Excellent article. Note the important distinction between frequency and 
intensity of hurricanes.
Tom

Quote:
NOAA [National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration], which once 
exemplified the constructive relationship between science and government, has become an 
instrument of what author Chris Mooney calls "the Republican war on
science." And, in this war, the public is the real casualty.
==========================================
Subj:   [CONS-SPST-GLOBALWARM-CHAIRS] The New Republic: NOAA official denials 
of global warming-hurricane connection were orchestrated    
Date:   2/10/2006 8:19:00 PM Central Standard Time  
From:    [log in to unmask] (Steve Bloom)
Sender:    [log in to unmask] (Chp & Grp Global 
Warming Energy Chairs)
Reply-to: <A HREF="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]</A> (Chp & Grp Global 
Warming Energy Chairs)
To:    [log in to unmask]
    
    


THE GOVERNMENT'S JUNK SCIENCE.
NOAA's Flood
by John B. Judis
Post date 02.09.06 | Issue date 02.20.06


On November 29, top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 
Administration
(NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service, held a press conference 
in
Washington, D.C., to sum up this year's disastrous hurricane season. The 
first question
from a reporter was one the press had been asking since Hurricane Katrina 
reached land
three months before: "I was wondering if one of you can talk about what 
extent, if any,
global warming may have played in the storms this year?" Noaa's chief 
hurricane forecast
scientist, Gerry Bell, stepped forward to answer. Bell denied that 
"greenhouse warming"
had any effect on the hurricanes. The hurricanes, he insisted, were merely 
part of "the
20- to 30-year cycles that we've seen since 1950."

Aren't there recent reports, the reporter then asked, that "global warming 
may have been
responsible for the intensity of the storms"? No, Bell said, the storms' 
intensity was
"part of the multi-decadal signal that we see. It's not related to greenhouse 
warming."
According to Bell, there was simply no conceivable connection between global 
warming and
hurricanes. And Bell's denial of a link echoed the statements of other top 
noaa
administrators and those posted on the organization's website. These 
statements by noaa
officials were widely cited in columns and editorials debunking claims of a 
link between
global warming and hurricanes.

There's only one problem: Many respected climate scientists, including some 
who work for
noaa, believe the organization's official line on the link between global 
warming and
hurricanes is wrong. What's more, there is reason to believe that noaa knows 
as much. In
the broader scientific community, there is grumbling that noaa's top 
officials have
suppressed dissenting views on this subject--contributing to the Bush 
administration's
attempt to downplay the danger of climate change. Says Don Kennedy, the 
editor-in-chief of
Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of 
Science, "There
are a lot of scientists there who know it is nonsense, what they are putting 
up on their
website, but they are being discouraged from talking to the press about it."

NOAA's official position reflects what used to be the conventional wisdom on 
the
relationship between global warming and hurricanes. Until recently, most 
empirical climate
studies had focused on the frequency of hurricanes; and most researchers 
concluded that
there wasn't a link to global warming--the frequency was connected to 
cyclical trends.
But, in the last year, two important studies have suggested that there is an 
observable
link between global warming and the growing intensity of hurricanes. In 
August, Kerry
Emanuel of MIT, one of the nation's most respected climate scientists, 
published a study
in Nature concluding that global warming may lead "to an upward trend in 
tropical cyclone
destructive potential."

Emanuel was not arguing that global warming caused any particular hurricane, 
including
Katrina. "It's statistically impossible to say this, just as it is impossible 
to say that
a very warm day is a result of global warming," he explains. "All you can say 
is that the
odds of having a day like that increase when you have global warming." In 
other words,
global warming didn't necessarily cause Katrina, but it may be increasing the 
odds that
hurricanes like Katrina will occur.

In September, Peter Webster, H.-R. Chang, and Judith Curry of Georgia Tech 
and G.J.
Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (ncar) published a 
study in
Science that bolstered Emanuel's conclusions. They found "a thirty-year trend 
toward more
frequent and intense hurricanes," which coincided with global warming. While 
they were
careful not to draw final conclusions from the limited period they studied, 
what they
found, the researchers wrote, "is not inconsistent with recent climate model 
simulations
that a doubling of CO2 may increase the frequency of the most intense 
cyclones." One of
the simulations the researchers cited was done by a noaa scientist. Thomas R. 
Knutson of
noaa's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton and Robert E. 
Tuleya of Old
Dominion University had shown that "if the frequency of tropical cyclones 
remains the same
over the coming century, a greenhouse gas-induced warming may lead to a 
gradually
increasing risk in the occurrence of highly destructive category-5 storms."

These findings have sparked an intense debate among climate scientists. In 
response to
criticism, Emanuel has modified part of his theory without discarding the 
whole. According
to Kennedy, forthcoming papers by Emanuel and by Kevin Trenberth of ncar 
could strengthen
the case for a link between hurricanes and global warming. In the meantime, 
however, noaa,
which has never before taken an official position on such a raging scientific 
controversy,
is making pronouncements suggesting that there is no debate at all.

In making these statements, noaa officials have sometimes included carefully 
crafted
caveats designed to deflect criticism from scientists who know about the 
controversy. But,
because they don't acknowledge the debate explicitly, the general public is 
likely to miss
the caveats' significance. Appearing before a subcommittee of the Senate 
Commerce
Committee on September 20, for instance, Max Mayfield, the director of noaa's 
National
Hurricane Center, said, "The increased activity since 1995 is due to natural 
fluctuations
and cycles of hurricane activity, driven by the Atlantic Ocean itself along 
with the
atmosphere above it and not enhanced substantially by global warming." Noaa 
officials also
resort to clever ambiguities that elude the public. They deny, for instance, 
any link
between global warming and hurricane "activity"--a term that glosses over the 
distinction
between frequency and intensity. The November issue of noaa's online magazine 
declares
that "noaa attributes recent increase in hurricane activity to naturally 
occurring
multi-decadal climate variability" (italics added).

In settings where scientists are not likely to be listening, noaa officials 
have even
dropped the hedged and ambiguous language. On August 30, Conrad Lautenbacher, 
the head of
noaa, said in Weldon Spring, Missouri, "We have no direct link between the 
number of
storms and intensity versus global temperature rise." The next month, when 
CBS's "Face the
Nation" host Bob Schieffer asked Mayfield whether the hurricanes had 
"something to do with
global warming," he replied unequivocally, "Bob, hurricanes, and especially 
major
hurricanes, are cyclical." And, at the noaa press conference, Bell said 
simply of
hurricane intensity: "It's not related to greenhouse warming."

As expected, Rush Limbaugh, Rich Lowry of National Review, The Washington 
Times, and other
conservative voices have cited noaa to attack what Limbaugh has called "the 
global warming
crowd." But noaa's and Mayfield's statements have also influenced mainstream 
commentators.
Citing Mayfield, USA Today editorialized against "global warming activists" 
who were
turning the "storms into spin." CNN correspondent Ann O'Neill counseled 
against
attributing hurricanes becoming "bigger and meaner" to global warming. "Don't 
rush to
blame it on global warming, experts warn," she wrote. And two of the experts 
she quoted
were Mayfield and Chris Landsea, Mayfield's colleague at the National 
Hurricane Center.
Citing Mayfield, a Chicago Tribune editorial issued a similar admonition 
against linking
hurricanes with global warming.

According to The New York Times, officials at the National Aeronautic and 
Space
Administration (nasa) have attempted to discourage its chief climate 
scientist, James
Hansen, from speaking out on global warming. The same thing may be happening 
to scientists
at noaa. Francesca Grifo, the head of the Scientific Integrity Program at the 
Union of
Concerned Scientists, says a noaa scientist complained last year of "being 
what we now
call Hansenized." Emanuel, who regularly talks with noaa scientists, says, 
"Scientists who
don't toe the party line are being intimidated from talking to the press. I 
think it is a
very sad situation. I know quite a few people who are frightened, but they 
beg me not to
use their name."

The main instrument of suppression seems to be noaa's policy on contact with 
the press.
Since June 2004, noaa, which is part of the Department of Commerce, has had a 
policy that
its employees have to notify a public affairs officer if a member of the 
press contacts
them for an interview. But the policy was often ignored. Then, on September 
29, in the
midst of growing public debate over hurricanes and global warming, public 
affairs official
Jim Teet issued a memo requiring that "any request for an interview with a 
national media
outlet/reporter must now receive prior approval by DOC [Department of 
Commerce]."

Noaa Public Affairs Director Jordan St. John insists that Teet's memo merely 
restated the
existing policy, but, by requiring approval and not merely notification, 
Teet's
order--first publicized by reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of "The Raw 
Story"--erected an
entirely new hurdle in the face of noaa scientists who want to talk to the 
press. Noaa
employees, speaking on background, described the policy to me as "strange" and
"unfortunate."

Georgia Tech's Curry, who also serves as a noaa adviser on its Climate 
Working Group,
thinks that what is happening at the organization is an "absolute disgrace." 
Curry knows
of noaa scientists who disagree with noaa's position on hurricanes and global 
warming but
are being told not to talk to the press. "They are being muzzled," she says. 
Curry also
says that officials have been trying to prevent certain scientists at the 
National
Climactic Data Center from even working on the problem of hurricanes and 
global warming.
"You hear about Hansen, but nasa is not really that bad. Noaa is really, 
really bad," she
says.

Perhaps the most telling indictment of noaa comes from Jerry Mahlman. Mahlman 
joined noaa
in 1970, the year it was established, and served from 1984 to 2000 as the 
director of the
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Retired from noaa, he is now a senior 
research
associate at ncar in Boulder, Colorado. Mahlman, who has continued contact 
with noaa
scientists, says that dissenting scientists are being intimidated from 
talking to the
press and that their papers are being withheld from publication. Mahlman 
tells me, "I know
a lot of people who would love to talk to you, but they don't dare. They are 
worried about
getting fired."

According to Mahlman, the architect of noaa's policy on global warming and 
hurricanes is
its director, Lautenbacher, not underlings like Mayfield and Bell. 
Lautenbacher, a former
naval officer with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics whom Bush nominated to head 
noaa in
September 2001, has been an administration point man on global warming at 
international
conferences, where he justifies the administration's rejection of the Kyoto 
treaty. At a
U.N. climate conference in Milan in December 2003, Lautenbacher declared, "I 
do believe we
need more scientific info before we commit to a process like Kyoto."

Lautenbacher's predecessors regularly voiced their opinions on scientific 
subjects, but
they usually tried to steer clear of politics, and they didn't pretend to be 
presenting an
official position on a scientific controversy. But, under Lautenbacher, noaa 
has been
plunged into Bush administration politics. With the issue of hurricanes and 
global
warming, the organization has entered the even murkier realm of scientific 
censorship.
Noaa, which once exemplified the constructive relationship between science 
and government,
has become an instrument of what author Chris Mooney calls "the Republican 
war on
science." And, in this war, the public is the real casualty.

(John B. Judis is a senior editor at TNR and a visiting scholar at the 
Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace.)

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Subject: [CONS-SPST-GLOBALWARM-CHAIRS] The New Republic: NOAA official 
denials of global warming-hurricane connection were orchestrated
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