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2/19

NOAA 2 SullivanEdit

3/17 see main

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project 2025 plans to dismantle the federal agency that tracks hurricanes

Right-wing media have attacked NOAA and climate science for decades

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER

PUBLISHED 05/31/24

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that predicts changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coastlines and provides data that informs lifesaving forecasts such as tracking hurricanes, is in the crosshairs of Project 2025, the conservative battle plan for a potential second Trump presidency which describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” But researchers have pushed back on these charges and defended NOAA’s climate data and meteorological work — while forecasters are predicting an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season and experts say this summer could rival last year’s record heat.

Project 2025’s call to dismantle NOAA by eliminating or privatizing key functions of the agency is the endgame of years of attempts by conservatives and right-wing media to attack the credibility of the agency and the veracity of the data it produces. It also illustrates that the conservative plan is not just to dismantle U.S. climate policy, but also to scrub the climate data that underpins it.

[vid?]

; Wattsupwiththat.com, accessed 5/22/24; PolitiFact, 8/19/22]

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uber https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1362

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aha hmn earth2 bizarro rubber reverse:  it's wind green that actually harms eagles and whales [polar bears not declining?]; you libs tired to make us real murkins feel bad for selfishly trashing the planet for profit, but it's really YOU b/c dumb/ greedy hypocrites

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Over the past several days Fox networks have aired numerous segments insinuating that the recent deaths of whales across New York and New Jersey beaches are due to the development of offshore wind turbines.

There is no evidence to back up these claims.

NOAA Fisheries, the office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration responsible for the management of marine life, specifically addressed the question on January 24. NOAA stated that the recent whale deaths are “not related to offshore wind development.” The agency further wrote, “Of the whales examined, about 40 percent had evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement. Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the greatest human threats to large whales.” Indeed, nearly 3,000 ships passed through the Port of New York and New Jersey, near where whale deaths are occurring, in the last year — “a figure that vastly undercounts all the ocean traffic in the region and dwarfs the number of vessels that have anything to do with offshore wind.”

Importantly, NOAA Fisheries noted climate change as a contributing factor in the whale deaths. The world’s oceans are rapidly warming, with temperatures reaching a record high in 2022. This is forcing a change in the migration patterns of marine life, including whales, and “can lead to increased interactions with humans as some whales move closer to near shore habitats,” the agency writes.

Additionally, there aren’t even any wind turbines off of the coast of New Jersey. The whale deaths have also been happening at an increased rate since at least 2016, the NOAA reports, which long predates any offshore wind development in the region.

This is not stopping Fox from promulgating claims that offshore wind is killing these whales

On the January 30 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tucker Carlson sarcastically mocked a Politico article which stated that “there is no evidence the wind work and whale deaths are linked.”

“We have no idea why a dozen whales just turned up dead on the beaches of New Jersey,” Carlson said. “Does it have anything to do with the construction of wind turbines off the coast? ‘That's speculation,’ Politico reported. ‘Probably climate change.’ So the story was ridiculous, but what we didn’t get at first was that Politico was paid to run it.”

Carlson took issue with the fact that the article was featured in a newsletter sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council, later calling Politico “prostitutes” for publishing another article sponsored by offshore wind turbine manufacturers. In reality, Politico’s energy newsletters are typically sponsored by energy companies, not environmental groups — with the vast majority of these sponsorships coming from fossil fuel companies.

The next night, Carlson stated that “so-called green NGOs, supported of course by the people they give money to in the Biden administration, are backing the construction of massive offshore wind turbines that appear to bekilling large numbers of whales.” Carlson then hosted a local Republican politician from Nassau County, New York, who called “going all-electric” a “danger to our America,” and stated that “there will always be fossil fuels, at least in my lifetime.”

Carlson’s two recent segments follow a January 13 segment detailing “The Biden whale extinction.” (Another chyron during that episode read “Green New Deal wind farms are killing whales.”)

Questions about offshore wind development were also raised on Fox during the January 31 editions of both America’s Newsroom, with reporter Alexis McAdams stating, “As the whale deaths continue, some lawmakers and activists are calling for a hold on the preparations for offshore wind projects,” and The Story, with guest anchor Trace Gallagher stating, “It's the eighth whale to die along the shore of New Jersey and New York in the last two months, fueling the debate about whether the deaths are natural or maybe related to nearby offshore wind projects and the push to go green.”

Several more such segments covering the whale deaths ran on February 1. On Fox Business’ Varney & Co., correspondent Madison Alworth discussed the costs of offshore wind development without noting the massive economic benefits to local and state communities before stating, “All of this is the cost of this clean energy, but as you heard these conservationists saying it's costing our environment even more, and we're already seeing that expense.”

“Not in my backyard,” concluded host Stuart Varney.

Another segment on The Story began with Gallagher stating that, “The mayors of a dozen New Jersey towns [are] now calling for an immediate halt on plans to build thousands of offshore wind turbines as coastal communities raise concerns about the number of whales washing up dead on nearby beaches and soaring financial costs threaten the push to go green.”

Later, Alworth began a segment on Special Report with Bret Baier by claiming “conservationists say that offshore wind turbines are far from clean and may be doing more harm than good for the environment.” She ended the report by again mentioning the economic costs associated with wind turbines and none of the financial benefits.

Finally, Jesse Watters Primetime ran two segments linking offshore wind development to the whale deaths. In one, Alworth cited “conservationists” concerned with whale deaths saying “this clean energy might not be clean at all,” and she again brought up the economic costs of wind turbines without mentioning their benefits. In the second, host Jesse Watters interviewed ex-Greenpeace Canada member Patrick Moore to rail against renewable energy and complain that Greenpeace has been compromised by wind companies. Watters ended the segment by stating that wind turbines are “not good for the Jersey shore, for the Atlantic Ocean, and, as you said, it's not great for consumers either.”

Fox’s guests are not scientists — they have fossil fuel connections and an interest in blocking renewable energy development

Moore is a climate science denier who has consulted for polluting companies. He also (falsely) claims that he is a founder of Greenpeace, which allows Fox to paint him as a credible guest on climate, energy, and environmental issues.

Watters also tried this trick — obfuscating the credibility of an environmental advocate — in an earlier segment on offshore wind and whale deaths. On January 11, Mike Dean of Protect Our Coast NJ was labeled as an “ocean advocate,” and Dean went on to baselessly blame wind development for whale deaths, declaring, “The harms with these projects and the costs are limitless, and it’s really hard to find any benefits at all.” Fox did not note that Dean’s group appears to be backed by the Caesar Rodney Institute, a libertarian think tank with a history of hostility toward climate and environmental policies. The institute has also received funding from the fossil fuel industry, which has a long history of blocking renewable energy projects.

On the January 13 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson hostedMeghan Lapp, a fisheries liaison for the fishing company Seafreeze. Lapp claimed, without evidence, thatoffshore wind development means “essentially carpet bombing the ocean floor with intense sound.” In fact, Lapp has been appearing on Fox News since at least 2019 insinuating that offshore wind development is killing whales. She even appeared in Carlson’s 2021 anti-wind documentary which was chock full of misinformation and debunked talking points.

What has not been mentioned on Fox, and what has been excellently reported on by climate writer Michael Thomas, is that Lapp is a fossil fuel industry ally. Her campaign to stop offshore wind development has beenbankrolled by T:(style="background-color:#ff9900ff"):}::{exas Public Policy Foundatio**n, a fossil fuel-funded think tank that has fought climate policies tooth and nail. TPPF, of course, has spent decades advocating for offshore oil drilling — choosing to downplay the horrific environmental impacts of that practice while embellishing the impacts of offshore wind development.

Finally, Bonnie Brady of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association appeared on the aforementioned Varney & Co., The Story, and Special Report segments on February 1. Brady, like Lapp, is being backed by TPPFin her campaign to stop offshore wind development. Last year, both Lapp and Brady appeared in a TPPF film entitled “A Heavy Wind: The Threat to an American Heritage,” which detailed commercial fishermen fighting offshore wind projects.

One recent Fox segment interspersed with their offshore wind coverage illustrates the complete hypocrisy of Fox’s climate-related programming

During Fox’s fearmongering about offshore wind development on February 1, America Reports ran a segment with Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) that sang the praises of the Willow Project, a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska’s national petroleum reserve. Sullivan called the project “actually really good for our environment,” while Fox anchor John Roberts noted some benefits of the project, including billions in revenue and hundreds of jobs created.

While Roberts did ask a question about climate advocates not wanting to lock the U.S. into more fossil fuel extraction, this segment did not mention the massive environmental costs associated with the project. Environmental advocate and journalist Bill McKibben noted in a recent article on the project that Alaska is “already warming faster than almost any place on the planet.Warming so fast that taxpayers are already having to pony up huge sums of money to relocate coastal villages inland. Emissions from the Willow project’s oil would cause $19.8 billion in climate damages; it would generate $3.4 billion in federal tax revenue, which is…a lot less.”

McKibben also cited a Center for American Progress analysis of the project which found that “allowing the Willow project to proceed would result in double the carbon pollution that all renewable progress on public lands and waters would save by 2030.”

Contrast Fox’s fawning coverage of an oil drilling project with its dismissive, conspiracy theory-laden, and climate denial-infused coverage of offshore wind, and you get a perfect sense of why Fox cannot be trusted on climate and environmental issues. While it’s true that there are valid concerns with offshore wind’s impacts on the environment and local marine life — something that has been taken into consideration by government authorities in reviewing previous offshore wind projects —the reality is that fossil fuel projects are significantly more detrimental to the environment and climate than renewable projects.

You will rarely if ever hear these facts reported on Fox, as the network has time and again proved to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry, and its offshore wind coverage cannot be taken seriously.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25102020/noaa-climate-denial-david-legates/

no lnx pix

politics & Policy

War on NOAA? A Climate Denier’s Arrival Raises Fears the Agency’s Climate Mission Is Under Attack

David Legates has spent his career disputing climate science. Now he’s a top manager in the federal agency most involved in assessing global warming’s threat.

By Marianne Lavelle

October 25, 2020

In the shadow of the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has continued to press on with its work measuring the breadth and pace of the climate crisis.

So far in 2020, NOAA recorded the nation’s hottest summer on record, the second-lowest Arctic sea ice minimum and the greatest number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. coast since 1916. NOAA led a team that showed global warming is detectable at the bottom of the ocean. It funded work revealing the climate risks of coastal forest destruction. It helped develop a breakthrough method of measuring fossil fuel emissions in ambient air.

But climate scientists are bracing for the potential disruption of NOAA’s climate work with the appointment of two prominent climate science deniers and a former campaign official for President Donald Trump to top agency positions this fall.

One of the new hires, David Legates, a University of Delaware geography and climatology professor who works closely with anti-climate action advocacy groups like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has been especially critical of the agency that he will now help run. Dismissive of NOAA’s data-gathering and models, Legates maintains there is no scientific consensus on the environmental hazard of carbon dioxide emissions. He is in a newly created top deputy position, where he will not face Senate confirmation, but will report directly to NOAA’s administrator.

“People are very alarmed and saddened about it, and it’s spooking people on the inside,” said Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which regularly surveys federal scientists on their perception of political interference. “We know from the scientific surveys that having a climate denier at the helm causes people in the agency to self-censor, even if they aren’t told to change anything.”

David Legates. Courtesy of the University of Delaware

David Legates

The hiring of Legates and others, only weeks before the election, comes just as NOAA is set to collaborate with more than a dozen other federal agencies on the next Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, due out in 2023. Work on the project kicked off in earnest on Oct. 15 when a call for authors was published in the Federal Register. The state-of-the-science synthesis of climate impacts and trends across the United States is meant to serve as a roadmap for policymakers.

Veterans of the process fear the new hires may presage a Trump administration effort to inject doubt about the scientific consensus into the climate assessment.

Foes of climate action hope that’s the signal being sent.

“I hope it means that the administration, after three years of sitting on their hands, is actually going to reform the kind of junk science produced at NOAA,” said Myron Ebell, a former Trump transition official who is energy and environment program director at the conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “And I hope they will have a big impact on the way the next National Climate Assessment is put together.”

Any such efforts would be a radical departure from past National Climate Assessments. The last report presented the most dire picture yet of the climate risks facing the U.S. population and economy, and gained perhaps even greater attention because of the Trump administration’s effort to downplay its findings by releasing the final volume the day after Thanksgiving in 2018.

NOAA’s Uneasy Path Under Trump

As the nation’s lead agency for weather, water and climate prediction, NOAA has clashed repeatedly with the Trump White House—even on matters far less controversial than global warming.

The most notorious incident became known as “Sharpiegate,” when Trump warned last year that Hurricane Dorian was headed for Alabama and then blew up when NOAA’s National Weather Service contradicted his mistaken forecast. (Trump had a hurricane map displayed in the Oval Office that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie pen.)

President Donald Trump references a map while talking to reporters about Hurricane Dorian in the Oval Office at the White House Sept. 4, 2019 in Washington, D.C. The map was a forecast from Aug. 29 and appears to have been altered by a black marker to ext

President Donald Trump references a map while talking to reporters about Hurricane Dorian in the Oval Office at the White House Sept. 4, 2019 in Washington, D.C. The map was a forecast from Aug. 29 and appears to have been altered by a black marker to extend the hurricane’s range to include Alabama. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The cloud of “Sharpiegate” is at least part of the reason that NOAA has been without a permanent administrator throughout the Trump administration.

It is NOAA’s longest stretch without a Senate-confirmed leader since its creation in 1970. And, as the agency marks its 50th anniversary, its budget is, for the fourth consecutive year, facing a White House proposal for deep cuts. Congress has thus far rejected the proposed cutbacks, but like all federal agencies, NOAA is operating under a stopgap budget that expires Dec. 11, leaving the funding decision in the hands of the lame duck Congress.

Despite the uncertainty that has hung over the agency’s leadership and budget, there is widespread praise in the scientific community for the work that NOAA’s nearly 7,000 scientists and engineers have continued to do.

In September, NOAA’s storm-monitoring was much in the news, as the agency tracked 10 named tropical formations, a record for the month. At the same time, it was monitoring the spread of wildfires in the West, which has set records for the number of acres burned and the size of the fires. In response, media coverage of climate change soared.

On Sept. 14, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden highlighted the issue in a campaign speech. Trump, on a brief stop in California’s fire epicenter, doubled down on his climate denial. “It will start getting cooler,” he said. “Just watch. I don’t think science knows actually.”

On that same day, Legates, who has spent years raising doubt about what science knows on climate, was named to the newly created position of deputy assistant secretary for environmental observation and prediction at NOAA.

‘It’s Like Trying to Keep the Sun From Shining’

As recently as 2018, Legates described himself as a scientist who had been ostracized by NOAA and other federal agencies for his outlier views on climate.

“I have been notified (unofficially) that I am on a federal ‘do-not-fund’ list simply because I have been critical of the official position on anthropogenic global warming,” Legates said in a legal brief submitted in support of oil companies that were being sued over climate change. (Legates did not respond to requests for an interview for this story.)

In submitting the brief, Legates and other climate science skeptics were represented by a lawyer for Heartland, the conservative think tank that has led a years-long campaign to discredit climate science. The Heartland group went beyond the position of the oil companies in the suit, which focused their challenge on whether climate change was the appropriate basis for a lawsuit. Legates and his colleagues disputed the essential science of global warming, arguing that there was no scientific consensus on the cause of climate change or its dangers. (The case remains in litigation.)

It is an argument Legates has made often to Congress, state legislators, judges, including the Supreme Court, and most expansively, in lectures and panel discussions organized by Heartland and other groups that dispute climate science.

“Climate is changing because it always has changed and always will—it is dynamic and variable,” Legates said in testimony last year to urge Pennsylvania’s Legislature not to adopt Gov. Tom Wolf’s climate action plan.

“To create a Climate Change Action Plan to ‘stabilize’ the Earth’s climate is like trying to keep the Sun from shining,” Legates said. “We cannot halt something that for all history has been variable and so all such attempts at ‘climate stabilization’ are doomed to failure.”

Ocean acidification has been a central area of study for NOAA. Credit: NOAA

Ocean acidification has been a central area of study for NOAA. Credit: NOAA

Legates has a mix of views on climate change that are particularly dismissive of the work of NOAA. He doesn’t accept the accuracy of the data gathered by NOAA and others showing that the planet is warming, but he also argues that warming of the planet will help civilization to thrive. He disputes that carbon dioxide is driving climate change but also points to lab studies showing that species like crabs and lobsters grow faster in carbon-saturated water, asserting that could outweigh any damage of ocean acidification, which has been a central area of study for the agency. As for NOAA’s tracking of sea level rise, Legates admits that both sea level and CO2 are rising, but disputes that there is a correlation between the two.

“It’s all based on political views, it’s not based on science,” said Donald Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois who served as chief climate science expert in President Barack Obama’s White House. Wuebbles, who relies on the data gathered by NOAA in his work, is concerned about leadership of the agency, given the opinions that have been expressed by the new appointees. “Nothing they say really deals with any of the science, other than just to make strange statements that the data doesn’t back,” Wuebbles said.

A Career Devoted to Climate Skepticism

Legates has described himself as someone fascinated with weather since his childhood in the small town of Harrington, Delaware. He told the Wilmington News-Journal that when he was a fifth-grader, he made his own weather-observation station, taking wind and rain measurements daily before and after school.

“I’ve just always been interested in weather,” Legates told the paper. “Unless you lock yourself in an interior room, you can’t get away from it.”

He took an unusual path to climate science, studying geography and math before pursuing his Ph.D. in climatology at the University of Delaware. For his dissertation, he delved deeply into the issue of bias in the measurement of precipitation, and his early publications on this issue are among his most cited works.

Legates collaborated, for example, on 1994 research that concluded that the United States gets about 9 percent more rain and snow than the official records indicate. The issue, according to the paper, was that the records had not accounted for problems with rain-collecting gauges, which could be affected by factors like wind-blown snow, evaporation or heat. The findings had obvious implications for understanding climate change, and whether current precipitation patterns marked a change from the past, or were an artifact of problematic measuring practices.

[cf The Anti-Scientists series]

But Legates was not alone in noticing this issue. His studies are part of a vast body of thousands of peer-reviewed studies from around the world on such biases and how to correct them. NOAA has done extensive work on this topic, and is transparent about the data correction it has made in its own precipitation records. And the National Climate Assessment and the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have taken into account such uncertainties in providing a number of possible scenarios for global warming impacts.

But for Legates, the work was a first step in a career devoted to skepticism over the scientific consensus on climate change. After teaching at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Louisiana, he returned to the University of Delaware in 1999 and was promoted to full professor in 2010. The office of the Delaware State Climatologist resides within the university, and in 2005, after the professor who had been serving in that post was promoted to an administrative position, Legates took over the job.

Legates did more than carry out the traditional job of the state climatologist, maintaining current and historical weather data for the state and being the go-to person for local media interviews on storms hitting Delaware. He collaborated with other climate skeptics on research and activism against climate action. Legates has said he has not received any funding for his climate change research since 2002. But over the last 18 years, he has worked closely with other authors and conservative groups who are funded by industry, as well as conservative and libertarian-oriented foundations.

[Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, David Legates and David Rothbard, Executive Producer of the film speak during the “Climate Hustle” panel discussion at the Rayburn House Office Building on April 14, 2016 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Kris Connor/Getty Images

In 2006, Legates joined with other contrarian climatologists in a legal brief filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute opposing the state of Massachusetts in its petition seeking federal Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases from motor vehicles.In that case, the Supreme Court issued its landmark 5-4 ruling that greenhouse gas emissions were a pollutant that could be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. That case led to what is known as the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, the underpinning of the climate actions taken under the Obama administration. Legates and his colleagues argued that the EPA had insufficient evidence of the harm of greenhouse gases.

“The net effect of greenhouse emissions on human health and welfare is unknown and has not been comprehensively determined, even as the technological and scientific advances associated with those emissions have dramatically increased life expectancy,” Legates and his colleagues said in their brief. “It is simply impossible to conclude that the net effect of greenhouse gases endangers human health and welfare.”

By joining in the brief, Legates was taking a position opposed to that of the state of Delaware, which had supported Massachusetts’ petition for greenhouse gas regulation. That led to a dust-up with Delaware’s then-governor, Ruth Ann Minner, a Democrat, who in February 2007, wrote a letter to Legates, directing him to stop using his title as state climatologist in making public statements on climate change.

“Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration,” she said.

The restriction on Legates’ use of his title didn’t stop his work as a contrarian. That same year, he was a co-author of a paper concluding that it was “highly premature” to suggest that global warming threatened the survival of polar bears of the western Hudson Bay. The paper instead focused on other stress factors the authors said affected the polar bears, such as interaction with humans and natural ocean oscillations. Legates’s co-author on the paper, Willie Soon, disclosed that his work on the research was partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil Corporation and the foundation of libertarian petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch.

Soon, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, became a frequent collaborator with Legates. They published a paper together in 2015 that challenged influential research showing that 97.1 percent of the peer-reviewed climate science papers published from 1991 to 2011 endorsed the consensus position that humans are the cause of global warming. Legates and Soon argued that only scientific papers that specifically quantified the level of human contribution to climate change—a criterion that would include only 41 papers, or 0.3 percent of the total—should be considered to endorse the consensus position.

“By that logic, there is zero percent consensus on heliocentrism—that the Earth is revolving around the sun—because not a single recent astronomy paper states, ‘the Earth is revolving around the sun,'” said John Cook, lead author of the 97 percent consensus paper, now at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. In other words, the human contribution to climate change is so widely accepted that it is implicit in most published research.

‘This So-Called War’

Beginning around 2009, the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the public institutions and universities of a number of contrarian scientists, including Soon and Legates, in an attempt to uncover the extent of fossil-fuel industry funding of their work. In 2015, Greenpeace unearthed and distributed documents showing that Soon had received $1.2 million in industry funding over the last decade, exposing him to criticism for using a title that invoked the prestige of Harvard and the Smithsonian for fossil fuel industry-backed research. The revelations led to new funding disclosure requirements at the Smithsonian.

The Greenpeace request faced obstacles at the University of Delaware, which is state-assisted but privately governed, and where only documents related to the spending of public funds are subject to state FOIA law. The school’s general counsel asked Legates to turn over documents so it could be determined whether they needed to be produced in response to the FOIA request.

Legates refused, arguing that doing so would violate his academic freedom. The Competitive Enterprise Institute then intervened on Legates’ behalf, firing off its own FOIA petition to the University of Delaware, aimed at obtaining documents of other faculty members who supported the consensus science on climate change. Legates then argued that the school’s general counsel was not making the same document demands with those faculty members as he did for Legates, in effect discriminating against him because of his out-of-the-mainstream views.

According to a footnote in a 2016 account that Legates later wrote about the incident, he also hired an unusually high-powered attorney to represent him in his dispute with the university: Noel Francisco of Jones Day, a law firm that represents a wide array of corporate clients, including Koch Industries and other fossil fuel interests. (Francisco is not known for representing university professors in FOIA cases; for three years, beginning in 2017, he was President Trump’s solicitor general, the administration’s top lawyer in arguments before the Supreme Court. He also was on Trump’s short list of potential Supreme Court picks.)

None of Legates’ documents were ever released to Greenpeace, but the episode was a bitter one, in his telling. After he hired his own lawyer, Legates said, he was terminated as Delaware State Climatologist and as co-director of an environmental monitoring network he had spent a decade helping to develop. In testimony before Congress in 2014, Legates said that his conflict with the administrators at the university revealed bias against contrarians.

“There is nothing in my records of which I am embarrassed,” he said in written testimony to a subcommittee of the Senate Environment Public Works Committee. “I tell you this story not because I seek sympathy, but because of many other cases for which the victims cannot speak out.”

At the time, there was talk in the Democratic-controlled Senate about a war on climate science that had stalled federal action to cut carbon emissions. But Legates, invited to speak by the Republicans, said that contrarian scientists who dispute climate science were taking the most flak from their institutions and were being denied federal research dollars.

“This so-called war on science is nothing but a diversion,” Legates said in his testimony. “The real war is being waged within the halls of academia and within our Federal granting agencies.”

Legates will now be a high-level manager of one of those agencies, thanks to the Trump administration.

‘We’ve Got to Make Sure It’s Done Right’

Legates’ hiring was one of a slew of top personnel moves made by the Trump administration at NOAA.

A day after he was hired, on Sept. 15, Erik Noble, who had served as a data analyst for the Trump campaign in 2016, was brought in as NOAA’s chief of staff. Noble had past experience as an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Center, where he did climate and weather prediction modeling, and he had been working in the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

On Sept. 21, the White House tapped meteorologist Ryan Maue to serve as the new chief scientist at NOAA. Maue has frequently posted criticisms on Twitter, some of them now deleted, aimed at scientists and politicians who draw connections between extreme weather or wildfires and climate change. Maue is also a former scholar with the libertarian Cato Institute. NOAA’s public affairs office did not respond to requests for details on the hirings.

Some close observers, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on personnel matters, said that the moves may signal that Trump, if he wins a second term, plans a wholesale sweep of NOAA leadership, replacing the current acting administrator, Neil Jacobs, NOAA’s former chief scientist Craig McLean and others who crossed the White House during the Sharpiegate controversy.

By placing Legates in a deputy position, the administration has made him legally eligible under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to be moved to NOAA’s top slot as “acting” administrator. One advantage of “acting” appointments is they are a way to avoid a contentious Senate confirmation process. Trump has said he prefers “acting” appointments, because it gives him more flexibility, but his administration has been slapped down by the courts for circumventing the vacancies law.

The personnel moves won praise from the community of conservative climate action opponents, who have mostly supported the president, but who expressed concern that he has not moved more aggressively to dismantle the remnants of climate science policy. “Legates’ appointment to NOAA represents a big win for climate realism,” wrote H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the Heartland Institute, on the group’s website.

But if Trump loses the election, added Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “I expect David would disappear pretty rapidly in a Biden administration.”

That isn’t necessarily the case. Political appointees sometimes go on to seek appointments to career government positions, an end-of-administration ritual known in Washington as “burrowing in.” Although there is anxiety in NOAA about Trump appointees finding a way to stay on in a Biden administration, there’s no indication that is Legates’ intention. Indeed, an email that his University of Delaware department chair sent to students said, “David hopes to be back at UD in the spring.”

Even if Legates and the other new hires have a short stay at NOAA, they still could have influence over the National Climate Assessment.

Nominations of scientists from both inside and outside the federal government will be accepted through Nov. 15. Hundreds of authors typically participate, and at least one climate contrarian—William Happer, a Princeton University emeritus professor of physics and former Trump White House official—has expressed interest in participating as an author. Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP who briefly held a position in the Obama administration and is now a physics professor at New York University, told E&E News that he has pitched to the Trump White House the idea of incorporating an adversarial review by skeptics of climate science into the National Climate Assessment.

That would make for a quite different report from the National Climate Assessment that came out on Black Friday in 2018. Philip Duffy, a physicist and former White House policy adviser who helped coordinate the National Climate Assessment in the Obama administration, said he believed that the last report was an important affirmation of the science at a critical time, likening it to the statements about the coronavirus by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“It was a strong statement which contradicted the party line, shall we say,” said Duffy, president and executive director of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Mass. He added that the assessment’s greatest value was the detail it provided on the specific impacts of warming on different regions of the country, from heavy precipitation in the South to heat and drought in the West. “It’s intended to form the basis of decision-making and planning. That’s what’s unique about it, and essential.”

But skeptics of climate science and opponents of U.S. action to curb fossil fuel emissions were sharply critical of that report, and the Trump administration for not exerting more control over it. Ebell, who disputes the validity of both the models and the data that have informed the climate assessment, said he believes that if Legates has an opportunity to help shape the next assessment, it could provide a much different perspective than the reports of the past.

“If David Legates and his colleagues are able to be involved in the preparation of the National Climate Assessment right up to the date of publication, they’re not going to feature the least likely scenario in order to scare the public,” Ebell said. “They’re going to feature the most realistic scenario, and that will be a huge improvement.”

What that most realistic scenario is, however, is another matter: The consensus of mainstream scientists is that it depends on how much the world’s nations do to cut carbon emissions.

The 2018 National Climate Assessment focused both on a high-end global warming scenario, assuming little effort by nations to curb greenhouse gases, and a low-end scenario, consistent with nations implementing significant mitigation measures. At least one recent study concluded that the high-end scenario is the most realistic.

Wuebbles, who has been a coordinating lead author on past National Climate Assessments, said the next volume will come at a critical time.

“We need to make sure we understand well what climate change means, and what kind of options do we have, both in terms of trying to reduce the future climate change, but also in terms of ‘how do we adapt to be resilient,’” he said. “This is an important document for the government. We’ve got to make sure it’s done right.”

Wuebbles said he could not speculate on the impact the new leadership at NOAA could have on the report. “I think we’re all concerned,” he said. “We don’t know for sure.”

---

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-fires-noaas-chief-scientist-for-asking-political-appointees-to-follow-scientific-integrity-rules/

The Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is out.

Craig McLean, who until recently was the acting chief scientist, had sent a memo to political appointees at NOAA requesting that they, like everyone else, observe the agency's scientific integrity rules, The New York Times reports.

The next day one of President Donald Trump's political appointees, Erik Noble, told him he was out and had already been replaced.

The NOAA is the federal government's premier scientific agency. It oversees vital agencies including the National Weather Service.

The Times reveals that Trump's new political appointees at the agency "have questioned accepted facts about climate change and imposed stricter controls on communications at the agency."

It's a formula Americans have seen at other federal agencies under this president, including the scandal surrounding Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo.

"Mr. McLean had sent some of the new political appointees a message that asked them to acknowledge the agency's scientific integrity policy, which prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings," The Times reports.

"Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?" Noble replied to McLean.

It's a formula Americans have seen at other federal agencies under this president, including the scandal surrounding Health and Human Services spokesperson Michael Caputo.

"Mr. McLean had sent some of the new political appointees a message that asked them to acknowledge the agency's scientific integrity policy, which prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings," The Times reports.

"Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?" Noble replied to McLean.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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==

aaas sci mag

climate change denialist given top role at major U.S. science agency

By Scott Waldman, E&E NewsSep. 14, 2020 , 9:50 AM

Originally published by E&E News

A controversial researcher who rejects climate science was hired by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for a senior position, in a move suggesting the Trump administration is asserting growing influence over the study of rising temperatures.

David Legates, a geography professor at the University of Delaware, has a long history of questioning fundamental climate science and has suggested that an outcome of burning fossil fuels would be a more habitable planet for humans.

He was hired as deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for observation and prediction, according to a report by NPR.

The move marks an escalation within the Trump administration to undermine the agency's ability to warn the public of climate risks, observers said.

Legates has spent his career denying consensus climate science while elevating the work of fringe researchers and industry-funded scientists. He has claimed that addressing climate change would do more harm than good, and he has said pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would benefit humanity.

When testifying before the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee last year, Legates blamed natural variations for the unprecedented level of warming that scientists say is caused by the release of carbon dioxide from human activity.

"Climate has always changed, and weather is always variable, due to complex, powerful natural forces," Legates said. "No efforts to stabilize the climate can possibly be successful."

Legates has also said that teaching children about climate change was an effort "to satisfy the climate change fearmongering agenda that pervades our society today."

The hiring of Legates comes as wildfires are burning uncontrollably in the West after a period of intensely hot temperatures that many scientists link to climate change. It also comes amid a highly active hurricane season that NOAA research suggests could be a sign of strengthening storms.

Legates' appointment points to the direction the Trump administration will take on climate science if the president is re-elected in November, said Myron Ebell, the former head of President Trump's EPA transition team and the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

It shows that Trump wants to do more than roll back climate policy by actively trying to reshape climate science. Legates is a critic of climate modeling used to predict future conditions. Ebell said Legates could play a significant role in shaping the next National Climate Assessment.

NOAA and NASA are among the world's premier science agencies, and the data collected by their satellites and other equipment has informed climate research around the world."It's a very good sign that after sitting on their hands for three-and-a-half years, the administration is finally going to inject some science into official climate science," Ebell said. "This is the kind of thing we have been pushing for since before Trump was elected, to get real science into the assessment, instead of junk science, which NASA and NOAA have been doing for years."

NASA peer-reviewed research has shown that climate models have largely been accurate in predicting future conditions. The National Climate Assessment, an influential report required by Congress that's released every four years, has identified the unique ways climate change is affecting regions across the country. It has been used in local emergency preparedness, in infrastructure planning, and for development in communities across the country.

The National Climate Assessment is a comprehensive summary of the peer-reviewed science on how climate is changing and is the work of hundreds of scientists and authors around the world, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and one of the report's lead authors. She said attempts to skew the report away from consensus science could harm people.

"Any attempt to censor, skew or limit the information it presents will hamstring the ability of federal and state agencies to make decisions based on sound science and harm every citizen of this country who relies on their government to provide an accurate assessment of the increasingly dangerous risks they face from a changing climate," she said.

Legates was appointed the Delaware state climatologist in 2005 but was later asked to step down by officials with the University of Delaware and was told in 2007 by then-Governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) to stop using the title.

Even as Trump rejects climate change by calling it a hoax and directing his administration to roll back emissions regulations, the climate work at NOAA and NASA has generally been untouched.

Legates is expected to report directly to acting NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs, who was recently criticized in an inspector general report for allowing the agency's science to be politicized. Jacobs was cited by the independent watchdog for his role in "Sharpiegate," when Trump displayed a map with a hand-drawn path during Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

Jacobs was pressured by the White House to criticize the work of his own weather forecasters after they corrected Trump's false claims that Dorian was going to hit Alabama, the report said.

Neither Legates nor an NOAA spokesperson responded to requests for comment.

Legates has taken a dim view of the role the government plays in creating climate policy. He is a frequent guest at events sponsored by the Heartland Institute, which works to muddy public understanding of climate science.

In September 2019, Legates claimed that regulating carbon dioxide was actually a government control program designed to restrict the lives of ordinary Americans.

"Most governments want to keep control, and most governments get bigger and bigger over time," he said. "Carbon dioxide becomes that molecule by which we can take control of your lives, of your efforts, and everything that goes on."

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. Copyright 2020. E&E provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.

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https://theenergymix.com/2017/02/10/u-s-scientists-counter-courtroom-attack-on-noaa-climate-science/

2/17

american scientists and scientific organizations are pushing back against a lawsuit demanding that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) release 8,000 pages of drafts, email discussions, and peer review critiques leading up to a 2015 study that debunked the notion of a “hiatus” in global warming between 1998 and 2012.

“Now more than ever, it is critical that we defend climate scientists and their research,” said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund (CSLDF), one of the organizations responding to the lawsuit by the conservative organization Judicial Watch. “Forcing the disclosure of scientists’ private emails is invasive, unnecessary, and hugely detrimental to the scientific method."

The Judicial Watch suit “was inspired by a Congressional subpoena from Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who denies the science of global warming and the need to take action,” InsideClimate News reports. The accusations against NOAA had already been refuted, but were amped up last weekend by the Daily Mail, a UK tabloid that has since been disavowed by Wikipedia as an unreliable source.

On the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) blog, Director of Science & Policy Peter Frumhoff says the 2015 study, published in the journal Science, was one of several that refuted claims that the rate of global warming had slowed down or paused in recent decades. The Daily Mail “screed”, he said, came from David Rose, “a writer with a history of inaccurate reporting on climate science.”

The article was an example of a “very old strategy,” Frumhoff writes. “Repeated and amplified through the climate denial echo-chamber, Rose’s allegations of misconduct have now been taken up by Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Science Space and Technology Committee. Smith, who has long used his perch to harass NOAA scientists, issued a press release reiterating these unsubstantiated claims and accusing [retired NOAA climate scientist Thomas] Karl and colleagues of manipulating data for political purposes.”

The amicus brief from the CSLDF, the UCS, and the American Meteorological Societyargues that “groups across the political spectrum have attempted to discredit scientific studies they dislike…by seeking to use the scientists’ emails and preliminary drafts against them.” Frumhoff warns that, “along with other recent high profile attacks on prominent climate scientists and science agencies, this may well be part of a larger political strategy to intimidate federal scientists, justify cuts in agency budgets, staffing and missions, weaken support for U.S. and international climate policies and, most fundamentally, erode public trust in science and evidence so central to a functioning democracy.”

InsideClimate reports that it’s unclear whether the Trump administration would defend its own researchers against the lawsuit. But Michael Halpern, deputy director of the UCS’ Center for Science and Democracy, said the new regime “might not want to set a precedent that all government information should be public.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/potential-for-sudden-and-extreme-change-new-climate-report-warns-a-feedback-loop-may-already-be-underway/

no lnx

‘Potential for sudden and extreme change’: New climate report warns a feedback loop ‘may already be underway’

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common DreamsDecember 11, 2019

In addition to warning that “the feedback to accelerating climate change may already be underway,” the U.S. government’s latest report on conditions in the Arctic reveals that temperatures in the region are persistently warming, leading to land and sea ice melting, permafrost thawing, species being threatened with extinction, and putting Native communities at risk.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday published its 14th annual Arctic Report Card (pdf), which warns that “the Arctic marine ecosystem and the communities that depend upon it continue to experience unprecedented changes as a result of warming air temperatures, declining sea ice, and warming waters.”

The new NOAA report “draws particular attention to the Bering Sea region, where declining winter sea ice exemplifies the potential for sudden and extreme change,” and features commentary from Indigenous elders.

“The Bering Sea, in particular, has experienced unprecedented declines in sea ice over the last two years, with resulting changes in algae growth to include observations of thepresence of harmful algal blooms,” Clark University polar scientist Karen Frey, lead author of one of the report’s chapters, said in a statement.

Zack Labe

@ZLabe

The annual @NOAA Arctic Report Card is available today for 2019. It discusses recent changes in the Arctic, extreme events, and broad implications for the Earth system.

Infographic highlighting 2019's extreme events within the Arctic

Erich Osterberg, a Dartmouth College professor who has studied glaciers, told PBS NewsHour that “I think the headline from this report is that the Arctic is in real trouble. If this were an annual health check-up, I think we’d have to say that the Arctic is chronically sick and getting worse. 2019 was a particularly bad year for the Arctic.”

Osterberg, who did not contribute to the report, highlighted that this year saw the second-warmest average annual land surface air temperature on record, which led to significant sea ice loss in the Arctic Ocean and melting of glaciers on Greenland—both of which cause sea level rise.

Major findings include observations about rising temperatures, the Greenland Ice Sheet, North American Arctic snow cover, Tundra greening,thawing permafrost, sea ice extent, thickness of sea ice, ocean primary productivity, wildlife population declines, winter sea ice, and northerly shifts in the distribution of fish species.

Andrew Freedman

@afreedma

This is a BIG deal, and a finding that's a bit buried in the @noaa Arctic Report Card out today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/10/arctic-may-have-crossed-key-threshold-emitting-billions-tons-carbon-into-air-long-dreaded-climate-feedback/ …

The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a...

A new federal report on the Arctic finds the region is in the midst of drastic and sudden changes as a result of human-caused warming.

washingtonpost.com

NOAA’s new report is made up of 12 essays written by an international team of 81 researchers from 12 countries. An independent peer review was organized by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Arctic Council.

“It’s a really sobering report, but I have to say it’s not a very surprising report,” said Osterberg, “because this is a continuation of the trends that we’ve been seeing happening in the Arctic for quite a few decades now as climate change has gotten worse.”

Alongside the report, NOAA published a short video which explains that “unprecedented warming and exceptionally low levels of sea ice are imposing dramatic, rapid, and disruptive change on marine ecosystems in the far north,” including a “cascade of impacts on the marine food web.”

Watch:

“Changing growing conditions, including warmer summers, decreasing snow cover, and permafrost instability lead to alterations in the vegetation of the Arctive landscape. This can strongly affect habitat for caribou, birds, and other wildlife,putting further pressure on northern ecosystems and communities,” the video details. “Indigenous communities along the Bering Sea are on the front lines of climate change. As sea ice disappears, so does hunting access to seals, whales, whales, and other marine life.”

Bering Sea Elders Group executive director Mellisa Johnson, who edited a chapter of NOAA’s report, spoke with InsideClimate News about dead or dying salmon increasingly washing up on the shores over the past few years. She explained that “the seals, they don’t want to eat those types of fish. They know they’re unhealthy for consumption. So then they don’t have enough fat reserves to last them.”

The chapter that Johnson edited, which offers perspective from Indigenous voices, reads in part:

Our resilience as Indigenous Peoples comes from our close proximity to the food resources that we depend on. In a warming Arctic, access to our subsistence foods is shrinking and becoming more hazardous to hunt and fish. At the same time, thawing permafrost and more frequent and higher storm surges increasingly threaten our homes, schools, airports, and utilities. Our environment has changed, but we remain vigilant. By adapting as we always have, we continue to hunt, fish, and harvest from the ocean and land. But, we fear for our young people; we worry that they will grow without the same foods and places that we have known throughout our lives. Maintaining what we inherited from our elders and thinking about our future generations, we offer this report as a glimpse into what we are observing and experiencing at the locations of our eight communities in the Bering Sea region of Alaska.

Johnson, whose group represents 38 regional communities, emphasized in her comments to InsideClimate News the need for action to address the climate impacts in the region. “The Bering Sea provides for our people,” she said. “It’s our responsibility to take care of the one who provides for our people.”

Retired Navy Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet, deputy undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere at NOAA, led the news conference where the report was released Tuesday. In a statement, he underscored the importance of scientists continuing to track the conditions in the Arctic.

“The speed and trajectory of the changes sweeping the Arctic, many occurring faster than anticipated,makes NOAA’s continued investment in Arctic research and activities all the more important,” Gallaudet said. “We need the best scientific information to support NOAA’s efforts to better understand how environmental change is affecting the Arctic and weather around the globe, to support adaptation and economic opportunities in the region, and to sustain our ocean-based Blue Economy.”

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https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/351945-rep-lamar-smith-cites-fake-news-in-fight-against-climate-science

Rep. Lamar Smith cites fake news in fight against climate science

BY BOB WARD, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/23/17

Rep. Lamar Smith (R- Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology has worked to delegitimize an important study on climate change, establishing there has been no recent slowdown in climbing temperatures. Smith’s pursuit inadvertently required citing other work that is far less credible.

Earlier this year, Smith again challenged the findings of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report by Thomas Karl, citing a British newspaper article, alleging Karl and his colleagues had “rushed to publication, and [the report] was not free from political bias.”

The article has since been ruled to be inaccurate and misleading by an official regulator.

The Mail on Sunday was forced to publishan “adverse adjudication” on Sept. 17 admitting that a story by its reporter, David Rose, had breached the Editors’ Code of Practice of the UKIndependent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO**). The organization was established and is funded by a group of British newspapers, including The Mail on Sunday and its stablemate, the Daily Mail.

The article at fault was published in February as an expose of  “how world leaders were duped over global warming,” focusing on Karl, alleging NOAA had “rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.”

The story was mainly based on a blog post and interview with John Bates, a former NOAA employee who was not involved in the study, but who was unhappy about the way in which its data had been archived.

The academic paper on ‘Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global warming hiatus,' which was published in the respectable journal ‘Science’ in June 2015, presented the results of a new analysis of oceanic and land surface temperatures, and concluded that they “do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase in global surface temperature.”

Rose alleged that Bates had “shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data”. But a seven-month investigation by IPSO, carried out in response to a formal complaint I submitted about inaccuracies in the article, concluded that these claims were untrue.

The adjudication states that IPSO’s Complaints Committee “decided that the newspaper’s claims that Bates’ testimony had provided “irrefutable evidence” that the paper had been based on “misleading, ‘unverified’ data”, leading — as the headline claimed — to world leaders being “duped” over global warming, and “convinced” to invest billions in climate change, went much further than the concerns which Dr. Bates had detailed in his blog or in the interview; they did not represent criticisms of the data collection process, but rather, were assertions of fact that the data had been demonstrated conclusively to be wrong and had a significant impact on the decision making of world leaders, with an additional implication this had been part of a wilful attempt to deceive”.

In addition, the adjudication points out that Rose’s article had included “significantly misleading statements” about the archiving of data used for the academic paper, and that it was accompanied by a graph that had created a “significantly misleading impression” of trends in global average temperature.

In an important caveat, the adjudication stresses that the Complaints Committee’s “central concern was whether the article had accurately reported Dr. Bates’ concerns”, and it did not assess whether Bates’s claims were true.

In fact, it became apparent very soon after the publication of Rose’s article that several of Bates’s allegations were false.

In particular, Bates’s post on the Climate Etc blog stated that “Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’ — in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets — in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy”.

But Bates backed away from his accusations of scientific fraud when challenged by other journalists, and he told a reporter at Associated Press that there had been “no data tampering, no data changing, nothing malicious” by Karl and his co-authors.

Most reputable media were skeptical of Rose’s false claims when they were published in February. However, a few outlets, such as The Times in the U.K. and Fox News, were fooled and erroneously reported the story without checking its veracity.

In addition, Science Committee Chairman Smith, was taken in by Rose’s article and cited it in a letter he wrote inFebruary to the Acting Administrator of NOAA, Mr Benjamin Friedman.

It is perhaps surprising that he and others were not more suspicious about Rose’s article given his track record of inaccurate and misleading reporting about climate change and his previous admission that he was an unwitting conduit for false information about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

However, Smith seems to be carrying out a campaign against Karl and his co-authors since publication. The IPSO ruling should catch Smith’s attention. Smith should set the record straight by acknowledging that he cited a fake news article in his letter to Friedman.

Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

==

Search Results

Web results

Lamar Smith, the departing head of the House science panel ...

www.sciencemag.org › news › 2017/11 › lamar-smith-...

1.

Nov 5, 2017 - Smith repeatedly suggested that the study, led by NOAA climate researcher Thomas Karl, was rushed into publication by President Barack ...

Rep. Lamar Smith cites fake news in fight against climate ...

thehill.com › opinion › energy-environment › 351945-...

1.

Sep 23, 2017 - Lamar Smith should set the record straight by acknowledging that he cited fake news in criticism of NOAA.

New analysis shows Lamar Smith's accusations on climate ...

arstechnica.com › science › 2017/01 › noaa-temperatur...

2.

Jan 4, 2017 - Both of those datasets also drift cooler than the comparison data, but less so than NOAA's old dataset. The difference between four major sea ...

Congresswoman Defends NOAA Scientists From Lamar Smith ...

insideclimatenews.org › news › ranking-congresswoma...

2.

Nov 23, 2015 - Lamar Smith and NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson delivered a blistering critique of a Republican campaign ...

House Science Committee Hearing Renews Battle of Science ...

insideclimatenews.org › news › lamar-smith-epa-noaa-c...

2.

Feb 7, 2017 - Rep. Lamar Smith revved up his campaign against the EPA's 'secret science,' and took particular aim at refuting a NOAA study that debunked a ...

The House Science Committee's Anti-Science Rampage | The ...

www.newyorker.com › news › news-desk › the-house-s...

1.

Sep 14, 2016 - Kathryn Sullivan, the head of N.O.A.A., received a subpoena. It came from Lamar Smith, the Texas congressman who chairs the House ...

Lamar Smith | DeSmog

www.desmogblog.com › lamar-smith

2.

In addition to defending ExxonMobil, Lamar Smith has repeatedly attacked the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and has also fought against the NOAA ...

CONGRESS: Lamar Smith blasts NOAA climate study ...

www.eenews.net › stories

1.

Mar 17, 2016 - Lamar Smith (R-Texas) asked NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan to immediately comply with his subpoena requesting emails of scientists ...

Who is Lamar Smith, and why won't he stop bothering NOAA ...

grist.org › politics › who-is-lamar-smith-and-why-wont...

1.

Dec 23, 2015 - Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), allow us to fill you in. Smith is the proud recipient of ...

What's the Deal with Rep. Lamar Smith's Subpoena to NOAA ...

blog.ucsusa.org › gretchen-goldman › whats-the-deal-...

1.

Nov 16, 2015 - Concern is growing about the broader implications of House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith's subpoena to NOAA and subsequent ...

==

A surprising number of dolphins are washing up on Southern California beaches this February, and the Pacific Marine Mammal Center (PMMC) wants to know why.

The PMCC has responded to six beached dolphins in just 14 days, it said in a Monday press release. By this time last year, it had only responded to one stranding.

"This drastic and unexpected increase in cetaceans has had a significant impact on our Center. With so many incidents concentrated in such a short period of time, this has taken up much of the attention as well as our resources away from our more 'traditional' animal care operations focused on seals and sea lions," PMMC CEO Peter Chang said.

PMCC is working with scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NOAA certified labs at universities across the country to determine what is causing the uptick in dolphin deaths.

"There are a variety of potential reasons as to why these dolphins are stranding. These include, but are not limited to, viral infections, bacterial infections and toxins," PMCC veterinarian Kristen Sakamaki said.

One source of toxins could be algae blooms that the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS) has observed off the coast of Southern California. Algae blooms can release domoic acid, which is poisonous for humans, marine mammals and seabirds.

Another potential source could be the storms and heavy rainfall that Southern California has received this winter, which flushes more excess nutrients and pollutants from land into the oceans.

...

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https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-admin-takes-advantage-of-california-fires-2594248442.html

Trump Admin. Takes Advantage of California Fires to Funnel More Water From Endangered Fish to Agriculture, Critics Say

The Commerce Department seemed to take its direction from President Donald Trump's Twitter account on Wednesday when it issued a directive to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to prioritize fighting wildfires over protecting endangered species when allocating California's water resources, The Huffington Post reported.

The directive comes days after Trump tweeted blaming California's raging wildfires on "bad environmental laws which aren't allowing massive amount of readily available water to be properly utilized."

Firefighters disagreed with Trump's assessment.

"We have plenty of water to fight these wildfires," Deputy Chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Scott McLean told The Huffington Post on Monday. "It is our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires."

But that didn't stop Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross from using an emergency provision of the Endangered Species Act to direct water towards the fires.

"Today, I direct NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service to make clear to all its Federal agency partners that the protection of life and property takes precedence over any current agreements regarding the use of water in the areas of California affected by wildfires," Ross wrote.

Environmentalists are concerned this move isn't about the fires at all, but rather an attempt to use the disaster to intervene in a longstanding disagreement between agriculture, the fishing industry and environmentalists over whether more water should be used to irrigate crops or should be left in rivers to preserve fish species like delta smelt and Chinook salmon.

Ross's directive comes one month after the California Water Resources Control Board proposed diverting less water towards cities and farms in an attempt to save the two endangered species.

"Secretary Ross's directive is nothing more than a smokescreen designed to weaken these protections that NMFS's scientists determined are necessary to keep these native fish from going extinct. It's almost like the extinction of these creatures is their real goal, so that they no longer have to leave any water in rivers, but can divert it all to corporate agribusiness. The people of California won't stand for Trump destroying our precious resources to line the pockets of his corporate buddies," senior director of the water division for the Natural Resources Defense Council Kate Poole said in a statement reported by ABC News.

Around 80 percent of all water in California currently goes to agriculture, according to The Huffington Post, but, for Trump allies in the state like Republican Congressman Devin Nunes, that is not enough.

Nunes even went so far as to blame the drought that devastated California from 2011 to 2017 on a misallocation of water resources.

"There was plenty of water," he told The New York Times in 2014, according to The Huffington Post. "This has nothing to do with drought. They can blame global warming all they want, but this is about mathematics and engineering."

Meanwhile, another department head also seemed to take his cue on the wildfires from a different argument in the same Trump tweet, in which the president said the state "must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!"

On Wednesday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wrote an opinion piece for USA Today in which he blamed the fires in part on a buildup of fuels in forests.

He called for more active forest management through logging, controlled burns and "mechanical thinning" and blamed environmentalists for preventing this kind of action.

"Yet, when action comes, and we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods," he wrote.

However, his OpEd doesn't appear to signal any imminent policy change, ABC News reported.

Zinke issued a directive last year calling on land managers to be more "aggressive" in clearing dead trees or brush, but Interior Department spokesperson Heather Swift told ABC News that there were no changes in the works this year.

==

==

https://www.ecowatch.com/noaa-commercial-fishing-proposal-2584281440.html

NOAA Proposes Opening Marine Monuments to Fishing Within 90 Days

When reports surfaced in June that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) might shift the language of its mission statement away from climate and conservation and towards security and the economy, acting head Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet rushed to reassure reporters that the agency's mission would remain unchanged.

But a copy of the presentation in which Gallaudet floated the language change, reviewed by The Huffington Post Thursday, reveals a much more specific proposal which exemplifies what a shift away from conservation might mean: opening marine national monuments to commercial fishing.

Gallaudet gave the presentation at the Department of Commerce's "Vision Setting Summit." In it, he outlined the Commerce Department's "Strategic Priorities for 2018," which included cutting the U.S. seafood trade deficit (the U.S. imports more than 80 percent of the seafood it consumes) and expanding maritime commerce. To meet those goals, he proposed granting "permit fishing in marine monuments" within 90 days of the meeting.

The proposal comes as the world's oceans are increasingly threatened by plastics and overfishing. As of 2016, nearly 90 percent of fisheries were either fished to capacity or overfished. Another 2016 report warned there could be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.

For Oceans 5 program director Seth Horstmeyer, Gaulladet's proposal would "fly in the face" of the goal of the marine national monument program, which is to preserve ocean ecosystems and resources, including fisheries. He told The Huffington Post that allowing fishing in these protected waters would turn them into "paper monuments."

Horstmeyer also said that fishing in marine monuments would do nothing to impact how much fish the U.S. catches relative to other countries.

"Each year the Hawaii-based longline fishery is allocated a quota for how much bigeye tuna they can catch, so opening marine monuments will not allow more fish to be caught and certainly will not reduce the trade deficit," he said.

Despite this, opening marine national monuments to fishing is not a new idea for the Trump administration.

In 2017, President Donald Trump signed executive orders asking for a review of 27 national monuments on land and sea.

A draft of a report by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke leaked to the press in September recommended opening the Pacific Remote Islands, Rose Atoll and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts marine national monuments to commercial fishing, but the final draft of his report did not mention authorizing commercial fishing in any particular monument.

Instead, it suggested Trump lift the current prohibition on fishing in monuments and move authority over fisheries to regional councils as allowed by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976.

NOAA spokeswoman Julie Roberts called attention to Gaulladet's statement when news of the presentation first surface last week, in which he said it was not "a final, vetted proposal." But when asked about fishing specifically, Roberts did mention Zinke's proposal for managing fisheries in national monuments based on the 1976 act.

"Successful implementation of this statute has been the key to the U.S. having the most sustainable wild-caught fisheries management in the world," Roberts wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. She did not answer questions about which monuments could be impacted.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

'Fish Fights' Could Erupt as Climate Change Drives Species Across ... ›

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25062018/noaa-mission-climate-change-science-weather-research-oceans-coasts-timothy-gallaudet-trump

he acting chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration proposed removing the word "climate" from the research agency's mission statement, the latest maneuver in the Trump administration's wide-ranging effort to downplay federal work on climate science and limit the public's access to it.

The proposal drew swift condemnation from scientists. "Redefining@NOAA's mission is a serious threat to the breadth of science, services and stewardship that NOAA provides," tweeted the former head of NOAA Jane Lubchenco.

The proposed revision was unveiled by Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere Timothy Gallaudet in a PowerPoint presentation he used at a "vision setting" summit last week of the Commerce Department, which houses NOAA. After the response from scientists and questions from the media, Gallaudet walked back the proposal through a statement issued by the NOAA press office.

Instead of describing the mission as "to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts," in line with the existing mission statement on the agency's website, his presentation had suggested the phrase "to observe, understand and predict atmospheric and ocean conditions."...

IN  another shift, the missions of protecting coastal resources and ecosystems would be replaced with "to protect lives and property, empower the economy, and support homeland and national security."

NOAA's research on climate change and its effects is used by cities, states, farmers, the country's national security apparatus, businesses and universities, said Andrew Rosenberg of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a former NOAA staffer who obtained the PowerPoint and shared it with the media.

Latest Push to Undermine Climate Science

Environmental and science advocates called the shift among the starkest examples to date by the Trump administration to undermine federal work on global warming. President Donald Trump and many of his top advisers deny manmade climate change, which has led to his high-profile decisions such as pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement and scrapping the Clean Power Plan.

But in smaller yet still meaningful ways, the administration has worked from the outset across federal agencies to strip mention of climate change and curtail work on it, according to watchdog groups such as the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI).

In December 2017, for instance, the administration dropped the mention of climate change as a global threat from its National Security Strategy document. Also in December, the Interior Department issued a secretarial order halting efforts on public lands to adapt to climate change.

Joel Clement, a whistleblower who was formerly director of its office of policy analysis, accused the Interior Department of reassigning him to an obscure accounting post as retaliation for speaking out about the threats manmade climate change poses to Alaskan villages. In August, the administration disbanded a federal advisory panel that helps government and corporate officials incorporate climate research into planning. And in April 2017, the Environmental Protection Agency scrubbed from its website "extensive information on the EPA's work to mitigate climate change, as well as details of data collection efforts and indicators for climate change," according to EDGI.

Afterward, Gallaudet Walks It Back

Through the NOAA press office, Gallaudet issued a statement that walked back the proposed changes in his presentation.

The PowerPoint "was intended to share new ways NOAA could augment the DOC's [Department of Commerce] strategic plan. It was not intended to exclude NOAA's important climate and conservation efforts, which are essential for protecting lives and the environment. Nor should this presentation be considered a final, vetted proposal," the statement said....

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off bs

Timothy Gallaudet, Ph.D., was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on October 5, 2017, as the assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere for the Department of Commerce in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Dr. Gallaudet was previously a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, where his most recent assignment was Oceanographer of the Navy and Commander of the Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command. During his 32 years of military service, Dr. Gallaudet has had experience in weather and ocean forecasting, hydrographic surveying, developing policy and plans to counter illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, and assessing the national security impacts of climate change. He has led teams of Navy sailors and civilians performing such diverse functions as overseeing aircraft carrier combat operations, planning and conducting humanitarian assistance and disaster response efforts, assisting Navy SEAL Teams during high visibility counter-terrorism operations, and developing the Navy's annual $52 billion information technology, cyber security and intelligence budget.

Dr. Gallaudet holds a bachelor's degree from the U.S. Naval Academy and master’s and doctoral degrees from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, all in oceanography.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/climate-science-denying-trump-regime-silently-killed-nasa-carbon-monitoring-system

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hurricane-harvey-trumps-weather-cuts-are-now-eye-storm

9/1/17

As Hurricane Harvey churned toward the Texas Gulf Coast last week, meteorologists, climate scientists and lay weather nerds on Twitter marveled at the crisp, detailed images of the storm sent to earth by a brand-new satellite. The nation’s first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-16, had been launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida 11 days after the November election, and has since transmitted high-resolution pictures of smoke from Canadian wildfires, of the August 21 North American eclipse and of a major fog event that spread out over the Midwest and Eastern U.S. But it’s been the images of hurricanes — Hilary, Gert and now Harvey — that have most mesmerized and thrilled weather forecasters, who for the first time have been able to see the storms develop from tropical wave to threatening hurricane almost in real time.

GOES-16 scans the earth every 15 minutes and tracks active storms at intervals as short as 30 seconds. It tracked Harvey as far back as August 17, when it was a tropical storm with 40 mile-per-hour winds approaching St. Lucia Island in the Caribbean.

“This new satellite will save lives,” said Todd McNamara of the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron, in a NASA video released last year.

If President Trump’s budget blueprint for fiscal year 2018 passes muster in Congress, however, the agency behind GOES-16, the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, could be facing lean times. Weather satellites take years to design and build, weeks to successfully launch (GOES-16 was delayed when Hurricane Matthew skimmed the Florida coast last year), and a well-funded staff of scientists to interpret and distribute data. The satellite agency, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), already gets less than it asks for every fiscal year. Trump has proposed cutting its roughly $2 billion budget by 18 percent.

A proposed budget in the U.S. House of Representatives would cut the satellite program even more steeply, by 23 percent, although the Senate budget only asks for a six percent reduction. The White House Office of Management and Budget insists the funding is enough to maintain the “current generation” of satellites. But the lack of commitment to the program reflects the administration’s ongoing hostility toward any science and research that might advance our knowledge of the earth’s climate — even when that research clearly saves lives. Here are four other ways that Trump’s priorities could make managing future disasters more difficult — and dangerous — in the U.S.

===

https://ic.ucsc.edu/college8core/c8wiki/index.php/Overfishing#Articles_and_Reports

As Northwest Salmon Economy Teeters on Brink, Trump Gives It a Push 11/17.

... Pacific salmon found either side of two US-Canadian borders — one between Canada and the Lower 48, and the other between Canada and Alaska — represent a huge binational resource. And in the past, the governments of both countries had worked together to protect that shared fishery, signing a groundbreaking treaty in 1998 and creating the Pacific Salmon Commission, a bilateral management authority headquartered in Vancouver, to make sure both sides got what they needed and that the salmon did not disappear.

For 20 years the commission kept the peace between fishermen, people like Sampson working on both sides of the borders, trying to conserve a dwindling resource as the ocean grew ever more stressed.

But now, as representatives of both governments meet to renew the historic management and conservation treaty that had ended decades of “fishing wars,” there are signs that Washington is withdrawing from the responsible management role carved out under three administrations. The Trump administration’s 2018 budget (“A New Foundation for American Greatness”), if approved by Congress, will dramatically cut funding to NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Alongside the better-known cuts to climate change research, Trump wants to reduce allocations to NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), eliminating two programs specifically targeted to protect vital salmon habitat, including one expressly dedicated to curbing the salmon’s historic decline.

Though these proposed cuts, as with so much of Trump’s agenda, seem unlikely to be approved by Congress for now, the president’s budget is a worrying indicator of the administration’s priorities and intent. As Pacific salmon stocks risk collapse, the US president has called for fiscal austerity and a withdrawal of economic support to Northwest communities in a time of great need — the very real existential threat to salmon is also a threat to predators, both animal and human, who depend on the fish for survival.

....

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new 9/17

https://www.ecowatch.com/silence-climate-scientists-2491043851.html

The Desperate But Effective Attempts to Silence Climate Scientists

By Jeremy Deaton

People play dirty when they can't win by playing fair. This is, more or less, the story of climate change denial in the U.S.

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that humans are altering the climate, reaping changes with potentially catastrophic consequences. Climate deniers can't dispute the data. They can't win on facts. Instead, they impugn the credibility of scientists, a tactic which has proved both ugly and effective.

Right-wing groups are using open records laws to obtain scientists' emails, and then misrepresenting the content of those emails to question the integrity of researchers and cast doubt on their findings, all of which has a chilling effect on scientific inquiry. But scientists have earned powerful allies in the fight to protect their research—including, by a strange set of circumstances, the Trump administration.

"Climategate" led to a wave of harassment.

The current spate of invasive records requests back to "Climategate," a 2009 controversy that erupted when a hacker obtained more than 1,000 emails sent and received by climatologists at East Anglia university in the United Kingdom. Parts of some emails, taken out of context, suggested scientists had manipulated data to exaggerate the warming trend.

Climate deniers harped on the leaks to paint climate scientists as ideologically motivated and dishonest. Though an official inquiry into the matter exonerated scientists, the damage was already done. Their calls for universities to investigate climate scientists prompted institutional probes that hampered research efforts. Today, conservative advocacy groups point to "Climategate" when making open records requests.

"I think anyone who looks at the whole 'Climategate' manufactured controversy understands now that it's bogus, but that's the rationale that they've used," said Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit working to protect researchers threatened by legal attacks.

The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E), a conservative think tank with ties to coal and oil companies, cited "Climategate" as the impetus for its "transparency project." In 2011, the group sued to obtain more than 10,000 emails written or received by Michael Mann, a researcher at the University of Virginia and one of the scientists implicated in "Climategate." The Virginia Supreme Court sided with Mann, who lamented the "coordinated assault against the scientific community by powerful vested interests."

That same year, E&E requested more than a decade of emails from University of Arizona climate scientists Jonathan Overpeck and Malcolm Hughes, another researcher ensnared by "Climategate." E&E's legal brief alleged there is a "climate scientific-technological elite" which has "behaved badly" in the past, a reference to "Climategate." In a gesture of surprising candor, E&E acknowledged that it was searching for emails to "embarrass both Professors Hughes and Overpeck," whom it characterized as "academic climate alarmists." That suit continues to this day.

The University of Arizona case volleyed back and forth between the trial court and the appellate court, which recently determined the trial court had failed to consider a statute that protects "unpublished research data, manuscripts, preliminary analyses, drafts of scientific papers" and other documents produced by researchers at Arizona public universities.

Now the case will go back to the trial court, which will reevaluate the records request in light of this statute. The ruling is a pyrrhic victory for researchers and the university, who must dedicate even more time and money to fighting off E&E. "That's basically as good as we could have hoped for," Kurtz said. Even when scientists win, they lose.

The lawsuit has taken a hefty toll on Overpeck and Hughes. Overpeck said he spent six weeks of his sabbatical sorting through 90,000 pages of emails, explaining the case was a "grave distraction" from his work and family. Hughes spent an entire summer collecting emails, failed to attend to his work and lost a research grant as a result.

These injuries are temporary. More worrisome is the long-term effect that records requests have on research. Hughes noted that, due to his involvement in the case, other scientists have been reluctant to email him. While Hughes is nearing the end of this career, he said that, were he a young man, he would "consider a different line of work or another institution."

Even if E&E loses in the trial court—and it most likely will—the group will have nonetheless succeeded in bullying climate scientists. This, rather transparently, was the point. If E&E had concerns about the empirical rigor of climate research, it could have scrutinized the findings of specific studies. Instead of interrogating the final product, it went after the hastily scribed emails exchanged between colleagues.

"I have taught, researched and administered in academia for more than 40 years and have not seen a time in which freedom of inquiry has been more needed, or more imperiled than it is now," Hughes wrote in a letter to University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan when E&E was working to obtain Mann's emails. "Nothing is more likely to quash the creativity of America's scientists than the ever-present ear of a hostile listener intent on finding, at all costs, the appearance of malfeasance. Nothing is more calculated to discourage research into topics that may challenge power interests."

Today, some states are enacting policies to protect scientists. Rhode Island and North Dakota recently passed laws guarding academic freedom. The Rhode Island statute specifically shields "drafts, notes, impressions, memoranda, working papers and work products" from open records requests. Kurtz hopes more states follow suit.

Climate scientists have an unlikely ally in the Trump administration.

At the federal level, the issue becomes more complicated. The legal protections that guard the emails of federally-funded climate scientists also shield government employees, including those working for the president. As a result, climate scientists have an unlikely ally in the Trump administration.

In 2015, the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch made a FOIA request to obtain the emails of climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Judicial Watch has a history of harassing opponents with records requests—most notably Hillary Clinton. Its president, Tom Fitton, claimed the NOAA documents requested would show "the Obama administration put politics before science to advance global warming alarmism."

"This case is interesting because it was actually started under the Obama administration, but the Trump administration continued it, I think, because the Trump administration recognizes that it's important to maintain these open-records protections," said Kurtz.

The administration, though leaky, is notoriously secretive. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, who regularly antagonizes climate scientists, recently installed a $25,000 soundproof booth in his office. Pruitt has also been sparing in his use of email, in part, as a response to a 2014 open-records request that revealed his close ties with the fossil fuel industry. "The Trump administration, I don't think, is eager to be turning things over under open-record laws," said Kurtz.

The rationale for protecting scientists' emails from public disclosure is simple. FOIA was enacted to make government more transparent, but it also threatened to discourage open conversations among federal employees. Judges have interpreted the law to exclude these conversations from records requests—what's known as deliberative process privilege.

"The deliberative process privilege was designed to allow agency employees to have freedom to communicate with each other and toss around ideas and engage in devil's advocate debates and what-if arguments and really feel like they can be candid with each other," Kurtz said. "In addition, there's the rationale that people might toss out ideas that are later determined to be bad ideas and never implemented, and if you produce all those emails, it's really going to confuse the public."

The NOAA suit was settled in August. "The trial court judge agreed that the emails in the NOAA case were exactly the sort of emails that this deliberative process privilege was designed to protect," Kurtz said. Judicial Watch declined to appeal to the ruling.

As with the University of Arizona case, the damage was already done. If Judicial Watch had concerns about the empirical rigor of the NOAA study, it could have scrutinized the data, the method or the results—all of which were publicly available. But, the group didn't want to debate the merits of the science. Its goal was more specific.

Invasive records requests undermine scientific inquiry.

A 2015 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that researchers in numerous fields—public health, environmental science, genetic engineering—face attacks from groups on both sides of the ideological spectrum. The report explains that "individuals and well-heeled special interests across the political spectrum are increasingly using broad open records requests to attack and harass scientists." It warned that such tactics can "can curb the ability of researchers to pursue their work,chill their speech and discourage them from tackling contentious topics."

With climate change, there is evidence that this is already happening. A 2015 study found that climate scientists frequently downplay the gravity of their findings in response to harassment. Authors wrote that, " in response to constant, and sometimes toxic, public challenges, scientists have over-emphasized scientific uncertainty, and have inadvertently allowed contrarian claims to affect how they themselves speak, and perhaps even think, about their own research." This erodes public understanding of science.

"We all lose when scientists self-censor due to continued harassment. We have a poorer understanding of the science and are less able to make good personal and policy decisions," said Michael Halpern, head of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Scientists will be more likely to keep their heads down and refuse to publicly engage or ask contentious research questions if they don't feel that their peers who are attacked are adequately protected."

How then do scientists balance privacy with transparency? Where is the line between confidentiality and obfuscation?

"We think it's totally appropriate to FOIA for funding information and conflict of interest information," Kurtz said. "When you're getting into research emails and candid communication, I think that's really harmful." She added, "Short of something where you have actual evidence of criminal fraud, I think those things should be protected."

FOIA is designed to give a window into the policymaking process, but science is already transparent. "When you're doing a peer-reviewed study, your peers are looking at your research and giving you feedback on it, and they are determining whether or not it is appropriate for publication," said Kurtz. Scientists must publish their data, their methods, their results, and they must disclose their source of funding .

"That sort of transparency is actually what you need to replicate the research, evaluate the research," said Kurtz. "That is not happening in the policymaking field where FOIA was originally designed to operate."

Because science is transparent, it is also self-correcting. Researchers can interrogate, criticize and improve upon each others' work. In 2013, Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts made headlines when he found a number errors in an influential study authored by two Harvard economists. The paper showed that economic growth slows down in countries with high national debt, and it was used to justify austerity measures following the Great Recession. Herndon, 28, published a paper which called attention to the errors and refuted its conclusions about national debt.

This is how research works. Researchers evaluate and attempt to replicate the findings of their peers. They have every incentive to prove each other wrong. Herndon's work earned him the acclaim of serious economists, weeks of fawning press coverage and a star turn on The Colbert Report. Any person who could do the same for climate research would be similarly celebrated.

If E&E, Judicial Watch or any other groups were to find and publicize flaws in peer-reviewed climate research, they would be doing a public service. But, overwhelmingly, the data show that humans are driving the warming trend. So instead, right-wing groups go after emails, looking to defame scientists.

"Scientific transparency is obviously important," Kurtz said. "What we want to preclude is scientists having to live in a fish bowl."

Reposted with permission from our media associate Nexus Media.

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In January we filed a brief asking the D.C. District Court to protect nine National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate scientists. On August 21, the court ruled in favor of these researchers, upholding NOAA’s decision not to release its scientists’ research documents to the conservative group Judicial Watch.

https://climatesciencedefensefund.org/2017/08/25/d-c-district-court-rules-in-favor-of-noaa-climate-scientists-in-foia-case/

We’re thrilled by this outcome, but our work is far from done. This case is part of a growing trend where groups that dispute the reality of climate change attempt to use open records laws to access publicly-funded climate scientists’ private documents. These groups often aim to make public and manipulate scientists’ emails — including taking scientific jargon out of context — to discredit and distort peer-reviewed climate research.

We continue to support researchers in these cases; in July, we filed a brief asking the Arizona Court of Appeals to protect two scientists from another of these invasive open records requests.

To learn more about how anti-science groups and individuals attack and intimidate researchers, check out our profile of atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe. Her commitment to climate communication and public outreach has led to ongoing harassment and aggressive legal inquiry.

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ref

In January 2017, CSLDF filed a brief asking the federal District Court for the District of Columbia to protect National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate scientists. On August 21, the D.C. court upheld NOAA’s decision not to release its climate scientists’ research documents to the conservative group Judicial Watch.

In the case, Judicial Watch sought to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows U.S. citizens to request copies of government documents, to obtain NOAA scientists’ emails, drafts, and peer review comments related to a June 2015 paper published in Science. The study, which is also known as the “Hiatus Paper,” found that recent ocean surface temperature increases were greater than those indicated by other peer-reviewed studies, thus refuting the idea of a “pause” in global warming.

The scientists’ findings did not sit well with Judicial Watch, which doesn’t agree with the science of climate change. Judicial Watch sued for the NOAA scientist’s documents; the organization’s president claimed that the requested materials “will show that the Obama administration put politics before science to advance global warming alarmism.”

NOAA produced some of the documents Judicial Watch requested, but withheld others, arguing that the “deliberative process privilege” protected these documents. The deliberative process privilege allows for the denial of a FOIA request if it can be shown the requested government documents involve materials that are “predecisional,” meaning written as part of the decision-making process, and “deliberative,” meaning involving consultative give-and-take. The rationale for this privilege is to safeguard preliminary documents that, if released, could prevent candid collaboration and open discussions among agency employees.

NOAA argued the privilege exists to protect the sort of deliberative materials that are the heart of the scientific process. “In pursuing a research objective, scientists may begin with only a rough idea, and then develop, test, and revise that idea as data is collected and interpreted. Possible interpretations are generated and tested in part through candid debates and exchanges among peers. Indeed, the exchange and debate among peers is the mechanism that allows NOAA to ensure its scientific products are robustly developed and accurately tested.”

Judicial Watch claimed that the deliberative process privilege could not be applied to scientific materials, but the district court sided with NOAA, concluding that both the case law in the D.C. Circuit, as well as the facts of the case, showed that “drafts of the Hiatus Paper, internal deliberations, and peer reviewer comments thus fall within the scope of [FOIA] Exemption 5,” which includes the deliberative process privilege.

The district court also dismissed Judicial Watch’s claim that a February 2017 article in The Mail on Sunday showed potential wrongdoing by the NOAA scientists and should, therefore, overrule the deliberative process privilege. In the article, a former NOAA employee asserted that certain data archiving protocols had not been completed for the Hiatus Paper; the court said Judicial Watch “cites to a single article in a British tabloid reporting, based on a former employee’s allegation” which “does not meet th[e] narrow standard” necessary to show “nefarious government misconduct.”

This case is part of a larger trend where groups that dispute the scientific consensus on climate change attempt to use FOIA or state open records laws to access publicly funded climate scientists’ private correspondence, including similar cases in Arizona (currently on appeal) and Virginia.

Hostile groups have also targeted researchers in other fields – from biomedical researchers to environmental health scientists – under open records laws. In light of these abuses, many jurisdictions have begun instituting protections for scientific research under open records laws, including most recently Rhode Island (effective June 27, 2017) and North Dakota (effective August 1, 2017).

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Judicial Watch has 30 days to appeal the district court’s decision.

— Lauren Kurtz is the Executive Director of the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund

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lamar smith on breitbart

...science is clear. For nearly two decades, the satellites that measure global temperature have shown no discernible increase. This fact has been very inconvenient to the Obama administration that wants to promote an extreme climate change agenda at an international meeting next month in Paris.

More conveniently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently published a study in the journal Science that made “adjustments” to global temperature data. The study was conducted in order to refute the notion that there has been any pause in global warming.

The NOAA study claimed to use “new methods” of data collection that changed historical temperatures from both land and oceans. This is beyond suspicious. Just in time for this administration’s final carbon emission regulations and international climate negotiations, NOAA changed the way it has analyzed data for decades to get results that support the president’s agenda.

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http://grist.org/climate-energy/this-tiny-program-keeps-our-coasts-safe-so-trumps-gutting-it-of-course/

The semi-annual meeting of the Sea Grant Association in Washington, D.C., is usually a straightforward affair. It’s typically a time for administrators from around the country to discuss coastal research and hash out the association’s business.

But as members gather to start their meeting on Tuesday, there’s plenty of drama. The Trump administration reportedly plans to slash the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and gut federal funding for NOAA’s Sea Grant program.

This time, Sea Grant’s very existence is at stake.

“My initial reaction [to the news] was horror and disgust,” says Jim Eckman, director at California Sea Grant. “I think we’re facing a much graver crisis that we’re going to have to deal with.”

Though hardly a household name, Sea Grant funds important work, supporting over 3,000 scientists and paying for coastal research through 33 university programs. Sea Grant projects shed light on sea-level rise, ocean acidification, the effect of melting glaciers on kelp beds, and much, much else.

Congress created the Sea Grant program in 1966 in part to improve scientific understanding for the fishing industry. Since then, it has helped pay for projects that encourage commercial fishers to adopt sustainable practices off the coast of Ventura, California. It has backed efforts to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and to forecast the loss of wetlands from hurricanes hitting Louisiana.

Sea Grant directors get federal money and hustle to match it with private and state investment for research. Sometimes they manage to double what the government gives them. But without a federal commitment, the program would be finished, says MaryAnn Wagner, a spokesperson for Washington Sea Grant.

Coming to grips with the reality of climate change is scary enough. Dealing with its assault on coasts without the extensive research to understand the consequences? Downright devastating, administrators say.

In coming days, directors will start mapping out plans to defend the program. “Big fights are a-brewin’,” Eckman says.

The Trump administration reportedly wants to use the cuts to NOAA and its $73 million Sea Grant program to help pay for a $54 billion boost in military spending.

Eckman and other directors doubt Sea Grant’s bipartisan support in Congress will erode so quickly for a program it has supported for decades. They hope Congress will have their backs.

“I have to assume there are some wise people in our Congress who see the flaw” of prioritizing defense over science, says Paul Anderson, who directs Maine Sea Grant. “Mr. Trump is setting up for a political battle.”

Sea Grant’s managers say Trump’s proposal underscores the administration’s disrespect for science. They suspect similar cuts will come to programs at the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Forest Service — at a cost to scientific understanding.

Slashing funding for scientific research would be “a disservice to everybody in the nation and the world,” Anderson says. “It’s like flying blind. Why would we fly blind if we don’t have to?”

Though the cuts seem drastic, it’s not the first time a president has threatened to obliterate the Sea Grant program. In 1981, the Reagan administration proposed pulling federal funding. A task force assembled to defend Sea Grant. An analysis of 57 examples from the program found the $270 million the government spent on Sea Grant during its first 14 years yielded $227 million in economic benefits each year. Congress was ultimately swayed to protect it.

A similar political dance could happen this time. According to Wagner from Washington Sea Grant, every federal dollar spent returns about $8 in economic benefits. A NOAA analysis shows the program helped support $575 million in economic development and more than 20,000 jobs in 2015. “This is a small but mighty program,” Wagner says.

Knowing Sea Grant has survived a challenge before buoys hope that maybe the Trump administration won’t succeed in scrapping it. “It makes me less worried,” says Linda Duguay, a Sea Grant director at the University of Southern California. “But then, I thought the election was going to go in a different direction.”

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By Brian Palmer

3. Preparing for the flood without NOAA.

After proposing to cut the EPA's budget by 24 percent last week, Trump now reportedly plans to cut the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by 17 percent.

Perhaps even more than the EPA, NOAA poses the biggest challenge to Trump's habit of ignoring scientific evidence. The government's top climatologists work for NOAA, and the agency is the nation's greatest resource for sound scientific research on climate change and its effects. NOAA scientists have a tradition of independence and rigor—they are not to be tangled with, especially by a president whose own understanding of science seems shaky on a good day.

President George W. Bush learned this lesson. His credibility took a major hit in 2006 when government scientists like James Hansen accused him of censoring valid research for political reasons.

The biggest victim in Trump's NOAA budget cuts would be the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which operates the satellites, radars, buoys, stations, and gauges that indicate changes in the earth's climate. The program has collected 20 petabytes of data about the state of our planet, approximately the same amount of data in 133 billion digital photos. It is a treasure trove of priceless scientific information, and slashing it to bits would be crazy. If climate science is truly unsettled, as Trump claims, collecting data is the only way to settle it.

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see also nasa letter (bogus) and tag

targeted by lamar smith

see noaa 2 sullivan post 2/17

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sds climate conf cancelled but gore jimmy

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http://www.climatedepot.com/2017/02/12/christopher-booker-will-trump-gop-bring-an-end-to-the-costliest-scare-story-ever-known/

entine morano telegraph uk

Booker weighs in on the latest NOAA scandal:

Two years ago last week, I wrote a column given the provocative heading “The fiddling of temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever”. It was the second of two articles which attracted a record 42,000 comments from all over the world, reporting on the discovery by expert bloggers in half a dozen countries – led in Britain by Paul Homewood on his site “Not a lot of people know that” – that something very odd appeared to have been done to the official land surface temperature records on which, more than anything else, the entire alarm over man-made global warming has rested.

These derive from the record known as the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), run by the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). By comparing archived data with that now being published, the bloggers claimed to have discovered that temperature records all over the world had, seemingly, been systematically “adjusted” to show older temperatures lower than those originally measured and more recent temperatures higher than those recorded: thus conveying the notion that the world is warming significantly more than the actual data justified.

This scandal has now  surfaced again with accusations made by Dr John Bates, a recently retired senior scientist at the NOAA, against his former boss , Tom Karl. Bates alleges that an NOAA paper written before the historic climate conference in Paris in 2015 breached its own rules and was based on misleading and unverified data. That, to many, looks like the paper was designed to stoke up hysteria over global warming in the run-up to the conference.

A Greenpeace protest hot air balloon is launched near the Eiffel Tower in Paris

2015 saw a major climate conference in Paris Credit: Benoit Tessier/Reuters

The warmist lobby had no greater concern at that time than the so-called “pause”: the evidence that, for nearly 20 years, the trend in global temperatures had been failing to rise as all the official computer models had predicted it should.

Karl’s paper won worldwide publicity by purporting to show that there had, in fact, been no “pause”, and that both land and sea temperatures had continued to rise more than was previously accepted.

What Dr Bates now claims is that, in defiance of rules he himself drew up and over his (Bates’s) private objections, Karl’s paper had again been based on “adjustments” that the scientific evidence didn’t justify.

The paper, widely quoted by President Barack Obama and others, played a key part in persuading the Paris conference to sign a “historic” (but non-binding) agreement to take all sorts of hugely costly measures to prevent global temperatures rising by “more than two degrees”.

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http://www.factcheck.org/2017/02/no-data-manipulation-at-noaa/

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https://science.house.gov/news/press-releases/former-noaa-scientist-confirms-colleagues-manipulated-climate-records

off BS

Former NOAA Scientist Confirms Colleagues Manipulated Climate Records

Feb 5, 2017  Press Release

WASHINGTON – U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology members today responded to reports about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) 2015 climate change study (“the Karl study”). According to Dr. John Bates, the recently retired principal scientist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, the Karl study was used “to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.”

Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas): “I thank Dr. John Bates for courageously stepping forward to tell the truth about NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.  In the summer of 2015, whistleblowers alerted the Committee that the Karl study was rushed to publication before underlying data issues were resolved to help influence public debate about the so-called Clean Power Plan and upcoming Paris climate conference.  Since then, the Committee has attempted to obtain information that would shed further light on these allegations, but was obstructed at every turn by the previous administration’s officials.  I repeatedly asked, ‘What does NOAA have to hide?’

“Now that Dr. Bates has confirmed that there were heated disagreements within NOAA about the quality and transparency of the data before publication, we know why NOAA fought transparency and oversight at every turn.  Dr. Bates’ revelations and NOAA’s obstruction certainly lend credence to what I’ve expected all along – that the Karl study used flawed data, was rushed to publication in an effort to support the president’s climate change agenda, and ignored NOAA’s own standards for scientific study.  The Committee thanks Dr. Bates, a Department of Commerce Gold Medal winner for creating and implementing a standard to produce and preserve climate data, for exposing the previous administration’s efforts to push their costly climate agenda at the expense of scientific integrity.”

Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Darin LaHood (R-Ill.): “I applaud Dr. Bates’s efforts in uncovering the truth of this data manipulation, and I commend Chairman Smith and the Science Committee for conducting rigorous oversight on behalf of the American people.  Transparent and faithful execution of the scientific process, especially where taxpayer dollars are involved, is crucial to ensure that our policies are based on sound science and not on politically predetermined outcomes.”

Environment Subcommittee Chairman Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.): “I commend Dr. Bates for bringing to light the corrupt practices used by his former colleagues and hope this serves as a deterrence to anyone thinking of manipulating science to serve their own political agenda.  I applaud Chairman Smith and the Science Committee's efforts to provide the necessary oversight to ensure the American people have the best information possible.”

Background

In the summer of 2015, NOAA scientists published the Karl study, which retroactively altered historical climate change data and resulted in the elimination of a well-known climate phenomenon known as the “climate change hiatus.”  The hiatus was a period between 1998 and 2013 during which the rate of global temperature growth slowed.  This fact has always been a thorn in the side of climate change alarmists, as it became difficult to disprove the slowdown in warming.

The Karl study refuted the hiatus and rewrote climate change history to claim that warming had in fact been occurring.  The committee heard from scientists who raised concerns about the study’s methodologies, readiness, and politicization.  In response, the committee conducted oversight and sent NOAA inquiries to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Karl study.

Over the course of the committee’s oversight, NOAA refused to comply with the inquiries, baselessly arguing that Congress is not authorized to request communications from federal scientists.  This culminated in the issuance of a congressional subpoena, with which NOAA also failed to comply.  During the course of the investigation, the committee heard from whistleblowers who confirmed that, among other flaws in the study, it was rushed for publication to support President Obama’s climate change agenda.

For a complete timeline of the Science Committee’s oversight of NOAA’s 2015 climate change study, click here.

115th Congress

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A senior adviser to President-elect Donald Trump is urging the new administration to shut down NASA’s world-leading climate science work. The idea, apparently, is that turning away from facts about climate change will make it go away.

That would not only be devastating for global efforts to keep our climate safe, but a severe problem for anyone who depends on cutting-edge weather prediction – including farmers, states vulnerable to destructive storms, businesses and our economy as a whole.

The problem is that climate and weather research comprises a “seamless suite” of services. Advancements in climate modeling support critical weather prediction modeling.

Since weather prediction and short-term climate prediction (think El Niño, drought and so on) are important to all Americans, cuts to climate research at NASA would have large economic consequences and negative impacts on efforts to protect American lives and property.

This work is particularly important in dealing with weather disasters occurring across the southern tier of the United Sates. And as the climate continues to change, weather prediction will become ever more important for preparedness and planning.

Cuts to climate research at NASA would have large economic consequences and negative impacts on efforts to protect American lives and property.

The bigger picture is that climate change is on a path to cause trillions in damage to our economy, according to Citibank estimates. That’s why so many leading businesses want to keep us on track to cut carbon pollution. If we don’t we will be leaving a terrible burden for our children.

Science makes America great

America was born in an age of reason. Our founders respected science.

Science made America what it is – it helped us win World War II, the space race, the Cold War and made us the preeminent global power.

Weather and climate prediction have provided incalculable value to our economy and saved untold numbers of lives.

Slashing vital research on climate – as suggested by Bob Walker, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who now serves on Trump’s NASA transition team – will hurt everyone, no matter who they voted for.

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Sea Level Rise Estimate Grows Alarmingly Higher in Latest Federal Report

NOAA's latest report arrives, predicting worst-case scenario of 8 feet of rise by century's end, just as Donald Trump takes office with pro-fossil fuel policies.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24012017/sea-level-rise-global-warming-federal-report-donald-trump

New federal estimates say global sea levels could rise faster than previously thought, and the rise may be even worse in many coastal regions of the United States.

A new report, written by scientists with several federal agencies and universities, says that under a worst-case scenario, climate change couldraise the oceans an average of more than 8 feet by 2100, about 20 inches more than a previous federal estimate published in 2012. The best case now projected would be an average of about a foot.

The report was delivered just as President Donald Trump took office, immediately working to undo President Barack Obama's climate policies. On his inauguration day, pages mentioning climate change on whitehouse.gov were removed. Trump has promised policies to increase fossil fuel development in the U.S., and to undo Obama's major emissions-cutting initiative, the Clean Power Plan.

Sea level rise will likely be worse in some regions of the U.S. because of ocean currents, wind patterns and settling sediments. The authors examined six scenarios with a range of probabilities in an effort to help state and local governments plan for sea level rise. Under all of them, theNortheast should expect higher waters than much of the rest of the globe. The Pacific Northwest and Alaska would likely experience lower-than-average increases under the best-case scenarios.

"The ocean's not flat," said William V. Sweet, one of the authors and a scientist at NOAA. "It's not going to rise like water in a bathtub."

The six scenarios are based on United Nations models of future greenhouse gas emissions, depending on whether countries rapidly slash pollution or continue burning fossil fuels as usual. The authors determined that the worst-case rise of more than 8 feet has only a 0.1 percent chance of occurring by 2100, even under a business-as-usual emissions scenario, but a rise of more than 1.5 feet is near certain with high emissions.

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Unrelenting warmth during what should be the iciest time of year sent global sea ice extent to a record low last month, the National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Friday, with both polar ice caps at a record-low extent every single day of the month.

Compared to the average from 1981 to 2010, the area of ice missing in the Arctic was about the size of Texas and Arizona combined; in the Antarctic, it was bigger than Alaska, according to the NSIDC.

Temperatures in the Arctic were about 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average throughout November and December, with peak readings soaring to 50 degrees above the long-term average around Christmas, when the North Pole warmed above freezing, a mark rarely seen outside of summer.

"Some of the crazy weather patterns we've seen this winter could be, in part, due to the loss of sea ice," said NSIDC director Mark Serreze. "We've had very unusual weather patterns pumping warmth up into the Arctic...the changes are happening so fast that we can't keep up with them."

Scientists measuring sea ice in a three-year run of record global heat feel the urgency of the data they are capturing, while the political climate around them changes even faster.

The NSIDC is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is administered by the Department of Commerce.

With many in President-elect Donald Trump's proposed cabinet on record either denying that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases or questioning the need for urgent action, many fear that future funding for government climate science could be at risk.

After Trump's election, a senior NASA official expressed concern in an internal email that the Earth Sciences division would have its funding cut, and Trump adviser Bob Walker, a former House Science Committee chair, has said he believed NASA should end its climate monitoring programs, which he calls "politically correct environmental monitoring." Christopher Shank, the leader of Trump's NASA transition team, is policy director for the House Science Committee, which has doggedly questioned the climate work of NOAA and NASA scientists.

Those sentiments have led some scientists reportedly to begin to duplicate climate data to protect it from potential Trump administration tampering.

NASA ice scientist Walt Meier said he hopes it does not come to a showdown with Trump policymakers. "Our aim is to get the best data, the best models, the best understanding of the science to policy makers and the public," Meier said. "We hope that the policymakers use that wisely. My job is to provide the information to make the decisions."

Monitoring Arctic sea ice conditions is important, he said, because of implications for shipping, the Arctic environment and energy development.

Serreze said, "We at the NSIDC view our role as the honest purveyors of the best scientific information. We've tried to avoid getting into advocacy because we would lose respect. We're in a situation now where the data speak for themselves. People who deny that, who say that humans don't have anything to do with it, have their head in the sand. Deny it at your peril.

"You can't hide or suppress data. We're in the information age."

The information these days carries sobering implications about the vicious cycle of climate change, which has been amplified in the Arctic as it warms at double the rate of the global average.

"Our attention is starting to shift to what we are seeing in the autumn and winter. Things are creeping into the cold season," he said. "September has been viewed as month that tells the most—after the melt season, what have you got left? Now, we're realizing we have to look at a lot more than what's been going on in winter."

The slow formation of sea ice this winter is a seasonal climate feedback loop. Less ice on the ocean means the water absorbs more heat in late summer, which slows the freeze-up in autumn and early winter.

"You're at a situation where, in the past, when everything was ice covered, heat from the ocean can't get to the atmosphere, but when when the ocean is exposed, it can't be colder than 32 degrees Fahrenheit," said Meier. "But the most remarkable thing about this year and last year is not just the internal Arctic warming from the sea, but the heat coming up from south."

According to Serreze and Meier, there's increasing evidence that the continuing loss of sea ice is, at least in part, causing the weather patterns that funnel even more warm air toward the Arctic by shifting the path of the jet stream.

"It's not only the extent. The thickness and volume are even more concerning," said Lars Kaleschke, an oceanographer with the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.

Recent satellite data show that much of the thicker multi-year ice has vanished from the Arctic. The remaining ice is so thin that it's susceptible to melting and breaks up faster during stormy weather, according to Mats Granskog, a research scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute who specializes in tracking the age of Arctic ice.

Granskog and other scientists shared observations from recent field research at the recent conference of the American Geophysical Union. As the ice breaks up, water as warm as 40 degrees Fahrenheit can surge up thousands of feet from deep in the ocean, melting even more ice, said Amelie Meyer, an oceanographer at the Norwegian Polar Institute. Within 48 hours, the surface temperature can climb more than 70 degrees Fahrenheit, to above freezing, which increases the moisture in the air tenfold, Meyer said. That moisture and warmth fuel more storms, which intensifies the cycle, they said.

The changes in Antarctic ice extent the past few months have been equally dramatic, but the causes are not well understood. By August of 2016, the belt of ice around Antarctica was sharply below average.

The exact cause of the precipitous decline remains elusive, scientists said, but they detected significant changes in wind patterns in August, September and November that are most likely linked with global warming, according to Serreze.

The job of monitoring complex systems like the Arctic and Antarctic and studying climate change impacts requires not just well-funded U.S. research, but also global collaboration. For example, some European satellite missions have specialized in reading sea ice thickness and volume. Together with data from NASA and NOAA, scientists are able to most accurately paint a picture of global climate change.

Mark Drinkwater, head of the European Space Agency's Earth Observation Program science division, said in an email significant policy changes under Trump "could indeed have a very important impact on what is today an extremely positive reciprocal working relationship. Shifts in U.S. policy could easily impact this relationship."

According to Drinkwater, European Earth observation programs are dependent on NASA and NOAA for certain critical data, and vice-versa.

"Policy (be it mitigation, adaptation, technology infusion) is completely reliant on knowledge...required to avoid the 'blind spot,' which could otherwise slap humankind in the face."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

ARCTIC   CLIMATE SCIENCE

CLIMATE CHANGE   NOAA

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http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-worse-anti-science-nonsense-of-2016/

Interfering with government scientists?

Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but already there are troubling signs that his administration may attempt to interfere with the work of government scientists and experts.

Energy Department questionnaire. The president-elect’s transition team submitted a questionnaire to the Department of Energy asking for a list of employees and contractors who had worked on the Obama administration’s efforts to calculate the “social cost of carbon” — that is, the dollar value of the health and environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. The transition team also asked for a list of staffers who attended U.N. climate negotiations. As the Washington Post explained, the questionnaire “has raised concern that the Trump transition team is trying to figure out how to target the people, including civil servants, who have helped implement policies under Obama.” (The department didn’t comply with the request, and the Trump team ultimately disavowed the questionnaire after facing criticism.)

Earth science at NASA. One of Trump’s space advisers, Bob Walker, has repeatedly floated the idea that the administration should begin to remove Earth science from NASA’s portfolio. NASA’s Earth science program is well known for producing some of the world’s most important climate change research, and Walker’s proposal has sparked an outcry among many in the scientific community. (Walker has suggested shifting the work to NOAA, but the incoming administration hasn’t proposed giving NOAA additional funding, and Walker’s critics have called the plan unworkable.) Trump hasn’t actually adopted Walker’s idea, and scientists such as David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist who receives NASA funding, are optimistic that he won’t. But if Trump does attempt to gut NASA’s research efforts, the backlash could be intense. “We’re not going to stand for that,” said Grinspoon on our Inquiring Minds podcast. “We’re going to keep doing Earth science and make the case for it. We’ll get scientists to march on Washington if we have to. There’s going to be a lot of resistance.”

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guard uk no link ref

Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’

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