Absolute madness. Trump is ripping the eyes out of America's ocean. In June, the National Science Foundation begins hauling up more than 900 deep-sea instruments that have spent the last decade tracking the collapse of the climate system.
Off Oregon. Off Alaska. Off North Carolina. And in the icy waters between Greenland and Iceland, where the Atlantic's heat conveyor belt is showing the first cracks of failure.
Fishermen lose the data that predicts where the fish will be. Coastal towns lose the early warning on flooding. Farmers lose the signals that shape next year's harvest. Every working family on a coast or a field pays the bill so fossil fuel donors can keep cashing checks.
The whole network cost $48 million a year to operate. That is less than the price tag of a single F-35 fighter.
For that money, the public got real-time data on ocean temperatures, carbon absorption, marine heatwaves, and the current system that keeps Europe from turning into Siberia.
Congress restored the funding twice after Trump tried to slash it by 80 percent. So the administration shrugged, called it a "descope," and started yanking the instruments out of the water anyway.
Why? Because you cannot panic about a fever if you smash the thermometer.
It fits a pattern. The EPA already killed the endangerment finding that anchored climate regulation. The National Center for Atmospheric Research was shuttered. NASA scrubbed climate language from its own reports on the hottest years ever recorded. Now the ocean sensors go dark.
The instruments themselves cost hundreds of millions of public dollars to design, build, and place. Tearing them out with no plan to replace the data is not budgeting. It is sabotage of your right to see what is being done to you.
You cannot vote out a hurricane. You can vote out the people who made sure you never saw it coming
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