House Divided: What future for NOAA?

America's "wet NASA" never materialized. In its place the agency found climate change politics, a financial industry constituency, and became a house divided.

Yesterday, the trade association, Reinsurance Association of America (RAA) kicked off its annual conference. A headline speaker was Rick Spinrad, NOAA Administrator who’s talk was titled “Who develops hazard data? What is the governments role?”

I don’t know the content of the talk; I wasn’t there. But the premise is foreshadowing.

First is the apparent interest in NOAA by the reinsurance industry. Second is last summer’s announcement that the National Science Foundation was seeding a new public-private partnership whereby NOAA would provide climate modeling for reinsurance industry.

Later in the day at the RAA conference is another talk about catastrophe modeling as the industry’s “attempt to emulate the latest scientific consensus around the range of possible outcomes.”

For those that follows the interplay of politics and climate change science- or any policy context where social value conflicts and science intermingle- it may not be surprising that the notion of scientific consensus is often manufactured and the discourse of consensus is used to quell dissent where there is disagreement.

It’s not that consensus does not exist- no scientist challenges everything all at once. But it is not uncontroversial, broad areas of consensus that need regular shoring up either by industry using proprietary methods, government forces, or censorship from within a research community.

This is part of a serious problem in which the scientific journals and their relationship to the media plays a significant role.

Figure 2 rom Clark et al. “illustrates how the published literature could overwhelmingly indicate that X is True, even if X is more often Not True. If social processes align to discourage particular findings regardless of their validity, subsequent understandings of reality will be distorted increasing the likelihood of false scientific consensus and dysfunctional interventions that waste valuable time and resources for no benefit or possibly even negative consequences”

It is a running theme in reinsurance and ILS industry news that climate change science- and the media storms it can spin- provides for a “moving feast,” that is quite profitable. This is different messaging than the public generally receives in mainstream media outlets.

There is then a powerful interest in maintaining the validity of many climate change assumptions in reinsurance, ILS, and more recently across the financial sector.

Indeed, I’ve heard it said that the main consumer of climate and climate change risk projections is the financial sector. No one else has the money and expertise to make use of that amount of data and modeling complexity.

AAAS (NIH not shown to make the rest legible)

The idea of NOAA originated in the 1960’s and was most fully articulated by the Stratton Commission. The Commission was in pursuit of a comprehensive national ocean policy to balance resource development and conservation. They envisioned a powerful agency- NOAA- that organized everything from coastal management to ocean resource development, including seafloor mining.

These early roots did not focus NOAA on weather per se. Rather, the meteorological community would be supported by NOAA’s increased activities in ocean research and resource development.

Nixon created NOAA with the Reorganization Plan #4 of 1970 and lumped together several existing offices, placing the whole thing under the Department of Commerce.

Offices that came together under the original NOAA

However, a coherent US ocean policy never materialized. To the extent that one does exist today, it does so as different administrations’ normative regard for the oceans. By 1971, commentary in Science argued that the aspirations of a “wet NASA” were all dried up.

Instead, NOAA excelled(!) in weather forecasting, data collection, and emergency warning and communication by virtue of acquiring the Environmental Science Services Administration and its offices (first line above).

Nor, did NOAA become the powerhouse many had hoped. It’s funding had always been modest (shown above). Congressional appropriations for NOAA peaked in 2000 at 0.033% of US GDP. By comparison the next highest ranking federal agency is the USDA with 2.5 times the budget as NOAA in the same year.

That Congress never clarified what it wanted from NOAA has been a longstanding issue, according to the Congressional Research Service. Some have argued that Congress could strengthen the agency by giving it clarity and consistency. Others argue for dissolving NOAA and distributing its activities to other independent agencies. Others look to make NOAA and independent agency.

With its ocean orientation DOA and weather forecasting activities that are excellent with perhaps minimal expectation of significant further advancement, NOAA- or at least a part of it- has turned to the business of climate change and shoring up consensus.

Info about NOAA’s offices is here

The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) operated by the NESDIS (purple above) was created in 2015 through consolidation of several NOAA data hubs. Tom Karl, a career NOAA official, served as its inaugural director. Karl had been assigned to chair the Subcommittee on Global Change Research under the White House OSTP back in 2010.

In 2015, a lapse in agency data recording and use protocols boiled over into a political spectacle a couple of years later with Congressional and Departmental investigation into the merits of “the Karl Study” which argued that their was no “hiatus” in the temperature record since the late 1990s.

Science summed up the incident as a culture clash within NOAA’s NCEI

The new furor underscores a long-running tension within NCEI, one that has generally pitted research scientists trying to publish new advances against engineers seeking to ensure everything follows standard protocols, say several scientists who have worked at the center.

Apparently, however, there is a history of background controversy of data use by NCEI’s predecessor, NCDC.

Around the time of that debacle, the authors of the Karl Study, moved on to establish and/or advise the climate analytics firm, The Climate Service, the namesake of which came from efforts to establish “The Climate Service” within NOAA and oriented towards a climate changed future. The firm is now part of S&P Global.

Along for the ride in an advisory capacity came members of the National Climate Assessment technical support unit which is also housed by NCEI. At least some in this group have advisory roles at very significant places within the insurance industry.

Somewhat overlapping and continuing to this day comes the shenanigans that Roger Pielke Jr. documents regarding NCEI’s Billion Dollar Disaster dataset. It’s development contradicts NOAA’s scientific integrity policies. That it is a marketing ploy parading about as science is spot on. Even NOAA has used it front and center in its budget requests.

Also alarming is the spat that has surfaced around Atlas 14- a product based on historical data maintained by the National Weather Service- of which at least some among the NCEI believe should be more focused on climate change. The attack on the data appears to be a coordinated one coming from a climate risk analytics firm and at least some within NCEI.

And wouldn’t you have guessed that those within the analytics firm, were formally organizing data for NCEI.

NOAA is clearly struggling. It has done an amazing job with weather forecasts and emergency warnings.

Now, it’s high time that the US reorient its time and resources towards a coherent ocean policy and supporting research.