NOAA’s Ark

©NOAA

It’s been hard to maintain faith in government institutions over the past four years, as they’ve been systematically debased and politicized, while their integrity has been chipped away. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration is no exception, from its rebuke of forecasters who contradicted Trump during Sharpiegate in September 2019 to its hiring of climate-science denier David Legates as deputy assistant director for commerce for observation and prediction in September 2020—despite the heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes and floods that have become more and more commonplace in the United States. (Legates's new title seems as long as his history of accepting money from fossil fuel companies.) And yet sometimes NOAA isn’t terrible. Sometimes it’s possible to remember that it’s one (or was one) of the world’s premier science agencies, and that informational graphics like the one at the top of this post are important when the world feels like it's falling apart. That downloadable image and others are available here.