Storm within a storm –
“What’s next? Climate science is a hoax?”
The controversy only burned all the brighter when the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service tweeted that Alabama residents had nothing to fear from Dorian (which was accurate). This tweet occurred after the president’s tweet about Alabama’s risk but was apparently not directly in response to the president. Instead, it came in response to a surge of public inquiries. According to the meteorologist-in-charge of the Alabama office, Chris Darden, his office’s phones “started ringing off the hook” with public inquiries and concern after the president took to Twitter.
In response to this sequence of events, NOAA released an unattributed statement on September 6 that rebuked the Alabama forecasters: “The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time. ”
In an email on the evening of September 6, the director of the National Weather Service, Louis Uccellini, wrote to Neil Jacobs , the acting director of NOAA about an “upwelling” of upset in the entire weather community due to the NOAA statement. “The mood out there is pretty ugly,” he said.
Craig McLean, the acting chief scientist at NOAA, was even more aghast in emails. “What’s next? Climate science is a hoax?” He wrote in an email addressed to Jacobs and other senior leaders at NOAA and the National Weather Service. “Flabbergasted to leave our forecasters hanging in the political wind. Embarrassed, Craig.”
Meanwhile, the workforce at National Weather Service offices across the country were scared about their employment. “Employees now fear for their jobs and are questioning whether they should post potentially life-saving info or check tweets first,” John Murphy, the chief operating officer at NOAA, wrote to Jacobs.
In In the midst of this storm was Neil Jacobs, who on one hand had to answer to the White House and Trump — who clearly were not stepping back from a wrong-headed and irresponsible forecast — but also had the grace to realize that his workforce was being besmirched in the process. “You have no idea how hard I’m fighting to keep politics out of science,” Jacobs wrote to one NOAA employee. “The situation we’re in is incredibly unfortunate. I don’t have words to describe how I feel right now,” Jacobs wrote another.
The extent to which Trump’s actions severely distracted officials and forecasters at a time when they needed to be entirely focused on understanding the storm and warning US citizens about its impacts is significant. At the same time, the civility and dedication of people like Chris Darden, the meteorologist-in-charge of the Birmingham National Weather Service office, is pretty remarkable.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings