In the hands — and voice — of Michael Lewis, weather forecasting becomes an unexpectedly rich subject with a fascinating set of heroes and villains. But the really big — and bad — news here involves Barry Lee Myers, chief executive of AccuWeather, President Trump’s choice to head NOAA, under whose aegis the National Weather Service operates. It has been Myers’s mission since the 1990s to make it illegal for the National Weather Service to issue forecasts except in emergencies, to make forecasts a paid service and to suppress the data from which they are drawn. Marketed forecasts, Lewis makes plain, are products dependent on data collected through the infrastructure and expertise paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Lewis ranges further here, too, revealing the increasing, Trump-propelled privatizing of public-funded data collection.

Source: Washington Post August 31, 2018 13:52 UTC