Crippled By Blizzard, DC Announces New Global Warming Agency by Phone

By Marc Sheppard

On Monday, the nation’s capital was still digging out from the weekend’s record snowfall that would effectively shut down the federal government for days. Making matters worse was the awareness among DC residents that their shoveling would require a repeat performance quite soon, as another major winter storm was due to hit early Wednesday. What a perfect day to announce the formation of a new federal agency to study and report on global warming.

Of course, with the city all but crippled by the snow, plans to make the announcement before the National Press Club were quickly scrapped. So those hearing official launch speeches Monday were forced to do so via conference call. And adding another dash of the bizarre, what they heard was U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announce “the intent to create a NOAA Climate Service line office dedicated to bringing together the agency’s strong climate science and service delivery capabilities.”

That’s right – this new, undoubtedly politically-tainted and irresponsibly expensive waste of taxpayer dollars (the new portal itself cost us $1.5 million) created to provide “climate information” to the nation, will do so under the egis of none other than the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The same NOAA recently accused of intentionally manipulating the surface based temperature data sets it produces in order to bias worldwide climate trend analyses to the warm side and help foment carbon hysteria.

But the seemingly peculiar timing of the announcement was perhaps no accident. NOAA’s official announcement refers to the new service as a “reorganization” of the parent agency, promising that “[u]nifying NOAA’s climate capabilities under a single climate office will integrate the agency’s climate science and services and make them more accessible to NOAA partners and other users.”

“Reorganization” sure sounds a lot like “rehabilitation,” doesn’t it? Like when wayward celebrities and politicians use drug or alcohol rehab for damage control. Or when disgraced sports figures repent serial adultery by quickly changing their address to that of a swanky "sexual compulsion" rehab.

It appears that what we have here is the Obama administration hastily attempting to redeem NOAA’s sullied reputation before the full weight of the hammer drops – as it has for its partners in crime over at the IPCC (See today’s superb piece by S. Fred Singer). Speaking of which, Ecofactory reports that the administration believes its new program will “challeng[e] the IPCC as the gold standard for research in this field.” In fact, they expect the move to “help shore up the public's mistrust of climate science and ‘regain the consensus’ lost by the recent scandals that have troubled the United Nations IPCC.”

Good luck with that one, guys. As they used to say in Dodge – you can’t put the excrement back in the mule.

Besides, if there remained any doubt that NOAA is hopelessly beyond redemption, Jane Lubchenco eliminated it Monday with the words, “NOAA is committed to scientific integrity and transparency.” That’s quite a statement coming from the administrator of an organization that not only selectively removed 75% of the world’s temperature stations from cooler locales, but further corrupted its widely disseminated data by replacing the readings from the removed stations with those of warmer stations.

And while the Obama administration needs no reaffirmation of its astounding cluelessness regarding the extent of “the public’s mistrust of climate science,” here’s more from NOAA’s announcement nonetheless:

More and more, Americans are witnessing the impacts of climate change in their own backyards, including sea-level rise, longer growing seasons, changes in river flows, increases in heavy downpours, earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons in our waters. People are searching for relevant and timely information about these changes to inform decision-making about virtually all aspects of their lives.

Wow. While I’m tempted to rebuke the entire silly alarmist laundry list for the hundredth time, there’s one item I just can’t get over the stupidity of including under these circumstances.

After all, trying to sell earlier snowmelt in a city shoveling record snow off its sidewalks is beyond dumb -- even by Washington standards.

Tick Tock, Alarmists.