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- Hacker News
- It's a leveled playing field now. No more pesky "I can provide data that shows..." to stand in the way of making things GREAT AGAIN. All arguments' strength rely on how much money is backing each, which is what makes all things GREAT. Facts are what those with power want it to be, not what some young upstarts claim from reading some machines. And that, again, is GREATNESS!!by skeledrew
- 100% !
- I worked directly with the Ocean Networks Canada team for my engineering capstone project- they're a fantastic crew who are really clearly dedicated to providing open access to their data (they have a free API if you want to play with it!)
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)
by simonerlic - Care to link this free APIby lawgimenez
- This seems to be a case of administration impounding funds authorized by Congress for this purpose. As in they’re just spending what Congress told them to.
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...
by throwarayes - The North Atlantic’s ‘cold blob’ may signal a major current’s decline https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cold-blob-may-signal-cur...by swframe2
- The final rebuttal to “the data doesn’t lie”: pull the sensors.by james_marks
- It's a natural extension of "stop the count" and "if we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases".by burkaman
- There is a midterm comming up in the USA. If you're living there and you're now not going to vote,I'm sorry but you're complicit. They might make it inconvenient, but you all still got some power left over there.
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.
by hyperman1 - I understand the present US administration would want to stop funding this, and that they have the power to do so.
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?
by fancyfredbot - If you destroy the sensor network now, it is that much more expensive for a future administration to rebuild from scratch.by warkdarrior
- You're looking at it from the lens of cost to government, but ignoring the lens if cost/profit for companies. Government spending isnt real spending to them, because its not their money. Government spending is only bad when if means they (the individuals) would profit less.by xboxnolifes
- An apologist would argue that leaving the sensors to degrade and leach into the environment or for ones with buoyant parts to possibly break free and endanger seagoers is not better than deconstruction.
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.
by greycol - “Have the power”
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.
by throwarayes - It's not about the cost, it's about ideology. Same reason they've paid nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds to energy developers to abandon offshore wind farm projects. The point isn't to save money, it's to stop green energy projects, which is an ideological goal. If their decisions don't make sense to you it's because you're not viewing them through their ideological lens.by adithyareddy
- The countries on the other side of the Pacific in East Asia will just have to pick up the slack and the same applies to those on the European side of the Atlantic, just another signal of the decline of the United States.
I’m sure that the same will apply to the weather satellites above.
by Danox - Should Europe put sensors on the US coast to continue measuring the collapse of the AMOC ? I'm not 100% sure the US navy would enjoy that.
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.
by phtrivier - Read the article, but I'm still not seeing why the U.S. is pulling these sensors. Anyone have any insight?by bbbrad
- "See no evil, hear no evil" - literally.by cyberax
- Russel Vought. Look him up.by caconym_
- Dismantling monitoring programs which show evidence of climate change is one of the Project 2025 priorities.
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."
by tjohns - It doesn't make much sense.
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.
- The current administration doesn’t care about climate change, or believes it’s a hoax. Given this, they see no need to fund research and data gathering that tells them otherwise.by clintonb
- Because they're scientific instruments to collect databy ezfe
- Political strategy. Step one of controlling a population is to stop information flow; you can't stop something bad happening if you don't know about it. Since the party in charge thinks climate change is a hoax, all efforts at slowing climate change are therefore bad. So you remove the tools people use to document and respond to climate change, and now everything is fixed, in your world view.by 0xbadcafebee
- There's no point in spending taxpayer money understanding what may or may not happen in the future, when we already know what will happen: Jesus is coming back. We need to spend on the military for the final battle of Armageddon.
^ Literally the beliefs of the most influential part of the political base of the administration.
- The scales of money at play always seem so strange. Oh a few hundred million for ocean sensors, or about what a few OpenAI / Cursor employees or a few hundred FAANG employees could personally fund if they desired to do so.by arjie
- Lol Big Tech employees don’t have desires beyond money at any cost.by righthand
- It’s nothing to do with money, that’s always the libertarian excuse, and HN laps it up far more than the rest of the word.by hdgvhicv
- The US military budget is 900 billion dollars. The government can afford a few hundred million for some sensors, it should not need private sector patronsby dwroberts