Loyalty to Trump, Well, Trumps Public Safety At National Weather Service

A new National Weather Service job application
form now has a Trump "loyalty test" 
question on it. 

Yes, you saw the exact same headline on this here blog thingy the other day, except it concerned FEMA, not the National Weather Service.

But the issue is the same, and maybe in some respects worse. 

Let's lay it out:   

We got the good news recently that the National Weather Service will hire about 450 people, reversing the stupid earlier decisions to drastically cut the NWS work force. 

The staff cutbacks  left National Weather Service offices severely short-handed, and raised seriously questions as to whether life-saving storm warnings would go out to the public in a timely manner.

There was healthy public pressure for once, even from some Republicans, so the Trump people reluctantly allowed NWS to start hiring again.  They're taking applications as we speak. 

Sure, qualified applicants need to have a degree and background in meteorology or other related sciences, and prior experience is obviously helpful, as it is with any job.  

The National Weather Service meteorologist job application, though, has applicants explaining how they would advance President Donald Trump's agenda if hired. 

Here's the specific question that's most problematic:

"How would you help advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relative Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired."

Meteorologists outside the NWS and other observers are alarmed by the loyalty test question.

As ABC News reports:

".....some experts said they are alarmed at the prospect that a candidate's ideology could matter for jobs in science. 

'The fundamental question is, will this make forecasts any better? That's the job of the weather service,' said Rick Spinrad, who led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the weather service, under president Joe Biden. 

'These people should be hired for their knowledge in meteorology or hydrology or information technology or physics - not civics.  Bottom line, I'd rather have a great forecaster who's never read an EO than a policy muck who's taken one meteorology class,; he said, referring to executive orders."

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist at Yale Climate Connection and co-founder of Weather Underground, is also dubious at best at the application question.

"Whether or not you support the President's Executive Orders will not enable a meteorologist to make a better forecast or issue a more timely tornado warning, and should have no place on a job application for the National Weather Service," Masters said. 

What gets tricky in this is weather forecast is intertwined with climate change. Many extreme weather events are now made worse by the world's warming atmosphere. 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration denies the existence of climate change. He is trying to shut down clean energy while promoting fossil fuels like oil and natural gas. So if the public or the media has questions for a NWS meteorologist regarding a weather event and whether it had anything to do with climate change, how do they answer, and keep their jobs?

Then there was Sharpiegate, that whole thing in Trump's first term in which NWS meteorologists got in trouble for contradicting Chief Meteorologist Donald Trump on his very wrong prediction that a hurricane would hit Alabama.

Will National Weather Service meteorologists feel pressure to not tell the public something important about the weather if it will displease the Orange God?

It's true this loyalty test job application question is supposedly optional. But if you ran across a job application that really seems to want this info, would you expect to land the job if you didn't answer the question? 

Looking through the NWS job application, we also come find this question:  

"In this role, how would you use your skills and experience to improve government efficiency and effectiveness? Provide specific examples where you improved processes, reduced costs or improved outcomes."

When there's dangerous weather looming, shouldn't a meteorologist be warning the public, and not worried about how to save money in that moment? 

True, any office and workplace can find efficiencies and cost savings, but I worry this sounds like encouraging National Weather Service employees to skimp on complete forecasting. 

This isn't just the National Weather Service. Many government agencies that focus on science are now being told to ignore science, and to instead embrace junk policy. 

Politicizing science has probably already cost American lives. How many more will it cost? 

Biden Bans Offshore Oil Drilling, We'll See How Long It Takes For Trump To Reverse That

President Biden this week announcing a ban on oil
drilling in much of the offshore waters
around the United States.

 It might be a bit of a Hail Mary, and probably a bit Sysiphean, but President Joe Biden this week banned new offshore oil and gas drilling in almost all U.S. coastal waters.  

The move was an effort to at least throw a monkey wrench in incoming President Donald Trump's plans to, as he puts it, drill, baby drill. 

Climate change is part of Biden's motivation for this. "As the climate crisis continued to threaten communities across the countermand we are transitioning to a clean energy economy, now is the time to protect these coasts for our children and grandchildren," he said. 

Biden's move was also probably prodded by his memories of the big oil spill along the beaches of Santa Barbara, California in January, 1969.

".....drilling  off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation's energy needs," Biden said in a statement. 

Biden's acton will at least delay the offshore part of incoming President Trump's climate-denying drill baby drill approach to fossil fuel extraction.

Trump continues to cling to the notion that climate change is a hoax, and that clean energy is basically worthless, so we have to keep burning fossil fuel. His brain hasn't really left the 1950s. And besides, the United States has never produced as much oil as we do now, even with efforts to transform to a "clean energy economy."

For his part, Trump said he would end Biden's drilling ban on "day one." 

"I will unban it immediately," Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, "I have the right to unban it."

Actually, he doesn't.

According to the Associated Press, Biden's authority to enact this ban is under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which allows the president to protect offshore areas.  Once a president does what Biden has done, an act of Congress is needed to undo it.

It's a Republican Congress full of Trump fanboys and girls, so no doubt they'll do the deed, but it will take a lot more longer to complete than it say, the act of throwing ketchup against a White House wall.

Environmentalists were strangely elated at this development, considering the Republican Congress will get rid of this order soon enough. A for instance from the AP: "This is an epic ocean victory!" said Joseph Gordon, campaign director for the environmental group Oceana. 

For a little while, anyway. 

As NPR explains, much of the ocean territory where Biden banned new drilling is not of immediate interest to oil companies, except for an area they're salivating over in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Still, the ever-present American Petroleum Institute, who spent last week throwing darts at Vermont's climate superfund law, are in a bit of a snit over Biden's move.

"American voters sent a clear message in support of domestic energy development, and yet the current administration is using its final days in office to cement a record of doing everything possible to restrict it," American Petroleum Institute president Mike Sommers said in a statement. 

Or did voters actually send that "clear message?"

Trump clearly won the election, but in the popular vote it was only a 49-48 split in the percentages. And I didn't see any polling during the election in which there was a huge groundswell of Americans demanding new drilling.

Sure, nobody wants to pay an arm and a leg for gasoline, or fuel oil, and I suppose increased domestic production would help tamp prices down. Though it's a global market, so world events could upset that anti-inflationary setup no matter how much oil the United States pumps out of the ground. 

Besides, at last check, the United States was producing more crude oil than any other nation at any time, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

Given that fact it will be hard for Trump to increase oil production beyond where we're already at.  

Trump thinks his efforts will cut energy costs in half for consumers. That's a tall order, but he doesn't have a great track record of following through with his promises anyway, so take that with a grain of salt. 

Meanwhile, we're cranking out the oil and burning it up and making climate change worse and thus making disasters worse and making the world a more difficult place in which to live. 

Trump wants to make the U.S. dominant, all right. One of the main things we might well  be dominate at is making the most destructive contributions to climate change of any nation in the world.  

Media, Including Me, Recently Wrongly Ignored A Cataclysmic Climate Calamity

Destruction in Libya after last month's extreme flood,
made worse by both climate change and political
instability. This will happen again and again, unfortunately. 

Severe, record floods have been all over the new recently, as climate change has contributed to some epic inundations around the world.  

Yes, heat has been in the news for months, and so have floods. I can point to Vermont a few months ago, where we got tons of media attention for our horrible floods. 

Meanwhile, how many of you have heard details of the big flood last month in Libya? Sure, it's been in the news, sort of, but that calamity has not been a headline grabber. I also haven't touched this story, which is actually a shame. 

Two or three people died in Vermont's floods. Which is undeniably horrible. 

Over in Libya, the death toll was around 20,000, making it among the worst floods in modern history.  At least another 40,000 people have been displaced by the flood, just in the city of Derna. It pretty much got passing notice in the media. Can you imagine the uproar if God forbid a flood killed 20,000 people in the United States?

The Libya calamity was important, and we should have covered it more for this among other reasons: 

It was a classic example of how climate change teams up with humans' propensity for evil, corruption and incompetence to really mess things up. 

The storm that caused the flood, Storm Daniel, was turbo-charged by climate change. It formed over the Mediterranean Sea in September, and took on some tropical characteristics because of the record warm water temperatures out there. 

This along with the fact warmer air can hold more moisture than chillier air, helped Storm Daniel unleash incredible amounts of rain on Libya and elsewhere. It's another example of what climate change can do. 

On top of that, Libya's so-called government is in shambles.  As the BBC reports:

"Libya has been in political chaos since long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and killed in 2011 - leaving the oil-rich nation effectively split with an interim, internationally recognized government operating from the capital, Tripoli, and another one in the east."

That other government is in control, as it were, with Derna.  Due to the chaos, Libya had no real system like stable nations to warn the population of the impending danger. 

When the big floods hit us here in Vermont this summer, we had a well-organized government agency, namely the National Weather Service, broadcasting precise, timely warnings.  That prompted people to get out of the way. People fled flood prone areas, based on the warnings they'd received.

Vermont's state government, especially Emergency Management, and well organized local first responders, rescued dozens of people. The national agency, FEMA, swooped in to provide aid. 

In other words, the system more or less worked, and fatalities were kept to a minimum. 

In Libya, had there been a functioning government, what ever their equivalent of the National Weather Service would have issued dire warnings. The government would then order evacuations. Derna would still have been largely destroyed, but perhaps tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. 

We've always been really, really bad, corrupt governments with fatal, often genocidal results. I'm not minimizing that. It's just that some humans, anyway, are incredibly cruel and indifferent beyond belief.

So there's a feedback loop between climate change and unstable governments.  It isn't and won't be just Libya. There are plenty of unstable governments one storm away from disarray and dissolution. Additionally climate change can destabilize governments. 

Migrants continue to flow toward Europe and the United States. That migrant flow is contributing to  political and societal divisions in both regions.  Please note I'm not taking sides on this issue here. But however you feel about migrants and immigration, fairly or not, it's causing political strife, discord, and most distressingly, either threats of violence or actual violence. 

Most of the migrants are fleeing crime, corruption, poverty and war. Increasingly, climate change is finding its way into the calculus when migrants decide whether to leave their homeland.

As PBS points out, it's hard to tease out how many are fleeing climate problems, because most migrants flee for more than one reason.  For instance, in El Salvador, crop failures due to climate driven droughts and floods and prompting people to leave. But those same people are also leaving due to gang violence and government corruption. 

So was it climate change, gangs or a bad government that prompted Mr. El Salvadorian to try fleeing to the United States? Probably a combination, but we'll never know. 

Meanwhile, here in Vermont, I'm still seeing bits and pieces of updates on the news regarding recovery from our July floods. I haven't heard a peep about Libya in weeks, it seems. 

Thursday a did a search on Google news "Libya flood." 

I did see one article from BBC published two days earlier titled "Libya floods: The flawed response that increased Derna death toll."

Other than that, there's a Washington Post story from a week ago, and nothing else for over two weeks. That's not to say there wasn't any other news story recently regarding the Libya flood, but you're left to wonder what's going on over there.

Yes, big new events are overshadowing Libya, the biggie being the Israel/Hamas mess and tragedy. 

But the dearth of updates on Libya and other international disasters leaves me thinking the victims are basically on their own with the aftermath. I know there are good international relief agencies trying to help, but there's only so much they can do.  

The Libya flood is definitely out of the headlines, for better or worse. We will just wait, dreading the next climate and human tragedy