Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Independent Review Needed for Weather Disasters and Warning Verification

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As a 35-year national NWS forecaster and researcher in severe and tropical meteorology, I support the bipartisan National Weather Safety Board (NWSB) Act, which would provide an NTSB-like board review of weather disasters. Numerous other meteorologists and I have suggested something akin to this for many years.

While I agree with fellow retired NWS scientist Alan Gerard in his “Substack” column that it doesn’t do enough to evaluate non-weather disasters nor NWS performance, we shouldn’t let the perfect get in the way of the good. The NWSB Act would be a positive step toward learning from weather disasters in a systematic, consistent and accountable way, not the overpoliticized, self-interested, wagon-circling shams that the “NWS Service Assessments” often became.

Improving NWS verification services may need separate legislative action anyway, especially to address one of the most blatant, yet little-discussed, conflicts of interest that exist in all of federal government, and has for decades: verification of weather warnings by the very same offices that issue them (often, even the same forecasters).

This includes rampant use of estimated — as opposed to measured — wind and hail reports, with over 90% of thunderstorm-wind “verification” being estimates and, based on human wind-tunnel experiments, overestimates. [For much more on this, read a formally peer-reviewed, scientific publication that I lead-authored.] It’s a fox-guarding-henhouse verification system rife with opportunities for padding and inflation, regardless of how much actually happens (which is practically unknowable).

As someone who loves the NWS as a 35-year public servant there, and sees it as an extremely valuable service for the taxpayer (at a bit over a penny a person a day), its very integrity and scientific credibility depend on eliminating conflicts of interest, and ensuring optimal service through independent evaluation of both disaster services and warning performance.

One likely finding I already predict, with great confidence, will be that NWS technology and delivery each need vast improvement. Due in part to longstanding short-staffing and failure to encourage and enable true innovation, both NWS’ front-facing forecast suite (including web/app presence) and internal capabilities have become vastly outdated.

To wit, we should have been using four-dimensional, XYZ-plane-rotatable displays of model and radar fields by the time I retired, on touchscreens. That tech has been in the media at least 25 years, gaming industry since the late 1990s, Hollywood even earlier. Three-dimensional storm simulations have been around in research since 1978, on then-massive computers with less capacity than high-end gaming desktops and cloud computing of today, and finescale simulations of tornadoes and their parent supercells with Hollywood-quality graphic output were run a decade ago, on data far denser than modern operational weather models.

Instead, the most advanced severe-weather forecast operation in the world (SPC) still was — and remains — stuck with 30-year-old 2D display systems and having to mouse-click individual points on outlook lines (instead of using a stylus or finger to save time). The only 3D rotatable displays in the NWS are in licensed private-sector radar software (GR2 Analyst)!

We already should have had nationally deployed, phased-array, dual-polarization radar by 2011 when in reality, the old, greasy mechanical dishes (increasingly failure prone) were retrofitted with dual-pol. Both phased array and dual-pol tech, BTW, were in military and lab use before I was born. One is still not in our radars.

As for forecast presentation, technical discussions for other meteorologists still have their place, and should. Yet I agree with those who say we (NWS, of which I am a proud retiree) could do a much better job conveying threats in meaningful, animated, easy to understand ways. Yes, that should include robust app development and aggressive use of modern web capabilities—not handcuffing ourselves to the slowest common denominator of 486 processors and Netscape because somebody, somewhere, might still be using a teletype emulator. Hell, it wasn’t until just a decade ago that we quit using ALL CAPS in everything, like it was still 1967.

It’s baffling that we still have to issue watches with expiration times, instead of rolling them along open-ended with the threats, as we discussed among us (“amoeba watches”) for 20+ years. That predates the oft-tested, never implemented concept of “Threats in Motion” for warnings, which is very similar, and which also is long past technological capability for operationalizing. Funding (or lack thereof) has played a role, but in my experience, bureaucratic intransigence and a CYA culture frightened of innovation was at least as responsible.

Independent review would highlight shortcomings — both technological and situational — not to assign blame, but to spotlight areas for improvement. NWS, and the entire weather enterprise, should welcome true accontability!

National Debt: Not Just a “Problem” — A Crisis

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Interest Paid by Federal Government

Here is a chart (click to enlarge!), tracking interest paid by the government on the national debt, since 1990. This fraction of the federal budget also is growing. That’s because the national debt is getting bigger. For other purposes, it may, but for this, it really doesn’t matter which supposed “side” of the debt-bloating duopoly you prefer. Administrations (purple, my addition) and Congresses of both parties have been in place during debt-growth periods, and therefore, increases in interest payments.

Ignore and/or mock those who claim the national debt is not a problem. They are naive, unknowing, shallow, woefully and likely willfully ignorant of basic economics, and are not to be taken seriously.

Why federal debt not just a problem…but a crisis? Among a vast many other things, the proportion of the budget taken up by interest payment balloons, all other aspects get crowded out. As the fraction of the budget that goes to interest gets larger, less and less money will be left over for every other Federal budget aspect. Hard choices must be made. Austerity must be undertaken. That ultimately includes your favorite budget programs, and mine.

Austerity doesn’t win votes, so the can keeps getting kicked, money keeps being printed, inflationary times raise interest rates, the national debt grows larger (raising interest payments even when rates stay the same or fall), and this budget parasite swells up still further.

It’s a vicious cycle that media is almost wholly ignoring. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t involve Hollywood celebrities, British royalty, the “transgender” fad, prosecution of politicians, failure to prosecute politicians, famous pro athletes, whiny Tik Tok influencers, or other titillating clickbait that passes for “journalism” now. And it’s over 30 trillion times more important than all that put together.

The time will come, maybe in my lifetime but certainly in my children’s, when:
* Republicans’ favorite spending targets — military programs, home-district pork, the secret state, endless overseas wars — get crowded out of the budget by debt interest. Then what?
* Democrats’ favorite spending targets — social-entitlement programs, home-district pork, the secret state, endless overseas wars — get crowded out of the budget by debt interest. Then what?
* Bipartisan-supported beneficial and popular functions of government that take up very small budget fractions — air-traffic control, meat inspections, railroad safety, natural-disaster response, national parks, and yes, dangerous-weather forecasting — get crowded out of the budget by debt interest. Then what?
* We cannot afford even basic defense of the nation from foreign attack or takeover. Then what (besides the need to learn Mandarin)?

Those times are coming. Maybe in two decades, maybe in five. When they do, however, and the government no longer can afford to fulfill whatever you think or the Constitution directly mandates is its function, this republic is lost, forever.

I used to wonder why the end-times prophecies of Revelation never mentioned nor even hinted at an overseas superpower akin to what the U.S. has been, far from the Middle East. Between our own malignant moral and cultural decrepitude, and the upcoming fiscal implosion of debt-interest dominance of the budget that self-destroys the nation as anything relevant or powerful on the world stage, now I know.

There are solutions — painful, sacrificial, all-encompassing ones that yes, involve intense austerity — but as long as politicians pander to their bases and want votes, and the populace/lemmings don’t question things in a critical mass big enough to matter, we’ll keep marching toward the cliffs in ignorance of the fall that awaits.

Pray for your children and grandchildren. Even without an asteroid, no matter what happens with climate, regardless of anything going on abroad: tough times are on the way, the likes of which this nation has never experienced.

Active Repression of Journalism by U.S. Federal Officials

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U.S. authorities under the last three presidents have wanted to extradite freelance reporter Julian Assange, currently held without cause in a British prison, to face U.S. prison for practicing journalism. The domestic-spying deep state hacked into the computer of longtime reporter Sharyl Attkisson during the Obama administration. More recently, using warrants signed by puppet judges, Federal thugs raided the homes of several Project Veritas investigative reporters, including its founder, James O’Keefe, over a supposedly “stolen” diary belonging to Joe Biden’s daughter that Veritas gave back without disclosure.

The common pretext between O’Keefe and Assange? The suits and ties in DC unilaterally have decided those being targeted with these tyrannical tactics are not journalists.

What? That’s not the government’s call to make. Journalism is not supposed to be subject to Federal gatekeeping in a supposedly free society. The Constitution not only provides no Federal authority over news reporting of any sort, by any means, but expressly forbids its interference therein!

When a government nominally bound by Constitutional law of press freedom simply can declare the people it is persecuting “aren’t journalists”, and get away with that, they can come after anyone for reporting anything. Then there is no freedom of the press; the Constitution is no longer an ideal, but just another meaningless piece of paper that some long-dead dudes scribbled stuff on, hundreds of years ago. Moreover, “journalism” becomes a governmentally prescribed caste system of dictated exclusivity, rendering all approved “journalists” as de facto stenographers for the regime.