by Chris White
A former member of the Obama administration claims Washington D.C. often uses “misleading” news releases about climate data to influence public opinion.
Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin told The Wall Street Journal Monday that bureaucrats within former President Barack Obama’s administration spun scientific data to manipulate public opinion.
“What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data.
He pointed to a National Climate Assessment in 2014 showing hurricane activity has increased from 1980 as an illustration of how federal agencies fudged climate data. Koonin said the NCA’s assessment was technically incorrect.
“What they forgot to tell you, and you don’t know until you read all the way into the fine print is that it actually decreased in the decades before that,” he said. The U.N. published reports in 2014 essentially mirroring Koonin’s argument.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported
…”there is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century” and current data shows “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century.”
Press officers work with scientists within agencies like the National Oceanic Administration (NOAA) and NASA and are responsible for crafting misleading press releases on climate, he added.
Koonin is not the only one claiming wrongdoing. House lawmakers with the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, for instance, recently jumpstarted an investigation into NOAA after a whistleblower said agency scientists rushed a landmark global warming study to influence policymakers.
Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith, the committee’s chairman, will “move forward as soon as possible” in asking NOAA to hand over documents included in a 2015 subpoena on potential climate data tampering.
Koonin, who served under Obama from 2009 to 2011, went on to lament the politicization of science suggested that the ethos should be to “tell it like it is. You’re a scientist and it is your responsibility to put the facts on the table.”
NASA and NOAA’s actions, he said, are problematic, because “public opinion is formed by the data that is formed from those organizations and appears in newspapers.”
Neither agency responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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C’mon, next you’ll tell us that scientists ask other scientists to delete emails to get around Freedom of Information Requests…
Does this come under the heading of ‘No, really?’?
This kind of thing has been going on in Foggy Bottom since those gasbags in Congress decided that the Dust Bowl was a figment of the imaginations of farmers and reporters, until it blew into town,right into their faces.
Nothing new here, just confirmation. Your tax dollars at work, folks!
Thank you for the article!
This is important. Kudos to Steven Koonin for coming out and give is face for this “manipulation”.
We are accustomed to various special interest groups cooking the books to promote their interests in Washington. We don’t expect the science establishment to be cooking the science, but that is what is happening. The arrogance and irresponsibility exhibited by the science establishment is quite amazing. It will take a while for the public to adjust to the idea that organized science is as corrupt as the trial lawyers or the teachers’ union. The global warming scare is nothing but an attempt at wealth redistribution.
Many, perhaps even most of them wouldn’t care, because global warming is merely the latest excuse to impose the economic and political policies they have always wanted.
True, but they just hit a brick wall.
What does that have to say about the just finished March for Science? Are the people marching even aware of such bogus data like this? Would they even care if they were told that much of science today is the fudging of data to achieve a predetermined results?
And in other breaking news, bears poop in the woods.
The National Climate Assessment was released six months after the 2013 IPCC report, yet almost all its claims were based on the 2007 IPCC report. This is because the 2013 report recanted all the alarmist claims of the 2007 Report. The Obama Administration’s commitment was to alarmism, not to the best science.