NOAA, Obama Administration Launch Climate Propaganda Project

The Obama administration yesterday announced the launch of a new climate “information” project to be run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). While the stated purpose of the project is to provide user-friendly information to help governments and businesses adapt to climate change, the project is already revealing a focus on presenting alarmist propaganda.

Prominent global warming alarmist Tom Karl has been appointed the director of the new project. Karl’s penchant for twisting the facts to advance global warming alarmist was recently evident in a December 2009 interview with the Washington Post.

Karl told the Post, “Sea-level rise has been accelerating over the past two decades compared to the previous 100 years of observed data.” This is simply not true. Sea level rise has been remarkably consistent (and moderate) since 1920, with a notable reduction in pace since 2004.

Karl also told the Post the Climategate emails “do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus that the earth is warming and that human activity is largely responsible.” Such an assertion is ridiculous after the Climategate emails revealed how scientists at the forefront of global warming alarmism hid, destroyed, manipulated, and misrepresented data that contradicted their alarmist theories and additionally strong-armed peer-reviewed scientific journals to blackball scientists and scientific papers that presented evidence we are not facing a crisis.

Karl’s alarmism and penchant for misrepresenting data appears to be par for the course for the new government climate project. NOAA unveiled a new Web site to accompany the project, www.climate.gov, that is a virtual dumping ground for alarmist propaganda and scientific half-truths.

For example, Karl’s subordinate, Michon Scott, is the author of a lead story titled, “Short-term Cooling on a Warming Planet.” The article presents a litany of attacks explicitly directed at “skeptics” and skeptical arguments. When an article’s explicit purpose is to lay down the gauntlet against “skeptics,” its lack of balance and objectivity should be quite clear. Those who are not yet convinced should consider some examples.

In one section of the article, Scott asserts that Arctic sea ice is declining at an alarming rate. He presents a map of the Arctic showing an outline of average minimum Arctic sea ice extent during 1979 through 2000 juxtaposed on minimum Arctic sea ice extent in 2007. The 2007 sea ice extent is significantly less than the 1979-through-2000 average.

What Scott conveniently forgets to mention is that NASA has determined that variable local wind patterns, rather than global warming, caused the substantial retreat of Arctic sea ice in 2007 by blowing sea ice east toward Greenland where it could escape into the North Atlantic Ocean rather than blowing sea ice west where it remains trapped in northern latitudes by the Alaskan and Siberian land masses.

Still more deceitfully, Scott failed to note that minimum Arctic sea ice has rebounded by 25 percent since 2007, despite the unfavorable local wind patterns. Even the most novice student of Arctic sea ice knows of substantial recent growth in Arctic sea ice, yet Scott deliberately left it out in order to present an erroneous portrait of Arctic ice retreat.

In the same paragraph in which he paints a deceitful picture of Arctic sea ice, Scott writes, “In 2002, some 3,250 square kilometers of the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula shattered over a period of just five weeks.” True, but once again Scott leaves out important information that dispels the myth that global warming is to blame. Even the most novice student of Antarctic sea ice knows that Antarctic sea ice extent has been growing ever since NOAA satellite instruments began measuring it in 1979. Indeed, for much of the past few years (including 2007, the year of Scott’s Arctic sea ice deception) Antarctic sea ice has been at record extent. The Larsen B Ice Shelf collapse in 2002 is clearly an exception to the rule of expanding Antarctic sea ice, but Scott deliberately hides that fact.

Amazingly, in the course of presenting his nefarious Arctic and Antarctic sea ice deceptions, Scott has the moxie to scold “skeptics” for allegedly being deceitful. Scott favorably quotes an alarmist ally saying the following: “When you’re in a court of law, you have to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The people who have been focusing on the ‘cooling’ have not been telling the whole truth.”

Tom Karl, President Obama, and NOAA should heed the words of Michon Scott, with one important correction, “When you’re in a court of law, you have to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The people who have been focusing on the ‘warming’ have not been telling the whole truth.”