10% Of NOAA Staff Laid Off, With More Cuts Possible

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. A bit later in the hour, a conversation with former NIH director, Harold Varmus, about the future of biomedical research and how a brainless organism builds complex, subterranean supply chains.

But first, some science news stories from the week, 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.

Umair Irfan is a senior correspondent at Vox covering science, climate change, and the environment, and he’s based in Washington, DC. Umair, welcome back to Science Friday.

UMAIR IRFAN: Hey, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: All right. Let’s dig into NOAA here. Remind us what NOAA does.

UMAIR IRFAN: 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And who works there?

UMAIR IRFAN: 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What’s the state of NOAA right now?

UMAIR IRFAN: 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.

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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: To what degree are these cuts at NOAA about NOAA’s work in climate change, or is this just a general belt tightening?

UMAIR IRFAN: There is the general belt tightening, but NOAA does appear to be somewhat of an ideological target. The Project 2025 Guidebook that was put out by the Heritage Foundation, 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Privatizing all of its weather functions. Weather is political.

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, it’s profitable, apparently, if you can actually 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 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 that we use to route airplanes and ships and how farmers used to plant, a lot of that may be downgraded.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Umair, you seem like you’re down the rabbit hole on NOAA. What are some of your big aha’s from this reporting?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yeah, 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 very important emergency work. Basically, not just long-term and medium-term forecasts, but 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 life saving work. People need these forecasts to evacuate, to prepare, and it really does save lives. 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 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s stay on this weather balloon ride for a second. Tell me about this new study on plastic rain.

UMAIR IRFAN: 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 damage trees and wetlands and lakes and things like that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Every child of the ’80s remembers this.

UMAIR IRFAN: 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, 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Can you remind me of the basic atmospheric physics here? How does trash on the ground become plastics in the sky?

UMAIR IRFAN: Well, one of the big sources of these plastics are roadways. 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 enucleated around something, some little drop of stuff. And increasingly, it turns out that plastic is what’s causing this moisture to condense in the 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Are there places where the rain is more plasticky than other places?

UMAIR IRFAN: 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 survived this on its own.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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 catch phrase for plastic rain?

UMAIR IRFAN: 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 from just random fibers that get discarded. And so there’s no one source that we can ratchet down. And this requires a big society-wide effort to try to eliminate. And that’s going to be really, really difficult.

FLORA LICHTMAN: OK, my brain needs to leave this planet for a minute, I read about some exciting Saturn news.

UMAIR IRFAN: 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 Maunakea Observatory in Hawaii, by observing a patch of space near the planet Saturn.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That we hadn’t looked at before?

UMAIR IRFAN: 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 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 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.

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?

UMAIR IRFAN: 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 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 big rocks hurling into each other really hard, creating a lot of the fragments that we see around Saturn. And so maybe it’s 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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.

UMAIR IRFAN: 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 in Australia over the course of his life.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How many times did he give blood?

UMAIR IRFAN: 1,173 times.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. That’s got to be many, many times a year.

UMAIR IRFAN: 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 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 life-saving medicines.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Because we don’t have a synthetic version. But there are other James Harrisons out there, people with this antibody?

UMAIR IRFAN: Yes, there are others, and there is kind of like a hunt right now to try to find more people 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s about all the time we have for now. Thanks, Umair.

UMAIR IRFAN: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, covering science, climate change, and the environment, and he’s based in Washington, DC.

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