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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From: Steve Bloom <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [CONS-SPST-GLOBALWARM-CHAIRS] The New Republic: NOAA official
denials of global warming-hurricane connection were orchestrated
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