Project 2025 Goals: Take Away Free, Accurate Weather Forecasts and Warnings, Make Them Expensive And Less Accurate

Among the many bad ideas in the Heritage Foundation's
Project 2025 is breaking up NOAA and probably
putting what are now free, accurate weather forecasts
and warnings behind paywalls. 

 There's lots of buzz about Project 2025 and the great harm it would cause if Donald Trump goes along with this blueprint.  

Project 2025 is  detailed, 922-page plan put together by the conservative Heritage Foundation of how they see the federal government radically changing if Trump is elected. Trump himself says he knows little to nothing of the plan, but a lot of observers aren't buying that.  

If enacted, it would concentrate power in the presidency, leading to the risk of abuses of that power. It would impose a hardline religious agenda. And it would gut numerous federal agencies, and do things like abolish the Department of Education,  intensely slash Medicaid, and purge the government of federal employees and replace them with Trump loyalists and hacks.  

Which brings us to a topic more related to the point of this here blog thingy. Which is what it Project 2025 would do to the National Weather Service and NOAA.

Project 2025 would make it harder to obtain weather forecasts - even those that have life-saving warnings. Chances are it would make the forecasts less accurate. It would end research and information into climate change. And would flood the agency with all those loyalists and hacks I mentioned. 

PAYWALL FORECASTS?

The United States - like in most developed countries - delivers free weather forecasts, storm warnings, and often life-saving advice on coping with dangerous weather. Think about how many lives must have been saved over the years because National Weather Service meteorologists issued tornado, hurricane, flood and winter storm warnings to the public. 

Those warnings are available to everybody.  As The Atlantic points out, all this is available for the low, low price in taxpayer dollars of $4 per person annually. 

One of many scary things about Project 2025 is that it might privatize weather forecasts, which could put them behind a paywall. Which means people who can't afford such forecasts would be out of luck.  

"What you do not want is a paywall system of weather where only paying customers can find out if they're about to drive into a tornado," John Oliver once said. 

He was then referring to a now- abandoned proposal by AccuWeather some years ago to take over forecasting services from NOAA.

But this is precisely what we'd get out of Project 2025. As Outside Magazine writes, this proposal would have a private company like AccuWeather take over many of NOAA's functions, and we'd have to start paying for weather reports a warnings. 

Forget people with low incomes. They high and mighty hard core right wing clearly believes only people with money "deserve" life-saving weather warnings and information. 

That's a slap in the face to everybody, including who knows how many Vermonters who were saves by cost-free warnings during the extreme flash floods we had last month. 

AccuWeather, to their credit, rejected the idea of their organization replacing the National Weather Service, unlike their public stance several years ago.  But Project 2025 backers would likely just find another organization - probably one much less reputable than AccuWeather, to do the weather forecasting. 

Which begs the question, how accurate would those privatized forecast be, if you had enough money to afford them? Perhaps not very. Especially since these forecasts might not be produced by scientists, but political hacks who would put spin for their Dear Leader above actual facts. 

The Project 2025 document makes the false claim that private weather firms offer more accurate forecasts than the National Weather Service. Besides, private weather forecasting companies rely on NOAA data to make their forecasts. 

After all, one of Project 2025's goals is to "ensure appointees agree with administrative aims."

Will these privatized forecasts tell you the hurricane is headed your way? Or will it falsely tell you it's headed somewhere else to satisfy the whim of Trump or whoever is in charge?

The track record isn't good. Meteorologist in Chief Trump back in 2019 said massive Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama. Real meteorologists with the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service disagreed, saying Dorian would miss Alabama.

Those professional meteorologists were of course correct, as Alabama escaped unscathed from Dorian, but Trump could not stand to being contradicted by those lowly dumb scientists. Which is why he produced a hurricane prediction map, suspiciously altered by a Sharpie to "show" that Dorian was headed toward Alabama. 

You can see how Trump, if he's re-elected, or some other egomaniac would go further and really try to mislead the public about dangerous storms 

That's especially true because most scientists believe climate change is a real threat. The fine folk at the Heritage Foundation beg to differ. In their Project 2025 scheme, they would stop anything that even hints at climate research.

For instance, as Outside reports, Project 2025 would downsize the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. That bunch provides scientific research so that forecasters can better understand tornadoes, hurricanes, other storms, climate change and ecosystem health. 

"The source of much of NOAA's climate alarmism," sniffs the folks at Project 2025.  

Lately, you've probably seen on the news that some Republicans, including Trump, have been backing away from Project 2025, whether they explicitly say so or not.  

That's because there's so much in there that so many people don't like. Remember, though, they're just going to keep it relatively quiet unless and until Trump is elected. Then they'll unleash this monstrosity, whether you like it or not.