NICK POPE
CONTRIBUTOR
A government watchdog group has filed a complaint with the Biden administration over its use of a dataset frequently used to push its climate agenda.
Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) filed the complaint with the Commerce Department over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “Billions Project” dataset, which purports to keep track of natural [and climate] disasters that have caused at least $1 billion in damages going back to 1980. The billion-dollar disasters (BDD) data — cited frequently by the Biden administration to insinuate that climate change is intensifying and justify sweeping green policies — is based on opaque data derived from questionable accounting practices, PPT alleges in the complaint.
“American families and businesses continue to struggle with persistently high inflation, which many attribute in large part to the energy policies and government spending of the current administration. The idea that blatant violations of scientific integrity could be underlying the rationale for these policies should concern every American,” Michael Chamberlain, PPT’s director, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Unfortunately, this is far from an isolated incident. The Biden Administration came into office pledging that its decision making would be grounded in the highest-quality science, but all too often has failed to live up to those promises.” (RELATED: The Entire Push To Halt New Natural Gas Exports Traces Back To One Ivy League Prof And His Shaky Study)
The complaint was filed with the Commerce Department, as NOAA operates under its auspices, Chamberlain told the DCNF.
PPT’s complaint alleges that NOAA does not adequately disclose its sources and methods for compiling the BDD dataset, adds and removes BDD events from the dataset without providing its rationale for doing so and produces cost estimates that are sometimes significantly different than those generated by more conventional accounting procedures.
While NOAA states that it develops its BDD data from more than a dozen sources, the agency does not disclose those sources for specific events or show how it calculates loss estimates from those sources, PPT’s complaint alleges.
The complaint further alleges that NOAA’s accounting methods are opaque and “produce suspect results.”
For example, when Hurricane Idalia took aim at Florida in 2023, NOAA initially projected that the storm would cause about $2.5 billion worth of damages before insured losses ultimately came in at about $310 million, according to PPT’s complaint, which cites the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation for that figure. Nevertheless, NOAA subsequently marked up its estimate for how much damage the storm caused to $3.5 billion, a discrepancy for which NOAA provided no explanation, PPT alleges in its complaint.
NOAA researchers have disclosed in the past that the agency considers factors such as functions pertaining to livestock feeding costs — in addition to more conventional types of damages — in their cost calculations.
Further, the complaint alleges that BDD events are quietly added and removed from the dataset without explanation, citing Roger Pielke Jr., a former academic who believes climate change to be a real threat but opposes politicized science. In a forthcoming paper analyzing the merits of BDD statistics, Pielke compared the dataset in late 2022 to the dataset in the middle of 2023 and found that ten new BDD events were added to the list and 3 were subtracted without explanation.
Apart from the issues with methodology alleged by PPT in its complaint, the use of BDD events as a proxy for climate change’s intensity is inherently misleading because economic data does not reflect changes in meteorological conditions, Pielke has previously explained to the DCNF.
For example, increasing concentrations of assets, especially in coastal areas, can confound the usefulness of BDD events as an indicator for the intensity of climate change, as Energy and Environment Legal Institute Senior Policy Fellow Steve Milloy has previously explained to the DCNF. Hypothetically, the same exact hurricane could hit the same exact place, decades apart, with vastly different damage totals; this would be the case because there are simply more assets sitting in the way of the storm, not because the storm was any more violent due to worsening climate change.
NOAA has acknowledged this limitation of the dataset in prior communications with the DCNF.
Additionally, NOAA will add disasters to the list retrospectively because it adjusts for inflation, meaning that a hurricane that caused $800 million in damages in 1980 dollars would be added to the list because the damages exceed $1 billion when adjusted for inflation, for example.
The Biden administration has frequently cited the BDD dataset to substantiate its massive climate agenda.
For example, Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk cited the dataset in written testimony submitted to lawmakers in February explaining the White House’s decision to pause new approvals for liquefied natural gas export terminals.
The BDD statistics are also referenced Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), the Biden administration’s landmark climate report that is intended to provide the most sound scientific basis for lawmakers and officials to craft climate policy.
NOAA asserted that the increasing frequency of BDD events is a sign of intensifying climate change in a January press release and blog post summarizing 2023, and then defended the use of the dataset in subsequent communications with the DCNF.
“Sensational climate claims made without proper scientific basis and spread by government officials threaten the public’s trust in its scientific officials and undermines the government’s mission of stewarding the environment,” PPT’s complaint states. “It also poses the danger of policymakers basing consequential government policy on unscientific claims unsupported by evidence.”
NOAA declined to comment, citing the active nature of the scientific integrity complaint. The White House and the Department of Commerce did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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Government science has been manipulated by activists since at least Nixon’s War on Cancer, a now moribund model kept as a zombie by California’s Proposition 65. There was supposedly an epidemic of cancer, caused by trace amounts of synthetic chemicals, as advanced by a group at the National Institutes of Health. Of course, Nixon gave them major funding, and the ultimately untestable model did not die until Reagan cut the funding.
I agree Tom, “the danger of policymakers basing consequential government policy on unscientific claims unsupported by evidence.” Has been a problem with the IPCC since this political organization began, because of their overt socialist environmental agenda. The NOAA are another tool in the activists playbook with their dodgy temperature data manipulations, and now their dangerous climate criteria bullshit. I am over this takedown of real scientific method by these entities, they have given science a bad name and support disrespect for science by the general public. Who are they to believe anymore?
Government bodies given the mission of studying a specific problem, are very certain to find that problem, lest their funding be deemed unnecessary. If you were able to form a government agency for investigating the effect of unicorn poop on leprechauns, you could be assured that their total lack of data was solely due to being underfunded.
Non binary leprechauns…..
https://www.epa.gov/climateimpacts/climate-equity
EPA is committed to supporting communities—particularly those facing disproportionate impacts—develop and implement equitable solutions to climate change impacts.
Indeed. It took decades to eliminate the federal Board of Tea Experts. That bureaucracy was responsible for approving the flavor of imported tea. It existed until last September.
Did it approve the flavour of imported tea, then?
Bobclose, I could not agree more. Astonishing that science has been perverted, distorted and stretched every which way to satisfy a political agenda: additional funding to keep themselves viable financially. Self-perseverance is alive and well.
We can also thank Nixon for the EPA. He was trying to get the hippies off his back and created a monster.
Nixon actually pushed many progressive policies, to the detriment of us all.
Tom,
All covered in the 800 magnificent pages of the Edith Efron book named The Apocalyptics. Recommended reading for all who seek to understand government methods to scare the people. Helps understand what is going on with scares like Climate Change, Covid, Population Bombs, Lead Poisoning, Deadly Radioactivity, Plastic Microparticles, Species Extinctions, to name but a few.
For further relevant reading, recommended recent papers by Prof Edward Calabrese on the unscientific propagation of the Linear No Threshold LNT belief for the harm from toxins.
We have to start to question the very basics of scare campaigns. Smoking causes cancer, it is claimed, but have the prime chemicals been identified in the smoke, and so on?
Geoff S
I read Efron, and her book seriously needs an update. It was written as the events were taking place, and it needs a bit more distance.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
H. L. Menken
NOAA: Think of a number…
“the most sound scientific basis for lawmakers and officials to craft climate policy.”
The hubris of this idea is astounding; that omniscient Science™ can know the future and omnipotent Government™ can control it.
Referring to post top picture, the article and issue isn’t about Gavin or NASA… it’s about NOAA!
Same schist, different pile.
Looks like Gavin lost some weight.
Each government agency is supposed to follow OMB Responsibilities Section 515 of the Treasury and General Government Appropriations Act for FY2001
(Public Law 106–554) directs the Office of Management and Budget to issue government-wide guidelines that provide policy and procedural guidance to Federal agencies for ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information, including statistical
information, disseminated by Federal agencies.
NOAA/NASA websites fail miserably in their adherence to the Congressional mandated requirements. In the guidelines they even state peer review by technical journals as an inadequate basis for validation of issues that have a significant financial consequence.
I believe that there should be a concerted effort to challenge the lack of balance that permeates their websites using quality assurance requirements each has developed based on OMB 515.
I am sure NOAA/NASA are just outliers in the promolgation of useful information.
😄
We all know that some of our supposed trusted institutions like NASA have been captured and corrupted by the global warming cult. Here’s a new study by a Danish scientist explaining the blatant manipulation of temperature data by NASA.
PROFESSOR EXPOSES NASA’S ‘MASSIVE RETROSPECTIVE TEMPERATURE ADJUSTMENTS’Danish professor emeritus at the University of Oslo, Ole Humlum, has exposed large ‘alterations’ made to the surface air temperatures by the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis — an estimate of global surface temperature change run by NASA.
GISS has altered its historical warming trend (between Jan 1915 to Jan 2000) from 0.45C to 0.67C, so reveals Humlum. This is a massive increase of 49%, and in turn means that almost half of the documented warming in that period—the majority of the 20th century—is due to administrative ‘adjustments’ made years after the original temperature measurements were logged.
In his recently published 2023 climate report, Humlum concedes that such adjustments can be important when evaluating the overall quality of the various temperature records. But the GISS results don’t show rises and falls spread evenly throughout the record; instead, these tamperings invariably cool the past and warm the present, thus fabricating—or at best exaggerating—the modern day warming trend.
Humlum provides the below graph.
What it shows is administrative alterations made to past temperatures since May 2008.
The blue lines show where historic measurements have been adjusted downwards, the red lines are where they have been adjusted upwards. In just the past 16 years, NASA has been altering historic inputs, cooling the past and warming the present.
Open URL to see NASA’s falsified graph
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/nasa-caught-altering-temp-data-to-support-warming-scam
These adjustments cannot be overstated.
They have injected substantial cooling into the ‘official’ record from ≈1900 up to the 1970s, and substantial heating over the most recent 50 years.
Even more concerningly, GISS (i.e. NASA) is not alone in adjusting its database in this fashion. NOAA do it all the time. So do the UK Met Office.
Charged with a similar global temperature collection ‘HadCRUT’, the UK Met Office has, in the past decade alone, made two major revisions to the record which, lo and behold, added ≈30% extra warming to dataset. In doing so it removed an inconvenient temperature pause from ≈2000 to 2012 (a pause still visible in the satellite record).
Professor Ole Humlum explains that the climate has remained in a quasi-stable condition for millions of years.
“Modern observations show that this normal behavior is also characterizing recent years, including 2023, and there is no observational evidence for any global climate crisis.” Believing that one minor constituent of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, controls nearly all aspects of climate is “naive and entirely unrealistic,” he concludes.
Miami population 1950? 249,000 Today? 6,000,000
That’s the 1950s Baby Boom after WWII and their descendants.
and Cubans
Government’s use of creative accounting is not new, nor limited to this administration.
“… events were added to the list and 3 were subtracted without explanation.”
When there should be documentation and there is none: prima facie case of malfeasance.
The burden of proof is on NOAA to prove its actions are not fraud or (*cough* *cough*) an honest mistake.
It’s old, but it’s true – “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Just one more dishonest, untrustworthy and inept government agency. Government at every level needs to be whittled down and many departments need to be eliminated.
But where do you start? There are so many candidates.