of it. Now, go find any supposed "waste" and you'll find that, again, the science has been completely misrepresented to the public by an anti-science media source that was focused on creating fake propaganda rather than properly informing the public.
Seriously. Prove me wrong, go find all this bath water that you claim exists, post it here!
Alternatively, they could just increase the military budget by 300 billion (or more).
Which why the $300 million claim is fake news.
That is also fake news. The US did not lose the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war
You keep using those words, but it's clear you don't know what they mean (or what anything means). Enjoy your trolling.
Don't project your inability to discern fake news on others.
>(or what anything means)
Cringe.
>Enjoy your trolling.
Enjoy your fake news delusions.
No it didn't, that is fake news. Please provide an unbiased source where JD Vance claims the US will be paying Iran $300 billion.
"Well, Ed, that's the sort of thing they could have access to, funded by the Gulf coast coalition, so long as they honor their end of the obligation. I think that one of the things you're going to see, Ed—and people have to be skeptical of this—is that the hardliners in the Iranian system will overemphasize the benefits that Iran gets, while underemphasizing all the things that they have to concede and all the things they have to provide in order to get these benefits," Vance replied.
NBC news. He said the "Gulf Coast coalition", but it's unclear exactly who is going to be paying into that.
Very cool and worthwhile way to spend your one fleeting existence dude: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446644