In agency-wide email, NOAA chief moves to regain scientists’ trust after defending incorrect Trump tweet
By Jason Samenow
13 September 2019
(The Washington Post) – Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sent an all-staff email Friday afternoon in an apparent effort to repair damage from an unusual 6 September 2019 statement that sided with President Trump rather than agency weather forecasters.
The controversial NOAA statement, which was unsigned, rebuked forecasters at the National Weather Service who tweeted that Alabama would “NOT see any impacts” from Hurricane Dorian after Trump wrongly tweeted that the state would “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”
The Washington Post learned Jacobs and NOAA chief of staff Julie Kay Roberts were involved in crafting the statement, which admonished the Weather Service’s Birmingham office for speaking “in absolute terms.” However, Jacobs fought issuing such a statement and also tried to block the paragraph that called out the Birmingham Weather Service office but lost both those arguments, according to two people who spoke to The Post.
The Post subsequently reported that the statement resulted after Jacobs was ordered by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to fix things at the request of Trump, through his acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney.
In the email to staff released Friday, with the subject line “Keeping NOAA’s Mission in Focus,” Jacobs showered praise on forecasters for their efforts during Dorian — specifically calling out the efforts of the Birmingham office.
“During hurricane Dorian, our Weather Forecast Offices, including Birmingham and the National Hurricane Center, did their utmost to produce accurate and timely weather forecasts to inform the general public and ensure public safety,” Jacobs wrote. […]
Michael Halpern, deputy director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in an email that Jacobs and NOAA are “taking the right steps to repair the damage” from this whole saga.
“The question will be whether Secretary Ross and the White House will make that same commitment,” Halpern wrote. “So far, their silence has been telling.” [more]
In all-staff email, NOAA chief praises scientists after agency’s defense of incorrect Trump tweet
![Effects of experimental open-top chamber (OTC) warming on ecosystem respiration (ER). Experimental warming increased ER across the tundra biome but the magnitude of the response varied across time and space. Effect of OTC warming on ER Hedges’ SMD calculated as (mean ER of the warmed plots − mean ER of the control plots)/pooled standard deviation across the 136 growing season datasets (that is, unique experiment × ER measurement year combinations). On the top of the graph, a blue diamond shows the mean estimate (est. = 0.57 and 95% CI [0.44–0.70], error bars) of the ER response across the 136 datasets, as well as the Q value testing for heterogeneity and P value from the meta-analysis. Black dots represent ER Hedges’ SMDs of individual datasets and 95% CIs (black error bars) in alphabetical and chronological order. Individual datasets are represented by the experiment ID in black (left) and ER measurement year (right) in a colour scale ranging from dark blue, light blue, orange to red which represents increasingly longer warming duration at the time of ER measurements. Experiments with more than 1 year of ER data are grouped. See Supplementary Tables 1, 2 and 4 for details on the datasets and SMD and CI values. The black dashed vertical line (SMD = 0) represents no change in ER with warming whereas the areas to the right and left of it represent increased (SMD > 0) versus decreased (SMD](https://desdemonadespair.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image-47-1200x675.png)