Snow Be Damned! The Feds Have Global Warming to Discuss

On a day when the rest of the federal government was shut down by a near record snowfall in Washington, the Department of Commerce today announced plans to create a National Climate Service.

The new office will bring together the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate data, modeling, and other services in one place, in order to help ordinary citizens, businesses, and all levels of government “help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change,” Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said.

Climate change is what used to be called global warming. The more neutral term means the same thing, as evidenced by NOAA’s press release, which noted: “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 snow melt, and extended ice-free seasons in our waters.”

Getting two feet of snow from one storm in a town that usually gets about one foot of snow all winter wasn’t mentioned by NOAA as an impact of climate change. That’s because this “Snowmageddon,” as dubbed by President Barack Obama, was caused by unusual weather patterns, such as the warm air of El Niño hitting cold arctic air that had settled over the mid-Atlantic coast. Call the National Weather Service for an explanation of this; the new National Climate Service is more interested in bigger, longer-term issues, such as the melting of polar ice caps.

Bringing all of NOAA’s climate-related information in one place will enable the agency to “get ahead of the demand curve” for climate information, Locke said.

Many types of businesses will benefit from this information. Locke expects entrepreneurs will use National Climate Service data to create specialized products for businesses like ski resorts, who will use the information to decide whether to expand or not. Wind-energy producers will be able to get maps on wind speeds and wind variability so they can determine how much energy they could expect to produce at a given location, he said.

“The better climate information that alternative energy companies have, the more profitable they can be,” he said.

Making climate science more accessible to average Americans also should “help us gain the consensus we need to move forward” on addressing climate change and “bring about an economic recovery by more rapidly modernizing our nation’s energy infrastructure,” said Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy.

Congressional appropriators will have to sign off on creating the National Climate Service, which would involve a reorganization of existing resources at NOAA and wouldn’t take place until October 1, at the earliest. Today, however, NOAA launched a new website, Climate.gov, to serve as a portal for all of its climate information, data, products, and services.

This portal should make it easier for people to examine the data that have led to various conclusions about climate change, said NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco.

This transparency is critical given recent controversies over climate-change data, which have given ammunition to skeptics that challenge the prevailing scientific view that manmade activities have caused global temperatures to rise. Despite these controversies—including emails that indicate some climate scientists want to silent dissenting views, “the science itself is sound; it’s solid,” said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

The challenge facing Climate.gov is to be objective about this science and not color its presentation based on the policy goals of the Obama administration or any other administration. If it becomes an advocacy site for legislation capping carbon emissions, global-warming skeptics—and many average Americans—will write it off as a snow job.

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Kent Hoover is the Washington bureau chief for bizjournals.