NOAA Chief Scientist Praises Forecasters, Calls Statement Backing Trump Inappropriate, Political
This following is the original message Craig McLean, NOAA Research Assistant Administrator, sent to all NOAA Research employees on the morning of Monday, September 9th regarding Hurricane Dorian and its wide-ranging impacts.
Dear Colleagues,
The fierce storm we know as Hurricane Dorian has concluded its ferocious path through the Bahamas and along the U.S. East Coast. Many of you have contributed to the excellent science that has underpinned the forecasts and current understanding of storms such as this one, which accelerated quite rapidly in intensity. The storm also presented challenges in track which improved with enhanced observations.
We know that our collective work, from the scientists in the aircraft penetrating the storm, to the scientists deploying the glider picket line, to the modelers and folks working the physics of the storms, across OAR and in our CI’S, and across all NOAA Lines, we are working the problem in order to give the NWS forecasters the best tools we possibly can to keep America and our neighbors safe. Thank you.
During the course of the storm, as I am sure you are aware, there were routine and exceptional expert forecasts, the best possible, issued by the NWS Forecasters. These are remarkable colleagues of ours, who receive our products, use them well, and provide the benefit of their own experience in announcing accurate forecasts accompanied by the distinction of all credible scientists—they sign their work.
As I’m sure you also know, there was a complex issue involving the President commenting on the path of the hurricane. The NWS Forecaster(s) corrected any public misunderstanding in an expert and timely way, as they should.
There followed, last Friday, an unsigned press release from “NOAA” that inappropriately and incorrectly contradicted the NWS forecaster. My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political. Our NOAA Scientific Integrity Policy and Code of Scientific Conduct make clear that all NOAA employees shall approach all scientific activities with honesty, objectively, and completely, without allegiance to individuals, organizations, or ideology.
The content of this press release is very concerning as it compromises the ability of NOAA to convey life-saving information necessary to avoid substantial and specific danger to public health and safety. If the public cannot trust our information, or we debase our forecaster’s warnings and products, that specific danger arises.
You know that the value of our science is in the complexity of our understanding, our ability to convey that understanding to a wide audience of users of this information, and to establish and sustain the public trust in the truth and legitimacy of that information. Unfortunately, the press release of last Friday violated this trust and violated NOAA’s policies of scientific integrity.
In my role as Assistant Administrator for Research, and as I continue to administratively serve as Acting Chief Scientist, I am pursuing the potential violations of our NOAA Administrative Order on Scientific Integrity. Thankfully, we have such policies that are independently cited as among the best in the federal community, if not the best. Your NOAA and OAR management and leadership team believes in these policies and principles. I have a responsibility to pursue these truths. I will.
Thank you for your continued excellent work, and your trust. Carry on.
Craig N. McLean
Assistant Administrator
Oceanic and Atmospheric Research
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
37 responses to “NOAA Chief Scientist Praises Forecasters, Calls Statement Backing Trump Inappropriate, Political”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
how soon before trump accuses this man of treason, fires him and then have FBI claim that NOAA are liars and are working to destroy his admin?
Well, the NOAA has been lying for years about alleged Global Warming so objections based on “scientific integrity” are kind of darkly humorous, especially since – given this guy’s job title – he’s pretty much the liar-in-chief of the agency. Trump should fire him for being a partisan political hack in an allegedly non-political science-y job. As for working to destroy his administration, that is also fairly apparent, though NOAA doesn’t often get a chance to get its licks in so it’s easy to see why it jumped on this made-up controversy with both feet.
Climate change denier detected.
Correct. “Climate Change” is our contemporary equivalent of the Nazi Big Lie about everything bad being the fault of the Jews.
It’s more like when the US tobacco company executives sat in front of Congress and they all said “I believe that nicotine is not addictive”. Money is a hell of a drug and makes CEOs believe pretty much anything. And here’s a cite for you, even though I’m sure you won’t read a word of it:
Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 years ago
A new investigation shows the oil company understood the science before it became a public issue and spent millions to promote misinformation
By Shannon Hall on October 26, 2015
https://www.scientificameri…
The big difference between the two is that everyone knows someone who’s addicted to nicotine, so the evidence simply can’t be ignored. Climate change isn’t as obvious to the layperson. But the signs are there and are growing in intensity every year. Climate change deniers choose to ignore the signs at the peril of future generations.
Money is a hell of a drug. And, if you’re a “climate scientist” you don’t get any unless you toe the Warmist line.
Scientific American is one of the leading purveyors of climate pseudo-science and has been for years so I accord nothing published there about climate any credibility.
What Exxon “knew” 40 years ago – as opposed to being aware of in the “scientific” literature – isn’t a very interesting question, especially given that the nascent climate alarmism of four decades ago was about allegedly imminent Global Cooling, not Warming. To the extent Exxon, or any other target of convenience by the Warmist left, has been spending millions, it’s to combat, not promote misinformation. Said misinformation, meanwhile, has billions backing it, much of it taxpayer money.
The reason “Climate Change(tm)” is not very apparent to the layman is that it is by-and-large not actually happening – at least not in the way alleged by Warmists.
There are certainly climate changes in particular locales. Most of these are cyclical like the alternating El Nino/La Nina influences on the CA climate.
The high latitude Arctic seems to have warmed a bit in recent years as well. But it has done so before and to an even greater extent centuries before fossil fuel exploitation.
There is simply no credible evidence for a generalized global warming trend over the entire planetary surface.
Sea level has also been rising minutely for centuries due to our being in an interstitial period between extended episodes of the normative condition of much of the Earth’s surface, namely covered with glaciers during an Ice Age.
It’s pretty obvious by reference to their own behavior that almost none of the high-profile rich and famous who pretend to adhere to the Cult of Warmism actually believe a word of it. That’s why Al Gore lives in a vast mansion whose carbon footprint rivals that of entire small 3rd-World countries. It’s why Leo DiCaprio is always private-jetting off to climate conferences where he can berate the rest of us for our supposedly extravagant energy use between spending quality time on his mega-yacht. It’s why former President Obama, who used to lecture us repeatedly about the imminent rise of the oceans and the flooding of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, recently purchased a multi-million-dollar beachfront mansion on Martha’s Vineyard. The only eco-warrior celebrity who actually seems to take all the climate blather seriously is Ed Begley, Jr.
To paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, I’ll take all this talk about a climate crisis seriously when the people doing all the talking about it start acting like they take it seriously.
Ok… I’ma just gonna block this cringe there is nothing to gain conversing with you…
I’m inclined to agree.
Riiiiiight..keep believing that POS and not your lying eyes and ears.
I see terabytes of phony “research,” “climate models” and scaremongering screeds and hear the same repeated endlessly in the partisan leftist press. What I don’t see is evidence, especially evidence of harm. I suppose you see much the same but, unlike me, choose to believe the lies.
Classic projection. Take what the Koch brothers and their allies and functionaries have done for decades — falsifying data and making false claims — and accuse climate researchers of doing it. Projection is Trump’s whole act.
The projection is all in the other direction. It’s a matter of record that the NOAA has been “adjusting” the actual U.S. surface temperature record for years to make the past appear colder and the present appear warmer. What would you call that? I call it scientific fraud on an epic scale done for political reasons using taxpayer dollars.
Ironically the NWS tweet he refers to was also “unsigned”. He also seems to be unaware that early on when the hurricanes path was uncertain, his own agency NOAA prediced with probabilities, as it should, the hurricane could impact Alabama. So either he is not a very good scientist or he is also being political.
Both. He’s certainly being political. As for science, this guy is the current head dude of the NOAA’s cabal that’s been fudging data for years to try inventing Global Warming after the fact where none existed.
…NOAA’s cabal that’s been fudging data for years…
Interesting statement. Any handy source for that?
His sources are the usual suspects @ Faux News, you know…the “alternative facts”cult members.
“Faux News” is kind of a tell, or don’t they teach you that in Progressive Agitprop 101? Facts are facts. “Alternative” realities aren’t real despite the best efforts of leftists everywhere to make them so over the past century or so. So there are no “alternative” facts. Altered “facts,” on the other hand, we’ve got by the megaton. And it’s your side doing all the alterations.
As for “cults,” I’d rate the Cult of Climate Change right up there with Scientology for viciousness, litigiousness and general scuminess. There’s not really much headspace above that level. Maybe Jonestown or radical Islam.
The problem with trying to alter reality by lying and then screeching those lies at ever-increasing volume is that sooner or later reality will have its day. Fiddling with the climate record to create faux “warming” where there wasn’t any is a sort of scientific Ponzi scheme. You can keep it going for awhile but, as underlying reality refuses to play along, it becomes necessary to keep telling bigger and bigger lies. Eventually someone is going to notice that its not actually 95 degrees in Bemidji, MN in February.
They’re easy to find, even given that the major search engines are all run by rabid Warmists. Here ya go, kid – first one’s free.
Thanks.
Ah Steven Goddard aka Tony Heller. Electric engineer and degree in geology. Not a climate research. No credentials in the field. Not a credible source.
Another appeal to credentials and authority rather than a grapple with the actual data on offer. Typical.
So-called “climate science” is not really a separate discipline so much as it’s a combination of pre-existing disciplines with a particular focus. After factoring the field into components drawn from chemistry, physics, mathematics, statistics and computer science, there is little, if anything, left. That makes anyone with training, knowledge and experience in any or all of the components of climate science perfectly well qualified to render opinions on at least those aspects of the field that intersect their own specific realms of expertise. Thus, those with significant expertise in math and stat – including engineers – are perfectly well qualified to point out statistical and mathematical malpractice by self-styled “climate scientists.” Software engineers are just as well qualified to point out the often wretched quality of the code comprising so-called “climate models.” Etc.
The rote dismissive response is that critics lack “credentials” in the field and/or their critiques have not been “peer reviewed” in “the literature.”
Well, of course not. Dissenters from Warmist orthodoxy were first driven from faculty positions, then from the editorships of journals so that what now remains is a self-defending, self-referential bubble universe of “climate scientists” who are all members of the regnant cult the field has become.
No one not a card-carrying acolyte of the Climate Change Cult can get any sort of job or even obtain a degree in the field. No one who attempts to publish anything contrary to Warmist Holy Writ is going to even get his work sent out for peer review by the uniformly Warmist journal editors now in place. That hardly matters anyway, as the “peers” picked to do the notional “reviewing” would all be card-carrying Warmists too.
Having thoroughly rigged the game against “outsiders,” the insiders then dismiss all substantive criticism of core Warmist dogma as “unscientific.”
Given the overwhelmingly leftist tilt of practicing journalists, it has proven no challenge at all to mobilize an army of useful journalistic idiots to take up much of the job of retail-level evangelizing for the Warmist religion.
According to you, experts don’t matter. Data don’t matter. Evidence can be dismissed. You go with whatever fits your ideology. And accuse the other side of lying.
The collective dumbing down of America is on evidence in your long rant. A sad picture of a technological based civilization unable to deal with what it’s own technology is telling it. Trump isn’t a cause, he’s a symptom. Sad.
Try reading for comprehension. I didn’t say experts don’t matter, I simply said that restricting one’s definition of “expert” to strictly people who are “credentialed” by the self-dealing “climate science” insiders is a convenient excuse to avoid grappling with substantive criticisms. The left, having gained control of the credentialing, wants the argument to be all about credentials, not science or data or anything else.
The dumbing down of America has been a central project of the left in America for most of the past century. But it is you, not me, who is among the normative results of that process.
Duheagle is using a classic Nazi technique of repeating the Big Lie enough that people believe it. Trump does the same thing.
The Big Lie is Climate Change of the “you have to surrender your liberty and property to us socialists immediately or WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!”
Your denial of reality has little to do with the actual data. It’s a fear of government stepping in and telling you how to live your life. That’s a political argument based on ideology, not a scientific one based on data or a moral/ethical position based on what we must collectively do to address the problem.
You can make all the claims you’d like, and cite arguments spouted by non-experts who get their money from carbon industries, but it doesn’t change reality. It merely makes you an uninformed ideologue.
“Actual data” about climate is harder and harder to come by as NOAA and others systematically “adjust” it to accord with their politically-motivated agenda.
I certainly do have a fear of “government stepping in and telling me how to live my life.” Don’t you? Or perhaps you simply think it’s only people like me who will be on the receiving end of the telling and people like you doing the telling? You might want to examine the history of leftist revolutions. That isn’t generally how things work out.
The house of cards that is climate alarmism is, fundamentally, a Ponzi scheme. The intital lies have to keep on being topped by even bigger and more obvious lies to keep the ball rolling. At some point, the whole superstructure of lies comes crashing down.
With 37mph winds in the lower right corner. For a regional office getting calls from panicked southerner hics this is the same as “Not threatening alabama calm yo tits people”
Trump said that early forecasts had the path going thru Florida and ending up in the Gulf. Once in the gulf, it could again pick up speed before hitting parts of Alabama and the Florida panhandle. Now, once it stalled over the Bahama’s, then all the forecasts changed. That doesn’t make the initial forecast that Trump referenced wrong. This NOAA guy got one thing right. Stick to science, and leave the politics to others.
Your revisionism does not match the thoroughly documented facts. The forecast that showed a track into the Gulf came and went four days before Trump spoke of the nonexistent threat to Alabama. The stall was predicted days in advance. Throughout, Trump was allegedly getting frequent updates. On the weekend of his spurious pronouncement, he was supposedly getting hourly updates. Yet his situation awareness was stuck in Wednesday because he wasn’t getting updates, because he was playing golf and watching TV.
All the NOAA track predictions are archived. https://disq.us/url?url=htt…. All the advisories and discussions are archived as well. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/
Trump skipped a World War II commemoration to keep watch on the storm. He then spent Saturday golfing. Sunday he showed up at FEMA looking and sounding exhausted, rambled on semi-coherently about not knowing about Cat 5 hurricanes, and tweeted out warnings to Alabama based on old information. On Monday it was back to the golf course.
He screwed up because he wasn’t paying enough attention to his job. Rather than correcting his mistake and leaving it be, he spent the week trying to distort the record to make it fit his untruth.
It was not a fierce storm. The Settlement Point station said 60mph, Nassau, 40 to the S. and The Canaveral Buoys about the same for the whole time it was in The Bahamas. Weather and Weather Nation channels said 160 mph. They never showed what the stations were reporting. Mr. McLean did they get these speeds from NOAA or did they just make up the wind speeds. It looks like fraud to me as they lied to get viewers to check back increasing their viewer count. Advertisers are more likely to advertise if they have more viewers. I have been watching TV weather for 60 years. Local AMS TV people would put up the wind speeds on grease pencil boards. These people never put up the speeds as it would show they were putting out fake news. AMS, do you approve of what these people did? A lot of emergency people may use these speeds. People may have fled Fla. because of what they said. The FBI should investigate. Their excuse might be that it was forecast to be a CAT5. Not a good excuse. A forecast can be wrong. Even NOAA. Did NOAA blow the wind forecast by 100mph? It was a CAT1. They should have fact checked. The stations all agree according to the distance from the center. windmapper.com just reports the stations. At my house and how far I was from the center what they said checked. Is that site lying? They have always been correct at my house. Most of time even their forecasts. These speeds were 1 hour old.
2500+ ex-ppl in bermuda beg to differ with you.
Dorian hit the Bahamas, not Bermuda. And the death toll was 30, not 2,500+. Get a freakin’ grip.
The damage was caused by the storm surge and wave action. Maybe some tornadoes. The winter Storm of the Century 20 years ago blew 50mph at me for 2 days from the NW. It caused a 11′ storm surge. Friend lost 2 Caddies near the beach. Same with Dorian in the Bahamas. I still have a video in my head of stilt houses with water up to the 2nd floor and waves.
A Cat 1 with 40-60 mph winds flattened the Bahamas? Seriously? I live in Mojave. I’ve seen winds that strong. They damage roofs but don’t flatten buildings.
It’s true that a lot of damage resulted from flooding and waves. But there was more to it than that.
Tornadoes. The flooding and wave action was 2 days. I saw one house with the walls standing. Every thing else gone. 11′ storm surge. CB walls probably. Boats everywhere. Storm surge. In the open ocean their are reports of 50′ tall waves. They were exposed to the open ocean with 60mph wind for 2 days from the NE. They are only 2-3′ above sea level. Wait till all the ice melts from global warming. It will be worse. The waves pounding for 2 days will tear up stuff. Tons of water crashing onto a house. How many tons will your roof hold up? Water is heavy.
Right now there is a trough from W. of Fla. out into the Atlantic. 4 places that might make a storm. I have never seen anything like that. Must be Global Warming.