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We
indeed live in VERY dark times.
Elephant Tears Over Lost Climate Cherries — House Republicans’ Most Recent Witch Hunt Targets NOAA
4
November, 2015
We
live in dark times.
Dark
times of rampant, media-supported climate change doubt and denial
mongering. Dark times when global temperatures are hitting new
all-time record highs and extreme weather and climate change related
events are growing in scope, scale, and danger. Dark times when it is
becoming all-too-obvious that the fossil fuel companies of the world
are committed to continue burning their dangerous and heat amplifying
fuels regardless of the cost or pain or devastation inflicted upon
others. Inflicted on persons, communities and the very nations of
this world. Dark times when public officials level unfounded and
baseless attacks against the very science upon which we depend to
track the dangerous and growing crisis that is human-forced warming
of the globe.
* *
* *
(Most
recent NOAA global analysis graph showing that land and ocean
temperatures for September of 2015 were the hottest on record.
Republican climate change deniers in Congress have singled out NOAA
for a Witch Hunt, implying that NOAA scientists aren’t telling the
truth about warming. However, every temperature monitor around the
globe shows warming since the 1880s and every major monitor shows
that we are now experiencing the hottest period ever recorded. The
Republican assault on NOAA is therefore not just an attack against a
single agency. It’s an attack against the whole of climate science.
A false and unfounded attack made for the financial benefit of their
fossil fuel backers. Image source: NOAA
Global Analysis.)
Over
the past few weeks this continued commitment to inflicting climate
harm could not have been more plainly obvious than in the actions of
the Republican House Science Committee. The Committee, led by
Representative Lamar Smith, made baseless accusations that NOAA was
intentionally manipulating climate data. Lamar
Smith, in a recent statement seen here at Ars Technica blustered:
The American people have every right to be suspicious when NOAA alters data to get the politically correct results they want and then refuses to reveal how those decisions were made. NOAA needs to come clean about why they altered the data to get the results they needed to advance this administration’s extreme climate change agenda. The agency has yet to identify any legal basis for withholding these documents. The Committee intends to use all tools at its disposal to undertake its Constitutionally-mandated oversight responsibilities.
Representative
Smith and his committee, in a now typical tactic among those serving
fossil fuel corporate interests over the past two decades, has
basically decided to conduct a witch hunt.
He has no reason to suspect that NOAA is manipulating data. He has
merely accused NOAA of such a manipulation by claiming that NOAA
temperature data revisions are somehow a reason to suspect foul play.
This despite the fact that NOAA often revises data based on new
information as it becomes available. Despite
the fact that the data is publicly available and has been published
for peer review in the broader scientific community.
Data that if it had been inconsistent, manipulated, or baseless,
would have been revealed as such during the peer review process.
NOAA’s updates and data refinement are not fraud. They are simple
due dillegence.
Elephant
Tears over Lost Climate Cherries
But
despite the fact that both the methods and data are publicly
available, Representative Smith, his committee, and the members of
the fossil fuel media that support them continue to generate trumped
up accusations. This
is likely due to the fact that the NOAA revision came up warmer than
their previous data set by a margin of 0.06 degrees Celsius. A
margin that isn’t really too significant when it comes to overall
warming. But it is significant when you look at the most recent years
in the climate graph following the monster El Nino year of 1998. The
section that climate change deniers claim represents a pause in
global warming. With the revision, the new span of the graph really
doesn’t look like a pause anymore — much to the grief and outrage
of climate change deniers everywhere.
(Elephant
tears over lost cherries. NOAA’s most recent global temperature
trend analysis revision for the period of 1995 through 2014. Note
that in both versions the hottest years on record remain 1rst 2014,
2nd 2010, 3rd 2005, 4th 1998. Also note that neither graph really
supports the notion of a ‘pause’ in the long term warming trend.
Basically what climate change deniers have done is focus in on the
section of the graph that follows the record 1998 El Nino year
temperature spike. A period that was also followed by a cool phase in
natural variability called negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Image source: NOAA.)
As
a part of their attack on NOAA for the outrage of making their fake
pause look even less like a pause, the Republican Committee (which
may as well be named the Fossil Fuel Committee for the sake of
accuracy and consistency) continued to single out the US National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as the object of its attacks.
This action despite the fact that the whole of climate science
basically confirms NOAA’s data even as any rational or informed
analysis clearly finds no pause in the rate of atmospheric warming.
Attacking
Individual Scientists, Demanding All Internal Communications
Naming
individual scientists, particularly scientists who in the words of
Andrew Rosenburg had the “temerity to express … views that fossil
fuel companies should be held accountable for climate change,” the
committee had the audacity to falsely imply, yet again, that global
warming isn’t actually happening or that it stopped and that NOAA
is somehow at fault for reporting the fact that, yes, it is happening
and, no, it didn’t stop. It was, sadly, a scene that could have
come straight out of Animal Farm when the Republican House Committee
then made the ridiculous and unreasonable demand that NOAA surrender
“All Internal Communications” for its review.
(Japan’s
Meteorological Agency shows global annual temperature averages on a
consistent and continued rise since the dawn of widespread fossil
fuel burning in the late 19th Century. Japan’s data confirms that
of NOAA — the Earth is warming, we are hitting new all time record
high temperatures now. Image source: Japan’s
Meteorological Agency.)
Unfortunately,
the top scientists of the world have been subjected to this
ridiculous and baseless bullying time and time again. A prime example
was the manufactured Climategate scandal in which IPCC scientist
emails had sentences taken out of context by members of the
conservative media in an effort to claim that global warming science
was a fraud. The scientists, after years of fake controversy and
doubt-spreading, have since been vindicated time and time again. But
not after being subjected to the most heinous bullying to include
constant calls for internal records, court appearances, endless
attacks and demonizing by the corporate media, and even the receipt
of death threats to themselves and members of their families.
In
a recent article published by the Union of Concerned Scientists,
representative Ed Markie’s (D) outrage at the new order is plainly
noted.
He points out that all
of the scientific data is already public and
that requesting all internal documents amounted to basically bullying
and harassment:
However, obtaining all of the data and methods used in this study seemingly was not enough for the majority. You also demanded internal communications by NOAA scientists regarding their scientific research. NOAA, rightfully, has been reluctant to waste their time and resources, not to mention break confidence with their superb research scientists by responding to this demand…
I cannot help but note that your requests in this case echo the tactics of notable climate change skeptics, who frequently submit similar FOIA requests of climate scientists in both the federal government and in state universities. One of the most publicized occasions of harassment occurred when then-Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the American Tradition Institute (ATI) sought email communications of former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann.
Knowing
that the Republican House Committee was likely involved in another
fake fishing expedition, the NOAA head courageously refused to submit
to Republicans’ demands. And,
now, predictably, the fossil fuel media screams its fake outrage
about what NOAA supposedly has to hide.
According to a recent report in Media Matters:
Conservative media outlets are wrongly claiming that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is hiding data related to a recent study that challenged the so-called “pause” in global warming, and echoing Republican House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith’s baseless accusation that NOAA manipulated temperature records to show a warming trend. In reality, the NOAA study’s data is publicly available online, and NOAA routinely makes adjustments to historical temperature records that are peer-reviewed and necessary to account for changes to measuring instruments and other factors.
Every
Major Climate Monitor in the World Shows the Earth is Warming — So
Why Are Republicans Aiming Their Fake Outrage at NOAA?
It’s
not like the NOAA data is new or unique. Sure, NOAA shows the world
is warming. But so does everyone else in the global scientific
community. NASA GISS shows the world is warming. Japan’s
Meteorological Agency — warming. The Hadley Center — warming.
NCAR — warming. The UN’s IPCC — warming. Every sensory system,
every monitor that tracks global temperatures all shows the same —
warming.
(NASA’s
Land-Ocean Temperature Index showing that the world is entering its
hottest period ever recorded. Image source: NASA
GISS.)
And
all this warming backed up by reams and reams of scientific evidence.
The Himalayas have lost 20 percent of their ice as 90 percent of the
glaciers around the world are melting. Greenland is melting, and at
an ever more rapid rate. The North Atlantic Overturning Circulation
is weakening. The Oceans are becoming more stratified. The wetlands
of the world from the Arctic to the Equator are belching out more
methane (a feedback that comes about with warming). And everywhere
temperature records are falling, supplanted by new records that last
for a few years or maybe a decade before they fall again. Wildfires
are increasing in both intensity and frequency. The severity of
droughts and rainfall events are increasing. And we, as a global
community, are now treated to 100 or even 1,000 year floods,
hurricanes, droughts and fires on an annual basis.
Over
the past few weeks residents of Texas and South Carolina alike were
subject to freakish flood events of the kind that we’ve really
never seen before.
The
intensity of rainfall in South Carolina was so horrific that
residents now report that they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress
disorder.
Scientists warned us that rainfall events would tend to become more
intense as human-forced warming loaded up the atmosphere with more
and more moisture. Now, around the world, it’s happening.
And
last of all — sea levels are rising. Rising more rapidly than at
any time in the Holocene. Rising because they are warming up and
because the world’s glaciers are melting.
(For
most of the Holocene, global seas were remarkably stable — neither
rising or falling at a significant rate. By the late 19th Century,
seas had begun to slowly rise. As the Earth warmed and oceans sucked
up more heat, thermal expansion combined with glacial melt to cause
the seas to rise at an ever-more-rapid rate. As the world’s oceans
trap more than 90 percent of the excess heat re-radiated by
greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, rates of sea level rise are a
good confirmation that global temperatures are also rising. Image
source: Dr.
James Hansen.)
This
mountain of scientific proof that global warming is indeed real,
worsening, and ongoing is probably greater than any other proof for
any other science in existence. And yet the Republican House
Committee has the temerity to single out NOAA as some kind of
sacrificial offering to their demonic fossil fuel masters. And to
imply what is basically the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on the
American public — that climate change somehow isn’t real and that
NOAA, somehow, is hiding something in its email that proves that.
What
a ridiculous pile of festering nonsense!
Republicans
Fighting Against the Public Welfare
The
real reason Republicans are conducting a witch hunt against the
faithful public servants at NOAA is due to the fact that the
corporations who have supported their election campaigns simply
cannot continue to exist as they are now in a world that responds to
climate change. They would be forced to switch to new energy sources
or to learn how to effectively capture the carbon emitted by their
operations. Doing this would cost them money and put them in a
position where they no longer dominate markets. Where consumers start
to have more and more choice regarding what forms of energy they use.
Having
enjoyed market dominance for more than a Century, these entities are
not at all enamored with the prospect of having to compete or to
allow energy customers a broader range of choices or freedoms. They
have therefore made the cynical and ridiculously amoral decision to
attempt to deceive the public. To generate doubt about the veracity
of climate science reports. And to use this doubt to block government
policies that address the issue of human-forced climate change.
Since
a failure by government to enact effective climate policies will
result in a growing risk of inflicting damage to an ever larger group
of the US and global populace, those companies, media figures, and
politicians involved in this effort are complicit in what amounts to
a vast campaign to inflict harm on individuals, communities, and
nations. It does not matter if their original intent is simply to
preserve the profits of powerful fossil fuel corporations, the net
result is the same — the inflicting of harm on the public.
House
Republicans and the fossil fuel companies they serve are therefore
complicit in a heinous act. And their actions over the past month in
their leveling of trumped up charges against NOAA, is a stark proof
for what they’re doing — committing themselves to inflicting
climate atrocities upon the public for the benefit of fossil fuel
companies which they represent.
Links:
Please
support public, non-special interest based science like the fantastic
work provided by the now politically persecuted scientists at NOAA
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