Sheesh.
Josh Marshall notes
that Senator Rick "Maddog" Santorum has introduced a bill that would prevent the government from making meteorological data available to the public for free (as it has been here).
The justification? Having this information available free and without ads cuts into the profits of the Weather Channel and AccuWeather.
As Josh points out, the data distributed by NOAA and other government agencies is ours; we paid for it. Our tax dollars paid for every one of the satellites and other gizmos that enable us to have such an amazing handle on our weather. The data that the Weather Channel and AccuWeather sell mostly comes from the government. But they want to sell it back to us.
Josh:
This article in the Palm Beach Post goes into greater detail on the bill. And you can see from its proponents feeble justifications just what a con this is. They note, for instance, that the bill would not prevent the National Weather Service from alerting the public to imminent disasters, which is awfully generous of them.
Indeed, the executive vice president of AccuWeather, Barry Myers, probably had to have his face specially treated with some sort of fixing agent to prevent him from laughing out loud when he told the Post that the "bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector."
More from the Palm Beach Post.
"The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people's lives and property," said Myers, whose company is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, "It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of 'warm and sunny.'"
Listen, dickhead, simply making it illegal for the National Weather Service to share the information it collects with the public does not mean they will stop "producing forecasts of 'warm and sunny'". Forecasting nice weather is sort of part of the science of predicting bad weather. He seems to be implying that the Weather Service, once freed from the drudgery of forecasting the weather can focus their energy only on those situations when dangerous weather activity is happening. Presumably they'll find out that a hurricane is coming by paying a subscription fee to The Weather Channel. They'll be alerted when something is brewing and they can fire up all the expensive machines then.
It's clearly not necessary to say this, because Barry Myers is obviously just a liar, but exposing the data on the web is not a major expense once the data has been collected. No money will be saved by this bill, it's only purpose is to generate profits for these companies.
