Watchdog Group Challenges Biden Administration & NOAA over Massaging Climate Disaster Data
The Protect the Public’s Trust complaint supports the idea that Big Government is the sole source of the #ClimateCrisis.
A non-partisan watchdog group asserts that a key agency monitoring weather disaster outcomes for the Biden administration used misleading and self-serving data analysis to claim storms are becoming more extreme and expensive due to climate change.
Protect the Public’s Trust cited a new study that combed through data used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for its climate and disaster tracking project and found it inflated damages and made inexplicable data calculations that did not factor in obvious contributions to disaster costs, such as an increase in development in coastal regions and other areas vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding or wildfires.
Most recently, NOAA ballooned the cost of damages from Hurricane Idalia, an August 2023 storm that impacted the southeastern part of the United States.
While insured losses from wind damage and flooding totaled $310 million through mid-November of 2023, NOAA estimated the storm caused losses of $3.6 billion, or 12 times the damage covered by insurance.
Idalia’s steep costs were included in NOAA’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters tracking project, which has been used by the Biden administration to push its climate change agenda by saying weather events are becoming much more severe and costly, to the tune of billions of dollars in damages each year.
Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) filed the complaint with the Commerce Department over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as NOAA operates under its auspices.
The group’s report focuses on the “Billions Project” dataset. The information obtained through this program is focused on natural disasters that have caused at least $1 billion in damages going back to 1980.
PPT’s complaint alleges that NOAA does not adequately disclose its sources and methods for compiling the BDD [billion dollars disaster] 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.
…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.
According to PPT’s analysis, The “Billions Project” cost estimates deviate dramatically from the standard accounting practices for disaster loss estimates, and its loss estimates for hurricanes are substantially and inexplicably higher than the estimates from another NOAA entity, the National Hurricane Center.
“The American public has every right to expect, even demand, that the scientific research funded by their tax dollars is conducted under the most rigorous standards of integrity, transparency, and quality,” said PPT director Michael Chamberlain.
“This is especially true when that research is used to underpin decisions that affect nearly every aspect of their lives – from the cars they drive, to the foods they eat, to how those foods are prepared. Despite the fact the Billions Project is being used to affect precisely these types of decisions, the principles of scientific integrity, transparency, and quality appear to be severely lacking in its work.
If the federal government ever hopes to reclaim even a sliver of the trust it has lost in recent years, ensuring that these sorts of projects live up to their ideals is imperative.”
Hand billions of dollars to one entity of the Administrative State to study a problem and allow their “experts” to extract all the information that supports their narrative and hide, distort, or manipulate the data that doesn’t. Use the press to get the Administrative State message out, and silence anyone who challenge the approve set of facts as a conspiracy theorist.
Then the bureaucrats spend billions to solve a non-existent problem and expand the Administrative State further. This week, Team Biden doled out $20 billion dollars in “environmental justice” goodies.
…Vice President Kamala Harris and EPA Administrator Michael Regan will announce selections for $20 billion in awards to stand up a national financing network that will fund tens of thousands of climate and clean energy projects across the country, especially in low-income and disadvantaged communities, as part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda. This investment is part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a first-of-its-kind and national-scale $27 billion program funded through President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to combat the climate crisis by catalyzing public and private capital for projects that slash harmful climate pollution, improve air quality, lower energy costs, and create good-paying jobs.
Unfortunately, after 4 years of #FakeScience related to covid, the public now seems to be wise to the fact Big Government is the sole source of the #ClimateCrisis.
The PPT complaint is one of many recent developments that underscore why trust in both science and journalism is collapsing.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Watermelons lie more than dogs.
Green on the outside but red through and through! Loved when Rush said this!
A lot of this chicanery from the vile, lawless and totalitarian Dhimmi-crats has been getting exposed, lately:
The exposure of McKinsey’s totally contrived data touting the alleged benefits of “DEI” company hiring policies, which data was conjured out of thin air;
Medical studies touting the alleged benefits of “gender-affirming care,” totally debunked and contradicted;
The performance of “ESG”-focused investment funds revealed to be consistently sub-par;
and, the data supposedly supporting the apparatchiks’ destructive “climate change” energy, appliance and transportation schemes and spending profligacy, is revealed — not for the first time — to be manipulated, massaged and/or, cooked up to order, to support the Dhimmi-crats’ preferred policy and campaign Narratives(TM).
The hoax that only white majority countries take seriously….that in and of itself should tell you something.
Oh no, the non-white majority countries take it very seriously, while laughing their arses off behind closed doors. THEY are looking to get huge payouts from our gullible societies. Can’t get much more serious than that.
Wealth redistribution is one of the primary goals of this progressive invented non-issue.
It’s an absolute shame how many formerly respected institutions have been co-opted into this scam.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/geoengineering-test-quietly-launches-salt-crystals-into-atmosphere/
The nation’s first outdoor test to limit global warming by increasing cloud cover launched Tuesday from the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay.
The experiment, which organizers didn’t widely announce to avoid public backlash, marks the acceleration of a contentious field of research known as solar radiation modification. The concept involves shooting substances such as aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
The move led by researchers at the University of Washington has renewed questions about how to effectively and ethically study promising climate technologies that could also harm communities and ecosystems in unexpected ways. The experiment is spraying microscopic salt particles into the air, and the secrecy surrounding its timing caught even some experts off guard.
“Since this experiment was kept under wraps until the test started, we are eager to see how public engagement is being planned and who will be involved,” said Shuchi Talati, the executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that seeks to include developing countries in decisions about solar modification, also known as geoengineering. She is not involved in the experiment and only learned about it after being contacted by a reporter.
“While it complies with all current regulatory requirements, there is a clear need to reexamine what a strong regulatory framework must look like in a world where [solar radiation modification] experimentation is happening,” Talati added.
If I lived in the inner city or other low income, disadvantaged local, read minority, I’d worry about whether or not my kid was going to come home alive everyday much more than if there was a solar panel on the roof.
Another scam that riles me. I hope to God Trump wins and that De Santis follows him.
The USA cannot let the leftists puppet get back in, for that matter, the world cannot let that happen. 🤬
The climate zealots hate transparency. Their models are secret. Their data manipulations are secret. “Neutral scientists” only exist if their “work” follows the scientific method (i.e., systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation and the formulation and testing of falsifiable hypotheses). The work of the “consensus of scientists” who have “settled the science” of climate change is a bad joke.” Open models and a full disclosure of the underlying data used (and any manipulation of that data) are a necessary condition for me to take climate change seriously.
Mann made Hoax…
but after the Micheal Stein verdict who is willing to publicly shame them. The court systems must be overhauled so that the bull$hit climate lawsuits that the lefties keep winning don’t become the norm.
The Michael Mann v Mark Steyn case was not centered on climate science. Mann won a defamation action and was awarded damages because Steyn had compared Mann directly to a well known paedophile.
I learned about the climate hoaxes while taking an elective course in college back in the mid 70s. Nothing has changed since then other then what they call it. The USA is one of the best countries for the environment, but we let other countries slack. The USA politicians use this to tax and create more power for themselves.
“According to PPT’s analysis, The “Billions Project” cost estimates deviate dramatically from the standard accounting practices for disaster loss estimates,..”
This is a standard
scamhack. You can always create a crisis (to then not waste) by changing how you count, n calling it the same thing.See also changes to federal poverty level and inflation calculation under The Lightbringer. Among my favorites was an analysis comparing nationalized, government delivered health care quality vs. otherwise, that used whether HC was nationalized and government delivered in its quality metric.