Another blow for US ocean research

The Trump administration suggests further budget cuts for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). For 2021 NOAA will loose 727 million USD (13,5 per cent). The total budget of 4.6 billion is almost 25 per cent since 2017.

The climate change research program is cut in half. Among the programs targeted for termination are numerous research and education grants, the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund, and the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science.

Why is NOAA important?

When people at NOAA realised Donald Trump’s view on climate change (“a hoax”), climate expert and former president of the American Meteorological Society Marshall Shepherd wrote in Forbes what was at stake. He reminded us that knowledge about the ocean and climate change is built over time through years of data collection. If this work is put on hold, even in just 1-4 years, valuable time is lost. Research networks and knowledge will deteriorate.

Almost everything we know about the climate and the oceans come from state financed research, he points out. Exploitation of marine resources will increase significantly the coming decades. Sustainable use of these resources will not be possible without state financed research.

Researchers at NOAA feared what was gonna happen already in 2016 when they saw how Trump dealt with climate related issues. To secure their research they took back-up on external servers of climate data.

Not everybody can travel to Antarctica

All of us don’t have to go to Antarctica to see climate change ourselves. The amount of documentation and data collected has over the past years grown immensely. We know pretty well the state of the oceans.

Human made climate change affects the Earth’s energy balance. When this is out of balance, the oceans absorbs up to 93 per cent. This leads to increased ocean temperatures. Natural variations in temperatures are small. This means that temperature measurements in the deep sea is a reliable way to document the effects of human activity.

The pandemic could have been an opportunity

This is not the time to look at the positive sides of the pandemic. As I write this 184,000 people have lost their lives and 2.6 million cases are reported globally, according to WHO. Millions of people have lost their livelihood over night and where health services are limited, access to health care has worsened.

Recognising this fact, I still ask myself: Maybe the corona crisis can relieve the oceans for CO2, at least for a while? The oceans absorbed around one million tons CO2 every hour before corona. How much has it been the last four weeks? And how much plastic was produced last month? In 2018 the world produced 359 million tonn of which at least 8 tons run into the ocean. And over fishing is by no means solved. Maybe some threatened fish species can recover for a while?

What is state financed climate research?

As I write this, governments around the (rich) world is crafting trillion dollars rescue packages. Climate research and action can be a prioritised area.

Many things have happened since the IPCC published data on sea temperatures in 2013. One challenge then was the uncertainty with the data that was collected at only 700 meter depths.

Since then more than 3,000 thermometers have been placed in the oceans, mostly financed by states. These instruments cover pretty much the entire world oceans at a depth of 2,000 meters.

Cover photo: Deep sea lizard at 1.771 meter in 2018. Image: NOAA. License.