NOAA Arctic Report Card is Propaganda
For your end of the year pleasure. I sent an email to NOAA a few days back, calling their arctic report card video propaganda and I got an inquiry back from a Jana Goldman, asking why I thought so. My response is below, as is her email address if you'd like to comment also. You HAVE to watch the video I referenced. It's priceless. The link is the report card one just below.
Happy New Year, Marcia Turnquist
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Marcia Turnquist wrote:
Propaganda.
Sincerely,
Marcia Turnquist
Portland, Oregon
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jana Goldman [mailto:jana.goldman@noaa.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 4:18 AM
To: Marcia Turnquist
Subject: Re: arctic report card is...
Thank you for your message, Ms. Turnquist.
May I ask why you label it so?
sincerely,
jana goldman
Jana Goldman
Director
NOAA Communications & External Affairs@ NOAA Research
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Jana,
Where do I start? Just to make sure we're talking about the same video piece, here's a link to the one I watched: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/
The following statements in the video are either in dispute or, worse, blatant advocacy and fear mongering: *Changes in the arctic are starting to amplify each other. I seriously doubt
that. The evidence is weak.
*Warm temperatures continue. Yes, and they've been in the arctic before. Check records for the 1920's and 1930's.
*Loss of ice impacts sea level. Of course it does, but nothing dramatic is happening. No cities are drowning, Vanuatu is not under water. Al Gore still buys lovely beach houses.
*Polar bears are losing habitat. There's still plenty out there and their numbers are fine, even growing in some regions. Polar bears have lost habitat before, much more drastically, and they survive today.
*The shellfish pictures. I'll bet they had nothing to do with REAL ocean water. What did you do, stick them in acid to get those pictures? Absolutely ridiculous and you should find out and get rid of those pictures. The ocean remains alkaline last time I checked.
*The wind has shifted and now the warm is in the arctic and the cold is in the US and Europe. This is a blatant attempt to explain why "global warming" has called cooling and it only comes off as desperate. The likelihood that CO2 had anything to do with this is laughable.
*And finally, the last sentence, which is priceless: Taken together, these interconnected shifts are indicators of continuing arctic change relative to the previous decades at the end of the 20th century. First, what the bonsai does that MEAN? It says NOTHING! Second, the language shows another sneaky attempt at advocacy science and fear mongering. In other words, it's baloney.
And please don't tell me that all of this is backed by peer-reviewed science, because I know it's really pal-reviewed science among people of like minds getting paid for like results. Good luck with your PR job...You're on a sinking ship.
Sincerely, Marcia
P.S. Perhaps you'd enjoy reading from another perspective now and then. You could try one of the following: http://wattsupwiththat.com/
or http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/12/nasa-vs-ipcc-one-finds-global-warming-the -other-global-cooling-which-is-correct.html
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From: Gordon Fulks [mailto:gordonfulks@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 31, 2011 3:50 AM
Subject: RE: Arctic report card is...
Dear Marcia,
You are certainly correct that the video from NOAA Director of Communications & External Affairs Ms. Jana Goldman has all the earmarks of propaganda and no scientific content. This video is designed to reinforce the prejudices that earlier propaganda has introduced, without the caveats that are necessary in science. For instance, any legitimate scientist would have to indicate that many scientists do not agree with the standard rubbish about carbon dioxide. Please see the attached letter to President Obama from many senior scientists, probably none of whom are on the NOAA payroll and subject to NOAA restrictions. Did you know that scientists working for the National Weather Service are prohibited from disagreeing with NOAA's political stance in public?
But what do you expect from a US government agency headed by Professor Lubchenco who hails from our own Oregon State University? She has always advocated the heavy involvement of politics in science and is surprisingly ignorant of basic science. When at OSU she promoted the "Dead Zones" she found in the Pacific ocean off of Oregon as an indication of a dying planet. It is good that she left for service in the Obama Administration when she did, because her "science" was collapsing. The poor ocean conditions characteristic of the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) were changing back to their cold and highly productive phase. We have had great crab and salmon seasons of late. Should Lubchenco have known? Sure! The work of Mantua at UW and Russian scientists long ago established the reasons for the cyclic behavior of salmon runs. And the PDO is now known to be highly important to the earth's climate.
I remember a conversation that my father had about 50 years ago with the world-famous meteorologist Sverre Petterson at the University of Chicago. They were aware that the "Southern Oscillation" (El Ninos and La Ninas) was important to the world's weather and were hoping that the coming satellite era would allow them to better measure what we now call the PDO. My father was a high level administrator in NOAA's predecessor agency, ran the National Weather Service in the Midwest, and was a professional meteorologist.
But Public Relations people like Ms. Goldman who have no background in science can hardly be expected to do better than their boss who has credentials in biology but not in the physical sciences, let alone physics or meteorology. It is as H. L. Mencken said long ago: "A man cannot be expected to see the flaws in something if his income depends on his not understanding it." That is especially true of those without requisite credentials.
Why is it so important for someone who is purveying "science" to the public to have an adequate background in it? To answer that ask yourself why it is so important for someone who is purveying medical advice to have an adequate background in medicine. Working for an organization that has paid scientists on staff, all of whom are required to support the Anthropogenic Global Warming orthodoxy, is hardly a legitimate fallback.
The underlying issue that Director Goldman may recognize but is intentionally ignoring is the cyclical nature of weather, climate, the oceans, ice ages and so on. All of thesevery well known and very well documented phenomena are largely due to the fact that we live on a fluid planet with vast oceans and atmosphere that are never in complete equilibrium, a variable star that we call the Sun, and a planetary system that involves a big brute called Jupiter. These produce the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and Thermohaline Circulation, the Arctic Oscillation, the solar cycles and Galactic Cosmic Ray effect on clouds, and the Milankovitch Cycles. And that is just the beginning.
Ignoring all of these in favor of a little man-made carbon dioxide is just plain stupid. Running an effort that promotes the stupidity for political control, as in George Orwell's '1984,' is worse.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
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Dear Gordon,
This message you wrote below was especially well done. Keep it up.
Best wishes for a great new year!
Will
__________________________________________________
From: gordonfulks@hotmail.com
CC: marciaturnquist@comcast.net; jana.goldman@noaa.gov
Subject: RE: Arctic report card is...
Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:06:57 +0000
Dear Will,
I very much appreciate your support. Thank you!
Best wishes for the New Year.
Gordon
P.S. to others: Will Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University and was previously a high official in the US Department of Energy. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.