Killing the Mauna Loa observatory over irrefutable evidence of increasing CO2

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/trump_shoots_climate_messenger/

by rntn • 1 year ago

203 164 1 year ago

theregister.com

sroussey• 1 year ago

Coming for the scientists themselves next? (Ref to Galileo)

swiftcoder• 1 year ago

It's happened under pretty much every other autocratic regime in recent history...

perihelions5• 1 year ago

There's an ongoing and horrifically absurd witch-hunt against Chinese science grad students, led by MAGA FBI director Kesh Patel. He makes very popular Twitter threads for each one he arrests, drumming up a MAGA frenzy about how their insane conspiracy theories—the ones about an organized Chinese bioterrorism plot to kill Americans—were proven correct, again.

There are young PhD students who've been imprisoned for months without bail over these fictions.

moralestapia4• 1 year ago

Source on the imprisoned students? Outrageous, if real.

dangero2• 1 year ago

I haven’t followed these cases, but are you anti due process? How do you know these are fictions? Are you on the inside? It sounds like the cases will be tried in court and we will find out what’s true. Are you saying that’s not the case?

davedx• 1 year ago

Even the Third Reich appreciated the value of scientific research and engineering.

edent• 1 year ago

They literally didn't. They expelled anyone working on Jüdische Physik.

It is one of the (many) reasons they fell behind in atomic research.

mschuster91• 1 year ago

Depends on the research. For some areas such as gender science, they swooped in and literally burned decades worth of research [1]. And fwiw, even medicine was considered political - the term "Schulmedizin" was popularized by the Nazis who preferred esoterics, homeopathy and other quackery.

IMHO, it's more than warranted to call out parallels between events back then and events happening right under our noses today [2], not to mention the increasing and worrying trend of book bans [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_f%C3%BCr_Sexualwissen...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ohio-man-accused-burnin...

[3] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-school-library-book-ban...

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

When science and ideology conflicted, they picked ideology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Mathematik

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnenerbe

IAmBroom• 1 year ago

Is that why they closed the universities?

flohofwoe2• 1 year ago

I guess this phantastic appreciation must have been why the best German scientists fled to the US after the Nazis came to power ;)

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5299/The-scientific...

englishrookie• 1 year ago

Don't Look Up...

moralestapia4• 1 year ago

™

alphazard• 1 year ago

We really need prediction markets for these climate variables. It would do an awful lot to cut through the politicization of what the models can and can't reliably predict. A transaction fee for a market predicting this observatory's measurements could be used to help pay for the up keep of the observatory.

phtrivier3• 1 year ago

Please give me the (safe) place where I can bet that the CO2 concentration will be higher next year than now. And show me the (solvent) people ready to bet the contrary.

My next bet will be about "fire burns" and "water wets", please. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTU38cbXCGQ

mark242• 1 year ago

Go get yourself some home insurance on a single-family house in Miami.

supportengineer• 1 year ago

Trump leaned during the first administration that if you simply avoid testing for COVID, the case count drops dramatically. The voters rewarded him for this behavior with a second term.

NewJazz3• 1 year ago

The voters punished his handling of the pandemic by rejecting a second term, then a few years later they sorta forgot what happened I guess or maybe didn't want to vote for a woman.

UncleOxidant• 1 year ago

The electorate has the memory of a goldfish.

phtrivier3• 1 year ago

The voters punished Trump because of inflation. Then they punished Biden because of inflation.

Show me the gas and grocery prices from July-Nov 2028, and I'll be ready to bet on the winner of next elections (assuming they happen, etc...)

const_cast2• 1 year ago

No, you're wrong. She's not just a woman, she's also black.

jihadjihad• 1 year ago

Or just don't publish the data at all. It's why China's count of COVID-19 mortality relative to its (arguably deflated) case count is off by an order of magnitude [0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

metalman• 1 year ago

also on the hit list on.the way to setting an all time low for polar ice, right now

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today

they are operating under a reprieve for another couple of weeks, and then will have to re calibrate and re validate the data from another less good satelite..... "or something"*

* new scientific term

SoftTalker• 1 year ago

The graph on that page is suspect. Why does the Y axis start at 320? Why does the X axis start at 1960?

floren• 1 year ago

It starts at 1958 because that's when the measurements began.

ellisv• 1 year ago

MLO was founded in 1956 and began continuous CO2 measurement in 1958.

icehawk• 1 year ago

It's really not. "[Mauna Loa Observatory] was founded on June 28, 1956, as part of the US Weather Bureau"

And if you look at the tick marks on the graph, it starts before 1960.

0_____0• 1 year ago

Because those are the bounds of the data. There was no attempt to hide this fact in the graph (plot does not intersect "origin", well labeled axes...)

searine• 1 year ago

Why does the Y axis start at 320?

Because CO2 didn't start from zero in 1960?

timr7• 1 year ago

We have other ways to measure atmospheric CO2 that don’t require maintaining a telescope in Hawaii.

I don’t know why the funding cut is being made, but this article is leaping to a conclusion.

throwawaymaths5• 1 year ago

Maintaining just the co2 station is probably inexpensive enough that people who care could scrounge for coins under their cushions and keep it alive. I'd happily chip in let's say $50/yr.

cardamomo2• 1 year ago

No need to scrounge! What if just a tiny bit of our taxes went to this?

dmbche4• 1 year ago

The telescope is studying the sun. Solar events have non negligible effects of the weather. Mauna Loa produces meteorological reports used by sailors and pilots all around the world daily.

This observatory is the first one to show CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and their analyses have been cornerstone to the climate discussion since it's inception.

Unless it's shown that the observatory is burning millions, it's nonsensical to shut it down. It's not free to set up another equivalent lab.

And locations similar to Mauna Loa are not very common, to be clear. It's not gonna be cheaper to set up an equivalent.

timr7• 1 year ago

Well, at least you’re bothering to have the argument that the article didn’t, but you’re also just speculating about the cost/benefit.

There are good reasons to shut down telescopes, including age, outdated technology, and deprecation.

apical_dendrite2• 1 year ago

In addition to the high altitude and the isolation from human CO2 sources, they also have decades of data from that location, and having long time-series data is helpful.

The Trump administration is cutting many worthy science projects, often for arbitrary or political reasons.

perihelions5• 1 year ago

It's not a telescope[0]; it's a spectrometer that takes in local air samples. It's far more useful if it's at high elevation (else you're drowning in local/regional effects as noise), which is why it happens to be colocated with several astronomy experiments—but they are not the same equipment.

"We have other ways to measure atmospheric CO2"

It's destroying the continuity of the world's highest-quality and longest-running dataset.

edit: Also, this CO2 observatory closure reflects the entire NOAA climate observation budget being zero'd out[1], so I don't know what where else you'd like us to look instead.

[0] https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/climate/budget-cuts-clima... ("But President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would put an end to Mauna Loa, along with three other key observatories and almost all the climate research being done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.")

timr7• 1 year ago

The thing they’re talking about is a telescope. They incidentally have a CO2 meter there.

Running just the CO2 meter is something that could be done remotely, without the need for a telescope, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

cwmoore• 1 year ago

maintaining a telescope in Hawaii

Why does this seem so idiomatically ridiculous? It is not just the italics, but they do reinforce the statement.

The center of the Pacific is not interchangeable with many other places, to observe the atmosphere. Like maintaining a telescope in Seattle would be so much more practical?

timr7• 1 year ago

It’s in italics because, if the telescope is outdated or otherwise worth shutting down, keeping it around because it also makes a CO2 measurement is dumb.

I don’t know why they’re cutting it, but the article is just wildly speculating.

intended2• 1 year ago

You always have ways to not invest in science and research. To break liberal and scientific work and data lineages.

tito4• 1 year ago

It's an atmospheric monitoring station and a solar telescope. I've been there. it's basically a shipping container full of sensors and computers and two people huddled there keeping it running.

The big telescopes are on Mauna Kea.

bmmayer1• 1 year ago

Doesn't Mauna Loa spew CO2 by the metric ton on a regular basis? Why is that vantage point the best source of atmospheric CO2 ppm?

throwawaymaths5• 1 year ago

historical reasons. volcano aside the location is reasonable: altitude and relative isolation from human sources wothout being too out of the way to make maintenance a bear. hawaiian trade winds help with dispersal.

as for volcanism Supposedly it's in a rock creche on the mountain face facing away from the volcano, but you're right to be suspicious.

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

Doesn't Mauna Loa spew CO2 by the metric ton on a regular basis?

The 1960-present chart in the article is anything but regular, instead showing a steady rise, and doesn't appear to blip up for either the 1984 or 2022 eruptions.

rvbissell• 1 year ago

anything but regular

From context your meaning is clear, but I think you got that idiom inverted.

treyd• 1 year ago

It's high up in the atmosphere and has relatively few nearby point sources like cities since it's in the middle of the Pacific ocean. It's a unique environment that provides a valuable data point.

clint• 1 year ago

I believe the individual was speculating that the volcano itself could be outputting large, random amounts of CO2 which could be tainting its readings.

gonzo41• 1 year ago

Clean wind from the pacific is captured at the observation tower. Another point like it is Cape Grim Tassie which gets clean wind from the southern ocean.

Both of these points observe vastly cleaner air and provide that baseline.

breput3• 1 year ago

You're thinking of Mauna Kea, which is some distance - both horizontally and vertically - from Mauna Loa.

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauna_Loa_Observatory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_eruption_of_Mauna_Loa

Mauna Kea is dormant for the last 5k years or so.

samch• 1 year ago

Maybe they’ve thought about this and measure that too? Maybe they can adjust measurements based on data from multiple sensors?

https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/volc...

RandomBacon2• 1 year ago

The Hawaiians have been trying to get rid of the observatory for a long time now, they were finally successful?

breput3• 1 year ago

There are a number of telescopes on Mauna Loa which have not been removed, just this sensor.

perihelions5• 1 year ago

I don't want to touch that flame hazard with a thirty-meter pole, but, just to clarify context:

- The entirety of the Mauna Loa observatory, which is operated by NOAA (weather guys), is being shut down;

- The vastly larger Mauna Kea observatories, hosting dozens of federal and international clients, is unrelated

floatrock• 1 year ago

That almost sounds like a winning strategy in this whacko-world... "but getting rid of this would be caving to the woke beliefs of the non-christian mountain-god-worshipping natives!"

jmclnx• 1 year ago

Money wins all the time and the GOP is happy to take it for supporting fossil fuels. But the climate change fix party (democrats) is more than happy to open up new Oil Fields if they think high gas prices will hurt their election chances. That happened under Biden.

So here we are, seeing heat records being broken every year and storms causing more and more damage. Everyone knew this would happen 60+ years ago, but the bribes kept the gov. kicking the can down the road.

At least by closing Mauna Loa the facts can be denied going forward.

The next kick will probably "melt" the can.

crystal_revenge• 1 year ago

The fact that roughly half the comments here are some sort of weakly veiled climate denialism tells me it won't matter how much data we have anyway.

If members of a reasonably technical community can't accept what's happening, then there's no reasonable hope that people will ever be able to reason about our situation correctly. We are surrounded by evidence of all varieties in every direction that we are heading down a path of catastrophic climate change, and yet people contort their logic to find ways not to see it.

bantunes• 1 year ago

We've made a decision: we prefer to continue having this world (and all its conveniences including steak multiple times a week and flying for cheap) and lose it soon-ish than move to another one right now with less access to... stuff.

And the only way we can have it differently is with violence, which nobody wants. So we'll walk to the abyss together.

Earw0rm• 1 year ago

"but I worked really hard to EARN that steak. I'm not having some goddamn commie take it away from me."

"The rich declare themselves poor" - George Michael, Praying For Time, 1990.

intended2• 1 year ago

We - depends on the definition.

If there is a structural force shifting the market places of ideas and decisions, forcing certain choices or protecting and harvesting voting blocs - it’s not “we” in the sense of personal choice.

I concede, that if we define corporations as an expression of human desires - then yes, “we” have made that decision.

scottLobster• 1 year ago

We already have insane and growing wealth inequality and stagnant wage growth. The one thing that somewhat compensated for it is cheap goods, taking that away is not a winning argument in this environment. It's also a hard sell when Jeff Bezos has a wedding in Italy where dozens of private jets flew in and collectively emitted more carbon for that one wedding than all the gasoline vehicles multiple generations of my family have driven in their lifetimes.

And yet I, with my already depressed wages and kids to feed, should sacrifice steak and coach airline tickets?

I'm all for climate action, but it has to be policy level. If it's a choice between a warming world where we're solvent with some middle class prosperity, and a warming world where my wife, kids and I are broke because we went into six figures of debt replacing our ICE cars with EVs and retrofitting my house to passivhaus stanadards, I'm taking the former.

yablak• 1 year ago

You underestimate Russia's spambots.

whizzter2• 1 year ago

While ubiquitous I've lately started to ponder if we're giving them way too much credit just because some western players might have found common ground in amplifying the same messages.

whizzter2• 1 year ago

I think of my experience with real world technical people, maybe 2-4% are denialists but those are also very vocal (enough to saturate a place like this). Another 4-10% are under the sway, and I think that's a fairly reasonable assumption since in Sweden the party that represent those that would vote for the current US admin manages to get about 20% of the electorate (although possibly more in the younger age groups).

It's also a reminder that this is a well known public forum at this point, and those are always targeted by propaganda (or have gotten a large enough mass that denialists have gotten a large enough foothold).

Back in 97-00 slashdot was an amazing site, just a gathering of inquisitive people posting cool stuff. Over the years it degenerated with more hateful stuff despite valiant efforts to adjust moderation causing early people to drop off, this place was amazing back in 2015 when I joined and the work done to keep it somewhat tidy after some 18 years is actually impressive, but I'm also feeling a lot of the same types of comments increase that made slashdot a less interesting place to begin with.

MichaelZuo12• 1 year ago

I’ve never met any reasonably intelligent person in real life that denied climate change, of any kind whatsoever, is happening…

There are many people who doubt whether the majority of the observed effect is directly human caused however.

Of course whether it’s human caused directly or human caused via 10 degrees of seperation matters little to future generations… but someone, somewhere, needs to actually do the work and provide credible rock solid proof for each and every step along the way.

Otherwise the latter group will keep on growing in size and influence.

sershe2• 1 year ago

Various estimates of GDP loss from IPCC and such are iirc like 8-10%. That would catastrophically plunge us all the way to the dark ages of a few years ago. I just googled for the most alarmist estimates backed by an actual paper and the worst I could find was 12% per degree of extra warming by 2100. So, it's like going back from today to the 90ies. I mean having to listen to grunge and techno again does sound pretty catastrophic.

justsid• 1 year ago

So let me get this straight, going back 30-ish years is a-okay when caused by climate change but going back slightly less to curb it is a problem? We haven’t reached some sort of equilibrium and will stay at the currently committed level of climate change, it’s just getting worse.

This is all so maddeningly stupid and frightening.

Guid_NewGuid• 1 year ago

I keep meaning to do a project where I try and categorise this rightward drift over time. I've only been here for about 8 years on my main account but increasingly it feels comments here reflect the ideological schism in reality reflected everywhere else. This, I suppose, shouldn't be surprising, but it felt like for a while people in general held a higher standard of evidence.

As much as I'd like to chalk that up to bots, of which I'm sure there are some small amount, I think it has more to do with the ideological roots of this space. Extremists like Yarvin and Thiel are in the DNA of this forum and its userbase. Of course I'm likely to fall afoul of the guidelines even mentioning this. On any political thread you get this strange through-the-looking-glass sensation of people inhabiting an entirely disjunct reality.

And it also appears to be wholesale for many people, you can hold the position that DEI was pointless corporate propaganda and rolling it back is harmless, or H1B visas should be ended, but also that attacks on science and vaccination are bad but most people seem to have lost that nuance.

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

I’m scrolling down and genuinely can’t see the comments you refer to. Which comments that express this sentiment constitute roughly half? Do you have links?

adornKey• 1 year ago

On the other hand especially the technical community is very quick with censoring anything new about climate-modelling. There has been a lot going on in the last 5 years, but knowledge about any of that is very low. Even Institutes like NOAA still promote models based on very old approximation formulas (Myhre et al 1998 - logarithmic approximation of radiative forcing).

Anything newer - proper line by line calculations that get rid of the approximations and take a serious look at the absorption spectrum - is nowadays essentially a taboo...

sega_sai• 1 year ago

US vandalism continues. And that is truly vandalism in the sense of bunch of barbarians coming and destroying what they have little clue about.

mathiaspoint• 1 year ago

I like Richard Stillman's word for Trump: "the wrecker." It perfectly captures the disagreement here.

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

It has a bit of a dual meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(Soviet_Union)

hermitcrab• 1 year ago

It is so easy to destroy infrastructure and expertise that has taken decades to build. All so Trump and his buddies can get even bigger tax breaks. It is enough to make you cry.

BTW 'Barbarian' get a bad rap. They were in many ways more civilized than the Romans. But the Romans were really good at killing people and got to write the history.

Animats• 1 year ago

Politically, try framing this as "Trump is trying another coverup, like Epstein and Jan 6th". It's coverups that doom politicians, because they draw attention to the problem.

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

Epstein is rather unusual for Trump in that it's actually lingering.

His other coverups have not had any significant impact on his supporters. Quite a few have been enthusiastically embraced, like the Jan 6 pardons.

dmbche4• 1 year ago

But Trump already had Jan 6th and Esptein happend to him and nothing happened.

I don't think there's a way you can spin it.

Like those country leaders in Europe towards the middle of the last century, with the mustache, the newspapers couldn't have spun it away, y'know?

perihelions5• 1 year ago

Coincidentally, the "Space Force" observatory in Hawaii was recently given a $176 million upgrade contract.

https://spacenews.com/kbr-wins-176-million-contract-to-moder...

gmuslera• 1 year ago

The revolution will not be televised. Once we shut down all the alarms they will stop making noise, but that won't address what is triggering them.

It is not the only measurement of global CO2 source, anyway, but as a base point for long enough trend.

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

It's not just the NOAA monitoring station in Hawaii that's being closed, but also those in Alaska, Samoa and Antartica.

If it was just the Hawaii station, we could quibble over its merics (volcanic activity, etc.), but closing all four means only one thing: the US doesn't want data that tracks climate change.

If you don't track it, you don't have to do anything about it.

Assuming we survive, I can't imagine how future generations will look back on all these attempts at climate change denialism in their history books, dumbfounded by our stupidity.

tito4• 1 year ago

Catching up here. I visited there as part of building The State of Carbon website (https://carbon.datahub.io/). This was much upvoted project on HackerNews back when it was first created: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332595

Totally bogus. First off, it’s a critical dataset for tracking CO2 levels. And second, it’s just like two people huddling in a metal shipping container with a bunch of sensors on top of a mountain in Hawaii, not some kind of crazy budget.

Killing the Mauna Loa observatory over irrefutable evidence of increasing CO2

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