DOGE wants to dump NOAA's data.

Musk would blind the world to what's really happening to their climate. Who cashes in? Musk, with Starlink.

Photo: The NASA / NOAA geostationary satellite.

At the request of Roald Evensen, I, Morgaan Sinclair, place this article in the public domain. You are free to reprint and distribute this article in any medium whatsoever so long as you to not excerpt or abbreviate it and publish it in its entirety.

Hurricane Mitch formed over the Caribbean Sea on October 22nd, 1998. Just four days later, Mitch was a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 155 mph, and gusts to 180 mph. The central pressure was so low, it made your ears hurt.

When Mitch arrived at the position you see here, it all but stopped. The steering winds had arrived at a near-perfect balance with each other, so the storm was moving only a few mph. It would sit right there, in virtually the same spot for three days. And it had perfect outflow.

NOAA—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—and NASA, the NWS (the National Weather Service) and the NHC (the National Hurricane Center) were about to learn two very important things:

• That Mitch exploded because it came to a stop right over a hot eddy, a super-warm spot in the ocean that was just revolving over a fixed right under the eye of the hurricane, and

• That a virtually stationery hurricane could continue generating super-high wind speeds and rainfall indefinitely so long as the water was hot and the outflow was good.

The numbers from land-based and space-based observation poured in. Now the combined forecasting chops of the world’s four greatest scientific weather forecasting organizations rushed to try to save the tens of thousands of prople they knew were at risk:

• UKMet—the staggeringly competent United Kingdom Meteorological Office (the UK national weather service)—which routinely comes up with the most accurate hurricane tracks and the

• ECMWF—European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts operated as a joint effort of a consortium of European countries, and the

• NOAA / NASA / NHC / NSW consortium, the USA’s spectacular suite of observation satellites, expert weather forecasters, and ocean buoys, and the

• The U.S. Navy’s Monterey Naval Research Lab. The Navy’s storm tracks, with their northeast-heavy wind roses provide the best on-the-ground prediction of likely wind speeds and very specific latitude-longitude crosshairs.

Lying still in the western Caribbean, to the east of the Yucatan Peninsula and north-northeast of Honduras, Mitch poured rain: 4” an hour at its peak, with a total of 30” of rainfall on the coast and 50” of rainfall inland.

Nicaragua, Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador took major hits. But it was Honduras that would be devastated beyond belief by the 2nd most deadly Atlantic hurricane on record. The worst was the Great Hurricane of 1780, which may have killed as many as 27,500 people across the Caribbean. Mitch will kill more than 19,500 people in Central America.

Hurricane Mitch reached Category 5 status on October 26—when the NOAA image above was taken. It remained a Category 5 storm through the 27th and then began to weaken from outflow shear. Losing wind speed rapidly over October 27-28, Mitch came ashore in Northern Honduras on October 29th as a Category 1 hurricane.

Chart: Roeper / Researchgate

But then the second disaster happened. As the wind speed fell, the rainfall increased. For the next six days, Mitch meandered across Central America and the Yucatan, dumping millions of cubic miles of atmospheric moisture onto the earth and flooding a nation.

Honduras Appeals to the United States—and the USA Responds

For those of us who watched hurricanes and seismic events with professional links into the major data compilers, the appeal that came in from the government of Honduras was the saddest thing we’d ever experienced. They needed something very specific from the United States: they needed us to re-task a satellite—a very expensive thing for the USA to do — because they needed new pictures of their whole country.

Why? Because most of the bridges and roads were washed out. They didn’t know which way emergency vehicles should go to access what few roads remained to try to reach people stranded in the countryside. And their first responders needed to know where the rivers were. There was so much water flowing that the rivers had torn through their banks and carved entirely new routes to the sea. Where could the first-responders go to reach people in the hinterlands without being washed out to sea themselves by rivers that had changed course?

Of course, the United States—as it used to be—said yes. New satellite images flowed into Honduras’ emergency centers, saving thousands of lives, including those of irreplaceable first responders.

And Please Send Diapers. We need diapers.

And then came another plea. Meteorologists in Honduras started hitting the professional groups in the USA begging for help of another kind, and it is in their pleas to fellow weather professionals and lay weather buffs that the real story of this hurricane was told.

“Send food,” one wrote. “But also please send as many diapers as you can.” Honduras was, he said, “a nation of orphans.”

As the torrential rains had fallen for days and days, water rushed into homes, and it never stopped rising. It covered the windows and then rose up to the eaves. Desperate parents had just one last hope: they placed their own children, and every other child they could find, onto the roofs of their houses. They did not take this last bit of safety for themselves. They allowed themselves to be torn away from their homes by the rushing waters, leaving newborns and infants and toddlers in the care of other little ones, some as young as three.

And days later, when the rains stopped and survivors and responders found their way into the deep countryside, what they saw tore every single one of them apart. Children on the roofs of every structure still standing: traumatized children, sick children, hungry children, thirsty children … dead children.

Every meteorologist and weather buff I know, this one included, sent diapers to collection points in the United States to be flown to collection centers in Honduras to be air-dropped—with food, water, medicine, and water purification tablets—onto the hilltops in the countryside that would not be reached by any vehicles for weeks or months.

This Is Who We Used To Be

This is what the United States used to do when it considered USAid a critical element of its moral center as a nation. This is what the United States used to do, and it never sent the people in other countries, whom it loved as its own, a bill. And it’s what other countries do, too. After 9/11, almost every country in the world, however poor, sent aid to the United States in some form or another, and not a single one every asked to be paid back.

Does Elon Musk Want to Replace NASA/NOAA Satellites with Starlink?

If Musk successfully guts NOAA’s archives, United States weather forecasting goes blind. And not just weather. Geostationery and polar orbital satellites track major fires and, in combination with wind forecasts (from NOAA), they can tell us which way the fire will go. When the Thomas Fire hit the hills above Santa Barbara few years ago, I was able to access a fire perimeter image just SIX MINUTES after the satellite took the photo and confirm to friends in Santa Barbara that their house was still undamaged, although the fire perimeter was less than 1/4 of a mile away.

That’s because ALL DATA GATHERED BY THE US GOVERNMENT IS PUBLIC DOMAIN and therefore accessible to every U.S. citizen, and largely, by everybody in the world. People in Indonesia can see a cyclone coming because we share this information.

Musk Weaponizes Information Flow

It’s very, very cogent to note the following:

• That after the earthquake at the Turkish-Syrian border several years ago, Musk shut down Twitter to the affected area so that people on the ground could not send images of the devastation out of the area to news providers. He didn’t reconnect it until after Erdogan won the last presidential election. Erdogan had just penned a deal with Musk to give Space X a multi-million-dollar contract to launch a Turkish satellite. Good also to note that when the earthquake struck, Turkey had $5.00 USD in its emergency relief fund. So it had nothing to give the people at the border anyhow. But the doctors and nurses en route with medicine and skill couldn’t reach many in the earthquake zone or access information about which roads were still passable because they were set up to communicate through Twitter. … Musk and Erdogan, eager for money and power, may have killed untold numbers of people weaponizing the information system.

• During the same Turkish election cycle, Musk shut down Twitter access to Erdogan’s rivals for more than 36 hours before the election so they couldn’t communicate with each other.

• Musk shut down Starlink to Ukraine at the point that Russia was battling Ukraine for control of the deep-water port of Sevastopol, Ukraine in the Black Sea, which Putin desperately wants. So, suddenly, Ukraine couldn’t get any information about what was going on. That is the weaponization of information flow.

• On March 22, just 10 days ago, Erdogan again shut down X/Twitter access for Erdogan’s enemies as ongoing rallies protest the despot’s jailing of the opposition leader on bogus charges.

If NOAA is Blinded, Public Domain Knowledge Is Dead. Then You’ll Get Starlink. Then You’ll Get To Know Only What Elon Wants You to Know.

There is little question that the public domain nature of U.S. fire, weather, and earthquake sensing and reporting may be 100% destroyed—for the rest of the world but also for U.S. citizens. If Starlink replaces the NOAA / NASA suite of satellites, you’ll get to know only what the U.S. government wants you to know — and beyond that, you and the U.S. government get to know only what Elon Musk wants you to know.

So, now that Musk has destroyed—and he has destroyed them—all seven of the U.S. government agencies that were investigating Tesla and Space X for egregious safety lapses, violating government rules of operation, and gutting labor statutes, next is NOAA.

If he blinds NOAA and the rest of our meteorological suite, there are still the Brits and the Europeans and even China perhaps. But if he gains control of the entire Internet through Starlink, which I’ll guess is a major goal, you won’t have the information you need to protect yourself in natural disasters. And you won’t get to know what happened to the people in Myanmar or Tangshan or Honduras or Sumatra or Fukushima because all you get to know is what Big Brother allows you to know.

The loss of public domain status with regard to America’s wealth of scientific information, which Musk means to purge out of NOAA’s computers, will cripple the ability of any country Trump and Musk target to respond to natural disasters of their own.

And the very lucrative byproducts?

• Americans lose access to climate-change information at a time crucial for saving ourselves from the worst of it—and corporations that want profits at the expense of the natural world (and you) get to do whatever the hell they want to both.

• Americans, blocked from access to the rest of the world’s weather analysis, lose the ability to prepare for and survive hurricanes and massive fires. But the rest of the world will never know what you went through because Twitter and Starlink will block everyone’s knowledge of what happened, even from foreign news outlets, as they’re doing right now in Turkey, where journalists are telling each other to “stop filming and don’t talk to anybody.”

And the devastating byproducts?

• America, with its lost USAid and fatally wounded science, can no longer save millions and be loved for it and be believed to be the best country in the world.

• Americans can no longer be believed to be free at all, since they aren’t allowed to know the truth for sure about anything by their OWNERS.

This is another of Elon Musk’s ploys to convert the asserts of the American people to private ownership by people like him.

This is 1984. Orwell just got the date wrong.

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