1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
Their donors. In the USA members of congress spend an embarrassingly large amount of their time on the phone to their donors ensuring they are happy enough to fund their next run.
> A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work.
> Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.
Agreed that money should be virtually eliminated from the system. That said, people actually tend to be pretty satisfied with their representatives. It's the other Congresspeople who suck.
I bet you'll find that more people don't approve of what their representative is doing than do approve.
Low voter turnout allows for bullshit to slip through the cracks by targeting very small blocs of voters.
I genuinely believe that most problems in government would be fixed if voluntary voter turnout was around 99%, and that low rates, especially during midterms, is the largest threat to democracy in the United States as we know it to date.
This snide response would be a lot better if climate.gov had actually been taken down by those representatives you mention, rather than illegally destroyed by one man.
No no, the snide response works because this shutdown was a violation of aforementioned system. Downstream discussions on “oh hurrr ummm how do we decide what’s worth spending money on?!” are irrelevant. We already have a system to do that, and that system has decided to fund climate.gov
Clearly not, or it would be funded. The part of the system that’s supposed to decide decided to fund it. Then another part illegally blocked that and suffered no consequences.
Gerrymandering means that the house is a skewed representation of the people. The senate is a skewed representation of the people in its intentional structure.
Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.
They are doing the gag where they just describe representative democracy like it is a novel idea.
Practically we also need expert organizations and agencies to help advise the representative and implement their ideas, but I wouldn’t describe glossing over that sort of detail as “failing civics 101.”
Oh no, it's not because I don't understand the civic structure of my society. It's because your comment is poorly written. Want to give it another shot?
You kind of exemplify that drawing on this very topic where a bunch of people sit in a boat that is sinking stern first and the people in the bow section are expressing zero concern because their end isn’t under water.
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
That is the understanding that you've been presented with, likely by people looking to mislead you, but that's not at all what our actual budget reflects. The social safety nets that we supposedly don't have take up around 2/3rds of our federal budget.
It's like 50% if you also count the stuff I pay for that is a direct benefit to me at retirement (as does anyone who pays into social security).
So it might be a little nitpicky, and your point still stands. A lot of money is spent on defense and business, but not as much as the before portrays.
Where businesses benefit is in not paying the tax, instead of receiving payments. That's definitely a problem, but it's a different thing.
Okay? If I pay in and then get that benefit when it's my time to draw that benefit, it doesn't matter if it's my actual dollar or not. Technically right isn't the best right sometimes.
Also my point was that the original claim of 2/3 of the federal budget going to social programs is just wrong. It's well under half unless you count ss. Then it's about half.
As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.
Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
It makes me feel a little crazy seeing the constitutional architecture post-civil war used to diffuse responsibility away from the federal government and divide the people against each other working in action. People act like this isn't a country with very definite choices being made or that if something is bad over there, it doesn't matter over here. The wealthy, the corporations, the army, and the central government all deal with this place as a unified entity with various domestic fractures to exploit for their own purposes.
Social Security and Medicare have a separate, capped tax though. They're funded through that tax. Federal tax is effectively uncapped. Where does it go?
I agree with parent, the full quote is: "The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for."
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.
You do understand how this isn't an example of what I'm asking for, right?
In 20 years worth of history - you can't identify a single piece of legislation or a single executive action to demonstrate an ongoing threat to NOAA? You have to immediately jump to the tautology of "Project 2025 is dismantling NOAA because an article two years ago said Project 2025 was going to dismantle NOAA"?
If there is an active attempt at privatizing NOAA then you should be able to point to specific, real-world things that are happening to effect this change.
"The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated"
That's a direct quote.
The fact that it wasn't first on the list doesn't mean it's not on the list.
(no response needed; I know that you're a partisan actor to the degree that direct discussion with you offers no value to myself or to society. You're too dishonest, too sociopathic, and too disinterested in truth.)
I'm not aware of any private company that has a contract with NOAA or the NWS to privately disseminate the agency's weather data (either acquired itself or purchased commercially).
Operating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?
Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".
That sounds like the arrangement you said we have. The government provides data to private companies who then mass distribute it in various forms because those costs and needs vary.
The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
They get it for free from the government. They offer it as a paid service to the general public. Then they try to ban the government from giving it away for free to any potential competition.
> The problem is that those very same private companies are trying really hard to ban the government from providing the same data for free to the general public, because it would be "unfair competition".
In general, they aren't.
The sole example I can think of that even skirts with this was specifically an attempt by AccuWeather in the 2000's, coordinating with then-Senator Rick Santorum's office. And that was universally decried by the entire weather enterprise.
Project 2025 called for downsizing the weather service and have them focus on just data gathering and it should "fully commercialize its forecasting operations".
There have been no signs whatsoever that these types of changes would be happening. The only noticeable changes at NOAA - and anyone who works in the world of meteorology in the United States - have been a doubling down on existing, vetted programs for commercial data acquisition (all of which target supplemental capability, not backbone replacement) and a doubling down on existing modeling R&D (namely the re-up of EPIC and the commitment to the UFS).
NOAA is helmed by veterans of the weather enterprise. Do you see the American Meteorological Society issuing statements decrying the commercialization of the NWS or NOAA? Honestly, because NOAA is a Department of Commerce agency and the head of that cabinet department - Lutnick - has no interest whatsoever in weather or climate, there really isn't any ongoing concern that NOAA will be massively torn apart.
As mentioned they've already implemented many of the recommendations related to NOAA in the document. If anything they've gone even further in many of the cuts as they've cut the budgets so much a lot of balloon launches haven't happened vastly reducing the ground truth needed to keep models and forecasts accurate.
Instead, they've moved such things to... drumroll...private corporations.
I don't know who runs that website, but it has flat out falsehoods on it. If you search for "NOAA", two items come up with notes [1]:
1. "Note: The administration is firing NOAA employees and closing NOAA offices; reconciliation bill rescinds some NOAA funds." Uh, no - there have not been any NOAA office closures. The President's FY26 budget eviscerated NOAA OAR, but those cuts were almost entirely rolled back by Congress. Yes, NOAA and NWS employees were caught up in the DOGE probationary purges back in early 2025, but in many cases (a) they were hired back, and (b) the NWS is aggressively hiring at all levels to replace churn.
2. "Note: Private companies are now gathering weather data for NOAA; administration is "readying plans" to transfer National Center for Atmospheric Research work to private companies." NOAA has purchased data from the private sector for 30 years. The explosion in commercial earth observation has dramatically increased the available data that can be directly used in numerical weather modeling, and NOAA has operated a Commercial Data Program for over a decade to supplement its own investments. This is an expected evolution of the weather enterprise that was predicted and urged as far back as the National Academies' "Fair Weather" report in 2003 [2]. Furthermore - NCAR is part of the NSF, not NOAA, which really calls into question WTF your website is talking about.
So you start off saying they aren't commercializing forecasting and that there's no evidence of them wanting to downsize. Meanwhile you fully acknowledge they attempted to radically downsize twice in less than two years and acknowledge they've massively expanded the existing forecast commercialization. "No signs whatsoever" while you point obvious signs.
NOAA's budgets may have been approved by Congress, but they still face massive staffing shortages. The Trump administration has made it clear they don't care about impoundments and choosing to not spend money allotted by Congress.
When the regional climate offices went offline, do you think it was just incompetence, or testing the waters about letting such programs just die?
Sounds like they just haven't been fully successful at implementing their obvious policy goals. If they didn't want to do it, why write the budget that way? Why authorize those DOGE cuts? Isn't the expansion of commercialization in the plans of increasing commercialization?
It's like you refuse to see the obvious reality immediately in your face and choose to believe a convicted fraudster.
> Meanwhile you fully acknowledge they attempted to radically downsize twice in less than two years and acknowledge they've massively expanded the existing forecast commercialization. "No signs whatsoever" while you point obvious signs.
Uh, no. The CDP has moved forward at nearly the same rate it's been trudging along. There's a broad consensus across the weather enterprise that the CDP should _grow_ to better allow NOAA to access new data coming online from commercial sources - data which is already being acquired by competitor agencies such as the UK Met Office and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting.
Furthermore, it's ridiculous to conflate the bumbling executive actions like DOGE with earnest, deliberate restructuring of NOAA.
> NOAA's budgets may have been approved by Congress, but they still face massive staffing shortages. The Trump administration has made it clear they don't care about impoundments and choosing to not spend money allotted by Congress.
That's embellishing quite a bit. Define "massive" staffing shortages, will you? All those roles being actively filled by the National Weather Service? I can't go a single day without seeing someone in my extended network on LinkedIn announcing that they've been hired for a NWS forecaster role!
The one thing I'll give you is that there has been significant churn across OAR and EMC - but that's more due to the huge amount of money flowing into AI/ML ventures into weather/climate and more lucrative private sector opportunities than we've seen for a very long time.
> When the regional climate offices went offline, do you think it was just incompetence, or testing the waters about letting such programs just die?
You mean Regional Climate Centers? Despite the same set of challenges that virtually any institution that leveraged federal funds has seen, none of these have been "shut down."
> Sounds like they just haven't been fully successful at implementing their obvious policy goals. If they didn't want to do it, why write the budget that way? Why authorize those DOGE cuts? Isn't the expansion of commercialization in the plans of increasing commercialization?
Sounds like they _aren't implementing those goals_. You're mistaking the chaos of 2025 with actual policy coherence.
> It's like you refuse to see the obvious reality immediately in your face and choose to believe a convicted fraudster.
I don't believe anything other than what I see with my own eyes and do with my own hands, day-in and day-out working in the weather enterprise.
> I can't go a single day without seeing someone in my extended network on LinkedIn announcing that they've been hired for a NWS forecaster role!
This is obvious evidence of them trying to fill the shortfall. If they were so well-staffed, would they be hiring so much? They have so many openings because they have a shortfall!
> none of these have been "shut down."
They were, temporarily.
> Furthermore, it's ridiculous to conflate the bumbling executive actions like DOGE with earnest, deliberate restructuring of NOAA.
This bumbling executive action is the Trump administration's attempt at restructuring. The budget proposal is the attempt at restructuring. Why do you continue to bury your head in the sand and hand-wave their actions while saying they never would try to do these things when they're actively and openly trying to do these things? Who do you blame for the DOGE cuts of not the Trump administration?
> The CDP has moved forward at nearly the same rate it's been trudging along.
This is probably untrue. They've publicly announced more spending in 2025 than what they spent total in 2024 and that's just in big headline contracts. They haven't bothered reporting actuals in the 2025 CDP spend like they have for the previous decade. Huh I wonder why.
> I don't believe anything other than what I see with my own eyes
So go read their budget proposals. Go see AMS' own worries about what the administration will do. Go see them talking about staffing shortages. See the fact the NWS isn't launching as many balloons. See the lack of staffing in Oklahoma during tornado season. See the elimination of public datasets at climate.gov, see those staffers who were laid off and never had those positions backfilled.
They would never do the things they continue to say they want to do and attempted to do several times!
Before I rebut, I want to make very clear - I'm correcting the record because _in the future_ there could be serious threats to NOAA. Crying wolf today when things are tenuous but steady actively harms the community's preparation for when the knives _do_ come out for NOAA. As they have done so many times before, the slashers will point to these episodes of crying wolf as a smokescreen. It's literally their only play.
> This is obvious evidence of them trying to fill the shortfall. If they were so well-staffed, would they be hiring so much? They have so many openings because they have a shortfall!
You do realize that the NWS was understaffed _before_ the administration and the DOGE cuts, right? We're also riding the crest of a retirement wave from the major restructuring that happened in the early 90's.
> They were, temporarily.
Because of funding lapses during the _government shutdown_. Like many _other_ agencies and offices. Geeze.
> This bumbling executive action is the Trump administration's attempt at restructuring...
It really isn't. Anyone who has been around the public-private nexus surrounding NOAA knows the folks who have been itching to overhaul NOAA, and they're not particularly subtle about it. Notably, none of them were brought into any administrative or leadership positions that could actually effect structural change at NOAA.
The reality is that despite its section in Project 2025, conservatives don't actually care about NOAA; they care about climate change and have used scalpels to excise key government programs relating to it. But NOAA has been shielded because of any executive agency, NOAA and the NWS have extremely favorable ratings from the public and are actively and vigorously defended by a bipartisan coalition in Congress.
> This is probably untrue. They've publicly announced more spending in 2025 than what they spent total in 2024 and that's just in big headline contracts. They haven't bothered reporting actuals in the 2025 CDP spend like they have for the previous decade. Huh I wonder why.
Everyone expected the CDP to grow following the success of EPIC and the maturation and adoption of JEDI has the next-generation data assimilation framework for our modeling ecosystem. Hell - part of NOAA's last major action plans in the early 2020's explicitly called for it to grow in scope!
The reason you don't see actuals from CDP spend is because (a) the government is dysfunctional and Congress is ignoring its oversight to actual make sure these numbers are published in a timely manner, and (b) very few awards have actually been given out. It took what, 4 years for the first microwave sounding data purchase to happen, and it was only a 1-year award to Tomorrow and OMS?
> So go read their budget proposals. Go see AMS' own worries about what the administration will do. Go see them talking about staffing shortages. See the fact the NWS isn't launching as many balloons. See the lack of staffing in Oklahoma during tornado season. See the elimination of public datasets at climate.gov, see those staffers who were laid off and never had those positions backfilled.
I do read the proposals. I spend time on Capitol Hill working through these budgets with offices in both chambers and from both political parties. I also spend time with the House Science and the Senate SST committee staff.
Yes, there are real issues that NOAA and the NWS face. And I would absolutely fault the federal government for not being _as aggressive_ at remediating these issues.
But you're cherry-picking issues to paint a significantly more sinister story than what is actually happening.
> you're cherry-picking issues to paint a significantly more sinister story than what is actually happening.
Their budget proposals trying to slash a quarter of NOAA budgets doesn't seem like a cherry-picked issue. DOGE firing several hundred people and taking a while to fill those positions doesn't seem like cherry-picking issues. Seeing them fail to renew important contracts until after the public freaks out about it doesn't seem like cherry-picking issues.
And acting like the things happening at the NSF don't have any relationship to data used for NOAA is another thing. Oh, it's just programs being axed at the NSF, no worries, they'd surely never touch NOAA. I'm sure data about ocean temperatures has absolutely nothing to do with weather!
You see "the government is dysfunctional and Congress is ignoring its oversight" and yet that isn't an additional concern about the future of these programs, even though you understand the small amount of congressional oversight is the only thing that spared NOAA from massive cuts. What's guaranteeing this congressional oversight doesn't get worse? It's the only real backstop we seem to have and it's track record recently is abysmal, but you're telling me it's all just roses and sunshine!
> conservatives don't actually care about NOAA
Then why did DOGE happen? Why submit budget proposals slashing NOAA by a quarter??
Acting like these things aren't happening is continuing to ignore the foxes circling the henhouse. You were seemingly even unaware about the Regional Climate Centers going offline, telling me it didn't happen. Not understanding that their rapid hiring recently is because of massive staffing shortages, shortages mostly inflicted by this administration. Thinking Project 2025 is just a conspiracy theory when they have been actively working towards many of these policy goals all because Trump told you an obvious lie. I'm sorry, but if you're one of the people supposedly there helping to ensure these programs have a successful future and don't see the obvious attempts to smash these programs it makes me even more worried about their futures.
> Because of funding lapses during the _government shutdown_.
This is false! There wasn't a government shutdown at the time! The government shutdown happened from October to November but the climate centers going dark happened in April! Is April between October and November?
The centers went offline because the administration chose to delay reviewing the contracts. That was this administration's official position on the story. You're inventing a government shutdown out of whole cloth, its not even their own excuse.
> You do realize that the NWS was understaffed _before_ the administration and the DOGE cuts, right?
And yet you were just suggesting to me they're not understaffed, calling into question my claims of the NWS being understaffed. You're building your argument on shifting sands. First they're well staffed, now they've been understaffed for forever. Which is it?
> Their budget proposals trying to slash a quarter of NOAA budgets doesn't seem like a cherry-picked issue...
Because these aren't part of a plan specifically targeting NOAA. They're broad attacks on government infrastructure. The distinction is important.
> And acting like the things happening at the NSF don't have any relationship to data used for NOAA is another thing. Oh, it's just programs being axed at the NSF, no worries, they'd surely never touch NOAA. I'm sure data about ocean temperatures has absolutely nothing to do with weather!
How, specifically, does slashing programs at NSF lead to "privitization of NOAA"?
> Then why did DOGE happen? Why submit budget proposals slashing NOAA by a quarter??
Because _that's what Conservatives do_ in American politics. They virtue signal to their base and then run away from things as their efforts are neutered. Where have you been since the 2000? The executive branch doesn't set the budget, their recommendations to Congress are ceremonial at best. A cheap and easy way to generate optics without committing to actions with extremely negative repercussions.
Tell me - where are the Republican Congressional budget proposals which slash NOAA's OAR budget?
> Acting like these things aren't happening is continuing to ignore the foxes circling the henhouse. You were seemingly even unaware about the Regional Climate Centers going offline, telling me it didn't happen
Now you're just being disingenuous. You said they were cut - they _weren't_, they were caught in the blast radius of government funding shenangians in Congress along with hundreds or thousands of other programs. Show me an EO or a piece of legislation that eliminates the RCCs, will you?
> Thinking Project 2025 is just a conspiracy theory when they have been actively working towards many of these policy goals all because Trump told you an obvious lie. I'm sorry, but if you're one of the people supposedly there helping to ensure these programs have a successful future and don't see the obvious attempts to smash these programs it makes me even more worried about their futures.
No one said Project 2025 is a conspiracy theory.
It's not productive to waste time with you. You have no idea what you're talking about. But let me be very blunt - _you are making everyone's job harder_ by defaulting to Project 2025 and ascribing motives to actions where there aren't any. The Trump Administration _literally doesn't care_ about NOAA, and the agency has its defenders on both sides of the aisle in Congress who have actively responded to acute crises whenever the Admin's chaos creates them.
As the wailing about "muh NOAA is being privatized!" grows louder, it derails our interventions to safe harbor the agency because thoughtful, constructive compromise can be washed away as P2025 doomerism.
Stop exaggerating what's going on to win internet points.
> Because these aren't part of a plan specifically targeting NOAA.
A 26% budget cut proposal and massive firings aren't actually an attack. Sure. Oh its not specifically targeting only NOAA, I guess that's fine then. If they were to dismantle only NOAA that'd be a problem worth concern, but because its tied up in other things too its A-OK!
> The executive branch doesn't set the budget,
Tell that to the Trump administration which seems to constantly fail to spend money budgeted by Congress while spending billions on a war Congress told him not to engage in. How's all that USAID spending going these days?
> they were caught in the blast radius of government funding shenangians in Congress
Continuing to push this lie that even the administration isn't making. They were shut down briefly because the executive stopped cutting the checks by their own admission, not because of a congressional funding shortfall. The government was fully funded in April 2025. You act like I don't have a clue while you continue on with this easily checked thing.
> No one said Project 2025 is a conspiracy theory
Its in this comment thread, just not by you I agree. Strange for you to say such an obviously untrue thing. You do end up trying to downplay its influence left and right though.
> what Conservatives do
If you think this administration is just what normal conservatives have done in past administrations you really haven't been paying attention.
> The Trump Administration _literally doesn't care_ about NOAA
You're right, they don't. They suggest they want to cut about 26% of it. They would seemingly love to never have to care about it again.
> thoughtful, constructive compromise
Thoughtful and constructive compromise about what exactly? That global warming doesn't exist? That anthropogenic climate change is a fraud?
> it derails our interventions to safe harbor the agency
Safe harboring the agency? From what? Why do you need to be worried? What is it that you're harboring it safely from? You've just told me its obviously not the Trump administration.
Quit burying your head in the sand and wake up my dude. The only reason why the DOGE cuts were unsuccessful were because people spoke up. Quit acting like the only way to ensure bad things don't happen is to be quiet about things and ignore obvious issues. If you see something bad happening, speak up.
As long as it’s properly addressed to avoid abuse, I don’t have a problem with private companies and individual citizens both benefiting. You could easily put rate limits if you think it’s a major issue while still maintaining the free service for smaller users. I personally don’t like the privatization of profits while also maintaining the narrative that companies don’t benefit from public works.
Google uses barely any weather data. Perhaps some tornado and wildfire tracking for its datacenters, but that's about it. The vast majority of its potential use comes from Android users, which is... the general public.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
I work in this space. The load on private APIs -- and the management costs in general of reselling government data -- are utterly dwarfed by the upstream costs borne by the government.
The public __already__ pays for Google, The Weather Company, Apple, and really __everybody__ -- down to your local weather person and surf report -- to use weather data on a massive scale.
Government weather data underpins huge chunks of our modern, globalized economy. It should absolutely be better funded and even allowed to directly distribute data to the public and industry. NOAA and NASA et al could be given 10x their current allocation of tax money and you and I would still be getting a great deal.
So, research that you pay for with tax dollars, it's results should be published through a private entity?
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
Making the data available is non-trivial no matter who does it. There were many, many exabytes of this data a decade ago and countless petabytes of new data is generated every day. How to manage this has been an open question for a long time.
In practice access has always been restricted to this "public" data because there is not remotely enough bandwidth, either network or storage, to give everyone a copy of the data that may want it. They often don't even have enough capacity for internal users. A lot of it also sits in offline or near-line archival formats due to the scale of the data.
This is a general problem for data models of this type. You need to compute on the data in-situ or it won't scale but virtually no one can build that type of infrastructure at the scale required for these data models. It would also be extremely expensive to build and operate.
I'd argue is is absolutely within the mandate of government to collect, store, and publish weather and climate data at scale, as this work cannot be left to private companies or charity. It is fundamentally a collective action problem that will span generations and administrations, and one where there should be no incentive to profit or misinform. Citizens can only make sound decisions, both individually and collectively, if they have durable access to reliable facts.
There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.
Let's have the government collect the data and private companies can engage in that as well if they wish - both parties can call the other out if there's a discrepancy.
IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.
1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.
Making money requires accurate information about the world. For example I was just learning about how farmers hire scientists to grade chicken feed. They are incentived by their own profit to get good information about grain quality they wish to purchase.
> Making money requires accurate information about the world.
A company may have accurate information that their product causes cancer, but they aren't going to tell you that. They'll outright lie and say it doesn't, hire scientists to create fake research to "prove" that it's safe, and harass, threaten, and discredit anyone who tries to tell the public the truth.
This is probably an inopportune time to make that argument with Polymarket openly lying about their "truth telling machine" and paying influencers under the table to drive engagement.
Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function, even for the most ardent pro-market believers out there.
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
> Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function
Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years!
I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.
Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.