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Transcript:
As I’m sure most of you are aware, currently Europe is experiencing an intense heatwave. How intense, exactly? Well, as BlueSky users Abbey Arletto noted, temperatures are significantly higher in France right now than they were portrayed in a fictional forecast for August of 2050 shown in a tv show in 2014 that tried to scare people about the consequences of global warming. Certain areas are experiencing temperatures of 43 Celsius, or nearly 110 Fahrenheit, and thousansd of people have died from the heat and from drowning trying to find relief from the heat.
It’s horrific to watch happen and to know that events like this are becoming more and more common thanks to human-caused climate change. But instead of focusing on that, today I want to talk about some actual good news regarding global warming. I know, it’s getting harder and harder to find but I actually did it, and it’s going to blow your mind that the heroes of this story are US Senators from both sides of the aisle. Seriously. Yeah, I know.
So, as I’ve talked about a lot over the past few years, the masterminds behind the second Trump administration have been trying their best to dismantle American scientific research at every level. One of their goals is to pretend like climate change isn’t happening, which means destroying all of the research currently being done on climate change. One of our greatest tools is the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of sensors across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that was launched in 2016 to measure physical, chemical, geological, and biological markers from the surface all the way down to the sea floor, to give us the most comprehensive look to date on the overall health of our oceans.
Not only has this been a boon to researchers, but the OOI also helps fisheries prepare for warming trends, and fishermen note wind and wave conditions before heading out to sea, and meteorologists predict hurricanes and tsunamis.
So obviously, Trump tried to defund it. He first pulled funding last year, but a bipartisan coalition in Congress immediately restored the funding. Then he tried it again, and AGAIN Congress restored it.
In May of this year, the Trump Administration went a step further and announced that they were sending out ships to pull the sensors out of the water. True to their word, they began pulling the instruments out along the Oregon and Washington coast, managing to grab six out of a total of seven deep sea platforms before a few Senators stepped up. A Democrat, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and a Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, teamed up to pass a measure blocking the administration from removing the rest of the system and demanding the six they already got be serviced and returned.
Why would a Republican fight to protect science, as the rest of the Republican party continues to fall further into the anti-science dark age? Simple: because she would be directly and negatively affected by this particular anti-science action. Alaska runs on fishing. They need accurate ocean, wind, and weather data. That’s it.
But that was enough: following the measure’s passing, Trump’s National Science Foundation announced that they were not going to proceed with the previously planned removals and will be returning the sensors they did remove.
It’s hard to believe that there can still be bipartisan action for good these days, but that’s truly how fucking idiotic the Trump Administration is: even some Republicans can tell when they’re about to be screwed and act accordingly, at which point I am very much in favor of Democrats working across the aisle. The same goes for Democrat Ro Khanna working with Republican Thomas Massie to harass Trump over the Epstein files. Massie thinks climate change is a liberal hoax, so fuck him, but Dems should absolutely use him to attack Trump over Epstein.
Grist has a great article about the Senate saving the OOI, in which they draw a parallel to another odd coalition: when the Trump administration tried to come after the “Energy Star” label, which saves consumers about $40 billion each year, they were thwarted by a group consisting of The American Chemistry Council, which fights against power plant regulations, and the Pool and Hot Tub Alliance, which promotes natural gas in homes. Again, fuck those guys, but absolutely let’s use them to keep a program that reduces energy use, saves people money, and pisses off Donald Trump. A win-win-win.
Grist also points out that the restoration of OOI doesn’t mean that all our ocean monitoring systems are safe. Federal funding is due to run out in the next year for systems like OSNAP and RAPID, which I talked about back in 2023 when a bunch of bad science reporting had people thinking that the Gulf Stream was going to collapse in 2025. It wasn’t the Gulf Stream; it was the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and the research in question stated it was actually unlikely to collapse in 2025. And sure enough, it didn’t, though I guess some commenters think it did, apparently. But no, my streak of being right by simply repeating what the experts say continues unbroken.
(Hello, post-production Rebecca, here. While editing this video I decided I had some extra time, so I looked into why so many people were so confident that AMOC had collapsed in 2025. I got a clue from a few comments that didn’t say “collapsed” but “reversed,” which is extra weird because all of the research up to that point involved AMOC’s continued weakening and when that might lead to a full collapse. A change of direction was, to my admittedly limited knowledge, never discussed.
Well, it turns out that these poor souls were fooled by a new piece of mainstream science misinformation that I missed. In July of 2025, a website called “Intellinews” announced that “Southern Ocean current reverses for first time, signalling risk of climate system collapse.” They claimed that a study published on July 2nd of that year found that a portion of the AMOC, the Deep Western Boundary Current in the South Atlantic, had reversed course for the first time in recorded history. Already you can see that this is not, in fact, proof that the AMOC has collapsed or reversed. But it gets worse! Intellinews fails to properly cite this study, but they do mention that some Spanish scientists “confirmed” it.
Over at Newsweek, Anna Skinner tried to sort all this out by finding the most likely study, which is probably this one published the week prior in my favorite journal, PNAS. But that study is about the increased salinity on the surface of the Southern Ocean, and has nothing to do with any currents reversing or collapsing. One of the co-authors told Newsweek that a mistranslation led to an incorrect press release out of Spain, which was then printed with no clarification by Intellinews.
Another co-author told Newsweek, “We do not talk about DWBC in our recently published work. The AMOC is not collapsing this year.”
On a side note, Newsweek correctly calls out that Intellinews didn’t cite any sources which made everything harder to figure out, but Newsweek ALSO DID NOT CITE THEIR SOURCES, which means that I’ve just spent an hour chasing down this particular bit of misinformation just to figure out why a bunch of idiots left ignorant comments on a video I made two years ago in which I didn’t even say that it was impossible for AMOC to collapse, only that the researchers in that original study said it was unlikely to collapse in 2025 AAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHH okay sorry back to the video.)
That said, that research DID find that AMOC may slow down or fully collapse in the near future because of climate change, and it would be very, very bad for us when it happens. Scientists are still trying to figure out how likely it is that that will happen but there is new research to suggest it’s happening and it’s bad, and so it is extremely important for the entire world that we continue to fund these projects.
So we still have to pay attention to make sure the US government doesn’t destroy more research. The OOI situation provides a great example of the issue: they were able to remove six platforms in a few weeks, but the New York Times contacted Edward Dever, a professor of oceanography at Oregon State University who helps manage the instruments off Oregon and Washington, who said “I believe we could have one mooring ready to go before the end of the summer and 1-2 others ready by fall…Ships are generally scheduled about a year in advance. Scheduling cruises on short notice can sometimes be done, but it is a challenge.”
Tearing things down is easy. Building them back up is hard. But this situation also gives us some hope: when Congress stood up for science, Trump backed down. As a very wise man Republican politician once said, “if it bleeds, we can kill it.” Let’s fucking go.
