A White House news release on March 19 announced that the Obama administration is launching the Climate Data Initiative, a key part of which is a new government website to make access to the administration’s selective data on climate change more readily available.
The initiative is described as “a broad effort to leverage the Federal Government’s extensive, freely-available climate-relevant data resources to stimulate innovation and private-sector entrepreneurship in support of national climate-change preparedness.”
The launch of the website — data.gov/climate — will make the federal government’s climate-related databases “more open, accessible, and useful to citizens, researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators,” states the White House.
Initially, the focus of the website will be limited to coastal flooding and sea level rises, which — given the administration’s track record — will be blamed on global warming caused by human activities. This perspective is clearly evident in the language of today’s release, which states: “The [Climate Action] plan recognizes that even as we act to curb the carbon pollution that is driving climate change, we must also prepare our citizens and communities for the climate impacts that are already underway across the country.”
Lest there be any misunderstanding of what the administration’s views on climate change are, the news release quotes President Obama’s January 28 State of the Union address:
Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.
Despite that fact that a large body of scientific evidence exists to dispute that so-called climate change is anthropogenic (caused by humans), the administration has chosen to ignore the dissenting opinions and proceed full speed ahead as if such change (and its alleged causes) is indisputable. It also plans to spend a large amount of the taxpayers’ money to finance the government-approved solution. The White House release notes that the president’s proposed FY15 budget includes “a new $1 billion Climate Resilience Fund, within a fully paid for $56 billion Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative, that expands on existing climate-change preparedness programs to ensure we are doing everything we can to support the safety and security of our communities and resources.”
Data.gov/climate features post-Superstorm Sandy maps for New York and New Jersey that “show how the floodplain will change under different scenarios of sea level rise.” One link takes the user to a page ominously headlined “Coastal Inundation in Your Community.”
The implication, of course, is, “If you think Sandy was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.” And it’s all the fault of man-made carbon pollution.
John Podesta, counselor to the president, and John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a March 19 blog post on the White House website:
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.
Podesta and Holdren allude to the government’s ongoing solution: “Even as we work to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and expand renewable energy generation,” which conversely implies that such greenhouse-gas emissions are the culprit responsible for all of those “extreme events.”
The latest administration initiative is a follow-up to the Climate Action Plan President Obama released last June. During an address at Georgetown University, Obama announced that he would use his executive powers to require reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the nation’s power plants.
In response, House Speaker John Boehner said, “These policies, rejected even by the last Democratic-controlled Congress, will shutter power plants, destroy good-paying American jobs and raise electricity bills.”
On February 18, Obama asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) to develop a plan to increase fuel efficiency for heavy-duty trucks, which is a key component of his Climate Action Plan.
As the president increasingly uses constitutionally questionable executive power to implement restrictions on U.S. industry, his rationale is obviously fueled by the statement he made in his State of the Union address: “Climate change is a fact.”
While climate change may be a fact, the change has always been a part of our natural global weather pattern, and may result in periodic global cooling, as well as warming. What is not a fact, however, is that such change is catastrophic, the result of human activity, or can be controlled or altered by human action. As an article in Investors Business Daily last June noted:
President Obama paints skeptics of global warming as crackpots, while his cabinet threatens the job of anyone who doesn’t toe the same phony orthodoxy. This is emblematic of a political, not a scientific, agenda….
And contrary to the misleading White House statements, few deny that the climate is changing. It’s always changing. That’s how climate is.
But “climate change” is different from “global warming,” the idea the left has pushed for more than two decades before shifting to the less-specific “climate change.” Why the shift? Because over the last 18 years, Earth’s surface temperatures show no significant warming at all.
The article noted that “a peer-reviewed survey of 1,077 geoscientists and engineers [in 2013] found only 36 percent believe humans are responsible for global warming. Most said nature is the main cause.”
The government’s new data.gov/climate website will be operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. However, as The New American pointed out in a January 28 article, “Multiple U.S. government bureaucracies including NOAA, NASA, and the Department of Energy are again being accused of inappropriately manipulating temperature data — or ‘adjusting’ it, as officials at the agencies implicated in the scandal put it — to show global warming.”
The article quoted Steven Goddard, an independent analyst at Real Science, who wrote: “NOAA made a big deal about 2012 blowing away all temperature records, but the temperature they reported is the result of a huge error. This affects all NOAA and NASA U.S. temperature graphs, and is part of the cause of this famous shift.”
Goddard also cited satellite data indicating that by 2008, U.S. temperatures, far from increasing, had actually cooled down below 1980s and ’90s levels.
The article also cited respected climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer, who served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center before joining the faculty at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Spencer provided evidence that “virtually all of the USHCN [U.S. Historical Climatology Network] warming since 1973 appears to be the result of adjustments NOAA has made to the data.” Dr. Spencer said that his own studies of the data and corrections to account for urban heat island (UHI) effects “support [Steve Goddard’s] contention that there’s something funny going on in the USHCN data.”
Dr. Spencer concluded: “Clearly, adjustments to surface temperature data are at least as large as the global warming signal being sought.” (Emphasis in original.) “Until a transparent analysis of the USHCN methodology is carried out, and alternative methods and temperature datasets are tested, I can’t bring myself to believe any U.S. government pronouncements regarding record warm temperatures.”
In its March 19 release, the Obama administration stated that with leadership from NOAA and NASA, the new website will “make Federal data about our climate more open, accessible, and useful to citizens, researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators.”
If NOAA’s “adjusted” data is an example of the level of accuracy of the data.gov/climate website’s posted data, it is no wonder that the more Americans research “climate change,” the less they believe the government’s assertion that human-caused climate change is a fact. Those who want to review data that has not been “adjusted” by NOAA might do their own research at credible privately created climate websites such as Climate Depot or Watts Up With That?
Image: Screenshot of data.gov/climate
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