Part I of this article appeared earlier.
Is This The Document?"
The journal Nature reported yesterday that a NOAA document was "quashed" by the Department of Commerce. However representatives from NOAA vehemantly denied Nature's account and no document was available to support one side or the other. Now "versions" of a document titled "NOAA Fact Sheet: Atlantic Hurricanes and Climate" have been "leaked" to safeties in the field. Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, generously tracked down and presented a stripped down version of the "fact sheet" in the form of plain text on his blog.
The Nature article said that the suppressed NOAA information was a "consensus statement. They draft they saw "stated that global warming may be contributing to hurricane intensity and that further research is needed to clarify the issue." The text of the "draft" posted on Pielke's site did say that, (basically) but it wasn't the focus of the text (if there was one). The posted text posed five "questions", let's say, with their "answers", I suppose. The drift of the whole thing can be summarized by a brief word count. Number of times the word "decadal" is used: 9. Number of times "anthropogenic" is used: 1. "Global warming": 2. For instance:
-
Q: "Has there been increased hurricane activity?
A:"Seasons since 1995 have been more active...strong decadal variations...earlier periods were as active."
-
Q: "How have ocean temperatures varied?
A: "[..] They have warmed...this warming is attributed to the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation..."
-
Q:"What factors influence seasonal to multi-decadal hurricane activity?"
A: "The tropical multi-decadal phenomenon, [..] El Nino/La Nina determine the multi-decadal extremes"
-
Q:"How long will the current active period last?"
A: "Scientists disagree...there is a limited understanding of natural decadal variability...of irregular temporal behavior...the previous active period lasted 25 years".
The "fact-sheet" is titled "Atlantic Hurricanes and Climate", but "climate" is only mentioned twice, under "Key Problems NOAA is working on". The agency is working on "Understanding...climate variability"...and decadal prediction, and decadal hurricane variability. The phase "climate change" doesn't appear in the document. NOAA acknowledges anthropogenic forcing only to say they are working on "[u]nderstanding whether or not and to what degree anthropogenic forcing is having an influence on hurricanes".
"Global warming" is mentioned, but the term is spliced somewhat unscrutably into the other 600 words in the text, to limited affect. For instance here's one sentence lodged into multi-decadal causation verbiage: "Because of global warming the active period could persist." Here is another sentence:
"Strong natural decadal variations, as well as changes in data quality, density, sources, and methodologies for estimating hurricane strengths, lie at the heart of arguments whether or not a global warming contribution to a trend in tropical cyclone intensities can be detected."
The Nature article refers to a "consensus", but the text we viewed hardly strikes us as a consensus, nor would we call it a "fact" sheet. But the text we viewed was stripped of references, charts and data, so its hard to discern what it might have been or is now. It's more like a "position" statement, but perhaps there's something actually more substantive and worth suppressing in the unstripped document.
This may be the mysterious document, but if it is NOAA, the Commerce Department and others would like the Natureit to fade away as "an interesting piece of fiction". But the media focus on the NOAA report is only part of the story.
Transparency in Government?
The appearance of the fact sheet can be interpreted to support NOAA's defense of their May actions. But the news of the Nature article was pre-released en masse largely by the Associated Press. The AP article drew attention to the suppression of the NOAA report, but not to Nature's whole story.
The second half of Nature's article looked at a separate issue involving more emails, this time between the Department of Commerce, NOAA, and CNBC television. This was reported fairly extensively on the internet, it was Salon's story. The emails (several available here on Senator Waxman's site) reveal maneuverings around potential NOAA representation on a CNBC show about hurricanes and climate change. Tom Knutson is a NOAA research meterologist who uses models to simulate storms under different environmental conditions. He is one of the researchers who has shown that hurricanes formed under higher CO2 conditions tend to be more intense with higher precipitation. The emails turned on the politics of his stance and whether he should represent NOAA or whether a different scientist with views that the favored multi-decadal variation influence of hurricanes should represent NOAA in the CNBC interview. In the end, NOAA declined the interview.
Nature's story is not solely about one NOAA document that can be dismissed, it looks at several incidences of apparent obfuscation of pertinent NOAA research by the Department of Commerce, and strongly reinforces the case that there is a pattern of suppression of scientific data key to understanding the threat of hurricanes. This fact is not lost on many scientists, journalists, civilians, businesses and politicians.
However, the contentious presentation of the issue has motivated some observers to dismiss the issue as an election year tiff, for instance the Lompoc Record tells us to relax because the election is almost over. (where is Lompoc?). The New York Times barely summoned the energy to write three and a half sentences about the issue before concluding wearily that "scientists do not agree".
This is unfortunate. Moreover, it's unclear why NOAA doesn't just release their version of the whole document (references, data, charts, color and all). Why hide documents? Why hide science? After all, NOAA's "climate goal is to: "Understand and describe climate variability and change to enhance society's ability to plan and respond".
