Your Weather App Could Soon Develop Blind Spots

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2:17data center demand. So we're talking about PJM, that power grid, and it's something that we've talked about a lot. They see total capacity costs tying a record of$16.4 billion. So the power grab continues, and it doesn't help that when you've got really hot temperatures, you're seeing really kind of stress in terms of air conditioning. We may not need it here in this studio because Oh. It's, my fingers are numb right now. I think it's a perfect temperature, unfortunately. I'm sorry. I have hand warmers. That's how cold it is. But anyway, serious stuff going on. You heard me mention that I don't know if the weather app is actually going to be accurate.

2:56Yes, you did. Because who knows if that is actually accurate. Who knows if the data that they're getting from the government right now is actually as good as that data can be. That's what Mark Gongloff writes about. He's a Bloomberg opinion editor and columnist. He covers climate change. He joins us now from New Jersey. Mark, I'm so glad that you wrote this story. You actually reference a piece that made the rounds in the Stenevic family chat, which was from Gizmodo last week. My brother sent it around. And as you write about in the piece, too, you take the piece a step further. This piece basically said the Doge firings and the cuts that we've seen at the National Weather Service have really affected the number of weather balloons that can go up and gather data.

3:37What did this report find? And then what did you find in your column? the report found that there are there's a big chunk of the united states from the great plains up to the midwest and the pacific northwest where you're getting about half the number of weather balloon launches that you used to get and why this matters is you're not getting them in the morning and you're not and you're it's a big chunk of the west that's not getting weather balloons and what these things are is they're like mris for the atmosphere going from this ground all the way to the troposphere so uh the the what you lose then is weather that develops early that could affect your weather later and weather that develops in the west that could affect weather in the east which it almost always does weather moves from west to east so you have this huge gap where you've only got about half the data you used to get we haven't seen there nobody's done a study yet that says the, you know, forecasts are any worse.

4:37There are a lot of, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence. A lot of people are saying, you know, the forecasts don't seem right to me. And there was a big thing that happened in April in Kansas where all of a sudden these tornadoes hit in Kansas, which Kansas is, you know, obviously prone to tornadoes as, as we all know, but these sort of seem to come out of almost nowhere to some extent. And some people were starting to blame the lack of weather balloons on the Great Plains for that. So maybe we haven't missed too much yet, but is the possibility of a miss mark now greater if we're not launching more balloons, weather balloons into the atmosphere?

5:13Yeah, that's what meteorologists are saying. Again, not all of them because the jury is still kind of out. But the thing with these balloons is that what you miss most often is extreme weather. And that's the thing we care about the most, unfortunately and so things like flash floods a sudden a bunch of sudden tornadoes and also hurricanes and you know hurricanes intensifying um so those weather balloons aren't affecting that but there are other issues with the national weather service a lot of layoffs a lot of places are stressed out they don't have enough people they're not uh keeping up websites that sort of thing so everything's just kind of like on edge right now and so yes we haven't necessarily there's nothing, there's no fingerprints on any big mess yet, but the odds are going up.

5:57And then of course you have the long-term effect of people being stressed, meteorologists, you know, leaving a lot of, a lot of very experienced meteorologists were fired last year and you don't get that institutional knowledge back very quickly. Mark, come on. Can't prediction markets fill the void? Sure. Yes. Well, that's another interesting thing is that, you know, these prediction markets are based on knowing how much wind you're going to get in a hurricane or how many tornadoes you're going to get or where flooding is going to happen. And so I personally find that kind of not good morally to bet on those kinds of disasters, but people are doing that.

6:36And so there's money at stake. More importantly, there's money at stake in the insurance market. And that's where you start to get into real issues where if you have less data, if the forecasts start to deteriorate over time, insurance companies say, hey, I've got to uncertainty now about where tornadoes and such are going to land. I've got to price that uncertainty into your home insurance premiums, which are already very high right now. Right. So we're paying for the uncertainty. Yeah. Right. Yes. And more people pay for the uncertainty, right? If you don't know, if you actually don't know, especially since we know it's gotten more volatile and weather events are happening in places that didn't used to happen.

7:13Yeah. So where does this all leave us? I mean, I don't know. Do we all just wait for another administration or do some folks wait for another administration and then we start to see the weather balloons go back up? Or does the private sector get involved? I mean, how do I don't know? I don't know for sure. I can't predict the future either. It would be I could on the surface say, yeah, we just have to wait till 2030. But we really can't wait till 2030. There could be a disaster that comes. And, you know, this stuff does not go unnoticed. And there have been issues that like with the the ocean monitoring that the Trump administration wanted to tear up.

7:47There are a lot of people that said, hey, wait a minute, I need some of these forecasts that they're producing. And so businesses need these things. This causes, you know, whether extreme weather, whether you believe in climate change or not, extreme weather causes business disruptions. People want good weather. And so there could before 2030 be political pressure to say, hey, let's let's kind of juice up, you know, the what we've got going on at the government level, because you can't replace this with the private sector, unfortunately, at the moment, because all the private sector gets this stuff straight from the NWS, straight from the U.S.

8:17government. So you're kind of at a loss if you don't have that stuff. Real quick, just under 30 seconds. I know U.S. weather data really has been top notch, but our other weather knows no borders. So are other countries doing things that we can kind of rely on? And just real quickly, please. Yeah, I mean, Europe is doing some great things right now, and they've got some good models that help predict things. Other places are going to eventually catch up. The problem is that that takes time. It took lots of tax payment dollars, lots of years to build up what we've got now. So it's going to be hard to replicate that.

8:51Well, we appreciate being able to check in with you and staying on top of this. Mark Angloff, he's columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, covering all things when it comes to climate change. Really appreciate it.

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