Not measuring climate change won't make it go away |
The US National Science Foundation is dismantling a deep ocean monitoring system that provided crucial data on ocean currents.
In what a number of scientists suggested was the Trump administration’s latest effort to stop tracking the changing climate in the hope of convincing the public the climate emergency isn’t happening, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on 1 June it was dismantling a crucial deep-ocean monitoring system that for years has helped researchers understand the impacts of the crisis on the world’s oceans.
The NSF said it plans to send ships this month to remove more than 900 instruments from part of a project called the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The project collects data on temperatures, currents and the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide off the coasts of Oregon, Alaska, Washington and North Carolina, as well as in the Irminger Sea between Iceland and Greenland.
A spokesperson for NSF told The New York Times that the dismantling of the initiative will help the NSF in “prioritising support for evolving........