From the White House, courtesy of John Podesta and John P. Holdren, comes this announcement of a new initiative to provide repackaged NOAA/NCDC data in a way that supposedly helps “state and local leaders on the front lines of climate change”. It comes with an emphasis on the supposed climate link to extreme weather events, that even the IPCC backpedaled on and Nature said in an editorial aren’t real enough to endorse because it is a dead issue.
The initiative was unveiled on Wednesday and claims to be aimed at giving communities data to prepare for the effects of climate change, saying “it is impossible for them to ignore the consequences”. And, what if they do? Will these communities be dubbed “denier communities” and perhaps sealed off from the rest of the world to prevent their thinking from leaking out to infect other communities?
![under-the-dome21[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/under-the-dome211.jpg?quality=83)
So, with that in mind, here is the press release from the White House:
Climate Data Initiative Launches with Strong Public and Private Sector Commitments
Across the country, state and local leaders are on the front lines of climate change—and it is impossible for them to ignore the consequences. In 2012 alone, extreme weather events caused more than $110 billion in damages and claimed more than 300 lives.
While no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, we know that our changing climate is making many kinds of extreme events more frequent and more severe. Rising seas threaten our coastlines. Dry regions are at higher risk of destructive wildfires. Heat waves impact health and agriculture. Heavier downpours can lead to damaging floods.
Even as we work to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and expand renewable energy generation, we need to take steps to make our communities more resilient to the climate-change impacts we can’t avoid—some of which are already well underway.
That’s why today, delivering on a commitment in the President’s Climate Action Plan, we are launching the Climate Data Initiative, an ambitious new effort bringing together extensive open government data and design competitions with commitments from the private and philanthropic sectors to develop data-driven planning and resilience tools for local communities. This effort will help give communities across America the information and tools they need to plan for current and future climate impacts.
The Climate Data Initiative builds on the success of the Obama Administration’s ongoing efforts to unleash the power of open government data. Since data.gov, the central site to find U.S. government data resources, launched in 2009, the Federal government has released troves of valuable data that were previously hard to access in areas such as health, energy, education, public safety, and global development. Today these data are being used by entrepreneurs, researchers, tech innovators, and others to create countless new applications, tools, services, and businesses.
Data from NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Defense, and other Federal agencies will be featured on climate.data.gov, a new section within data.gov that opens for business today. The first batch of climate data being made available will focus on coastal flooding and sea level rise. NOAA and NASA will also be announcing an innovation challenge calling on researchers and developers to create data-driven simulations to help plan for the future and to educate the public about the vulnerability of their own communities to sea level rise and flood events.
These and other Federal efforts will be amplified by a number of ambitious private commitments. For example, Esri, the company that produces the ArcGIS software used by thousands of city and regional planning experts, will be partnering with 12 cities across the country to create free and open “maps and apps” to help state and local governments plan for climate change impacts. Google will donate one petabyte—that’s 1,000 terabytes—of cloud storage for climate data, as well as 50 million hours of high-performance computing with the Google Earth Engine platform. The company is challenging the global innovation community to build a high-resolution global terrain model to help communities build resilience to anticipated climate impacts in decades to come. And the World Bank will release a new field guide for the Open Data for Resilience Initiative, which is working in more than 20 countries to map millions of buildings and urban infrastructure.
Every citizen will be affected by climate change—and all of us must work together to make our communities stronger and more resilient to its impacts. By taking the enormous data sets regularly collected by NASA, NOAA, and other agencies and applying the ingenuity, creativity, and expertise of technologists and entrepreneurs, the Climate Data Initiative will help create easy-to-use tools for regional planners, farmers, hospitals, and businesses across the country—and empower America’s communities to prepare themselves for the future.
John Podesta is a Counselor to the President. John P. Holdren is Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Source: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/03/19/climate-data-initiative-launches-strong-public-and-private-sector-commitments
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To this WH initiative claiming a warmer climate is making weather more severe and that all we need is a Google Earth visualization to help state and local leaders see this, I say this graph is also “impossible to ignore”:
Dr. Roger A. Pielke Sr. says in a WUWT comment:
I recommend readers look at the minority AGU Statement I prepared and contrast that with the AAAS report’s statements in http://whatweknow.aaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AAAS-What-We-Know.pdf. My statement is
Pielke Sr., R.A. 2013: Humanity Has A Significant Effect on Climate – The AGU Community Has The Responsibility To Accurately Communicate The Current Understanding Of What is Certain And What Remains Uncertain [May 10 2013]. Minority Statement in response to AGU Position Statement on Climate Change entitled: “Human-induced Climate Change Requires Urgent Action” released on 8/5/13. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/rpt-851.pdf
The AAAS report is even worse than the AGU and AMS Statements (and I thought that would be hard to do). I know several of the authors of the AAAC report, and respect their science within their immediate area of expertise. However, the blatant advocacy and absurd statements such as
“The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science linking
smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases.”
show that this report is just political theater.
There are no health benefits from smoking, only health risks. CO2 is required for life on Earth including plant growth and function.
Added CO2 is a significant climate forcing (both radiatively and geochemically, the latter of which I feel is of more concern), but to directly contact to the health risks of tobacco demeans the scientific stature of this who make such wild claims.
Another example (and their are many in this report) is
“decades of human-generated greenhouse gases are now the major force driving the direction of climate change, currently overwhelming the effects of these other factors.”
is counter to established research which shows, for example, the first order importance of other human climate forcings; e.g. see
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union. http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/r-354.pdf
and
National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp. http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309095069/html/
They also ignore the recent recognition of the heightened importance of natural climate forcings and feedbacks.
This AAAS report is an embarrassment to the scientific community.
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If this whole affair was only about science, it would have been done a long time ago. This is about submitting people into slavery, restricting freedom.
Th time and effort this Adminsitration wastes on what is the equivalent of superstitious colap trap is an insult to the American people.
The opportunity costs of pushing garbage policies and faux initiatives like this is going to cause real issues to be neglected and hurt us.
Holdren’s behavior is difficult to distinguish from that of a con-artist.
He has been associated with life long failures, like Paul Ehrlich and is now seeking to impose this madness on us all.
That the President has chosen to waste more of his limited time on this says a lot about how out of touch he is with the real world.
That he tolerates proven failures advising him on cliamte expalins a lot why we are in trouble on real issues worldwide.
Is there room in the Dome for a family of four?
You’ve got to wonder how many rebranding excercises they have to go through to realise that CAGW scientivism is a product the public don’t want to buy? Hollywood has pushed the alarmism far further and with far more impressive graphics and they haven’t managed to recruit a CO2 reduction army. Do they really think the ‘cos the scientists say so’ is more persuasive? Lab coats might sell anti aging cream but only because people want to believe the claims.
Don’t they grow weary of failure?
How is climate change making weather more severe? Global surface temperatures are relatively flat.
Apparently, the heat has been going into the ocean depths. Can it spawn tornadoes and floods and droughts from down there?
Surface temperatures have leveled off. So what other aspect of climate change is causing more extreme weather?
Why mid-tropospheric temperatures in your model-observation graph instead of TLT or surface temps? Seems like the latter are more relevant to where we live, but perhaps don’t result in quite as wide a difference between models and observations.
This is all about propaganda.
I think all this really means is that we will now see a much more coordinated effort with a much higher level of centralized “message dicipline” imposed from on-high, emminating from the AGW libcult “saviors” who have been placed in positions of power within the federal government by this libcult administration. It really makes perfect sense from the libcult perspective to do this too, because it is a purely political effort aimed at enforcing a purely political, non-scientific doctrine.
One thing the libcult knows all to well: When science, logic and reason become impediments to their pseudo-religious objectives, shift the “debate” to brute force and use the power of government to step on the necks of the opposition.
The Open Data Initiative is such a high priority for the Obama Administration that it was his first Executive Order on his first day in office. It is premised on the idea that Big Data can now be used to plan the economy and that it will be used for that.
It also ties into the FuturICT global project I explained here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/science-fiction-made-real-were-we-ever-to-know-in-time/ . As the cited documents admit, these plans are not trying to model actual reality. Instead the existence of the model is to change reality by forcing changes in human behavior.
FuturICT also ties into the very same UN-affiliated entity, ITU, that is about to get jurisdiction over the Internet per last Friday’s White House news dump. You can bet Podesta and Holdren know all this. We need to as well.
The performance graph is a great rebuttal. As is the ACE and Tornadic Activity charts. We are entering the 3rd year of near record low activity in North America alone.
Holdren has pushed the extreme weather/climate change link from science and into fringe science:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/18/knappenberger-out-on-the-fringe-with-john-holdren/?page=all
Animal Farm from page 22 and on and on…..
Zeke,
The models don’t work very well at the surface either:
http://www.cato.org/blog/or-without-pause-climate-models-still-project-too-much-warming
-Chip
It seems to me from the statistics being bandid around, that “extreme weather events” are causing no where near the damage that implementation of the ACA is causing. I trust that the American people will see through this “extreme propaganda” & come to the conclusion that your President has lost his mind. It is now time for the VP to step up & have Obama sent to the looney bin. If Biden also proves to be insane who takes over? Is it Reid or Cantor? Sorry to be so rude about your esteemed leadership. I admit we have even more green insanity in the UK, burning your wood pellets to generate electricity to mention only one.
The White House seems to want to combat what the effect of a record-breaking cold and snowy winter has on the American public. It seems rather transparent to me. If Don Easterbrook is right, this is just the beginning of a downward spiral into a major cooling trend.
Kind of ironic they’re promoting data when their position is mostly opinion-based.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy was right about the wrong subject.
It isn’t the can of moose meat that should invoke “It could gag a maggot,” it’s this Global Warming thing.
Should the dome be over DC?
Didn’t see any Federal money appropriated or set aside to support this. So that’s all right then.
Zeke Hausfather says:
March 19, 2014 at 9:22 am
Climate models can not resolve surface temperatures accurately due to their extremely coarse mesh resolution. The best they can do is provide gross time-averaged estimates of regional anomalies.
Anthony says:
Not coordinated for Wednesday, per se. More like coordinated for 2014. Big Government, Bid Data, Big Media, and Big money Politics have a plan. These are among the opening actions. Big Data is coming out with its first piece later today. It is going to be a long year for Big Lies.
http://www.un.org/climatechange/blog/2013/12/11/big-idea-2014-the-year-for-climate-action/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reid-detchon/a-year-for-change-from-climate-talk-to-climate-action_b_4855820.html
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/01/23/davos-world-bank-president-carbon-pricing
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/19/obama-climate-change-tool-google/6568951/
http://tcktcktck.org/2014/03/senators-urge-climate-action/60890
http://www.sho.com/sho/years-of-living-dangerously/home
@TinyCO2
You asked if the government grows weary of failure, and if they can realize AGW is something the public won’t buy.
Have you heard of this thing called “Obamacare”?
Zeke Hausfather says:
March 19, 2014 at 9:22 am
You know full well why. Take your AGW agenda elsewhere unless you want to contribute some real, honest science. That’s if you can, of course.
Anthropogenic climate change science is like the science that linked peptic ulcers to stress.