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) |
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.
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.
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.)
At some point the baby's going to be thrown out with the bath water until the course is corrected.
It’s really hard to take this seriously after the COVID research shutdowns. You reap what you sow.
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?
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
When you don’t care about that thing anymore you stop measuring it.
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...
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
What I’m “shocked” about is that this is news to anyone.
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.
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.
> "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.
https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-change...
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.
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.
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.
^ 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.
Don't make it more complicated than it actually is.
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.
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.
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.
And that’s the charitable interpretation.
ChatGPT?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/12/nx-s1-5855734/census-bureau-d...
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".
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.
Disagree on the first. It wasn't as crude, but the politicization was absolutely there.
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.
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".
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.
[1] https://biomedical-sciences.uq.edu.au/article/2024/04/rise-o...
https://www.wgal.com/article/new-world-screwworm-pennsylvani...
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!
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.
I find it hard to believe anyone is willingly ceding power upward except towards the goal of a stronger more authoritarian rule by the elite classes because they don't think lesser people are worthy of making decisions. They don't care about stepping on others as long as they think they will get to do the stepping.
Its clear that Vought, Miller and even Vance are fans of Carl Schmitt as they're implementing his ideas, Vance has even mentioned him publicly.
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?
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.