NMFS also works with the fishing industry to reduce bycatch, which is all the marine life that fishers catch unintentionally. While caught accidentally, these animals are often injured or die along with the target species. Even with NMFS intact, the agency lacks the funds to adequately measure bycatch—a problem estimated in billions of pounds of discarded sea life annually. Bycatch is not only wasteful but also a huge threat to biodiversity, and iconic animals such as whales, dolphins, and sea turtles routinely find themselves snarled in fishing nets or lines. With fewer resources to address bycatch, the outlook for some species already approaching extinction is especially grim. Sewell asks, “If a highly imperiled right whale gets caught up in fishing gear, who’s going to remove it so that the animal has some chance of living and carrying on the legacy of that species?”
Finally, NOAA manages marine national monuments and national marine sanctuaries, such as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument. This protected seascape, which is approximately the size of Connecticut, lies off the southern New England coast and is home to iconic sperm whales, rare seabirds, and vulnerable deep-sea corals.
NOAA is one of the world’s leading climate research agencies
As of now, NOAA’s climate website, which contains vast repositories of publicly available and publicly paid-for climate data, is still up and running—but it’s unclear for how long.
That’s why McKinzie has been busy downloading and archiving all the NOAA data relevant to NRDC’s work. Other organizations, universities, and individuals are taking similar steps.
And there’s certainly a lot of data to save: NOAA’s scientists are some of the world’s leaders in climate research. The agency collects decades’ worth of data on all manner of environmental phenomena: from sea level rise and average ocean temperatures to coral bleaching and the chemical composition of the oceans to wildfires and urban heat islands. “It’s really hard to think of some aspect of the climate change problem that NOAA’s sensors and scientists are not involved in,” McKinzie says.
Federal agencies, regulatory bodies, journalists, advocates, teachers, students, and scientists the world over rely on this data. “Climate science is so complex,” McKinzie says. “If that core repository of data isn’t available and updated, so that we can keep trying to understand what is going on with the changing climate—it’s just a terrific loss.” (For the same reason, NRDC and its partners are currently suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture due to its illegal purging of climate change information that’s vital to farmers from its website.)
Without this scientific evidence detailing the climate crisis, legally challenging the Trump administration on its failure to take action on climate change could also become harder. And if NOAA’s robust climate research and recordkeeping disappear, McKinzie also worries about the ability of scientists to solve problems well into the future, as the consequences of a warming world continue to escalate.
“This vast archive contains within it the potential to understand things that we don’t know right now about climate change,” he says, “and perhaps about problems that we can’t yet imagine.”
