liars gotta defund non-liars or something sad face

My coauthors and I published a paper a couple months ago (open access here) on the role that forecast improvements could play in reducing heat-related mortality as the climate warms. For the paper, we interviewed a bunch of operational meteorologists, and the thing they said over and over again is that we have to keep improving weather data gathering if we want better forecasts. It's been sad to see things go the other way instead.

For a long time, and still to some extent, the UK's official weather forecasting organisation was part of the Ministry of Defence. That's because good weather forecasts are famously critical to military operations (there's about to be a movie about the most famous example of this).

So the Trumpists are actively working to damage the US's armed forces: to directly weaken the US as a military power.

It's hard to see them as anything but a death cult, frankly.

I'm a scientist working in risk, disaster and resilience, more specifically in wildfire and catastrophe modelling. It's interdisciplinary, and I work with atmospheric physicists, climatologists, meteorologists, ecologists etc. You can never have enough data and there can always be better data but I don't think we ever thought we'd be dealing with these acts of vandalism. I was so relieved when the OOI decision was reversed - that too has a functional role in severe weather forecasting.

Everything is a waste of taxpayer money until you learn the hard way what the government actually does and spend twice as much on rehiring and fixing  all the problems caused. If only this could've been seen coming a mile away.

Can confirm. Everyone here,  (Kansas) no matter how they vote, has a favorite weather forecaster, and has at least two weather apps on their phone with alerts turned on. (This is why I can talk at length about how Twisters should not have been set during the cellphone era, because no way anyone in OKLAHOMA at a rodeo in the summer would get surprised by a tornado. Or not know a famous storm chaser was there.) But this tornado season we have already had a couple of surprise tornadoes just south of Kansas City, and people have definitely noticed that the forecasts aren't great. They have definitely felt iffy all spring. It feels like since that storm a lot of them have been overly cautious, which is generally good because we've had some really crazy weather already this year. But, hard to plan around. 

https://www.kcur.org/environment-agriculture/2026-06-22/kansas-and-missouri-are-surprised-by-tornadoes-after-weather-service-cuts-reduce-early-warnings