How to watch: Scientists are hosting a 100-hour livestream to protest Trump cuts
The Trump administration has decimated climate science across the country, from the mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to the shuttering of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Now, scientists are defending their work, and its value to the country, by speaking directly to Americans through a 100-hour livestream full of presentations on everything from air quality to extreme heat to weather stations.
Beginning Wednesday, May 28 at 1 p.m. ET, the Weather and Climate Livestream will span five days, ending on Sunday, June 1 at 5:30 p.m. ET. It will feature climate scientists and meteorologists who will talk about their work and the impact of research cuts, and take audience questions.
The event kicks off with Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who was formerly an associate researcher at GISS, who will be live streaming the last hours of the GISS lab. That 43,000-square-foot space near Columbia University has been crucial to climate science, but is closing because the Trump administration terminated its lease.
The livestream will also include a panel discussion with terminated NOAA employees—in March, the Trump administration laid off more than 1,000 people—and another with the former directors of the National Weather Service, as well as 'primetime' talks from experts on topics like floods, drought, and hurricanes. Prominent climate scientist Daniel Swain —who often hosts his own virtual 'office hours' on climate news, heat waves, and wildfires—will be participating with an 'Ask Me Anything' session, open to audience questions, on Saturday, May 31 at 9:30 p.m. ET.
The 100-hour Weather and Climate Livestream is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@wclivestream/live. It's billed as a non-partisan event, organized in part by members of the Union of Concerned Scientists. To the participants, it's also an opportunity to try to save America's weather forecasts; the event website includes a link for Americans to contact their representatives and urge them to restore weather and climate funding.
Trump's funding cuts
Scientists, and everyday Americans are already feeling the cuts from the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): The National Weather Service, for example, is already flying fewer weather balloons, which hampered forecasters' ability to get accurate and timely data to the public about recent hail storms and tornadoes. NWS field offices are short staffed and scrambling to have regular coverage.
Hurricane season is also approaching, and is expected to be above-average, with 13 to 19 named storms. Trump's cuts would eliminate climate models that provide accurate forecasting, as well as FEMA services that would help Americans recover from climate disasters.
The administration's cuts would also close multiple research institutions and labs, all six of NOAA's regional climate centers, and end $70 million in grants to research universities. That means thousands of scientists will lose their funding, which translates to less storm forecasting, no more climate monitoring for farmers, and coastal communities without information on things like tides and flood risk.
'For generations, the U.S. government has invested in the science that helps us do so, building one of the greatest meteorology and climate science communities in the world,' the Weather and Climate Livestream website reads. 'In recent months, this community has been thwarted in our mission of serving the public due to substantial cuts and firings.'
But it's not too late to stop those cuts, the livestream organizers note. Already, the Trump administration has walked back some cuts in the face of public pressure—like by reopening shuttered weather data centers. The 100-hour livestream is a way to 'help keep this pressure building,' the site reads.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CBS News
27 minutes ago
- CBS News
Chicagoans flock to city's beaches to beat the extreme heat
Summer in Chicago started off with oppressive, dangerous heat as temperatures topped out above 90°, with the heat index climbing well above 100° on Saturday. The lakefront was crowded, and so were public pools, as crowds headed out to keep cool by taking a dip anywhere they could. "I am doing a plein air painting," Kira Mountjoy-Pepka said along the lakefront. "It means painting outdoors and capturing the light exactly as it is." As an artist captured Chicago's light and shadows, the heat left an impression on everyone. "Hopefully, I'll get out of here before I melt and turn into a puddle," Mountjoy-Pepka said. She painted in plein air that felt like 100° and rising. During an extreme heat warning with dangerously hot and humid conditions, people like Allison Vega flooded places like Millenium Park. "Kids are running around in their bathing suits, just laying on the ground in the dirty water, but they're cool. So, that's what matters. They're happy and they're cool," she said as her kids played in Crown Fountain. Bodies of water, no matter how big or small, were the place to be on Saturday. Buddies Zach Frame and Parker Greenfield beat the heat and the crowds at Humboldt Park Beach, the city's only inland beach, avoiding the larger crowds on the lakefront while still managing to find sand and sun. "I feel like we kind of skipped spring and went right into summer and then it hit pretty hard," Frame said. Chicago was sweltering, but the Windy City offered some brief relief. "The breeze definitely helps," Frame said.
Bloomberg
35 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Trump's Twists and Turns Over Iran Leave Oil Traders Hanging
The oil market is wrestling with Donald Trump's next act in the conflict between Iran and Israel, with the US president's every utterance over the fighting seemingly capable of spiking or crashing prices. In a wild week, Brent futures have surged 11% from before Israel attacked its nemesis, but with sharp moves up and down from one day to the next.
Boston Globe
37 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
It turns out weather on other planets is a lot like on Earth
Related : Advertisement But by leveraging the sheer amount of knowledge and data about our planet, scientists can get a head start on understanding the inner workings of storms or vortexes on other planetary bodies. In some cases, the models provide almost everything we know about some otherworldly atmospheric processes. 'Our planetary atmosphere models are derived almost exclusively from these Earth models,' said Scot Rafkin, a planetary meteorologist at the Southwest Research Institute. 'Studying the weather on other planets helps us with Earth and vice versa.' Satellite photo of the Baltic Sea surrounding Gotland, Sweden, with algae bloom swirling in the water. The churning clouds near Jupiter's pole appear like ocean currents on Earth — as if you're looking at small edges and meandering fronts in the Baltic Sea. European Space Agency Vortexes on Jupiter If you looked at the churning clouds near Jupiter's pole, they appear like ocean currents on Earth - as if you're looking at small edges and meandering fronts in the Baltic Sea. 'This looks so much like turbulence I'm seeing in our own ocean. They must be covered by at least some similar dynamics,' Lia Siegelman, a physical oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, recalled the first time she saw images of vortexes from NASA's Juno mission, which entered Jupiter's orbit in 2016. Advertisement Working with planetary scientists, she applied her understanding of the ocean physics on Earth to the gas giant in computer models. Whether it's in air or water on any planet, she found the laws of physics that govern turbulent fluids is the same (even though the vortex on Jupiter is about 10 times larger than one on Earth). When cyclones and anticyclones (which spin in the opposite direction) interact in the ocean, they create a boundary of different water masses and characteristics - known as a front. She and her colleagues found the same phenomenon occurs in cyclones at Jupiter's poles, showing similar swirls. 'By studying convection on Earth, we were also able to spot that phenomenon occurring on Jupiter,' Siegelman said, even though Jupiter has relatively little data compared to Earth. Related : She and her colleagues also found a pattern never seen on Earth before: a cluster of cyclones in a symmetrical, repeating pattern near the poles of Jupiter. These 'polar vortex crystals' were observed in 2016 and have remained in place since. Despite never seeing them on Earth, she and other planetary scientists collaborated to reproduce these swirls in computer models - relying on 'just very simple physics.' 'Planetary scientists use a lot of the weather models that have been developed to study either the ocean or the atmosphere,' Siegelman said. 'By just knowing so much about the ocean and the atmosphere, we can just guide our analysis.' Advertisement This NASA handout photo shows beds of sandstone inclined to the southwest toward Mount Sharp and away from the Gale Crater rim on Mars. HANDOUT Dust storms on Mars If you plan to move to Mars, be prepared to face the dust storms. At their most intense, they can engulf the entire planet and last from days to months. The dirt can block sunlight and coat infrastructure. While scientists have observed many of these storms, they still don't know how to predict them. Dust storms operate similarly on Earth and Mars. Dust is lifted and heated, and rises like a hot-air balloon, Rafkin said. The rising air will suck in air from below to replace it. Air pressure drops near the surface, sucking in more wind that lifts the dust. As Mars spins, the angular momentum causes the dust storm to rotate. In reality, Martian dust storms are more similar to hurricanes on Earth in terms of their scale and circulation, said planetary scientist Claire Newman. She said the sources are different (Mars is a dust planet, whereas Earth is a water planet), but they have a similar effect on temperature and winds. But it's still unknown how these Martian dust storms form. On Earth, a winter storm with a cold front can lift the dust; scientists sometimes see similar dust lifting along cold fronts on Mars, but many storms just seem to pop up. Related : To predict a dust storm, scientists need to understand the circulation patterns on Mars - forecasting the cold front that can lift the dust, for instance. But it's something researchers don't yet understand. Wind measurements are scarce on Mars, aside from a few scattered measurement sites on its surface. With adjustments, Earth-based models can simulate the conditions that can lead to the uplifting winds and dust storms. 'Almost everything that we know about the circulation patterns on Mars come from models,' said Rafkin, adding that scientists 'have effectively no observations of the movement of the air on Mars.' Advertisement In this photo, sand blowing off fields creates a dust storm near Morton, Texas, in May 2021. Dust storms operate similarly on Earth and Mars. Jude Smith/Associated Press The models currently serve as the best way to understand dust storms on the Red Planet, unless more dedicated studies and stations are added, similar to Earth. 'We're basically applying these models to try and get a sense of what the environment is,' said Newman, 'before we send robots or potentially people there.' Rain on Titan The second-largest moon in our solar system, Titan is the only other known world besides Earth that has standing bodies of rivers, lakes and seas on its surface - consisting of liquid methane instead of water. That's partly why some scientists think it could be a future home for Earthlings, if we can just figure out the 750-million-mile journey and learn how to survive the minus-179 degree Celsius surface temperatures. But how did those lakes and oceans fill up? Even though it rains methane, the precipitation on Titan is very similar to that on Earth, Rafkin said. On Earth, take a chunk of air with water vapor, cool it off and the air becomes saturated to form a cloud. Those small cloud droplets can bump into one another or take in more water vapor to grow bigger. But eventually, the water vapor starts to condense into a liquid and brings rain. We've seen this process take place on Earth both naturally in the atmosphere and in labs enough times to understand the physics. But limited observations on Titan - effectively only visiting its atmosphere a handful of times - have caused scientists to turn to models. Using the same underlying physics, scientists can model the cloud-making process on this foreign body. And, the modeled clouds look a lot like the few they have observed in real life on Titan. Advertisement This November 2015 composite image made available by NASA shows an infrared view of Saturn's moon, Titan, as seen by the Cassini spacecraft. Titan is the only other known world besides Earth that has standing bodies of rivers, lakes and seas on its surface. AP 'If we try to model them and we get clouds, but they look totally bizarre and different than what we're observing, then that's an indication that maybe we're not representing the cloud processes correctly,' Rafkin said. 'But as it turns out, for the most part, when we model these things, we can produce clouds that look reasonably close to what we've observed.' Because of its incredibly dense atmosphere, Titan has storm clouds - two to four times taller than those on Earth - that are able to produce feet of methane rain. While scientists haven't observed such huge volumes, they have modeled the deluges based on the surface darkening as a storm passed - similar to how rain on soil or pavement darkens the surface on Earth. It's still a mystery where the methane comes from. But at least we know to bring a very, very sturdy raincoat if we ever visit Titan.
