Next Tuesday is too late.
Anyway, it’s time Puerto Rico became a state. They pay taxes, they fly our flag, they are citizens, they can become president (yet aren’t allowed to vote in the general), no passport is needed to travel there. I suspect a lot of people don’t know most of that, and I bet the president didn’t know, which is the most likely reason for his delayed and weak response.
They are as American as anyone in the mainland and should finally be treated as such.
Or maybe if we stop spending money on fictional things trying to determine how much polar ice caps melting cause bears to have diarrhea, maybe we could spend it on better forecasting tool to see storms like Maria and give people more time to prepare?
... I'm going to point out that in regards to the 'forecasting' (i.e. modelling), is that time and time again Congress has seen fit to consistently cut that of the funds explicitly requested by that of the NOAA for upgrading it, and constantly been forced to be left behind with such funds, which has been putting the GFS (the NOAA's model) further and further behind the ECMWF (the European model) and the UKMET (the UK model) because of it.
In addition to that, there is also that of staffing cuts and the hiring freezes which are hurting that of the NHC in terms of handling these storms which means they are more overworked and more likely to make mistakes. There's also the need of keeping funding on track with new weather monitoring satellites to replace the older ones and be able to monitor what might emerge and the hurricanes when they do form.
In regards to that of more time to prepare, there is also that of the issue for when hurricanes undergo that of a 'rapid intensification'. It means there is less time to actually prepare because of it having undergone major strengthening, and of course Puerto Rico knew ahead of the time about what Maria was going to do, but if there is one thing modeling is not good at (from how I understand it) is not being able to handle rapid intensification well, and that is something that is vital to understanding and that means climate science is needed to be done as a result to understand the process of how it happens, why it happens, and what kind of conditions help lead to such favorable conditions for RI. It is impossible to say climate science should be ignored when discussing hurricanes, since it is arguably a major part of understanding about hurricanes.
As another part of what's going on, there's unfortunately what's also going on in the USVI (and I think it'd fit in here considering it was also affected by Maria). The USVI were hit hard by Irma and then arguably so shortly after, they were affected by that of Maria, and it's a full-out devastation there. I can't link the article, but both of the main hospitals in St. Thomas and St. Croix are going to have to be torn down and rebuilt as a result, and the authorities had to ease the strict curfew because bodies started to pile up at the morgue since people couldn't stay out long enough to bury them.
