Trump is killing the AMOC early-warning system over pocket change.
I keep a notebook in my shop — a spiral-bound book with oil smudges on the cover, the kind you can buy at the hardware store in Adams for three dollars. For twelve years I’ve written down the ice-out date on Lake Petenwell, the first mosquito of the year, when the deer start rutting, when the maple sap runs. The notebook is a mechanic’s log, not a scientific instrument. But it’s my piece of a bigger chain. The AMOC — the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a name that does not trip off the tongue — is the big chain. It’s the system of ocean currents that moves heat from the equator to the North Atlantic, and when it weakens or collapses, the climate in Europe and beyond changes ten times faster than what we’re already struggling to keep up with. The monitoring system that tells us whether that chain is about to snap is now being cut off.
Three ocean scientists laid out the situation in the Guardian this week — Penny Holliday of Britain’s National Oceanography Centre, Femke de Jong and Sjoerd Groeskamp of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. The AMOC has been directly measured for only about twenty years, a blink of an eye in climate time. Before that, we were guessing. The measurements we have are now a benchmark for climate models, and they’ve already shown that the current is weakening. Without them, we’re flying blind.
The administration’s budget proposal zeros out roughly half the funding for AMOC monitoring by cutting NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation. Last week, the administration descoped the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which was part of the program that watches the current. The total cost of all AMOC monitoring is about €25 million a year. That’s five cents per European citizen. The administration is saving pocket change by killing the early-warning system for a climate tipping point.
The European Union just committed €50 million to ocean observation and launched OceanEye, picking up the infrastructure the United States is walking away from. But that money won’t fill the gap the US is leaving, and it won’t be in place before the research vessels that service the monitoring arrays have to be financed and packed. The coastal floods that are already twelve times more likely than they were a generation ago are a preview of what happens when we stop watching the ocean.
The scientists in the Guardian make a comparison that should bother anyone who has ever paid a tax bill. Europe spends €1 billion a year monitoring space for asteroids — a civilisation-ending event whose probability is close to zero. The AMOC monitoring system — tracking a climate shift that could disrupt agriculture across the hemisphere, flood coasts, and reshape weather from Lisbon to the Dells — costs €25 million. That is the asteroid-tracking program’s coffee budget.
Here in Adams County, those cuts land differently than they do in a Guardian op-ed about European currents. NOAA runs the National Centers for Environmental Information. It is where the Wisconsin State Climatology Office pulls its long-term climate summaries. It holds the Lake Mendota ice-cover record — the longest continuous lake-ice dataset in North America, running since 1855 — that researchers and state fisheries managers use to track what is happening to the water. When the county conservation office advises a farmer on drainage tile or planting dates, the precipitation records and growing-zone maps it relies on flow through NOAA’s infrastructure. When NOAA’s budget gets cut, the data pipeline that feeds this county’s understanding of its own climate gets thinner.
I think about the ice-out on Petenwell. When I started writing it down, the lake froze over in early December and broke up in late March. The last few years, it’s been freezing in late December and breaking up in early March. That’s a month of ice cover gone. The AMOC is part of why that’s happening. The notebook doesn’t tell me what the AMOC is doing, but it tells me something is changing. The deer are bedding down later. The ticks are showing up earlier. The farmers who grow potatoes and corn on the sandy soil of the Central Sands are watching their irrigation costs climb because the summers are hotter and drier, and the winters are wetter and warmer. The AMOC is not some distant abstraction. It’s the engine that drives the weather patterns that determine whether the corn gets enough rain and whether the lake freezes thick enough for the ice-fishing shacks. When the engine sputters, we feel it here.
Wendell Berry wrote in The Unsettling of America about the “extractive mind” — the habit of treating everything as a resource to use up and discard, including the knowledge systems that let you understand what you are doing to the land. Cutting the monitoring systems is the extractive mind applied to observation itself. Aldo Leopold had the shorter version: the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces. The AMOC monitoring network is one of the pieces. So is the NOAA data pipeline that feeds Wisconsin’s climate records. So is the NSF funding that supports the university researchers who turn raw data into the understanding that farmers, fisheries managers, and county conservation departments actually use.
Imagine you own forty acres of sandy soil in central Wisconsin and your well is on the south side of the county where the nitrates have been climbing for fifteen years. You cannot test the water yourself. You need the county Land and Water Conservation Department to run the samples, and you need the state data series to know whether the trend is getting better or worse. Now imagine someone cuts the testing budget to save what amounts to the cost of a chainsaw chain per household per year. That is the AMOC situation at planetary scale. The monitoring costs nothing. The ignorance costs everything.
The administration that claims to put America first is making America the country that stopped watching. That is the Nationalist Shell Game at its plainest — the rhetoric of national strength while the policy guts the monitoring that strength depends on. Europe is stepping up with OceanEye and new commitments from the UK and the Netherlands. But ocean monitoring is not something one continent can do alone. The data has to be global or it is not useful. Half the funding comes from the United States, and the United States is walking away.
Aldo Leopold also wrote that “one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” The AMOC monitoring array is one of the things that tells us how deep the wounds are. Cutting it off doesn’t make the wounds go away. It just means we’ll be the last to know when they become fatal.
Five cents a year per person. That is the cost of watching the ocean. The cost of not watching it is the thing none of us can afford. The notebook on my bench will keep filling up, year after year, as long as I’m here. The AMOC monitoring array should be doing the same. The administration is killing it, and the rest of us are going to pay the price.