Pod Insights Science Friday 10% Of NOAA Staff Laid Off | Frozen Funds Leave Farmers In Limbo About this episode Layoffs at the agency, which releases weather forecasts and monitors extreme weather, could have serious implications. Also, funds for climate and sustainability-focused farming projects have been indefinitely frozen, even though the USDA has already signed contracts.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Flora Lichtman? This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman. Today in the podcast, we're checking in on the latest science news, starting with a look at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. How is this agency faring with widespread federal cuts to science? My next guest has reported on NOAA and how cuts may affect our access to information about weather and future climate events. Umer Orfan is a senior correspondent at Vox covering science, climate change, and the environment, and he's based in Washington, DC. Umer, welcome back to Science Friday.
0:35 Speaker 01 Hey, Flora.
0:36 Flora Lichtman? All right, let's dig into NOAA here. Remind us what NOAA does.
0:40 Speaker 01 Well, NOAA is the main agency responsible for analyzing the skies, the seas, and getting data to provide valuable information like weather forecasts, as well as long-term predictions of climate and lots of other useful things for the economy and for industry.
0:58 Flora Lichtman? And who works there?
1:00 Speaker 01 Well, NOAA has a staff of about 12,000 people around the world, but more than half of them are scientists and engineers. This is an agency whose core mission is research and development. It has a $6.8 billion budget. It operates satellites, a fleet of ships, underwater probes, and research stations around the world.
1:18 Flora Lichtman? What's the state of NOAA right now?
1:21 Speaker 01 Well, they've been facing a swath of cuts. Like other federal agencies, they've lost a lot of probationary employees. That's about 10% of their workforce. And so they've already lost about 880 workers. And now the agency is facing about 1,000 more job cuts, and that's starting to affect its operations. You know, NOAA launches 92 weather balloons every day from various sites across the US to get weather data. And some of those balloon launches have been cut back. They've been cutting back now on their monthly climate forecasts and reports. And there are reports now that other bigger research projects are starting to get drawn back, and the full consequences of this have yet to be seen.
1:57 Flora Lichtman? To what degree are these cuts at NOAA about NOAA's work in climate change? Or is this just sort of general belt tightening?
2:07 Speaker 01 There is the general belt tightening, but NOAA does appear to be somewhat of an ideological target. You know, the Project 2025 guidebook that was put out by the Heritage Foundation, you know, specifically calls out NOAA as one of the agencies that's promoting climate alarmism and has called for privatizing almost all of its weather functions.
2:27 Flora Lichtman? Privatizing all of its weather functions? Weather is political.
2:31 Speaker 01 Well, it's profitable, apparently, if you can actually, you know, put a price tag on it. NOAA provides a lot of its weather data for free, almost all of it, and that's the weather data that informs, you know, your local forecasts on TV, your weather apps. But there are also some private companies that are operating in this space. And in the Project 2025 report, they basically said that all of these functions should be privatized rather than being offered for free. Now, even some private weather companies have come out and said they don't think this is a good idea, that they rely on this open information being shared from the federal agencies. And there's been a lot of pushback on that as well, so it remains to be seen exactly how that will play out. But yeah, definitely weather forecasting, the stuff that we use, but also the stuff
3:15 Speaker 01 that we use to like route airplanes and ships and for how farmers used to plan, a lot of that may be downgraded.
3:21 Flora Lichtman? Oh, Mary, you seem like you're down the rabbit hole on NOAA. What are some of your big ahas from this reporting?
3:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, NOAA, it's under the Department of Commerce, which means that part of its core mission is protecting America's economy. And so it does a lot of research work on things like shipping routes and making sure that ships don't get grounded on rocks and how they avoid storms in the ocean. They also do a lot of work for farmers and helping them plan for what they want to plant for the season. And they also do a lot of like very important emergency work, basically not just long-term and medium-term forecasts, but like predicting where hurricanes are going to go. They fly aircraft directly into hurricanes to try to measure them and also do things like tornado forecasting and other kinds of extreme weather. This is lifesaving work. People need these forecasts to evacuate, to prepare, and it really does save lives,
4:14 Speaker 01 but it requires a lot of human power to actually gather the data, to analyze it and get it out in real time. And so all of that, all those inputs are going to be throttled, and it means that very likely that a lot of this forecasting work that has been improving drastically over the past few decades is likely to start sliding back.
4:34 Flora Lichtman? Let's stay on this weather balloon ride for a second. Tell me about this new study on plastic rain.
4:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, my colleague Benji Jones did some reporting recently on pollution in rain. And he was looking initially at what we knew about acid rain and how we solved that problem. That was essentially when we had pollution from power plants and factories emitting chemicals that reacted with water in the sky and produced acidic chemicals that would then, you know, damage trees and wetlands and lakes and things like that.
5:03 Flora Lichtman? And every child of the eighties remembers this.
5:05 Speaker 01 Right. And this is actually one of the good news stories because for the most part, we've managed to solve that acid rain problem by limiting the amount of pollution going into the air. The problem is that now there might be something else even worse in the rain. And it turns out that plastics, particularly microplastics, and as well as these class of forever chemicals like PFAS, those are also making it into our rain in increasing quantities and are entering our ecosystems in ways that we can't stop.
5:32 Flora Lichtman? Can you remind me of the basic atmospheric physics here? Like, how does trash on the ground become plastics in the sky?
5:40 Speaker 01 Well, one of the big sources of these plastics are roadway. So basically, as tiny bits of plastic get fragmented on roads and highways, they get whipped up into tiny motes of dust that move into the air. And then when they encounter moisture, they cause droplets to nucleate, to form. Basically, every drop of rain that you see has to be nucleated around something, some little drop of stuff. And increasingly, it turns out that plastic is what's causing this moisture to condense in clouds and is then making it down subsequently in the form of precipitation. And then that cycle then repeats over and over. As humans drink that water, as animals and plants take that water up, it ends up in their own bodies.
6:19 Flora Lichtman? Are there places where the rain is more plasticky than other places?
6:23 Speaker 01 There certainly are places where you'll see a little bit more of that. And that tends to be around more industrial areas, basically where we have higher concentrations of people, but also where we have higher concentrations of plastic waste, where we see a lot more waste dumping. So on shorelines where we have a lot of plastic bottles in the ocean, it gets whipped up in the sea spray. But there's no place, as far as we know, that's immune to this, that these plastic bits that get aerosolized spread all over the world. They spread hundreds and thousands of miles. And basically, we found traces of these microplastics in rain in very, very remote locations and have yet to find a place that has kind of survived this on its own.
7:00 Flora Lichtman? You know, people were really mobilized to solve the acid rain problem when we had the term acid rain, because of course, that sounds terrible. Do we need a catchphrase for plastic rain?
7:12 Speaker 01 It's hard to say. I mean, I don't want to also overly alarm people because right now, we aren't seeing the same scale of immediate effects that we did with acid rain, but that doesn't mean that we aren't vulnerable to some sort of long-term problem here. The tricky thing with this is just that there's so many sources of plastic. With acid rain, you had a handful of power plants and factories. You had a handful of just basically bad guys that you could target and scrutinize to make sure that they were doing the right thing. But this is coming from all sorts of plastic waste, from landfills, from car tire exhaust, and just from like just random like fibers that get discarded. And so there's no one source that we can sort of ratchet down. And this requires a big society-wide effort to try to eliminate. And that's going to be really, really difficult.
7:56 Flora Lichtman? Okay, my brain needs to leave this planet for a minute. I read about some exciting Saturn news.
8:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, recently, the International Astronomical Union announced that they have ratified 128 new moons around the planet Saturn. And that brings the total up to now 274 known moons. Most of these moons are a few miles wide. They're irregularly shaped, so think less like our moon, but more like the moons around Mars. They were discovered from the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii and by observing a patch of space near the planet Saturn.
8:32 Flora Lichtman? That we hadn't looked at before?
8:34 Speaker 01 Well, generally, it's a patch of space that they looked at consistently over a period of time. So when you look at one spot, then you can kind of get a sense of what's changing. And what they did was they found that there was these regular patterns of objects that kept moving there. And that's kind of the definition of a moon, something that follows a well-established trajectory that Follows a certain interval and that shows that this object is in the orbit of the planet. And so by using this technique, they were able to verify that there are indeed hundreds of other moons that we didn't really know about before.
9:05 Flora Lichtman? That's cool. I mean, reading this story made me feel for the first time like Earth is kind of lunar poor. Why is Saturn so moon rich?
9:15 Speaker 01 Well, because it's kind of a chaotic environment because it's such a large planet. It has a lot more gravity. It can pull a lot more things into its orbit. But it turns out because of these moons are so numerous, they think that these are actually remnants of collisions. And at least one collision around 100 million years ago, which is very recent in astronomical scales, accounts for about 47 of these new moons. And so basically just a couple of big rocks hurling into each other really hard, created a lot of the fragments that we see around Saturn. And so maybe it's sort of a mixed blessing that we don't see such dramatic collisions in our own atmosphere and should be grateful that we have the one moon.
9:55 Flora Lichtman? Okay, the grass is not always greener. One last story, an obituary for a person who impacted medicine in a big way, but probably most people have never heard of. Tell us about James Harrison.
10:07 Speaker 01 Right. James Harrison passed away recently at the age of 88. He was one of the most prolific blood donors and he's donated blood about more than 1,000 times in his life. The reason why is that his blood contains this very rare antibody called anti D. And scientists use this antibody to actually make a drug that protects babies. Basically, what can happen is that when a baby is formed in utero, it can have a certain protein on its blood that the mother's immune system will attack and that can cause miscarriages and it can also cause complications after birth. But if you have this anti D antibody, you can prevent that. And scientists estimate that Harrison saved about 2.4 million babies
10:52 Speaker 01 in Australia over the course of his life.
10:54 Flora Lichtman? How many times did he give blood?
10:56 Speaker 01 1,173 times.
10:59 Flora Lichtman? Wow, that's got to be like many, many times a year.
11:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, he kept up consistently throughout his whole life. Basically, as often as he could, he did. He drove a long distance, an hour away from his house to his regular donation center to do this. So he was very dedicated and I think he was very aware about how important his donations were. And it's kind of humbling that like, you know, despite a lot of our advanced technology and some of the works we've made in biotechnology, we're still relying on human donors, people who are very generous and very lucky to provide us some very important lifesaving medicines.
11:30 Flora Lichtman? Because we don't have a synthetic version. But there are other James Harrisons out there, people with this antibody.
11:36 Speaker 01 Yes, there are others and there is kind of like a hunt right now to try to find more people and with these proteins to get them to donate. But also there are efforts to try to replicate this synthetically and try to do this artificially. But they're still in the planning and testing stages. We haven't quite gotten there yet.
11:53 Flora Lichtman? That's about all the time we have for now. Thanks, Umar.
11:56 Speaker 01 My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Flora.
11:58 Flora Lichtman? Umar Urfan, senior correspondent at Fox, covering science, climate change and the environment. He's based in Washington DC.
12:07 Flora Lichtman? After the break, some USDA grants for climate and conservation projects are frozen. What does that mean for farmers and our food system?
12:16 Speaker 02 If our farms aren't constantly going in and out of business, that's good for the whole food system, for all communities everywhere.
12:29 Speaker 03 Science Friday is supported by PBS, presenting Going Wild. If you love learning about the natural world and meeting the scientists who help us understand it, be sure to check out the new season of Going Wild with Dr. Ray Wynn Grant. It's the chart-topping and Webby Award-winning podcast from the folks at Nature on PBS, now with a video companion series. In this season of Going Wild, host acclaimed wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Wynn Grant heads out into the field to explore the animals, people and stories that make nature worth saving. Stops include a hibernating black bear den in Arkansas and an underwater shipwreck site off the Florida coast. If you're looking for a place to start, check out the season's debut episode, where Ray joins beloved biologist and influencer Jordan King in the Florida Everglades
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13:37 Flora Lichtman? Around the country, farmers are planting and planting this season's crops. It can be uncertain work, and it's being made even more tenuous by some of this administration's changes to climate and conservation policies. The administration has frozen billions of dollars in grants to farmers for sustainable agriculture, conservation, and climate smart projects. In some cases, farmers had already signed contracts with the government and begun work on these projects. While some funding was recently released, many farmers across the country are still in limbo. Joining me now to talk about this and the future of farming in a changing climate are my guests, Patrick Brown, a farmer in Warren County, North Carolina, and Dr. Kitty O'Neill,
14:20 Flora Lichtman? an agricultural climate resiliency specialist at Cornell University's Cooperative Extension. She's based in St. Lawrence County, New York. Welcome to you both to Science Friday.
14:30 Speaker 05 Thank you.
14:31 Speaker 02 Thank you.
14:31 Flora Lichtman? OK, Patrick, let's start with you. You were set to receive a grant through this Climate Smart Commodities Program through the USDA. Can you explain what that was for?
14:42 Speaker 05 Yes, so our farm participates in partnerships and Climate Smart Commodities Grants to incorporate cover crops into our existing farm program, to add referring buffers to our forestry lines, and to create ways to regenerate our soil by fertility management. We were set to receive a reimbursement of up to $67,000 in grant funding for the work that we've already done last year.
15:13 Flora Lichtman? So this was a contract that was signed?
15:15 Speaker 05 Yes, these are signed agreements.
15:18 Flora Lichtman? Signed agreements and you are waiting for reimbursement and it hasn't come.
15:22 Speaker 05 Correct. As of January 29th, the program that oversees our projects stated that they received a letter from the USDA that all funds that were scheduled to be reimbursed would be frozen indefinitely.
15:36 Flora Lichtman? So some of that money was for cover crops. What is a cover crop and why is it important?
15:42 Speaker 05 Cover crops are important, especially in my area because we are highly erodible farmland. Our cover crops prevent erosion, but also it can add nutrient levels to offset the cost of synthetic nutrients that continue to rise in this inflated economy. So these cover crops save us money.
16:04 Flora Lichtman? And what does it mean for your farm to have these funds frozen? What's the impact for you?
16:08 Speaker 05 It's drastic because we were looking to try to actually operate this year without having to borrow capital from our banking institutions in order to do business. We were actually going into this year with a slight advantage to be more prepared, looking to, you know, increase our yields as we trace those yields each and every year because that determines our profit and how we build capacity on our farm.
16:32 Flora Lichtman? Kitty, how widespread is this? Do you have a sense? How many farmers are in the boat that Patrick's in?
16:38 Speaker 02 I hear variable answers to this question. Hearing directly from farmers like Patrick with their own direct experiences with some of these programs right now is the best information because it's not the same everywhere. Some projects seem to be continuing and others are kind of going in the direction of Patrick's where it's just been completely interrupted at the point of reimbursement.
17:04 Flora Lichtman? You know, a lot of Americans are on board with cutting federal spending. Why are these climate and conservation programs in farming necessary? What's the case for them?
17:16 Speaker 02 So I like to compare these current funding opportunities to something like the Clean Air Act of the early 90s. We identified an environmental problem. Coal burning plants in the Midwest were emitting sulfur and nitrogen into their emissions that were then causing acid rain and that was being deposited on all downwind communities for hundreds and hundreds of miles. And we had a federal initiative to help fund those plants, install scrubbers in their smokestacks and switch to low nitrogen and sulfur fuels.
17:56 Speaker 02 And those kinds of investments for those businesses would never have brought an economic return directly to the business, right? But with federal funding, we were able to incentivize those changes, bring about those improvements to all those communities downwind, including where I am, all the way in, you know, the Northeast. And we have, as a result, forests and lakes and soils coming back from that damage. So I think some of these current funding opportunities are much like that. We've identified a problem. We would like to see farms and lots of other businesses and municipalities too.
18:38 Speaker 02 It's not just for farms, but we've identified these places where we can provide some investment on projects and practices and systems that would never provide a business return.
18:52 Flora Lichtman? Well, Kitty, what is the problem? What's the problem we identified that these are addressing largely?
18:57 Speaker 02 There's greenhouse gas emissions. We've identified practices that will reduce CO2, methane, nitrous oxide kinds of emissions and therefore begin to reduce, slow down, and actually, in the case of agriculture, reverse climate change. So we've identified practices which will reduce the emissions of those greenhouse gases, capture more of it in soils. You know, Patrick mentioned cover crops and some other fertility management practices. Those are the kinds of things that will also, in addition to preventing erosion. Will capture more carbon, keep it in the soil over time and reduce emissions. So I think that's one of the interesting parts.
19:42 Speaker 02 This is not something that is being forced upon farms, but there is a lot of industry initiatives. For example, I'm in the Northeast. We have a lot of dairy farms. I'm familiar with some dairy industry initiatives. There's a big one called Net Zero. These are farmer organizations and they themselves have decided this is important. We need to work toward this. They're working on a lot of very innovative ideas to get, you know, carbon emissions from dairy farms down to zero over time. So these kinds of priorities exist outside the government, but the government's role
20:24 Speaker 02 has been to support and allow some of that to happen in cases where there would not be a direct business return, economic return to a farm for implementing some of those changes.
20:36 Flora Lichtman? Do you rely on federal climate data when you work with farmers, Kitty?
20:42 Speaker 02 You know, yeah, I do a lot. And that's one of the things that has been sort of in my mind. I use data from several of the regional climate centers, which are federally funded. They're actually sort of subdivisions of NOAA, the National Weather Service, things like that. And they've done a really great job of developing sort of regionally relevant tools and analysis portals to sort of look at data, visualize it in meaningful ways, which relate to agriculture, municipalities and businesses in the region. So it's all based on federal data sets and then looking at them in regionally relevant ways.
21:26 Flora Lichtman? Patrick, your farm has been in your family for several generations, I understand. And has climate change made you rethink how you approach farming or even whether it's a sustainable business?
21:39 Speaker 05 Yes. Now, that's a great question because I have identified climate change being a drastic measure for me over the last 20 years of farming this land. For example, planting dates.
21:53 Speaker 05 Farm regions have all changed since the eighties. For example, my location in Warren County, North Carolina, we were considered as Region 7B. Meaning that, uh, two regions below us would plant a lot earlier than we would. When it comes to traditional crops being planted or commodity crops being planted. I could even take it a step further. We, in the fall, would try to have our fall vegetables in the ground by August, the second week. Now we are pushing it towards almost September. You know, the, the different variables of weather and conditions have all changed and it has to come from something. It just can't change like that just because, you know, times or involvement.
22:36 Speaker 05 It has to, has to do with the ozone, has to do with the nature of the planet. And so, um, that is just one example, uh, planting dates that have really been, you know, a difference in how we do business and get prepared each and every year.
22:53 Flora Lichtman? Patrick, I asked Kitty this, but I, I want to get your take too. You know, a lot of Americans are on board with cutting federal spending. Why should the government spend money on these programs?
23:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, I also agree with auditing the government to make sure that tax dollars are being spent appropriately. However, when it comes to farmers that feed the world, where we need to focus more on what is being put into our products in order to be able to have a healthy environment for all that live on earth, we have to take a step back and identify what's important. What are these farmers actually doing? Uh, the USDA froze these funds without even looking at the data that was being collected. Uh, primarily the work that was being done, of course, was actually the work that the farmers were doing.
23:44 Speaker 05 But more specifically, we were tracing the carbon sequestration, GUG greenhouse gas exposure. All these things were being done that the USDA needs this data in order to really audit what farmers should be doing. And, um, I really think that is. It's kind of, uh, kind of like, uh, thinking that, you know, they would take the time to rationalize these projects, understand the importance of them, and then make the determination of what's important and what's not.
24:18 Speaker 02 Can I add one thing to that, Flora?
24:20 Flora Lichtman? Please.
24:21 Speaker 02 You know, a lot of these systems and databases and opportunities to look at data were developed in response to economic priorities. We identified at some point in time that farms are more stable, there's fewer boom and bust cycles. If there's some data with which farms and farm ag professionals like me can look at and sort of make some predictions and some recommendations about best practices, it not only helps smooth out some of the boom and bust rises and falls in economic systems for the farms themselves, but it enhances food security for all of us.
25:03 Speaker 02 You know, if our farms aren't constantly going in and out of business, that's good for the whole food system for all communities everywhere. And so all these systems exist because we identified that to begin with, helping the economy and helping, you know, people with food security.
25:21 Flora Lichtman? Yes, thank you for connecting those dots, that this, this matters to us as consumers of food, which is, you know, of course, everybody, right?
25:27 Speaker 02 Right.
25:29 Flora Lichtman? Thank you, Kitty. Thank you, Patrick.
25:31 Speaker 05 Thank you.
25:32 Speaker 02 You're welcome. Happy to be here.
25:34 Flora Lichtman? Patrick Brown, a farmer in Warren County, North Carolina, and Dr. Kitty O'Neill, an agricultural climate resiliency specialist at Cornell University's Cooperative Extension.
25:47 Flora Lichtman? And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including
25:53 Speaker 02 Shishana Buxbaum.
25:55 Flora Lichtman? Diana Plasker. Beth Ramey.
25:57 Speaker 01 Danielle Johnson.
25:58 Flora Lichtman? I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.
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