Trump admin tries to kill the most indisputable evidence of human-caused climate change by shuttering observatory | CNN
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The Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii has measured atmospheric carbon dioxide, which — along with other planet-warming pollution — has led directly to climate change, driving sea level rise, supercharging weather and destroying food systems.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32388210

The Trump administration’s proposed budget seeks to shut down the laboratory atop a peak in Hawaii where scientists have gathered the most conclusive evidence of human-caused climate change since the 1950s.

The president’s budget proposal would also defund many other climate labs, including instrument sites comprising the US government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network, which stretches from northern Alaska to the South Pole.

But it’s the Mauna Loa laboratory that is the most prominent target of the President Donald Trump’s climate ire, as measurements that began there in 1958 have steadily shown CO2’s upward march as human activities have emitted more and more of the planet-warming gas each year.

The curve produced by the Mauna Loa measurements is one of the most iconic charts in modern science, known as the Keeling Curve, after Charles David Keeling, who was the researcher who painstakingly collected the data. His son, Ralph Keeling, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, now oversees collecting and updating that data.

The proposal to shut down Mauna Loa had been made public previously but was spelled out in more detail on Monday when NOAA submitted a budget document to Congress. It made more clear that the Trump administration envisions eliminating all climate-related research work at NOAA, as had been proposed in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for overhauling the government.

It would do this in large part by cutting NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research entirely, including some labs that are also involved in improving weather forecasting.

https://archive.ph/caA1y

    • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Im a bit mixed with this because yeah if it was going to be conserved with stewardship given to native hawaiians or some such then it would be great. On the other hand if its going to be turned into hawaii’s first great coal mine…

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          I was wondering about if there is any iron on the Hawaiian islands the other day, specifically because I knew they were pretty young geologically speaking. This train of thought was inspired by Vintage Story, and my complete inability to find bauxite.

          • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            I don’t believe so. IIRC from my mineralogy & petrology courses, minable quantities of most metals occur from 4 sources:

            1. hydrothermal deposits: where water impregnates crustal rock at a high temperature and pressure, dissolving metals, which are then released as the water cools.
            2. placer deposits: where small crystals of metal ores are chipped away by erosion and carried by fluid. Those dense particles settle out from the liquid as soon as it slows down, so they all end up concentrated in specific places in rivers, lakes, etc.
            3. pegmatites & layered intrusions: these are igneous bodies which, due to the processes of their formation, tend to create either very large crystals of rare minerals (pegmatites), or significant concentrations of those rare metals over an entire magma chamber (layered intrusions). Hawaii doesn’t exhibit the necessary geologic conditions for either of these cases.
            4. banded iron formations: caused when, during the Great Oxygenation Event, microbes bound oxygen atoms to iron ions in the early ocean, effectively eating the energy of that reaction, as Iron ions became less stable with higher oxygen fugacity, and the Iron Oxide that was created, suddenly insoluble, sank to the ocean floor.

            As a very recent mantle-plume-driven volcanic arc, Hawaii doesn’t exhibit the necessary conditions for any of these in great degrees, so you would not expect to find any serious metal deposits there.

      • Tomassci@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        We all know Trump probably doesn’t know that there are natives, and if he does then it’s straight fuck you to them. I am not expecting a more right-wing president to deviate from the sacred tradition of fucking over the indigenous.

        • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          for sure. its just retiring the telescope, taken as a thing sans trump or any of the current fuckery, is necessarily a bad thing.