"With its first wave of firings, the new Trump administration has decimated NOAA."
"In the mid-2000s, the Pacific Northwest shellfish industry, one of the world’s largest, was on the brink of collapse. Millions of oyster larvae were dying, and no one knew why. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States were among the first to investigate. The federal researchers soon realized the problem was much bigger than oysters.
Over the preceding few years, scientists had begun studying what happens to fish and shellfish when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide—the result of burning fossil fuels. Water plus carbon dioxide makes carbonic acid and, as scientists were showing, the estuaries across the eastern Pacific Ocean are especially vulnerable to this acidity. But ultimately, NOAA scientists found, the crisis of ocean acidification was seeping into every part of the sea, felt all along the food chain from tiny crustaceans to whales.
While the U.S. Congress lacked the political muscle to rein in the carbon emissions fundamentally driving ocean acidification, in 2009 it did make a commitment to study the problem. The United States passed the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act, establishing, among other things, NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program. Over the subsequent 15 years, this program’s small team has partnered with universities and scientific institutions around the world to study how to protect oceans and marine life, and the millions of people who depend on them for food and fortune. It’s one small part of NOAA’s overall work measuring greenhouse gas emissions, modeling the global climate, monitoring and protecting fish and marine mammals, restoring and protecting coastlines from erosion and floods, providing marine navigation data, and even predicting space weather."
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