The fact that roughly half the comments here are some sort of weakly veiled climate denialism tells me it won't matter how much data we have anyway.
If members of a reasonably technical community can't accept what's happening, then there's no reasonable hope that people will ever be able to reason about our situation correctly. We are surrounded by evidence of all varieties in every direction that we are heading down a path of catastrophic climate change, and yet people contort their logic to find ways not to see it.
I think of my experience with real world technical people, maybe 2-4% are denialists but those are also very vocal (enough to saturate a place like this). Another 4-10% are under the sway, and I think that's a fairly reasonable assumption since in Sweden the party that represent those that would vote for the current US admin manages to get about 20% of the electorate (although possibly more in the younger age groups).
It's also a reminder that this is a well known public forum at this point, and those are always targeted by propaganda (or have gotten a large enough mass that denialists have gotten a large enough foothold).
Back in 97-00 slashdot was an amazing site, just a gathering of inquisitive people posting cool stuff. Over the years it degenerated with more hateful stuff despite valiant efforts to adjust moderation causing early people to drop off, this place was amazing back in 2015 when I joined and the work done to keep it somewhat tidy after some 18 years is actually impressive, but I'm also feeling a lot of the same types of comments increase that made slashdot a less interesting place to begin with.
I’ve never met any reasonably intelligent person in real life that denied climate change, of any kind whatsoever, is happening…
There are many people who doubt whether the majority of the observed effect is directly human caused however.
Of course whether it’s human caused directly or human caused via 10 degrees of seperation matters little to future generations… but someone, somewhere, needs to actually do the work and provide credible rock solid proof for each and every step along the way.
Otherwise the latter group will keep on growing in size and influence.
The sheer amount of evidence that the effect is indeed predominantly human-caused is so vast and convincing that at this point, failure to accept it reads like closed minds repeating the "No true Scotsman" fallacy.
We've made a decision: we prefer to continue having this world (and all its conveniences including steak multiple times a week and flying for cheap) and lose it soon-ish than move to another one right now with less access to... stuff.
And the only way we can have it differently is with violence, which nobody wants. So we'll walk to the abyss together.
We already have insane and growing wealth inequality and stagnant wage growth. The one thing that somewhat compensated for it is cheap goods, taking that away is not a winning argument in this environment. It's also a hard sell when Jeff Bezos has a wedding in Italy where dozens of private jets flew in and collectively emitted more carbon for that one wedding than all the gasoline vehicles multiple generations of my family have driven in their lifetimes.
And yet I, with my already depressed wages and kids to feed, should sacrifice steak and coach airline tickets?
I'm all for climate action, but it has to be policy level. If it's a choice between a warming world where we're solvent with some middle class prosperity, and a warming world where my wife, kids and I are broke because we went into six figures of debt replacing our ICE cars with EVs and retrofitting my house to passivhaus stanadards, I'm taking the former.
> I'm all for climate action, but it has to be policy level
Policy level climate action is the only kind that has any hope of succeeding. That or some magic technology that can suck carbon out of the air at zero cost.
China scaling up EVs, solar, and batteries is what will do it. Most humans don’t have the will or constitution to make it happen, but China will out of rational economics. The politicians making these poor climate policy decisions will be out of office eventually. Just keep grinding towards success whenever possible while the death rate keeps aging out those slowing progress down.
(EVs and PHEVs are ~50% of car sales in China 2025 H1, global light vehicle TAM is ~90M units/year, we're installing 1GW of solar every 15 hours, roughly 1TW/year etc.)
The progress on EVs, solar, and batteries has been nothing short of stunning. It has to continue, and will spread in any place where people use brains over ideology. But it won't solve everything. We don't have emissions-free alternatives for jet travel and many industrial processes. Carbon-neutral maybe, by synthesizing hydrocarbons, but not emissions-free. And we have to undo the last 100 years of damage.
Not wrong, but we're mostly locked in on the light vehicles and electrification front, the rest (as you mention) can continue to be worked towards. There is no silver bullet, just lots of work towards all the problems at once. Half of marine traffic is moving fossil fuels around the world, for example. That evaporates in the future. India and Africa will buy electrification and light vehicles from China, versus locking in a fossil fuel based economy. Everyone who needs fossil fuels is racing away from them for obvious economic and national security reasons, and everyone selling them is going to be desperate to sell them to the shrinking demand for them. There was $800B more capital invested in clean energy (~$2T) than fossil fuels globally in 2024.
To your point, the most important part is going to be how to rapidly remove the CO2 industrialization has injected into the atmosphere. This remains to be solved for at reasonable cost, but importantly, we're going to need a material amount of low carbon energy for that process.
“This is not inevitable. We have the tools, the instruments, the capacity to change course,” Guterres said. “There are reasons to be hopeful.”
This whole climate thing is really humanity’s worst nightmare.
We’re insanely good at finding solutions, adapting, pulling together when under existential threat. I mean it, it will never cease to amaze me.
We’re shit at:
* giving stuff up for the greater good
* changing voluntarily
* trusting others (countries) to sacrifice as much as yourself
Guess which qualities we need in this case?
It’s like this huge ball with an insane inertia rolling toward us while most are still thinking “ah, I guess I have time for one more appletini, then I’ll just stop that little ball”.
My only hope is we find a cheap and scalable way to pump CO2 out, but that’s really far fetched (and it would also cause us to stop all other efforts around co2 avoidance if it was ever found…).
Electricity, heat, transportation, agriculture, and construction are the largest sectors of emissions. Therefore, electrification, low carbon energy, shelter thermal efficiency, and electrification of vehicles is of paramount importance from a prioritization perspective.
Yeah. We’re talking about the burning of gas in cars. Production of electric cars is worse that production of ICE cars in terms of CO2. So, really, we’re discussing the fraction of a fraction here.
To be clear, I am still astonished and pleased at the success of EVs.
But let’s keep it in context, it’s one battle amongst many many battles.
> Yeah. We’re talking about the burning of gas in cars. Production of electric cars is worse that production of ICE cars in terms of CO2. So, really, we’re discussing the fraction of a fraction here.
This is factually inaccurate. In all cases, EVs are superior to combustion vehicles with regards to lifecylce emissions (construction + operation).
> As electric vehicles become a bigger part of the global car fleet, a contrarian take seems to surface every few months: are electric vehicles really that clean?
> When it comes to lifecycle emissions, the answer is a resounding yes. According to a new report by BloombergNEF, in all analyzed cases, EVs have lower lifecycle emissions than gas cars. Just how much lower depends on how far they are driven, and the cleanliness of the grid where they charge.
You didn’t read the article you’re citing and you didn’t get my overall point.
To make it clear: my overall point is, the burning of gas in cars is a fraction of co2 emissions in transport, which itself is a fraction of the overall co2 emissions.
That’s my point.
Now to the detail you are mentioning (detail!), your article actually agrees with me. Production of electric cars is more co2 intensive than from ICE cars. Read it. There’s even a break even point because of this. Over their lifetime, electric cars emit less co2 though.
Read the guidelines of HN please, your comment is antagonising, offers zero value. The article cited in the other response actually confirms this statement is correct, just read it.
God, Jeff Bezos's jet is such an inane distraction that I can't believe people are still falling for this. If you're upset about Bezos's CO2 footprint, the very easy way to fix it is to tax the rich more.
And then we can use the money for EV credits, more wind farms, and other initiatives. Hell, if you're really against climate policies, we could simply burn the money and at least that could help fighting inflation.
There is one party in the US that constantly shoots down climate policies. Guess what they also do to Jeff Bezos's tax. Somehow that doesn't bother all those "climate policy skeptics" that are deeply upset about his private jet.
If there is a structural force shifting the market places of ideas and decisions, forcing certain choices or protecting and harvesting voting blocs - it’s not “we” in the sense of personal choice.
I concede, that if we define corporations as an expression of human desires - then yes, “we” have made that decision.
While ubiquitous I've lately started to ponder if we're giving them way too much credit just because some western players might have found common ground in amplifying the same messages.
I’m scrolling down and genuinely can’t see the comments you refer to. Which comments that express this sentiment constitute roughly half? Do you have links?
I keep meaning to do a project where I try and categorise this rightward drift over time. I've only been here for about 8 years on my main account but increasingly it feels comments here reflect the ideological schism in reality reflected everywhere else. This, I suppose, shouldn't be surprising, but it felt like for a while people in general held a higher standard of evidence.
As much as I'd like to chalk that up to bots, of which I'm sure there are some small amount, I think it has more to do with the ideological roots of this space. Extremists like Yarvin and Thiel are in the DNA of this forum and its userbase. Of course I'm likely to fall afoul of the guidelines even mentioning this. On any political thread you get this strange through-the-looking-glass sensation of people inhabiting an entirely disjunct reality.
And it also appears to be wholesale for many people, you can hold the position that DEI was pointless corporate propaganda and rolling it back is harmless, or H1B visas should be ended, but also that attacks on science and vaccination are bad but most people seem to have lost that nuance.
Various estimates of GDP loss from IPCC and such are iirc like 8-10%. That would catastrophically plunge us all the way to the dark ages of a few years ago. I just googled for the most alarmist estimates backed by an actual paper and the worst I could find was 12% per degree of extra warming by 2100. So, it's like going back from today to the 90ies. I mean having to listen to grunge and techno again does sound pretty catastrophic.
That almost sounds like a winning strategy in this whacko-world... "but getting rid of this would be caving to the woke beliefs of the non-christian mountain-god-worshipping natives!"
> Doesn't Mauna Loa spew CO2 by the metric ton on a regular basis?
The 1960-present chart in the article is anything but regular, instead showing a steady rise, and doesn't appear to blip up for either the 1984 or 2022 eruptions.
historical reasons. volcano aside the location is reasonable: altitude and relative isolation from human sources wothout being too out of the way to make maintenance a bear. hawaiian trade winds help with dispersal.
as for volcanism Supposedly it's in a rock creche on the mountain face facing away from the volcano, but you're right to be suspicious.
It's high up in the atmosphere and has relatively few nearby point sources like cities since it's in the middle of the Pacific ocean. It's a unique environment that provides a valuable data point.
I believe the individual was speculating that the volcano itself could be outputting large, random amounts of CO2 which could be tainting its readings.
Clean wind from the pacific is captured at the observation tower. Another point like it is Cape Grim Tassie which gets clean wind from the southern ocean.
Both of these points observe vastly cleaner air and provide that baseline.
The telescope is studying the sun. Solar events have non negligible effects of the weather. Mauna Loa produces meteorological reports used by sailors and pilots all around the world daily.
This observatory is the first one to show CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and their analyses have been cornerstone to the climate discussion since it's inception.
Unless it's shown that the observatory is burning millions, it's nonsensical to shut it down. It's not free to set up another equivalent lab.
And locations similar to Mauna Loa are not very common, to be clear. It's not gonna be cheaper to set up an equivalent.
No, you're the one speaking about the telescope, while it's not really the point.
Meteorologist have been working there since the 1960s. I'm sure you have some understanding of the conplexity of weather and the precision problems with chaotic systems.
Mauna Loa has been producing quality data since the 60s and has the means (including telescopes) to gather quality data to do quality analysis.
We didn't just strap a telescope to a building - the people in the observatory are not looking at a thermometer, a CO2 meter and then checking out asteroids by the by. Everything they do is to have quality analysis.
The works had been refined over all this time. That's why theres a telescope. Because it's pertinent.
And indeed there are good reasons to do so - many of the observatories were decommissioned starting in 2010 I believe, a long process - care to share anything that would show that's the case here?
To me this is a state of the art meteorological observatory. Unless proven otherwise, we should keep it going.
Global shipping depends on quality weather reports. Every single ship and plane (cars, trucks and trains too but y'know) needs accurate weather data very often to be on time. That's not to talk about agriculture or the people monitoring hurricanes to give evacuation orders.
Weather/Climate modelling is very complicated and complex, it is chaotic, if you want to look that up. That means we need a lot of precise and specific (or seemingly esoteric, like coronal mass ejections or CO2 concentration) data to have it. That's hard to do and you need costly equipment at remote locations, like Mauna Loa.
Many of the things that 0.001% of people don't care about are needed to maintain our quality of life. People don't care about these things because they don't have to - they are basic infrastructure that they can take for granted. Before COVID, how many people cared about rapid vaccine development during a pandemic? And how much worse would your life be now if the government hadn't spent a few of your precious tax dollars building the capacity to rapidly develop and roll out vaccines? How many people think about things like plant diseases, or nuclear security, or consumer product safety?
The funny thing is that if the government only did things that people cared about, the number of things that people would have to care about would skyrocket.
History has shown abundantly that companies will ignore risks that are small. If the risk materializes, just let the investors' money burn and found another company. Or if the company is big, just let the government step in and save your too-big-too-fail ass.
It's not a telescope[0]; it's a spectrometer that takes in local air samples. It's far more useful if it's at high elevation (else you're drowning in local/regional effects as noise), which is why it happens to be colocated with several astronomy experiments—but they are not the same equipment.
> "We have other ways to measure atmospheric CO2"
It's destroying the continuity of the world's highest-quality and longest-running dataset.
edit: Also, this CO2 observatory closure reflects the entire NOAA climate observation budget being zero'd out[1], so I don't know what where else you'd like us to look instead.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/climate/budget-cuts-clima... ("But President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would put an end to Mauna Loa, along with three other key observatories and almost all the climate research being done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.")
I think you’re thinking of the complex on Mauna Kea (which has several individual sites and has funding from several countries).
Mauna Loa has a telescope that studies the Sun in order to help understand better how that contributes to changing weather patterns on Earth. It is a relatively small site but very important.
The reason that telescopes are often in high up, hard to reach places is because that is the most efficient, cost-effective place for them to be.
I think you are just fundamentally confused. There are two separate entities with similar names. There's the Mauna Loa Observatory, which is what's being discussed here, and there are the Mauna Kea Observatories. The latter one has the telescopes. The Mauna Loa Observatory monitors the atmosphere. It has other types of sensors that are useful for atmospheric science. It isn't an astronomical observatory that just happens to have a CO2 sensor. It was specifically set up in the 1950s to study the atmosphere because of the advantages of being at that specific location. It just happens to have a name that's similar to an institution that does have telescopes.
Maintaining just the co2 station is probably inexpensive enough that people who care could scrounge for coins under their cushions and keep it alive. I'd happily chip in let's say $50/yr.
Why does this seem so idiomatically ridiculous? It is not just the italics, but they do reinforce the statement.
The center of the Pacific is not interchangeable with many other places, to observe the atmosphere. Like maintaining a telescope in Seattle would be so much more practical?
It’s in italics because, if the telescope is outdated or otherwise worth shutting down, keeping it around because it also makes a CO2 measurement is dumb.
I don’t know why they’re cutting it, but the article is just wildly speculating.
That article doesn’t say what you’re asserting. It says that they’re cutting OAR, National Marine Fisheries Service, and some other things. The writer then goes on to say that OAR, in particular, does climate research. But it’s the research arm of NOAA, so that’s to be expected.
To go from this to “being shut down exactly and entirely because it is a station that performs climate research” is not a defensible statement.
I’m not saying that it’s inconceivable that the current administration is cutting funding that affects Mauna Loa because of climate ideology; I’m saying that without evidence, you’re leaping to conclusions that may or may not be justified.
> I’m not saying that it’s inconceivable that the current administration is cutting funding that affects Mauna Loa because of climate ideology; I’m saying that without evidence, you’re leaping to conclusions that may or may not be justified.
Okay, but if I had to make an assumption, I, and any reasonable person on Earth, would assume it's because of the extremist ideology of this administration.
They're anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-oil. Explicitly. I'm not saying this, they're bragging about it. And then things like this keep happening.
Hmm. Now if I were naive and stupid, I might say that it's just a coincidence. Luckily I am not, and I'm confident in say that yes, almost certainly the current administration and political climate has something to do with this.
I think there is more than enough evidence and that article covers it well enough, but here’s another one.
‘[Current OMB director Russ] Vought wrote in Project 2025 that NOAA should be disassembled because it is the “source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and said the “preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”’
It was one of the stated goals of Project 2025, explicitly for the reasons stated, and now one of the proposers of that specific goal is in charge of executing it, and it is being executed in precisely the way outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto.
In addition to the high altitude and the isolation from human CO2 sources, they also have decades of data from that location, and having long time-series data is helpful.
The Trump administration is cutting many worthy science projects, often for arbitrary or political reasons.
It's not just the NOAA monitoring station in Hawaii that's being closed, but also those in Alaska, Samoa and Antartica.
If it was just the Hawaii station, we could quibble over its merics (volcanic activity, etc.), but closing all four means only one thing: the US doesn't want data that tracks climate change.
If you don't track it, you don't have to do anything about it.
Assuming we survive, I can't imagine how future generations will look back on all these attempts at climate change denialism in their history books, dumbfounded by our stupidity.
they are operating under a reprieve for another couple of weeks, and then will have to re calibrate and re validate the data from another less good satelite..... "or something"*
Politically, try framing this as "Trump is trying another coverup, like Epstein and Jan 6th". It's coverups that doom politicians, because they draw attention to the problem.
Trump leaned during the first administration that if you simply avoid testing for COVID, the case count drops dramatically. The voters rewarded him for this behavior with a second term.
The voters punished his handling of the pandemic by rejecting a second term, then a few years later they sorta forgot what happened I guess or maybe didn't want to vote for a woman.
Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing and basically means that if you do something that might have a positive payoff in 5 years, you're basically doing an assist for the other side of the aisle. One party knows this and routinely passes tax cuts that are set to expire almost exactly when they lose power... The other side knows this but I guess tries to do the right thing anyway.
I'm sure there's some of that, but also ... a permanent tax cut comes with a negative budget estimate. A temporary tax cut doesn't look so bad. Then when it's time for the cut to expiring, making it permanent doesn't look as bad as it did when it was first proposed. Also, make the tax cut now, demand a balanced budget to make spending cuts when the other party is in power. </rant>
Most presidents assume they will still be in office in year 5. So it's not as bad of plan as you suggest. It's just risky as elections are not a sure victory for the incumbent.
Right, I mixed up my measures (mixed the hike on gas price that gave us yellow jackets in Europe with the us prices, which had a hoke but much smaller.)
Sorry.
That inflation was in large part a very-predictable bullwhip effect of what happened in 2020 and possibly could've been prevented by supply-side interventions in 2020, but voters were not punishing Trump for it in 2020. He lost votes for appearing generally inept in the face of a pandemic (probably nobody would do better) and in the face of police violence and protests (much of his base felt he should have been much more authoritarian from the federal level even then).
Or just don't publish the data at all. It's why China's count of COVID-19 mortality relative to its (arguably deflated) case count is off by an order of magnitude [0].
Money wins all the time and the GOP is happy to take it for supporting fossil fuels. But the climate change fix party (democrats) is more than happy to open up new Oil Fields if they think high gas prices will hurt their election chances. That happened under Biden.
So here we are, seeing heat records being broken every year and storms causing more and more damage. Everyone knew this would happen 60+ years ago, but the bribes kept the gov. kicking the can down the road.
At least by closing Mauna Loa the facts can be denied going forward.
Ooh! This is actually a bit of a passive, niche interest of mine. It should be noted I am not a professional historian. I just read a lot of material and watch a lot of interviews and documentaries.
The Nazis fell behind in atomic research for a variety of reasons, each with its own underpinnings. One of the most interesting in my mind was organizational failings. Although many different groups were working in this area, the regime leadership was rather disconnected and didn’t prioritize a coherent or integrated research effort. They didn’t provide much funding either. In some ways this created more room for unstructured scientific inquiry and creativity, but it also meant that no particular group could make any real progress toward usable reactors or weapons.
Contrast this with the Manhattan Project in the US (and the UK’s efforts at radar), which was supported and managed from the highest levels of government with a figurative blank check and despite immense compartmentalization also had a high degree of integration among disciplines and sites. There was one goal.
In my view this is an interesting manifestation of the foundation of the Third Reich. In Martin Davidson’s The Perfect Nazi, Davidson notes that the Nazi party was in many ways a child’s cosplay turned into a nightmare. Davidson writes that one of the key failings of the regime is that it was run by broken people who had more of an interest in catharsis than any real sense of society, advancement, or cohesion.
For radar, RV Jones' "Most Secret War" has an anecdote where the British raid a German coastal radar site (in France), nab the radar operator and are annoyed to discover that they know almost nothing about German radar. Pre-war Germany is already a fascist dictatorship so "ham" radio operators are enemies of the state because they're outside of your centrally controlled narrative. Whereas pre-war Britain has the usual amount of amateurs with radios. So when war broke out and they're conscripting towns at a time the British would see you're a ham and divert you from infantry training or whatever and make you a radar operator - which means the average British radar operator actually has some idea how radio works but the Germans are obliged to basically just pick a soldier and train him to operate the radar from scratch.
This apparently had significant operational consequences because if you don't know how it works all you can do when there's a fault is order spare parts. So German radar stations would be offline more often and for longer. Although Chain Home's transmitters were wildly more powerful than anything even a rich British amateur might have seen before, not to mention operating on frequencies unachievable with prior technology, the principles were familiar.
That is a fantastic contribution to the conversation. I think I’ve heard or read accounts that, if I’d thought long and hard about, might have led me to understand this, but this is new information to me.
I have seen Most Secret War recommended to me by basically every physical and ebook seller I have an account with, so I guess it’s time to take one of them up on the offer. Thank you!
Depends on the research. For some areas such as gender science, they swooped in and literally burned decades worth of research [1]. And fwiw, even medicine was considered political - the term "Schulmedizin" was popularized by the Nazis who preferred esoterics, homeopathy and other quackery.
IMHO, it's more than warranted to call out parallels between events back then and events happening right under our noses today [2], not to mention the increasing and worrying trend of book bans [3].
Realizing that the book burnings in the 1930s were not performed by the dumb Nazi brutes we know from movies like Indiana Jones, but by student organizations (e.g. what should be sufficiently smart people) was a bit of a shock to me (not really anymore from today's point of view seeing how easy otherwise smart people get themselves into a spiral of hate and fascist ideology).
So, it was smart and young German students that wanted to get rid of most or all of the material produced by one of the earliest institutions on the planet dealing with controversial topics like birth control, LGBT, fetishism, sadomasochism and venereal disease.
The founder and most of the researchers there were Jewish, so I wouldn't discard an antisemitic motive behind that as well.
As you say, I always bought the "dumb nazis burned books" story, but this context makes me think about the event in a much different way.
There's an ongoing and horrifically absurd witch-hunt against Chinese science grad students, led by MAGA FBI director Kesh Patel. He makes very popular Twitter threads for each one he arrests, drumming up a MAGA frenzy about how their insane conspiracy theories—the ones about an organized Chinese bioterrorism plot to kill Americans—were proven correct, again.
There are young PhD students who've been imprisoned for months without bail over these fictions.
The C. elegans PhD student at Univ. of Michigan was ordered held without bond[0], in June; and the Harvard Medical School researcher was freed by a judge after being—unlawfully—caged by ICE for 116 days[1].
Here's[2] the FBI director's Twitter thread about the C. elegans researcher, for a flavor of the MAGA sociology that's driving this. [edit]: His rhetoric in the case in [3] is even less hingèd.
[2] https://xcancel.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/19322140473000796... ("This case is part of a broader effort from the FBI and our federal partners to heavily crack down on similar pathogeon [sic] smuggling operations, as the CCP works relentlessly to undermine America’s research institutions.")
[3] https://xcancel.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/19300448842845230... ("This case is a sobering reminder that the CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply, which would have grave consequences... putting American lives and our economy at serious risk. Your FBI will continue working tirelessly to be on guard against it.")
>After being charged last month with trying to smuggle frog embryos into the United States, Kseniia Petrova, a Russian bioinformatician, was indicted on 25 June on additional charges by a grand jury in Boston, Massachusetts — including making a false statement to customs agents.
Well, that's ... something.
Honestly, when I first read your comment I got the impression that these students might have done something innocuous that got grossly misinterpreted (perhaps on purpose) and that's how they got in trouble ...
But the ones you showed so far did engage, quite clearly, in criminal behavior. I don't think ICE/Patel/Trump should be blamed for that.
Chinese scholar from UM Chengxuan Han expected to plead guilty in smuggling case
"During the secondary inspection, Han made false statements that she had not sent packages to members of the UM Lab," an FBI agent wrote in the court filing. "When pressed, Han admitted that she had shipped packages to members of the UM Lab. Han initially stated to (Customs and Border Patrol) officers that the packages were plastic cups (rather than petri dishes) and a book (omitting the envelope with suspected biological materials concealed in it)."
The FBI counterintelligence case against UM scholar Yunqing Jian, 33, and her boyfriend, 34-year-old Zunyong Liu, involves allegations that Jian received money from a Chinese foundation funded largely by the Chinese government to conduct post-doctoral work. That includes research on a fungus known as Fusarium graminearum, a biological pathogen that can cause devastating diseases in crops.
Maybe these students are getting overcharged, but they were clearly caught smuggling.
#3, regardless of intent, is definitely illegal shit. how can you possibly think its ok to smuggle pthogenic fungus into the the country in baggies, then lie about it.
it's also surprising there wasn't more scrutiny in the past. there are colonels in the PLA that have actively called for and published materials calling for agro and bio terrorism against the US, and all chinese nationals are required to debrief on return.
> Experts doubt that the smuggled fungus could be used effectively, since the logistics, as well as physical conditions, such as temperature and humidity, for creating a widespread infection with this pathogen are not straightforward. Furthermore, this fungal infection can be prevented and/or controlled with the use of pesticides and cultural practices, like harvesting early to stop fungal growth. Having said that, if the strain that Jian and Liu brought into the U.S is a new potent variant, there is a possibility of it being an effective weapon. Nevertheless, F. graminearum has been studied in the U.S. for more than a century, and it is a common factor to treat in food safety protocols.
You'd expect the CCP to be a little better at it if that were the intention.
The samples were completely common, the fungus is endemic to the US already and the PhDs are studying them for US institutions to lessen their impact on US crops.
Forgot to mention that the press releases make a critical typo that makes them seem extremely nefarious and implies they were planning on some sort of warfare when it’s extremely benign…
“While searching one of Liu’s cell phones, they found an article in PDF form titled “2018 Plant Pathogen Warfare under Changing Climate Conditions.” Authorities said the article specifically referenced Fusarium graminearum as “an example of a destructive disease and pathogen for crops” and is “responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year.”
But the actual article is about the ‘warfare’ between plants and pathogens in a world with a changing climate as denoted by the hyphen in the title..
“Plant-Pathogen Warfare under Changing Climate Conditions”
There is great need for future research to increasingly use dynamic environmental conditions in order to fully understand the multidimensional nature of plant-pathogen interactions and produce disease-resistant crop plants that are resilient to climate change.
what the actual fuck? you do not smuggle lab samples in baggies. that is suspicious behavior. you send it through the post and let authorities know you are doing it by declaring it.
Eh, the most believable conspiracy is gain of function research accidentally escaped a lab because of poor controls and then was covered up.
Gain of function research can be done for lots of reasons, one of which is offensive biological weapons, but there are others. It's pretty irresponsible to do regardless of your justification. But these were chinese researchers in china, not grad students.
China has been using students to acquire US technology, but we don't need crazy bioterrorism conspiracies. They were students, they came here to pay to learn things, it is no conspiracy that people on student visas learned things at the universities they attended. On top of that there have been inappropriate, illegal, or otherwise undesirable things foreign students have done that look a lot like espionage.
The basic problem is that democrats pretend problems don't exist and republicans pretend the problems are existential threat devil boogey monsters that need to be solved by sending people to gulags.
There's an excluded middle here where people want reasonable responses to potential issues.
I think the larger announcements yet to come, will crumble the current religion we call Science. I'd like to get back to REAL science with a lower case s.
Both of you have a screw loose and need to stop accepting the premise of the loudest idiots on social media and assuming the people who speak the loudest are representative of the feelings of people at large.
> Four years ago you couldn't even remotely mention this as a possibility; even, and particularly, among "the most educated"™ and "the most tolerant"™.
> will crumble the current religion we call Science
Facts: people who talk like this are pontificating nonsense and are never worth talking to because speech like this indicates a person has zero interest in an actual discussion. I want to insult instead of debate because I truly believe people who talk like this need to be publicly shamed for discourse like this. It is a root cause of the destabilization of our society and needs to be stopped. You're talking like an AM radio conspiracy call-in nutjob. If you want to be taken seriously, don't channel the ghost of Rush Limbaugh in your rhetoric.
I haven’t followed these cases, but are you anti due process? How do you know these are fictions? Are you on the inside? It sounds like the cases will be tried in court and we will find out what’s true. Are you saying that’s not the case?
It is so easy to destroy infrastructure and expertise that has taken decades to build. All so Trump and his buddies can get even bigger tax breaks. It is enough to make you cry.
BTW 'Barbarian' get a bad rap. They were in many ways more civilized than the Romans. But the Romans were really good at killing people and got to write the history.
That's a weird translation of the original Russian term for it. A more accurate translation would be "vermin" (it's the same word in Russian, and it's clearly meant to evoke that image).
> The air that swirls around the isolated outpost located on a Hawaiian volcano is a mix from all over the Northern Hemisphere. That makes it one of the best places to measure greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It is indispensable to scientists around the world.
If you can SLAP one somewhere, then slap one on the Mauna Loa and be done with finding an issue with Trump and do something in your god damn life without forcing me to pay taxes for crap.
The whole point is to collect time-series data at a location that's isolated from individual sources of CO2 emissions. That way we can see how CO2 concentrations are changing over long periods of time.
Your comment doesn't make any sense. If you shut down the measurement, you don't have any data going forward, so the data cannot be "everywhere". And you cannot substitute data collected in another location if you want to measure changes over time - which is a really important thing to measure.
We really need prediction markets for these climate variables. It would do an awful lot to cut through the politicization of what the models can and can't reliably predict. A transaction fee for a market predicting this observatory's measurements could be used to help pay for the up keep of the observatory.
Please give me the (safe) place where I can bet that the CO2 concentration will be higher next year than now. And show me the (solvent) people ready to bet the contrary.
My next bet will be about "fire burns" and "water wets", please. [1]
The fact that roughly half the comments here are some sort of weakly veiled climate denialism tells me it won't matter how much data we have anyway.
If members of a reasonably technical community can't accept what's happening, then there's no reasonable hope that people will ever be able to reason about our situation correctly. We are surrounded by evidence of all varieties in every direction that we are heading down a path of catastrophic climate change, and yet people contort their logic to find ways not to see it.
I think of my experience with real world technical people, maybe 2-4% are denialists but those are also very vocal (enough to saturate a place like this). Another 4-10% are under the sway, and I think that's a fairly reasonable assumption since in Sweden the party that represent those that would vote for the current US admin manages to get about 20% of the electorate (although possibly more in the younger age groups).
It's also a reminder that this is a well known public forum at this point, and those are always targeted by propaganda (or have gotten a large enough mass that denialists have gotten a large enough foothold).
Back in 97-00 slashdot was an amazing site, just a gathering of inquisitive people posting cool stuff. Over the years it degenerated with more hateful stuff despite valiant efforts to adjust moderation causing early people to drop off, this place was amazing back in 2015 when I joined and the work done to keep it somewhat tidy after some 18 years is actually impressive, but I'm also feeling a lot of the same types of comments increase that made slashdot a less interesting place to begin with.
I’ve never met any reasonably intelligent person in real life that denied climate change, of any kind whatsoever, is happening…
There are many people who doubt whether the majority of the observed effect is directly human caused however.
Of course whether it’s human caused directly or human caused via 10 degrees of seperation matters little to future generations… but someone, somewhere, needs to actually do the work and provide credible rock solid proof for each and every step along the way.
Otherwise the latter group will keep on growing in size and influence.
The sheer amount of evidence that the effect is indeed predominantly human-caused is so vast and convincing that at this point, failure to accept it reads like closed minds repeating the "No true Scotsman" fallacy.
We've made a decision: we prefer to continue having this world (and all its conveniences including steak multiple times a week and flying for cheap) and lose it soon-ish than move to another one right now with less access to... stuff.
And the only way we can have it differently is with violence, which nobody wants. So we'll walk to the abyss together.
We already have insane and growing wealth inequality and stagnant wage growth. The one thing that somewhat compensated for it is cheap goods, taking that away is not a winning argument in this environment. It's also a hard sell when Jeff Bezos has a wedding in Italy where dozens of private jets flew in and collectively emitted more carbon for that one wedding than all the gasoline vehicles multiple generations of my family have driven in their lifetimes.
And yet I, with my already depressed wages and kids to feed, should sacrifice steak and coach airline tickets?
I'm all for climate action, but it has to be policy level. If it's a choice between a warming world where we're solvent with some middle class prosperity, and a warming world where my wife, kids and I are broke because we went into six figures of debt replacing our ICE cars with EVs and retrofitting my house to passivhaus stanadards, I'm taking the former.
> I'm all for climate action, but it has to be policy level
Policy level climate action is the only kind that has any hope of succeeding. That or some magic technology that can suck carbon out of the air at zero cost.
China scaling up EVs, solar, and batteries is what will do it. Most humans don’t have the will or constitution to make it happen, but China will out of rational economics. The politicians making these poor climate policy decisions will be out of office eventually. Just keep grinding towards success whenever possible while the death rate keeps aging out those slowing progress down.
(EVs and PHEVs are ~50% of car sales in China 2025 H1, global light vehicle TAM is ~90M units/year, we're installing 1GW of solar every 15 hours, roughly 1TW/year etc.)
The progress on EVs, solar, and batteries has been nothing short of stunning. It has to continue, and will spread in any place where people use brains over ideology. But it won't solve everything. We don't have emissions-free alternatives for jet travel and many industrial processes. Carbon-neutral maybe, by synthesizing hydrocarbons, but not emissions-free. And we have to undo the last 100 years of damage.
Not wrong, but we're mostly locked in on the light vehicles and electrification front, the rest (as you mention) can continue to be worked towards. There is no silver bullet, just lots of work towards all the problems at once. Half of marine traffic is moving fossil fuels around the world, for example. That evaporates in the future. India and Africa will buy electrification and light vehicles from China, versus locking in a fossil fuel based economy. Everyone who needs fossil fuels is racing away from them for obvious economic and national security reasons, and everyone selling them is going to be desperate to sell them to the shrinking demand for them. There was $800B more capital invested in clean energy (~$2T) than fossil fuels globally in 2024.
To your point, the most important part is going to be how to rapidly remove the CO2 industrialization has injected into the atmosphere. This remains to be solved for at reasonable cost, but importantly, we're going to need a material amount of low carbon energy for that process.
“This is not inevitable. We have the tools, the instruments, the capacity to change course,” Guterres said. “There are reasons to be hopeful.”
https://halifax.citynews.ca/2025/07/22/un-says-booming-solar...
https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-solar-wind-power-f...
https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un-energy-transiti...
Aren’t cars just a fraction of the CO2 issue?
This whole climate thing is really humanity’s worst nightmare.
We’re insanely good at finding solutions, adapting, pulling together when under existential threat. I mean it, it will never cease to amaze me.
We’re shit at: * giving stuff up for the greater good * changing voluntarily * trusting others (countries) to sacrifice as much as yourself
Guess which qualities we need in this case?
It’s like this huge ball with an insane inertia rolling toward us while most are still thinking “ah, I guess I have time for one more appletini, then I’ll just stop that little ball”.
My only hope is we find a cheap and scalable way to pump CO2 out, but that’s really far fetched (and it would also cause us to stop all other efforts around co2 avoidance if it was ever found…).
Electricity, heat, transportation, agriculture, and construction are the largest sectors of emissions. Therefore, electrification, low carbon energy, shelter thermal efficiency, and electrification of vehicles is of paramount importance from a prioritization perspective.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Yeah. We’re talking about the burning of gas in cars. Production of electric cars is worse that production of ICE cars in terms of CO2. So, really, we’re discussing the fraction of a fraction here.
To be clear, I am still astonished and pleased at the success of EVs.
But let’s keep it in context, it’s one battle amongst many many battles.
> Yeah. We’re talking about the burning of gas in cars. Production of electric cars is worse that production of ICE cars in terms of CO2. So, really, we’re discussing the fraction of a fraction here.
This is factually inaccurate. In all cases, EVs are superior to combustion vehicles with regards to lifecylce emissions (construction + operation).
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/no-doubt-abo...
> As electric vehicles become a bigger part of the global car fleet, a contrarian take seems to surface every few months: are electric vehicles really that clean?
> When it comes to lifecycle emissions, the answer is a resounding yes. According to a new report by BloombergNEF, in all analyzed cases, EVs have lower lifecycle emissions than gas cars. Just how much lower depends on how far they are driven, and the cleanliness of the grid where they charge.
You didn’t read the article you’re citing and you didn’t get my overall point.
To make it clear: my overall point is, the burning of gas in cars is a fraction of co2 emissions in transport, which itself is a fraction of the overall co2 emissions.
That’s my point.
Now to the detail you are mentioning (detail!), your article actually agrees with me. Production of electric cars is more co2 intensive than from ICE cars. Read it. There’s even a break even point because of this. Over their lifetime, electric cars emit less co2 though.
> Production of electric cars is worse that production of ICE cars in terms of CO2
Politely, stop peddling horseshit.
Read the guidelines of HN please, your comment is antagonising, offers zero value. The article cited in the other response actually confirms this statement is correct, just read it.
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God, Jeff Bezos's jet is such an inane distraction that I can't believe people are still falling for this. If you're upset about Bezos's CO2 footprint, the very easy way to fix it is to tax the rich more.
And then we can use the money for EV credits, more wind farms, and other initiatives. Hell, if you're really against climate policies, we could simply burn the money and at least that could help fighting inflation.
There is one party in the US that constantly shoots down climate policies. Guess what they also do to Jeff Bezos's tax. Somehow that doesn't bother all those "climate policy skeptics" that are deeply upset about his private jet.
I believe the parent comment was speaking of violence as the answer, not EVs or veganism.
We - depends on the definition.
If there is a structural force shifting the market places of ideas and decisions, forcing certain choices or protecting and harvesting voting blocs - it’s not “we” in the sense of personal choice.
I concede, that if we define corporations as an expression of human desires - then yes, “we” have made that decision.
"but I worked really hard to EARN that steak. I'm not having some goddamn commie take it away from me."
"The rich declare themselves poor" - George Michael, Praying For Time, 1990.
You underestimate Russia's spambots.
While ubiquitous I've lately started to ponder if we're giving them way too much credit just because some western players might have found common ground in amplifying the same messages.
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I’m scrolling down and genuinely can’t see the comments you refer to. Which comments that express this sentiment constitute roughly half? Do you have links?
I keep meaning to do a project where I try and categorise this rightward drift over time. I've only been here for about 8 years on my main account but increasingly it feels comments here reflect the ideological schism in reality reflected everywhere else. This, I suppose, shouldn't be surprising, but it felt like for a while people in general held a higher standard of evidence.
As much as I'd like to chalk that up to bots, of which I'm sure there are some small amount, I think it has more to do with the ideological roots of this space. Extremists like Yarvin and Thiel are in the DNA of this forum and its userbase. Of course I'm likely to fall afoul of the guidelines even mentioning this. On any political thread you get this strange through-the-looking-glass sensation of people inhabiting an entirely disjunct reality.
And it also appears to be wholesale for many people, you can hold the position that DEI was pointless corporate propaganda and rolling it back is harmless, or H1B visas should be ended, but also that attacks on science and vaccination are bad but most people seem to have lost that nuance.
Various estimates of GDP loss from IPCC and such are iirc like 8-10%. That would catastrophically plunge us all the way to the dark ages of a few years ago. I just googled for the most alarmist estimates backed by an actual paper and the worst I could find was 12% per degree of extra warming by 2100. So, it's like going back from today to the 90ies. I mean having to listen to grunge and techno again does sound pretty catastrophic.
The Hawaiians have been trying to get rid of the observatory for a long time now, they were finally successful?
That almost sounds like a winning strategy in this whacko-world... "but getting rid of this would be caving to the woke beliefs of the non-christian mountain-god-worshipping natives!"
There are a number of telescopes on Mauna Loa which have not been removed, just this sensor.
I don't want to touch that flame hazard with a thirty-meter pole, but, just to clarify context:
- The entirety of the Mauna Loa observatory, which is operated by NOAA (weather guys), is being shut down;
- The vastly larger Mauna Kea observatories, hosting dozens of federal and international clients, is unrelated
Ah, thank you. I might have gotten the two mixed up.
Doesn't Mauna Loa spew CO2 by the metric ton on a regular basis? Why is that vantage point the best source of atmospheric CO2 ppm?
> Doesn't Mauna Loa spew CO2 by the metric ton on a regular basis?
The 1960-present chart in the article is anything but regular, instead showing a steady rise, and doesn't appear to blip up for either the 1984 or 2022 eruptions.
> anything but regular
From context your meaning is clear, but I think you got that idiom inverted.
historical reasons. volcano aside the location is reasonable: altitude and relative isolation from human sources wothout being too out of the way to make maintenance a bear. hawaiian trade winds help with dispersal.
as for volcanism Supposedly it's in a rock creche on the mountain face facing away from the volcano, but you're right to be suspicious.
It's high up in the atmosphere and has relatively few nearby point sources like cities since it's in the middle of the Pacific ocean. It's a unique environment that provides a valuable data point.
I believe the individual was speculating that the volcano itself could be outputting large, random amounts of CO2 which could be tainting its readings.
Which would be pretty obvious in the chart in the article, if it were the case.
Maybe they’ve thought about this and measure that too? Maybe they can adjust measurements based on data from multiple sensors?
https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/volc...
You're thinking of Mauna Kea, which is some distance - both horizontally and vertically - from Mauna Loa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa_Observatory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_eruption_of_Mauna_Loa
Mauna Kea is dormant for the last 5k years or so.
You're right - I meant Kilauea
Clean wind from the pacific is captured at the observation tower. Another point like it is Cape Grim Tassie which gets clean wind from the southern ocean.
Both of these points observe vastly cleaner air and provide that baseline.
The revolution will not be televised. Once we shut down all the alarms they will stop making noise, but that won't address what is triggering them.
It is not the only measurement of global CO2 source, anyway, but as a base point for long enough trend.
We have other ways to measure atmospheric CO2 that don’t require maintaining a telescope in Hawaii.
I don’t know why the funding cut is being made, but this article is leaping to a conclusion.
The telescope is studying the sun. Solar events have non negligible effects of the weather. Mauna Loa produces meteorological reports used by sailors and pilots all around the world daily.
This observatory is the first one to show CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and their analyses have been cornerstone to the climate discussion since it's inception.
Unless it's shown that the observatory is burning millions, it's nonsensical to shut it down. It's not free to set up another equivalent lab.
And locations similar to Mauna Loa are not very common, to be clear. It's not gonna be cheaper to set up an equivalent.
Well, at least you’re bothering to have the argument that the article didn’t, but you’re also just speculating about the cost/benefit.
There are good reasons to shut down telescopes, including age, outdated technology, and deprecation.
No, you're the one speaking about the telescope, while it's not really the point.
Meteorologist have been working there since the 1960s. I'm sure you have some understanding of the conplexity of weather and the precision problems with chaotic systems.
Mauna Loa has been producing quality data since the 60s and has the means (including telescopes) to gather quality data to do quality analysis.
We didn't just strap a telescope to a building - the people in the observatory are not looking at a thermometer, a CO2 meter and then checking out asteroids by the by. Everything they do is to have quality analysis.
The works had been refined over all this time. That's why theres a telescope. Because it's pertinent.
And indeed there are good reasons to do so - many of the observatories were decommissioned starting in 2010 I believe, a long process - care to share anything that would show that's the case here?
To me this is a state of the art meteorological observatory. Unless proven otherwise, we should keep it going.
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Global shipping depends on quality weather reports. Every single ship and plane (cars, trucks and trains too but y'know) needs accurate weather data very often to be on time. That's not to talk about agriculture or the people monitoring hurricanes to give evacuation orders.
Weather/Climate modelling is very complicated and complex, it is chaotic, if you want to look that up. That means we need a lot of precise and specific (or seemingly esoteric, like coronal mass ejections or CO2 concentration) data to have it. That's hard to do and you need costly equipment at remote locations, like Mauna Loa.
It's not for nerds.
Then have "global shipping" pay for it. I'm sure there are massive insurance companies with policies on giant boats that could help foot that bill.
If you get a line-item veto on your 1040 form, then I get one, too. You won't like what I use mine for.
But maybe we can agree that we should, in fact, provide that option to taxpayers.
Many of the things that 0.001% of people don't care about are needed to maintain our quality of life. People don't care about these things because they don't have to - they are basic infrastructure that they can take for granted. Before COVID, how many people cared about rapid vaccine development during a pandemic? And how much worse would your life be now if the government hadn't spent a few of your precious tax dollars building the capacity to rapidly develop and roll out vaccines? How many people think about things like plant diseases, or nuclear security, or consumer product safety?
The funny thing is that if the government only did things that people cared about, the number of things that people would have to care about would skyrocket.
And those skyrocketing concerns could be paid for by large and robust employment in the private sector.
History has shown abundantly that companies will ignore risks that are small. If the risk materializes, just let the investors' money burn and found another company. Or if the company is big, just let the government step in and save your too-big-too-fail ass.
But it's not a telescope that's measuring the CO2.
Exactly! You want to continue measuring CO2 from the same spot? Much easier and less expensive ways to do it.
It's not a telescope[0]; it's a spectrometer that takes in local air samples. It's far more useful if it's at high elevation (else you're drowning in local/regional effects as noise), which is why it happens to be colocated with several astronomy experiments—but they are not the same equipment.
> "We have other ways to measure atmospheric CO2"
It's destroying the continuity of the world's highest-quality and longest-running dataset.
edit: Also, this CO2 observatory closure reflects the entire NOAA climate observation budget being zero'd out[1], so I don't know what where else you'd like us to look instead.
[0] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/climate/budget-cuts-clima... ("But President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would put an end to Mauna Loa, along with three other key observatories and almost all the climate research being done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.")
The thing they’re talking about is a telescope. They incidentally have a CO2 meter there.
Running just the CO2 meter is something that could be done remotely, without the need for a telescope, at a tiny fraction of the cost.
It's not a cheap CO2 room sensor you got off aliexpress.
I didn’t say it was. It’s still orders of magnitude cheaper than maintaining an entire telescope complex on top of a Hawaiian island.
I think you’re thinking of the complex on Mauna Kea (which has several individual sites and has funding from several countries).
Mauna Loa has a telescope that studies the Sun in order to help understand better how that contributes to changing weather patterns on Earth. It is a relatively small site but very important.
The reason that telescopes are often in high up, hard to reach places is because that is the most efficient, cost-effective place for them to be.
I think you are just fundamentally confused. There are two separate entities with similar names. There's the Mauna Loa Observatory, which is what's being discussed here, and there are the Mauna Kea Observatories. The latter one has the telescopes. The Mauna Loa Observatory monitors the atmosphere. It has other types of sensors that are useful for atmospheric science. It isn't an astronomical observatory that just happens to have a CO2 sensor. It was specifically set up in the 1950s to study the atmosphere because of the advantages of being at that specific location. It just happens to have a name that's similar to an institution that does have telescopes.
Perhaps you should have some basic familiarity with what they do before deciding that they shouldn't be doing it. https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/programs.html
Maintaining just the co2 station is probably inexpensive enough that people who care could scrounge for coins under their cushions and keep it alive. I'd happily chip in let's say $50/yr.
No need to scrounge! What if just a tiny bit of our taxes went to this?
what if we all paid for things that made the world better out of our own pockets? or do we not believe in those things if it's inconvenient to us?
> maintaining a telescope in Hawaii
Why does this seem so idiomatically ridiculous? It is not just the italics, but they do reinforce the statement.
The center of the Pacific is not interchangeable with many other places, to observe the atmosphere. Like maintaining a telescope in Seattle would be so much more practical?
It’s in italics because, if the telescope is outdated or otherwise worth shutting down, keeping it around because it also makes a CO2 measurement is dumb.
I don’t know why they’re cutting it, but the article is just wildly speculating.
it is being shut down exactly and entirely because it is a station that performs climate research, as per the White House 2026 budget proposal:
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/11/nx-s1-5361366/major-budget-cu...
That article doesn’t say what you’re asserting. It says that they’re cutting OAR, National Marine Fisheries Service, and some other things. The writer then goes on to say that OAR, in particular, does climate research. But it’s the research arm of NOAA, so that’s to be expected.
To go from this to “being shut down exactly and entirely because it is a station that performs climate research” is not a defensible statement.
I’m not saying that it’s inconceivable that the current administration is cutting funding that affects Mauna Loa because of climate ideology; I’m saying that without evidence, you’re leaping to conclusions that may or may not be justified.
> I’m not saying that it’s inconceivable that the current administration is cutting funding that affects Mauna Loa because of climate ideology; I’m saying that without evidence, you’re leaping to conclusions that may or may not be justified.
Okay, but if I had to make an assumption, I, and any reasonable person on Earth, would assume it's because of the extremist ideology of this administration.
They're anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-oil. Explicitly. I'm not saying this, they're bragging about it. And then things like this keep happening.
Hmm. Now if I were naive and stupid, I might say that it's just a coincidence. Luckily I am not, and I'm confident in say that yes, almost certainly the current administration and political climate has something to do with this.
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I think there is more than enough evidence and that article covers it well enough, but here’s another one.
‘[Current OMB director Russ] Vought wrote in Project 2025 that NOAA should be disassembled because it is the “source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism” and said the “preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”’
It was one of the stated goals of Project 2025, explicitly for the reasons stated, and now one of the proposers of that specific goal is in charge of executing it, and it is being executed in precisely the way outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/11/white-house-plan-gu...
You always have ways to not invest in science and research. To break liberal and scientific work and data lineages.
In addition to the high altitude and the isolation from human CO2 sources, they also have decades of data from that location, and having long time-series data is helpful.
The Trump administration is cutting many worthy science projects, often for arbitrary or political reasons.
It's not just the NOAA monitoring station in Hawaii that's being closed, but also those in Alaska, Samoa and Antartica.
If it was just the Hawaii station, we could quibble over its merics (volcanic activity, etc.), but closing all four means only one thing: the US doesn't want data that tracks climate change.
If you don't track it, you don't have to do anything about it.
Assuming we survive, I can't imagine how future generations will look back on all these attempts at climate change denialism in their history books, dumbfounded by our stupidity.
also on the hit list on.the way to setting an all time low for polar ice, right now
https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today
they are operating under a reprieve for another couple of weeks, and then will have to re calibrate and re validate the data from another less good satelite..... "or something"*
* new scientific term
Don't Look Up...
™
Politically, try framing this as "Trump is trying another coverup, like Epstein and Jan 6th". It's coverups that doom politicians, because they draw attention to the problem.
But Trump already had Jan 6th and Esptein happend to him and nothing happened.
I don't think there's a way you can spin it.
Like those country leaders in Europe towards the middle of the last century, with the mustache, the newspapers couldn't have spun it away, y'know?
Epstein is rather unusual for Trump in that it's actually lingering.
His other coverups have not had any significant impact on his supporters. Quite a few have been enthusiastically embraced, like the Jan 6 pardons.
Trump leaned during the first administration that if you simply avoid testing for COVID, the case count drops dramatically. The voters rewarded him for this behavior with a second term.
The voters punished his handling of the pandemic by rejecting a second term, then a few years later they sorta forgot what happened I guess or maybe didn't want to vote for a woman.
The electorate has the memory of a goldfish.
Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing and basically means that if you do something that might have a positive payoff in 5 years, you're basically doing an assist for the other side of the aisle. One party knows this and routinely passes tax cuts that are set to expire almost exactly when they lose power... The other side knows this but I guess tries to do the right thing anyway.
I'm sure there's some of that, but also ... a permanent tax cut comes with a negative budget estimate. A temporary tax cut doesn't look so bad. Then when it's time for the cut to expiring, making it permanent doesn't look as bad as it did when it was first proposed. Also, make the tax cut now, demand a balanced budget to make spending cuts when the other party is in power. </rant>
Most presidents assume they will still be in office in year 5. So it's not as bad of plan as you suggest. It's just risky as elections are not a sure victory for the incumbent.
No, you're wrong. She's not just a woman, she's also black.
The voters punished Trump because of inflation. Then they punished Biden because of inflation.
Show me the gas and grocery prices from July-Nov 2028, and I'll be ready to bet on the winner of next elections (assuming they happen, etc...)
We didn't really have much inflation by Nov 2020?
Right, I mixed up my measures (mixed the hike on gas price that gave us yellow jackets in Europe with the us prices, which had a hoke but much smaller.) Sorry.
Inflation was low until things opened back up around April 2021 when the vaccines rolled out. See table here: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...
That inflation was in large part a very-predictable bullwhip effect of what happened in 2020 and possibly could've been prevented by supply-side interventions in 2020, but voters were not punishing Trump for it in 2020. He lost votes for appearing generally inept in the face of a pandemic (probably nobody would do better) and in the face of police violence and protests (much of his base felt he should have been much more authoritarian from the federal level even then).
Or just don't publish the data at all. It's why China's count of COVID-19 mortality relative to its (arguably deflated) case count is off by an order of magnitude [0].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
Money wins all the time and the GOP is happy to take it for supporting fossil fuels. But the climate change fix party (democrats) is more than happy to open up new Oil Fields if they think high gas prices will hurt their election chances. That happened under Biden.
So here we are, seeing heat records being broken every year and storms causing more and more damage. Everyone knew this would happen 60+ years ago, but the bribes kept the gov. kicking the can down the road.
At least by closing Mauna Loa the facts can be denied going forward.
The next kick will probably "melt" the can.
Coincidentally, the "Space Force" observatory in Hawaii was recently given a $176 million upgrade contract.
https://spacenews.com/kbr-wins-176-million-contract-to-moder...
Coming for the scientists themselves next? (Ref to Galileo)
It's happened under pretty much every other autocratic regime in recent history...
Even the Third Reich appreciated the value of scientific research and engineering.
When science and ideology conflicted, they picked ideology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Mathematik
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe
They literally didn't. They expelled anyone working on Jüdische Physik.
It is one of the (many) reasons they fell behind in atomic research.
Ooh! This is actually a bit of a passive, niche interest of mine. It should be noted I am not a professional historian. I just read a lot of material and watch a lot of interviews and documentaries.
The Nazis fell behind in atomic research for a variety of reasons, each with its own underpinnings. One of the most interesting in my mind was organizational failings. Although many different groups were working in this area, the regime leadership was rather disconnected and didn’t prioritize a coherent or integrated research effort. They didn’t provide much funding either. In some ways this created more room for unstructured scientific inquiry and creativity, but it also meant that no particular group could make any real progress toward usable reactors or weapons.
Contrast this with the Manhattan Project in the US (and the UK’s efforts at radar), which was supported and managed from the highest levels of government with a figurative blank check and despite immense compartmentalization also had a high degree of integration among disciplines and sites. There was one goal.
In my view this is an interesting manifestation of the foundation of the Third Reich. In Martin Davidson’s The Perfect Nazi, Davidson notes that the Nazi party was in many ways a child’s cosplay turned into a nightmare. Davidson writes that one of the key failings of the regime is that it was run by broken people who had more of an interest in catharsis than any real sense of society, advancement, or cohesion.
For radar, RV Jones' "Most Secret War" has an anecdote where the British raid a German coastal radar site (in France), nab the radar operator and are annoyed to discover that they know almost nothing about German radar. Pre-war Germany is already a fascist dictatorship so "ham" radio operators are enemies of the state because they're outside of your centrally controlled narrative. Whereas pre-war Britain has the usual amount of amateurs with radios. So when war broke out and they're conscripting towns at a time the British would see you're a ham and divert you from infantry training or whatever and make you a radar operator - which means the average British radar operator actually has some idea how radio works but the Germans are obliged to basically just pick a soldier and train him to operate the radar from scratch.
This apparently had significant operational consequences because if you don't know how it works all you can do when there's a fault is order spare parts. So German radar stations would be offline more often and for longer. Although Chain Home's transmitters were wildly more powerful than anything even a rich British amateur might have seen before, not to mention operating on frequencies unachievable with prior technology, the principles were familiar.
That is a fantastic contribution to the conversation. I think I’ve heard or read accounts that, if I’d thought long and hard about, might have led me to understand this, but this is new information to me.
I have seen Most Secret War recommended to me by basically every physical and ebook seller I have an account with, so I guess it’s time to take one of them up on the offer. Thank you!
Any other similar insights from your readings?
Is that why they closed the universities?
I guess this phantastic appreciation must have been why the best German scientists fled to the US after the Nazis came to power ;)
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5299/The-scientific...
Depends on the research. For some areas such as gender science, they swooped in and literally burned decades worth of research [1]. And fwiw, even medicine was considered political - the term "Schulmedizin" was popularized by the Nazis who preferred esoterics, homeopathy and other quackery.
IMHO, it's more than warranted to call out parallels between events back then and events happening right under our noses today [2], not to mention the increasing and worrying trend of book bans [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ohio-man-accused-burnin...
[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-school-library-book-ban...
TIL about [1].
It definitely adds an interesting nuance to the book burning thing.
Thanks.
Realizing that the book burnings in the 1930s were not performed by the dumb Nazi brutes we know from movies like Indiana Jones, but by student organizations (e.g. what should be sufficiently smart people) was a bit of a shock to me (not really anymore from today's point of view seeing how easy otherwise smart people get themselves into a spiral of hate and fascist ideology).
Absolutely.
So, it was smart and young German students that wanted to get rid of most or all of the material produced by one of the earliest institutions on the planet dealing with controversial topics like birth control, LGBT, fetishism, sadomasochism and venereal disease.
The founder and most of the researchers there were Jewish, so I wouldn't discard an antisemitic motive behind that as well.
As you say, I always bought the "dumb nazis burned books" story, but this context makes me think about the event in a much different way.
There's an ongoing and horrifically absurd witch-hunt against Chinese science grad students, led by MAGA FBI director Kesh Patel. He makes very popular Twitter threads for each one he arrests, drumming up a MAGA frenzy about how their insane conspiracy theories—the ones about an organized Chinese bioterrorism plot to kill Americans—were proven correct, again.
There are young PhD students who've been imprisoned for months without bail over these fictions.
Source on the imprisoned students? Outrageous, if real.
The C. elegans PhD student at Univ. of Michigan was ordered held without bond[0], in June; and the Harvard Medical School researcher was freed by a judge after being—unlawfully—caged by ICE for 116 days[1].
Here's[2] the FBI director's Twitter thread about the C. elegans researcher, for a flavor of the MAGA sociology that's driving this. [edit]: His rhetoric in the case in [3] is even less hingèd.
[0] https://detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2025/06/27...
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01958-4 ( https://archive.is/XIONv )
[2] https://xcancel.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/19322140473000796... ("This case is part of a broader effort from the FBI and our federal partners to heavily crack down on similar pathogeon [sic] smuggling operations, as the CCP works relentlessly to undermine America’s research institutions.")
[3] https://xcancel.com/FBIDirectorKash/status/19300448842845230... ("This case is a sobering reminder that the CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply, which would have grave consequences... putting American lives and our economy at serious risk. Your FBI will continue working tirelessly to be on guard against it.")
Can't read [0] since I'm not a subscriber.
>After being charged last month with trying to smuggle frog embryos into the United States, Kseniia Petrova, a Russian bioinformatician, was indicted on 25 June on additional charges by a grand jury in Boston, Massachusetts — including making a false statement to customs agents.
Well, that's ... something.
Honestly, when I first read your comment I got the impression that these students might have done something innocuous that got grossly misinterpreted (perhaps on purpose) and that's how they got in trouble ...
But the ones you showed so far did engage, quite clearly, in criminal behavior. I don't think ICE/Patel/Trump should be blamed for that.
Here is a link for the first article: https://archive.is/mlzx4
Not sure what the outrage is,
Chinese scholar from UM Chengxuan Han expected to plead guilty in smuggling case
"During the secondary inspection, Han made false statements that she had not sent packages to members of the UM Lab," an FBI agent wrote in the court filing. "When pressed, Han admitted that she had shipped packages to members of the UM Lab. Han initially stated to (Customs and Border Patrol) officers that the packages were plastic cups (rather than petri dishes) and a book (omitting the envelope with suspected biological materials concealed in it)."
The FBI counterintelligence case against UM scholar Yunqing Jian, 33, and her boyfriend, 34-year-old Zunyong Liu, involves allegations that Jian received money from a Chinese foundation funded largely by the Chinese government to conduct post-doctoral work. That includes research on a fungus known as Fusarium graminearum, a biological pathogen that can cause devastating diseases in crops.
Maybe these students are getting overcharged, but they were clearly caught smuggling.
#3, regardless of intent, is definitely illegal shit. how can you possibly think its ok to smuggle pthogenic fungus into the the country in baggies, then lie about it.
it's also surprising there wasn't more scrutiny in the past. there are colonels in the PLA that have actively called for and published materials calling for agro and bio terrorism against the US, and all chinese nationals are required to debrief on return.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibberella_zeae
> Experts doubt that the smuggled fungus could be used effectively, since the logistics, as well as physical conditions, such as temperature and humidity, for creating a widespread infection with this pathogen are not straightforward. Furthermore, this fungal infection can be prevented and/or controlled with the use of pesticides and cultural practices, like harvesting early to stop fungal growth. Having said that, if the strain that Jian and Liu brought into the U.S is a new potent variant, there is a possibility of it being an effective weapon. Nevertheless, F. graminearum has been studied in the U.S. for more than a century, and it is a common factor to treat in food safety protocols.
You'd expect the CCP to be a little better at it if that were the intention.
The samples were completely common, the fungus is endemic to the US already and the PhDs are studying them for US institutions to lessen their impact on US crops.
Forgot to mention that the press releases make a critical typo that makes them seem extremely nefarious and implies they were planning on some sort of warfare when it’s extremely benign…
“While searching one of Liu’s cell phones, they found an article in PDF form titled “2018 Plant Pathogen Warfare under Changing Climate Conditions.” Authorities said the article specifically referenced Fusarium graminearum as “an example of a destructive disease and pathogen for crops” and is “responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year.”
But the actual article is about the ‘warfare’ between plants and pathogens in a world with a changing climate as denoted by the hyphen in the title..
“Plant-Pathogen Warfare under Changing Climate Conditions”
There is great need for future research to increasingly use dynamic environmental conditions in order to fully understand the multidimensional nature of plant-pathogen interactions and produce disease-resistant crop plants that are resilient to climate change.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29787730/
what the actual fuck? you do not smuggle lab samples in baggies. that is suspicious behavior. you send it through the post and let authorities know you are doing it by declaring it.
have people gone mad?
How can you say outrageous to imprison students without knowing what that particular student did or is accused of?
I'm replying to @perihelions comment ...
The context should be pretty clear.
*facepalm*
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Eh, the most believable conspiracy is gain of function research accidentally escaped a lab because of poor controls and then was covered up.
Gain of function research can be done for lots of reasons, one of which is offensive biological weapons, but there are others. It's pretty irresponsible to do regardless of your justification. But these were chinese researchers in china, not grad students.
China has been using students to acquire US technology, but we don't need crazy bioterrorism conspiracies. They were students, they came here to pay to learn things, it is no conspiracy that people on student visas learned things at the universities they attended. On top of that there have been inappropriate, illegal, or otherwise undesirable things foreign students have done that look a lot like espionage.
The basic problem is that democrats pretend problems don't exist and republicans pretend the problems are existential threat devil boogey monsters that need to be solved by sending people to gulags.
There's an excluded middle here where people want reasonable responses to potential issues.
>Eh, the most believable conspiracy is gain of function research accidentally escaped a lab because of poor controls and then was covered up.
Four years ago you couldn't even remotely mention this as a possibility; even, and particularly, among "the most educated"™ and "the most tolerant"™.
Now plenty of them believe that was the case.
Don't know if Overton window is behind or if there was some sort manipulation involved, but it's definitely something I've noticed.
And yet still, your text fades gray.
I think the larger announcements yet to come, will crumble the current religion we call Science. I'd like to get back to REAL science with a lower case s.
Both of you have a screw loose and need to stop accepting the premise of the loudest idiots on social media and assuming the people who speak the loudest are representative of the feelings of people at large.
Specifically point out why you want to insult instead of argue on the facts. The screw must be loose in that direction.
> Four years ago you couldn't even remotely mention this as a possibility; even, and particularly, among "the most educated"™ and "the most tolerant"™.
> will crumble the current religion we call Science
Facts: people who talk like this are pontificating nonsense and are never worth talking to because speech like this indicates a person has zero interest in an actual discussion. I want to insult instead of debate because I truly believe people who talk like this need to be publicly shamed for discourse like this. It is a root cause of the destabilization of our society and needs to be stopped. You're talking like an AM radio conspiracy call-in nutjob. If you want to be taken seriously, don't channel the ghost of Rush Limbaugh in your rhetoric.
Personal attacks are not cool here.
Read the site's guidelines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I haven’t followed these cases, but are you anti due process? How do you know these are fictions? Are you on the inside? It sounds like the cases will be tried in court and we will find out what’s true. Are you saying that’s not the case?
US vandalism continues. And that is truly vandalism in the sense of bunch of barbarians coming and destroying what they have little clue about.
It is so easy to destroy infrastructure and expertise that has taken decades to build. All so Trump and his buddies can get even bigger tax breaks. It is enough to make you cry.
BTW 'Barbarian' get a bad rap. They were in many ways more civilized than the Romans. But the Romans were really good at killing people and got to write the history.
I like Richard Stillman's word for Trump: "the wrecker." It perfectly captures the disagreement here.
It has a bit of a dual meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(Soviet_Union)
That's a weird translation of the original Russian term for it. A more accurate translation would be "vermin" (it's the same word in Russian, and it's clearly meant to evoke that image).
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> The data it is collecting is already everywhere.
Sure, just slap a CO2 monitor on a smokestack somewhere.
These sensors are in a high, dry, very remote area with fresh air for a good reason.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/climate/budget-cuts-clima...
> The air that swirls around the isolated outpost located on a Hawaiian volcano is a mix from all over the Northern Hemisphere. That makes it one of the best places to measure greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It is indispensable to scientists around the world.
If you can SLAP one somewhere, then slap one on the Mauna Loa and be done with finding an issue with Trump and do something in your god damn life without forcing me to pay taxes for crap.
Nobody is forcing you to pay taxes, you can always leave. And, I think we can all agree that would be beneficial for everyone.
There already is one on Mauna Loa, since 1958.
People have an issue with Trump here because he's the one getting rid of it.
The whole point is to collect time-series data at a location that's isolated from individual sources of CO2 emissions. That way we can see how CO2 concentrations are changing over long periods of time.
Your comment doesn't make any sense. If you shut down the measurement, you don't have any data going forward, so the data cannot be "everywhere". And you cannot substitute data collected in another location if you want to measure changes over time - which is a really important thing to measure.
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The graph on that page is suspect. Why does the Y axis start at 320? Why does the X axis start at 1960?
Because those are the bounds of the data. There was no attempt to hide this fact in the graph (plot does not intersect "origin", well labeled axes...)
It's really not. "[Mauna Loa Observatory] was founded on June 28, 1956, as part of the US Weather Bureau"
And if you look at the tick marks on the graph, it starts before 1960.
It starts at 1958 because that's when the measurements began.
MLO was founded in 1956 and began continuous CO2 measurement in 1958.
>Why does the Y axis start at 320?
Because CO2 didn't start from zero in 1960?
We really need prediction markets for these climate variables. It would do an awful lot to cut through the politicization of what the models can and can't reliably predict. A transaction fee for a market predicting this observatory's measurements could be used to help pay for the up keep of the observatory.
Go get yourself some home insurance on a single-family house in Miami.
Please give me the (safe) place where I can bet that the CO2 concentration will be higher next year than now. And show me the (solvent) people ready to bet the contrary.
My next bet will be about "fire burns" and "water wets", please. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTU38cbXCGQ