Kind of a Potemkin in reverse. How's he going to know ?

military. I know many of them climb the ranks by bootlicking, but so many have crossed the line and Trump won't last long enough to protect them.
The only thing that frightens me about that conclusion is that a lot of them must be extremely confident that the Republicans aren't going to lose the next (or hold?) the next election.

along with all the other life.

including global warming, habitat destruction, population growth, etc. are real. AND they could be fixed. But that would require sharing, so they've decided that most of us need to go. It also explains the stoking of racial hatred, and trying to run up inflation high enough that people start starving and/or revolting.

These sensors provide info that can be used for a variety of purposes, but especially for monitoring weather and currents around the oceans so that ships sailing into any given area can know what conditions -- and dangers -- they are likely to encounter. They're not just dual-use technology, but multiple-use. And you can bet that the full range of sensors carried by these devices is not discussed publicly. Before the US gov't would spend million$$$$ on this technology, it would have canvassed every Dept. and Office in the gov't to ask "is there anything you would like to add to these abilities, and how much would it cost ?". Intel services and the Pentagon would have come up with a long list -- hydrophones, seismometers, magnetometers, mass detectors (the latter two items as specifically directional and sensitive as practical), wireless network monitors, etc. Any passing ship, even if observing strict radio silence, could be detected with the right equipment, and results from a network of detectors could effectively follow the ship's progress, to within a certain degree of accuracy depending on the type of detector. You have to wonder -- how many Russian ships pass close enough to this region to be detected ? Did Daddy Vlady tell Trmp he doesn't like the US peeking at his ships ?

As long as it's described as a tool for studying climate change, Trmp will hate it. Let him know the Navy wants it and he'll TACO again. Of course, the inebriated white supremacist and overgrown frat boy currently running our military won't question anything Trmp says or does, so he needs to be court-martialed or just thrown out ASAP.

The currently *acting* SECNAV was appointed by the former SECNAV to oversee unclassified IT systems, among other things, so maybe he has a little better understanding of the need for this technology than his predecessor. And it has to be better than Trmp's.

But is anyone outside our fucked up government doing anything? That's my question.

The implications of the removal are definitely expansive, and replacement would be not just financially detrimental but time intensive.

Who ordered this nonsense? Do we actually have a king now? It sure seems like it!

...but I suspect this is the case. Even if they are "removed" I doubt there will be people smashing them to pieces with hammers.

It will cost money to "destroy" the system and will require the participation of people who know where the system is installed, presumably well trained engineers.

I've been involved with the movement of advanced scientific instruments in my career from lab to lab. They require calibration and maintenance to be restored to their place, but the are generally serviceable.

I may be overoptimistic, since this moron is taking a chainsaw to science, but I don't think the damage will be irreversible. We'll lose data points to be sure, just as we did at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory, this winter and spring, losing two weekly data points for the first time since 1975, but again, we can recover some of the information, if nothing else, by interpolation.

Don't ask me where I read it. But I did. I read So much. Voracious is the word. It flies through my mind.

We are going certainly lose data points to be sure. It may howver be possible to reconstruct some of it. The ocean behaves as it does with or without measurement.

It seems we lost this year's maximum at the Mauna Loa CO₂ Observatory. This was probably from poor instrument maintenance. It looks like the analysis was failing on precision from the graphic on the hourly readings. This never happened before the orange pedophile was installed.

That is of course irretrievable at this laboratory, but not fatal. I would imagine that other nations or academic labs are collecting data of these types. I don't know that but I'm guessing.

The guy is antiscience buffoon of and damage to science is increasingly outrageous. If he dies soon enough and if the elections go well, overall it will be a blip one hopes.

This will probably not be like the case observed in nuclear engineering in the United States where the knowledge base contracted over some decades because of the malign efforts of ignoramuses.

Science is now far more international, and the collapse of the United States, while regrettable, will not be the collapse of science itself I think.

And I don't know if I care if I don't live to see it.

I appreciate your additions to this discussion.

Zhu, Y., Cheng, L., Trenberth, K.E. et al. Critical dependence of global ocean heat monitoring on the ocean observing system. Nat. Clim. Chang. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02661-6

I'm more sensitive about this than others. It's an enormous travesty.