DiscussMormonism.com

Everybody Wang Chung wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 07, 2025 3:21 pm

I'm sure glad Nelson was able to warn everyone. Just think how many lives were saved.

How Trump’s National Weather Service Cuts Could Cost Lives
May 13, 2025

Just more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew. There was little time to prepare for the storm, and much of the resulting property damage in South Florida was massive. But by last year, forecasters could give several days’ warning that the then approaching storms Helene and Milton were likely to abruptly morph into monsters.

Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events, improving computer forecast models, and making continent- and ocean-spanning efforts to collect the data that make those forecasts possible. Now meteorology experts are urgently warning that the Trump administration’s staff firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service (and its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) threaten to disrupt these crucial operations and turn back the clock on forecasting.

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” wrote five former NWS directors from both Democratic and Republican administrations in an open letter on May 2.

Ultimately, storm experts say, disruption caused by existing and proposed cuts will hit multiple fronts. An understaffed and underfunded NWS could mean that a tornado warning doesn’t come in time, that a hurricane forecast is off just enough so that the wrong coastal areas are evacuated or that flights are less likely to be routed around turbulence. “The net result is going to be massive economic harm,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain during one of his regular talks hosted on YouTube. “As we break these things, eventually it will become painfully and unignorably obvious what we’ve broken and how important it was. And it’s going to be unbelievably expensive in the scramble to try and get it back—and we might not be able to get it back.”

The NWS’s budget pays for weather services that benefit industry

For the past 20 years, a little more than 4,000 NWS staff members have put together 24-7 forecasts for the country’s approximately 300 million people every day of the year. “We have [a more] efficient level of [staff compared] to the number of people we’re serving than any other country in the world by two orders of magnitude,” says Louis Uccellini, who was NWS director from 2013 to 2022 and signed the open letter.

The NWS punches above its economic weight, too: it costs the average American about $4 per year. “It’s a cup of coffee,” says JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union that represents the NWS and several NOAA offices. With one third of the U.S. economy—from farming to trucking to tourism—being sensitive to weather and climate, the NWS provides an overall benefit of $100 billion to the economy. This is roughly 10 times what the service costs to run, according to an American Meteorological Society white paper. Recent improvements to hurricane forecasts alone have saved up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research—a nonpartisan, nonprofit economic research organization. In comparison, the NWS’s entire budget for 2024 was less than $1.4 billion.

...After the NWS’s first wave of firings and early retirements under the Trump administration, staffing at the service’s 122 field offices across the country has dropped to a 19 percent vacancy rate. Fifty-two offices are now considered “critically understaffed,” meaning a shortage of more than 20 percent. Some branches are down by more than 40 percent. “We’re small offices,” Becker says. Each weather forecast office has about 25 to 30 people. “When you’re down four people, it starts to hurt,” she adds. “There comes a point where you don’t have enough people to cover everything.”

The lack of noticeable degradations in forecast quality so far is “because of the valiant efforts of the people who remain in these now critically understaffed roles in field offices,” Swain said in his recent video. “But the cracks are really now starting to show.”

...People across the vast weather community, from individual meteorologists to professional societies such as the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association, have all expressed alarm about the cuts to NOAA and the NWS and have urged the Trump administration to reverse course. Industries that depend on weather and climate data, such as the insurance industry, have also spoken out. The Union of Concerned Scientists has also sent congressional leaders an open letter to urge them to reinstate NOAA’s staffing and funding that has been signed by more than 3,300 scientists and other experts.

Morale is extremely low in offices across the NWS, according to Swain’s video and to Uccellini and many others who know current employees at the agency. Funding cuts are forcing many employees to bring in their own toilet paper and soap. There is also “an extreme culture of fear” Swain said in his video, with “threatening and demeaning communications” from agency leaders that have called employees “lazy” and “low productivity.”

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life." —Five former NWS directors in a May 2 open letter

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ost-lives/

Marcus wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 07, 2025 5:56 pm

We also have a Weather Service with funding cut by Trump, and a warning published months ago in Scientific American:

How Trump’s National Weather Service Cuts Could Cost Lives
May 13, 2025

Just more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew. There was little time to prepare for the storm, and much of the resulting property damage in South Florida was massive. But by last year, forecasters could give several days’ warning that the then approaching storms Helene and Milton were likely to abruptly morph into monsters.

Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events, improving computer forecast models, and making continent- and ocean-spanning efforts to collect the data that make those forecasts possible. Now meteorology experts are urgently warning that the Trump administration’s staff firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service (and its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) threaten to disrupt these crucial operations and turn back the clock on forecasting.

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” wrote five former NWS directors from both Democratic and Republican administrations in an open letter on May 2.

Ultimately, storm experts say, disruption caused by existing and proposed cuts will hit multiple fronts. An understaffed and underfunded NWS could mean that a tornado warning doesn’t come in time, that a hurricane forecast is off just enough so that the wrong coastal areas are evacuated or that flights are less likely to be routed around turbulence. “The net result is going to be massive economic harm,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain during one of his regular talks hosted on YouTube. “As we break these things, eventually it will become painfully and unignorably obvious what we’ve broken and how important it was. And it’s going to be unbelievably expensive in the scramble to try and get it back—and we might not be able to get it back.”

The NWS’s budget pays for weather services that benefit industry

For the past 20 years, a little more than 4,000 NWS staff members have put together 24-7 forecasts for the country’s approximately 300 million people every day of the year. “We have [a more] efficient level of [staff compared] to the number of people we’re serving than any other country in the world by two orders of magnitude,” says Louis Uccellini, who was NWS director from 2013 to 2022 and signed the open letter.

The NWS punches above its economic weight, too: it costs the average American about $4 per year. “It’s a cup of coffee,” says JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union that represents the NWS and several NOAA offices. With one third of the U.S. economy—from farming to trucking to tourism—being sensitive to weather and climate, the NWS provides an overall benefit of $100 billion to the economy. This is roughly 10 times what the service costs to run, according to an American Meteorological Society white paper. Recent improvements to hurricane forecasts alone have saved up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research—a nonpartisan, nonprofit economic research organization. In comparison, the NWS’s entire budget for 2024 was less than $1.4 billion.

...After the NWS’s first wave of firings and early retirements under the Trump administration, staffing at the service’s 122 field offices across the country has dropped to a 19 percent vacancy rate. Fifty-two offices are now considered “critically understaffed,” meaning a shortage of more than 20 percent. Some branches are down by more than 40 percent. “We’re small offices,” Becker says. Each weather forecast office has about 25 to 30 people. “When you’re down four people, it starts to hurt,” she adds. “There comes a point where you don’t have enough people to cover everything.”

The lack of noticeable degradations in forecast quality so far is “because of the valiant efforts of the people who remain in these now critically understaffed roles in field offices,” Swain said in his recent video. “But the cracks are really now starting to show.”

...People across the vast weather community, from individual meteorologists to professional societies such as the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association, have all expressed alarm about the cuts to NOAA and the NWS and have urged the Trump administration to reverse course. Industries that depend on weather and climate data, such as the insurance industry, have also spoken out. The Union of Concerned Scientists has also sent congressional leaders an open letter to urge them to reinstate NOAA’s staffing and funding that has been signed by more than 3,300 scientists and other experts.

Morale is extremely low in offices across the NWS, according to Swain’s video and to Uccellini and many others who know current employees at the agency. Funding cuts are forcing many employees to bring in their own toilet paper and soap. There is also “an extreme culture of fear” Swain said in his video, with “threatening and demeaning communications” from agency leaders that have called employees “lazy” and “low productivity.”

“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life." —Five former NWS directors in a May 2 open letter

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ost-lives/

Cuts resulted from Republican effort to privatize duties of weather agencies
The cuts follow a decade-long Republican effort to dismantle and privatize many of the duties of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency within the Commerce Department that includes the NWS. The reductions have come as Trump has handed top public posts to officials with ties to private companies that stand to profit from hobbling the taxpayer-funded system for predicting the weather.

Project 2025, the conservative governing blueprint that Trump distanced himself from during the 2024 campaign but that he has broadly moved to enact once in office, calls for dismantling NOAA and further commercializing the weather service.

Chronic staffing shortages have led a handful of offices to curtail the frequency of regional forecasts and weather balloon launches needed to collect atmospheric data. In April, the weather service abruptly ended translations of its forecasts and emergency alerts into languages other than English, including Spanish. The service was soon reinstated after public outcry.

NOAA’s main satellite operations center briefly appeared earlier this year on a list of surplus government real estate set to be sold. Trump’s proposed budget also seeks to shutter key facilities for tracking climate change. The proposed cuts include the observatory atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii that for decades has documented the steady rise in plant-warming carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

On June 25, NOAA abruptly announced that the U.S. Department of Defense would no longer process or transmit data from three weather satellites experts said are crucial to accurately predicting the path and strength of hurricanes at sea.

“Removing data from the defense satellite is similar to removing another piece to the public safety puzzle for hurricane intensity forecasting,” said LaMarre, now a private consultant. ”The more pieces removed, the less clear the picture becomes which can reduce the quality of life-saving warnings.”

Trump officials say they didn’t fire meteorologists

At a pair of Congressional hearings last month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called it “fake news” that the Trump administration had axed any meteorologists, despite detailed reporting from The Associated Press and other media organizations that chronicled the layoffs.

“We are fully staffed with forecasters and scientists,” Lutnick said June 4 before a Senate appropriations subcommittee. “Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.”

Despite a broad freeze on federal hiring directed by Trump, NOAA announced last month it would seek to fill more than 100 “mission-critical field positions,” as well as plug holes at some regional weather offices by reassigning staff. Those positions have not yet been publicly posted, though a NOAA spokesperson said Sunday they would be soon.

Asked by AP how the NWS could simultaneously be fully staffed and still advertise “mission critical positions” as open, Commerce spokesperson Kristen Eichamer said the “National Hurricane Center is fully staffed to meet this season’s demand, and any recruitment efforts are simply meant to deepen our talent pool.”

“The secretary is committed to providing Americans with the most accurate, up-to-date weather data by ensuring the National Weather Service is fully equipped with the personnel and technology it needs,” Eichamer said. “For the first time, we are integrating technology that’s more accurate and agile than ever before to achieve this goal, and with it the NWS is poised to deliver critical weather information to Americans.”

Uccellini and the four prior NWS directors who served under Democratic and Republican presidents criticized the Trump cuts in an open letter issued in May; they said the administration’s actions resulted in the departures of about 550 employees — an overall reduction of more than 10 percent.

“NWS staff will have an impossible task to continue its current level of services,” they wrote. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life. We know that’s a nightmare shared by those on the forecasting front lines – and by the people who depend on their efforts.”

NOAA’s budget for fiscal year 2024 was just under $6.4 billion, of which less than $1.4 billion went to NWS.

Experts worry about forecasts for hurricanes

While experts say it would be illegal for Trump to eliminate NOAA without Congressional approval, some former federal officials worry the cuts could result in a patchwork system where taxpayers finance the operation of satellites and collection of atmospheric data but are left to pay private services that would issue forecasts and severe weather warnings. That arrangement, critics say, could lead to delays or missed emergency alerts that, in turn, could result in avoidable deaths.

D. James Baker, who served as NOAA’s administrator during the Clinton administration, questioned whether private forecasting companies would provide the public with services that don’t generate profits.

https://apnews.com/article/weather-texa ... 8dcb85562b

DanielPeterson -> noel an hour ago

noel: "Gov. Greg Abbott credited “prayer” as a possible “reason why the water stopped rising. Fake News?"
Why on earth would it be "fake news"? Religious people tend to believe in prayer.

noel: "Hopeless Meanwhile bodies found in trees."

Amazing. This is probably the first time in human history that anybody has ever considered theodicy, or the challenge posed by the problem of evil. Nobody had ever thought of it until the recent Texas flooding.

While many of the arguments against an omni-God are based on the broadest definition of evil, "most contemporary philosophers interested in the nature of evil are primarily concerned with evil in a narrower sense".[21] The narrow concept of evil involves moral condemnation, and is applicable only to moral agents capable of making independent decisions, and their actions; it allows for the existence of some pain and suffering without identifying it as evil.[22]: 322  Christianity is based on "the salvific value of suffering".

sock puppet wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 07, 2025 3:10 pm

The Bible instructs that God killed the wicked on the earth via a flood, with the only "righteous" ones (Noah and his family) being saved on an ark.

Mormon scripture (D&C 59:21): “And in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments.”

Are Mormons confessing God's hand in this past weekend's floods in Texas?

Did God save the righteous in that area, and only the wicked died?

huckelberry wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 07, 2025 10:39 pm

sock puppet wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 07, 2025 3:10 pm

The Bible instructs that God killed the wicked on the earth via a flood, with the only "righteous" ones (Noah and his family) being saved on an ark.

Mormon scripture (D&C 59:21): “And in nothing doth man offend God, or against none is his wrath kindled, save those who confess not his hand in all things, and obey not his commandments.”

Are Mormons confessing God's hand in this past weekend's floods in Texas?

Did God save the righteous in that area, and only the wicked died?

Only righteous saved with Noah? Some of the family are pictured as problematic. One would expect a story like that to be simplified, even so I would not expect only the bad guys died. The story goes people were violent and God wanted a start over. Innocent children would die in the story like they do in real floods.

I do not think there is an expectation only bad folks die in a flood, Biblical or otherwise.