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The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration occupies a squat, dark building set against an open field on Princeton University’s Forrestal Campus, several miles from the main campus. Founded by Joseph Smagorinsky, who had worked with Jule Charney to develop numerical weather prediction at the nearby Institute for Advanced Study, the office now known as GFDL originally served as the most forward-looking scientific branch of the U.S. Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C. In 1967, in one of its most famous efforts, scientists Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald published the first modern calculations of the climate system’s sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The next year Smagorinsky moved the lab back to Princeton, where numerical modeling had originated.
Today GFDL is one of the premiere climate and weather-modeling centers in the world. Its high-powered supercomputers consume half the lab’s budget and are constantly being replaced with the latest hardware. Twenty-four hours a day, they’re solving equations. At the same time, though, GFDL shares with Princeton the ethos of a university. On a sunny day in late August 2006, there were plenty of open spots in the lab’s parking lot, and some of the scientists wore shorts and sandals. One of them, Thomas Knutson, came downstairs to greet me for an interview that, just half a year earlier, he might not have been able to give—or at least not without prior clearance, or perhaps a “minder” from the NOAA public affairs office listening in. For while GFDL may have the feel of a college campus, it’s a government laboratory, and under the Bush administration, its climate scientists were kept on such a tight leash that eventually, you might say they decided to rebel.
Knutson became the hero of this rebellion, though you wouldn’t know it from his meek and soft-spoken demeanor. He wears a short haircut that looks almost (but not quite) military, and talks with a marked accent that signals his rural southwestern Virginia origins. Of all the scientists at GFDL, he works in what’s arguably the most politically fraught area: right at the intersection of hurricane and climate research.
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In addition to its climate models, GFDL boasts one of the top hurricane forecasting models in the world. During the 1990s, encouraged by Jerry Mahlman, the lab’s director at the time, Knutson led an effort to bridge the two research groups. The collaboration, which in all likelihood could only have taken place at GFDL, resulted in a series of high-resolution experiments exploring how hurricanes would change in a warmer climate, culminating in Knutson’s previously discussed 2004 study, which used some 1,300 simulations. The most famous figure from the paper, showing storms growing stronger by about half a Saffir-Simpson category, hangs on his office door.
That paper came out during the 2004 hurricane season, even as Gray and storm experts from some of GFDL’s sister offices within NOAA debunked links between the recent destruction and global warming. Knutson didn’t see any scientifically defensible connection to the Florida storms either, and said so to the press at the time. Still, under a media policy for all NOAA scientists, he had to inform agency public-affairs officers about requests to interview him before responding to those requests. And not just that. Internal e-mails revealed following a Freedom of Information Act request by the environmental group Greenpeace give a sense of how the protocols worked in practice.
On one occasion, a NOAA public-affairs official based in Washington, D.C., apparently traveled up to Princeton to sit in on an interview that Knutson did with ABC News. In another instance, an official e-mailed Knutson a series of talking points “in anticipation of possible media inquires regarding climate change and the recent hurricane season”—sound bites that, according to the e-mail, had been prepared at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center and the Hurricane Research Division of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (where Landsea worked at the time). The message they articulated was the one the hurricane community broadcast during and after the 2004 season: No studies conclusively link observed hurricane behavior and global warming; hurricane trends in the Atlantic instead spring from a “natural multi-decadal cycle”; and increased hurricane damage to the United States can be attributed to “massive development and population increases” in coastal areas. The talking points even described Knutson’s own study for him.
But Knutson wasn’t rocking the boat back then. During the 2005 season as the Emanuel and Webster studies emerged, however, he shifted his view slightly. Knutson wasn’t necessarily convinced that the new results, which contradicted his own more modest findings about the sensitivity of hurricanes to climate change, were correct. But he certainly considered it within the range of possibilities. As he told a reporter with the Los Angeles Times just days after the landfall of Hurri cane Rita: “If that’s what the climate system is really doing, I find the implications to be rather alarming.” In short, Knutson was now willing to give at least a lukewarm endorsement to the notion that a trend might be emerging in intense hurricanes, linked to global warming.
“That seemed to trip some wires somewhere,” he remembers.
The administration of former oilman George W. Bush had problems with climate science, and with its climate-scientist employees, almost from the outset. While campaigning for the presidency, Bush had endorsed mandatory restrictions on industrial emissions of carbon dioxide. But just months after taking office he reversed his position, calling scientific knowledge about global warming “incomplete” and shortly afterward rejecting U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol. Meanwhile, Bush’s administration called upon the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), whose experience with global warming studies dated back to the Charney Report, to provide a rapid independent evaluation of early 2001 findings released by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In its Third Assessment Report, the IPCC had attributed greater certainty than ever before to the conclusion that humans were driving global warming.
In practice, Bush’s request to the NAS meant that a small group of American experts (including, among others, NASA’s James Hansen) spent a month reviewing the collective work of more than a thousand global experts, carried out over several years. They returned, unsurprisingly, with an endorsement of the IPCC’s central findings. When the press then asked for the president’s reaction, Bush and his administration were put in an awkward position. The president had already called the science of global warming into question and dismissed Kyoto. And yet here was the nations leading scientific advisory body warning that global warming was, indeed, just as real and severe a problem as everyone had been saying—and doing so in a report requested by the White House itself.
The administration responded with what amounted to a multi-year holding pattern. When the topic came up, the president always described global warming as a serious issue that needed to be addressed. But the administration never endorsed anything beyond voluntary measures, combined with research initiatives, to deal with it. Occasionally, Bush would mouth an apparent endorsement of the scientific consensus as represented by the IPCC and the NAS reports. At other times, however, he would brazenly mislead the public by suggesting that a serious debate still existed over whether global warming might be “natural.”
Meanwhile, at the various government agencies involved in some form of climate research—ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to NOAA to NASA—the media began to expose science scandals at regular intervals. White House officials were caught editing scientific documents to downplay the urgency of the information. Public-affairs officers were caught interfering with government scientists’ ability to speak to the media. Evidently having taken a page from Senator James Inhofe, Bush himself was revealed to have met with novelist Michael Crichton to discuss climate science.
One of the most stunning flaps occurred in 2003, when the New York Times reported that officials at two White House branches, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Management and Budget, had bowdlerized a forthcoming EPA report on the state of the environment, reducing its global-warming section to “a few noncommittal paragraphs.” In a leaked memo, EPA staff complained that the edited report “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus” on climate change. They added that the White House had “discarded” conclusions from the NAS report that the administration had itself requested. Ultimately the EPA decided to drop the global warming section from the report rather than put out misleading information.
A similar story emerged two years later. Rick Piltz, a former employee of the Climate Change Science Program, an interagency group directed out of NOAA, revealed that the White House had repeatedly sought to edit program reports, once again in such a way as to raise doubts about human-caused global warming. The man with the red pen was a lawyer who had previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, now stationed at the Council on Environmental Qual ity. After the lawyer resigned amid the scandal, he went to work for ExxonMobil.
Piltz went further in his accusations. Toward the end of the Clinton administration, an ambitious scientific report known as the U.S. National Assessment had sought, for the first time, to comprehensively study the effects that global warming could have upon the United States. Projected impacts included a reduction in mountain snow pack (and therefore water supplies) in the West and a rise in sea level that would slowly swallow coastal areas. The report also considered whether hurricanes might intensify or increase in number, though it merely cited the many uncertainties surrounding this issue.
The National Assessment had also been endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences in its report for Bush. Yet the administration worked to prevent its disturbing scenarios from coming before the public in a prominent way. Piltz charged that references to the Assessment had been “systematically” deleted from documents and reports put out by the Climate Change Science Program. The Assessment, he wrote, had been sent into a “black hole” by the Bush administration. It hardly seems a coincidence that conservative think tanks at work on the climate issue had spent much of their fury attacking the National Assessment and, in particular, the climate models that formed the basis of its conclusions.
Tales like these contributed to a widespread sense of suspicion among the nations scientists. It seemed clear that the Bush administration wanted to control the flow of information about climate science, presumably to keep the issue out of the news and off the agenda. But it wasn’t only the stories that made their way into the press that troubled members of the science community. It was also the stories they heard by word of mouth. Many came from their friends and colleagues who worked within branches of the Bush administration, including the GFDL. These government scientists were growing increasingly uncomfortable with administration policies and practices that seemed to constrain them from freely sharing their knowledge about climate change with the media and the public. As government employees, federal climate scientists ultimately receive their salaries from American taxpayers. Yet those taxpayers were being prevented from hearing about the scientific knowledge their money had funded.
The issue appears to have first reared its head right at the beginning of the Bush administration. On January 24, 2001, only days after Bush’s inauguration, Jana Goldman, a NOAA public-affairs officer assigned to GFDL, had requested to be forwarded all media requests concerning the key climate-related news story of the day (and a particularly sensitive one at that): the newly released IPCC report. “If you get any press requests for IPCC please bump them to public affairs before you agree to an interview,” Goldman e-mailed to GFDL climate modeler Ronald Stouffer, one of Knutson’s colleagues. In retrospect, Stouffer’s reply reads like the opening salvo in what would become a years-long struggle over how journalists’ requests to interview GFDL scientists would be handled:
Can I ask why this is the policy? It seems cumbersome at best. If this policy is implemented, it will greatly cut down on NOAA scientist interviews. We scientists are hard to track down. I think a reporter will just go somewhere else if we make it hard for them. The IPCC story is widely available . . .
What would happen if I sent a reporter to you or Scott? Assuming they still wanted to talk with me, they would then have to re-contact me. Seems a lot more work for me. It is at least one if not 2 more interruptions in my day.
—Ron
The issue did not appear to escalate right away, however. Despite her initial request concerning the IPCC report, by mid-2001 Goldman was asking merely to be kept “in the loop” about interview requests. GFDL researchers like Stouffer took less issue with that type of a policy, which did not bring the public-affairs staff into the process in a way that might delay or otherwise impede press interviews. And so the scientists wrote regular e-mails describing their interactions with the media.
In late 2003, though, a flare-up occurred that seemed to presage a tighter press policy. Kevin Trenberth had collaborated with NOAA scientist Thomas Karl on an article for Science magazine that strongly attributed recent warming to human activities. “Anthropogenic climate change is now likely to continue for many centuries,” it read. “We are venturing into the unknown with climate, and its associated impacts could be quite disruptive.” But when the study came out, media calls to Karl were apparently routed instead to a senior NOAA official who debunked and criticized the article. Usually that’s a take journalists hear on their second or third phone call (if they get that far), not their first. Trenberth called what had happened “unconscionable.”
By mid-2004, rules for interacting with the press had been officially codified and published. A written NOAA policy required agency scientists to refer all national media requests, as well as all requests on “controversial” issues, to public-affairs officers prior to responding. It was no longer okay for the scientists simply to fire off notification e-mails after they’d already talked to reporters.
And in terms of its actual implementation, the new policy seems to have been even more constraining. Scientists like Stouffer were now having to get prior approval or clearance before doing press interviews. This represented a considerable step beyond mere notification, and potentially placed public-affairs officials, sensitive to various political pressures (including those coming from the Department of Commerce, under which NOAA is subsumed), in the position of deciding which scientists could speak and which could not. In fact, in many cases the scientists first had to write out long explanations of what they would say if given permission to be interviewed. Meanwhile, public-affairs officers sometimes sat in on or listened to these interviews, reinforcing the sense that the scientists had better be careful what they say.
Also in relation to the new policy, Goldman asked to know about any papers coming out in scientific journals on which GFDL scientists were lead or second authors. When GFDL deputy director Brian Gross asked whether the request “pretty much covers every possible scientific and technical publication,” Goldman responded, “You betcha, especially in the current political climate’ (pun intended).”
It’s not unreasonable for a government agency to require some type of notification from its scientists when they have a paper coming out, or when they do a media interview. If these scientists are generating news through their comments or their work, administration officials may have to respond to that news, and could be blindsided if not kept in the loop about it. And of course the Clinton administration had had media policies of its own. But in practice these do not appear to have been nearly as constraining, notes climate modeler Anthony Broccoli, who worked at GFDL during both administrations, leaving for Rutgers in 2003. From Broccoli’s perspective, something changed during Bush’s first term in office but after his own departure from GFDL. “My experience prior to that time was not as restricted,” he comments. Adds Stouffer: “It evolved from notification to clearance over time.” Stouffer can understand the need for the former, but he bristled under the latter—especially because he believes that pre-clearance often effectively prevented him from speaking to the press.
In some cases, the information-control processes forced upon NOAA climate researchers can only be called ridiculous. For example, GFDL atmospheric scientist Venkatachalam Ramaswamy—“Ram,” as his fellow scientists call him—co-authored a study published in February 2006 in Science on the cooling of the lower stratosphere, which the study explained by invoking both greenhouse gas emissions and natural factors. Ramaswamy is a leading climate scientist highly involved with the IPCC process, and his results can hardly be called controversial—certainly not by the standards of much else in climate research (such as the Emanuel and Webster papers). Yet curiously, the NOAA press release that was supposed to announce the paper didn’t appear until several days after the study had come out. Ramaswamy had to liberate his non-NOAA coauthors to write their own press releases because he could not get clearance for his own in time.
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Later, the cause of the delay became apparent: NOAA and the Department of Commerce had set up a Byzantine thirteen-step review process for the clearance of press releases. A document had to wend its way through public-affairs, policy, and political branches of NOAA, and finally past the Department of Commerce’s public-affairs office as well, before being disseminated. Not only did this process give ample opportunities for political figures to edit the text; it took about three weeks from start to finish. As Ramaswamy wrote to Goldman:
Any updates on the “clearance”? I suppose there are 2 sorts of clearances—one for the press release itself and the other for me to talk to the “press” should they call.
Unlike some of his colleagues, Ramaswamy has not had many problems with the public-affairs process while working at GFDL (though an official did listen in on one of his interviews). But of the press-release incident he says: “I don’t know why it was delayed beyond the publication date, but whatever the reason was, those kinds of things should not really happen.”
Compared with Ramaswamy, GFDL climate modeler Ron Stouffer, a frank and even at times blunt researcher who is an expert on the thermohaline circulation, had more colorful (and troubling) encounters with the NOAA public-affairs process. At least as of mid-2004, Stouffer was having his interview requests pre-cleared by Goldman. (She happened to be GFDL’s main public-affairs contact during the Bush administration, but she had also worked in the Clinton administration and the scientists don’t blame her for the NOAA policies she had to implement.) As Stouffer wrote to a reporter with National Geographic News in response to a request in April of that year, “If there is no problems from above, I would be willing to do the interview.” When the interview did happen, a NOAA public affairs official named Kent Laborde listened in. A month later, another official sent Stouffer “internal noaa talking points” on how to address the subject of abrupt climate change, as might result from a hypothesized shutdown of the thermohaline circulation.
“How close to the talking points do I need to stay?” Stouffer asked in reply.
All of this happened before NOAA’s 2004 media policy kicked in. When it did, the transition wasn’t exactly comfortable. As Stouffer confessed to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times that September, he had knowingly broken the “new rules” by failing to clear an interview they had done about computer modeling of the climate—and indeed, was “breaking the rules yet again by replying directly to you.” While Stouffer said he was “not in any trouble that I know of,” the chilling nature of the situation—as well as its absurdity—was well captured in a parody of the Times article that fellow researcher John Lanzante sent to Stouffer:
Ronald J. Stouffer, a modeler at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., noted that many competing simulations had been created by independent teams using differ ent methods—and they all showed warming, as he picked up his hat, pink slip in hand, and headed out the door of his spacious office for the last time. . . .
And somewhere, John Lanzante, the sun about to set, was sticking his head out of his hole in the ground, counting his blessings that they didn’t quote him saying pretty much the same thing while in his semi-comatose state, having jumped out of bed to answer the phone to talk to the NY Times reporter . . .
“The bad news for you all, is that you are still stuck with me,” Stouffer wrote back.
Parody aside, it seems unlikely that Stouffer would have been fired for doing the New York Times interview without permission. But in light of the sensitivity of the climate issue in the Bush administration, he had good reason to be worried about other consequences. As he explained in an interview, “If you break one of the NOAA rules, I guess there’s a whole wide range of disciplinary things that NOAA can do to you, from a letter in your personnel folder, to nothing, to being fired at the extreme.”
As of mid-2005 Stouffer was playing by the rules, having his interview requests preapproved. By late that year, however, reporters weren’t merely asking about the science; they were also following up on rumors that NOAA’s researchers had been effectively muzzled. Stouffer refused to talk to one of these muckrakers. As he later summarized for Goldman (without naming the journalist):
The reporter got quite upset with me. I asked what did he expect? He knew I could not talk, yet he called anyway. It was not the most positive NOAA scientist-reporter interaction.
The time wasn’t quite ripe for the problems at NOAA to burst into the media. Discomfort, however, was mounting. Stouffer’s own experience included having NOAA officials sometimes listen in on his media interviews and having to provide detailed advance write-ups of what he would say if interviewed. Furthermore, he had seen the number of interviews in which he actually ended up participating drop off steeply. The preapproval process—which took, on average, two to three days—was evidently too great a deterrent, given reporters’ short deadlines. Stouffer characterized cases in which a journalist’s interest in interviewing him disappeared before he’d received approval as a “pocket veto.” This may have been the most pervasive effect of the NOAA policy: Journalists, knowing how it worked, stopped requesting interviews in the first place.
“You quickly train the reporters not to call NOAA scientists, right?” explains Stouffer. “And that’s exactly what happened.”
Following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent media storm—which included, as one of its subsidiary narratives, questions about the role of global warming in hurricane intensification—the tensions at NOAA rose dramatically. When Goldman notified GFDL that the Commerce Department wanted to “coordinate” on all “Katrina-related, national inquiries,” hurricane modeler Morris Bender commented: “Most of the national media seem to understand the restrictions being placed on government scientists.” Bender added that journalists were already going to an outside scientist who collaborated with GFDL when they needed quotes for their stories, and “maybe that is all for the better.” Within weeks another e-mail had gone out to ensure that NOAA employees complied with the official media policy. By late November there was no mistaking it—interview requests were going to be closely scrutinized. As GFDL director Ants Leetmaa informed one of the lab’s climate scientists, Isaac Held, “in theory jana needs to approve of the interviews ahead of time.”
Yet at the same time, scientists from other parts of NOAA—especially the National Hurricane Center—not only seemed to be talking more freely, but were putting out what sounded like an official line on hurricanes and global warming, just as they had during the 2004 season. They were attributing increased hurricane activity since 1995 to a “natural cycle” in the Atlantic basin, and nothing more. And their statements were, in turn, being used by anti-global warming activists as well as some in the media—including in a major editorial in USA Today—to debunk the notion of a strong hurricane-climate link.
On September 20, 2005, the day that Hurricane Rita passed Key West and headed into the Gulf, National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield testified before the U.S. Senate. The period of intense Atlantic hurricane activity that had begun in 1995, Mayfield said, had not been “enhanced substantially” by global warming. Mayfield did not even cite or mention the recently published papers in Science and Nature, which suggested otherwise, in his written testimony. In response to a question from Alaska senator Ted Stevens, Mayfield stated: “Without invoking global warming, I think that just the natural variability alone is what [recent hurricane activity] can be attributed to.”
In October 7 testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Mayfield truly bent over backwards to keep global warming out of the picture. He was asked by Republican congressman Vernon Ehlers of Michigan for “a little futurism. . . . What is the future outlook with respect to both hurricane frequency and intensity during the next fifty to one hundred years?” Knutson’s modeling studies, as well as the maximum-potential-intensity theories of Emanuel and Holland, suggest that global warming can be expected to influence hurricanes in the future even if it is not yet clearly influencing them. Indeed, the uncontroversial 1998 consensus had stated as much. But Mayfield dodged any mention of global warming in his reply, in the process ignoring that prior consensus as well as the newly published work. His words on this occasion were truly extraordinary, because even as he noted the importance of sea-surface temperatures to hurricane activity, Mayfield then ascribed Atlantic sea-temperature changes exclusively to “cycles” that would “very likely continue,” entirely omitting the role of global warming in heating the oceans.
Mayfield’s adherence to what Emanuel has called the NOAA “party line” was reflected by other scientists at the agency. As the record 2005 hurricane season drew to an apparent close on November 29—at the time, no one expected to see a Hurricane Epsilon or a Tropical Storm Zeta—NOAA held a press conference that featured its administrator, Vice-Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, Jr., and Gerry Bell, a meteorologist with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center who produces the agency’s seasonal hurricane forecasts. Unsurprisingly, Bell found himself peppered with questions about global warming and hurricanes from assembled reporters. In response, he entirely dismissed the notion that global warming might have played any role in the pattern of increased storm activity since 1995 or in the record 2005 season, stating that although Atlantic waters were “two to three degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal” that year, this change could be attributed solely to a “multi-decadal cycle” and was “not related to greenhouse warming.” Bell, again, didn’t acknowledge that ongoing global warming was causing warmer ocean temperatures.
In a simultaneous article published on its Web site, NOAA went still farther, asserting that the views expressed by Bell and Mayfield were a matter of broad agreement at the agency: “There is consensus among NOAA hurricane researchers and forecasters that recent increases in hurricane activity are primarily the result of natural fluctuations in the tropical climate system known as the tropical multi-decadal signal.” Nowhere did the release mention the work of NOAA’s own Tom Knutson suggesting that global warming might increase the risk of Category 5 storms in coming decades. In fact, even then Knutson and the other GFDL modelers were working on a study attributing the warming of the Atlantic’s main hurricane development region to human influences.
If Knutson seemed a probable dissenter from his agency’s “party line,” it’s worth noting that during the Clinton administration, NOAA had taken a far less dismissive view on the basis of what, at the time, constituted considerably less evidence. In a February 12, 1998, press re-lease, NOAA announced, “Hurricanes May Be Intensified by Global Warming,” citing earlier work by Knutson and his colleagues. And on April 18, 2000—Earth Day—the former administrator of NOAA, Dr. D. James Baker, gave a speech alongside Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans to highlight the risks posed to the city by global warming. Noting that storm-surge models suggested that New Orleans’s levees could be overtopped during a bad storm, Baker said, “With sea level rise, the danger to New Orleans becomes even greater.” He also discussed changes to hurricanes that might be brought about by global warming: “The sci entists cannot say if we will have more hurricanes, but mostly agree that the hurricanes that we do have will be more severe.”
International experts also seemed more open-minded than the present leaders of NOAA. At a December 2005 news conference Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, was asked whether global warming was linked in some way to the dramatic 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. “The honest answer is: we don’t know if it is,” Jarraud stated.
Eventually, the internal and external grumblings over NOAA’s hard line made their way into the press, and the agency became case study number two of the Bush administration’s repression of government climate scientists. The first was the public revelation by NASA’s James Hansen, in early 2006, about attempts by his agency’s own public-affairs staff to clamp down on his statements about “dangerous” global warming.
As reported by Andrew Revkin in a New York Times page-one story on Sunday, January 29, Hansen claimed NASA public-affairs officials had tried to block his ability to speak out about the urgency of addressing climate change. In particular, Hansen said he’d been targeted following his speech at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in December 2005—the talk delivered just before Emanuel’s own not entirely apolitical presentation, which had drawn attention to an apparent crackdown on GFDL scientists in relation to the hurricane—climate question. Hansen’s story had an easy-to-grasp narrative that prompted immediate and sustained outrage. It turned out that his would-be oppressor was an officer in the NASA press office, George Deutsch, who was in his early twenties and (it was later revealed) had not officially graduated from college at the time. The notion that the Bush administration would empower someone like Deutsch to block a legend like James Hansen from speaking out about climate risks was staggering.
The Times story set in motion a series of events that gave new legs to the narrative of scientist suppression in the Bush administration. When Times global warming ace Revkin broke the Hansen story, he knew of similar allegations about NOAA. They had already been made public by Emanuel at the AGU meeting, and Revkin also knew firsthand the constraints under which Ron Stouffer had been laboring at GFDL. Still, Revkin and other reporters had been unable to get a NOAA scientist to go on record with complaints until Hansen blazed the trail. “The Hansen piece uncorked a bottle,” remembers Revkin. “It clearly made it easier for a lot of scientists to talk more freely.”
Hansen continued to stir the pot in statements made at a conference in New York, where he claimed, just as Emanuel had previously, that he knew NOAA scientists who were afraid to speak out about efforts at information control. Rather hyperbolically, Hansen liked the situation to “Nazi Germany.” As for having “minders” on press calls, Hansen noted that while NOAA claimed this was to protect the scientists doing the interviews, “if you buy that one please see me at the break, because there’s a bridge down the street I’d like to sell you.” The words were quoted in the Washington Post.
And so the pressure on NOAA began to build. Around the same time, another article, this one in the New Republic, exposed the agency’s one-sided public claims on the hurricane-climate issue and contained further allegations from Emanuel, Curry, and others that there had been a clampdown on government scientists’ ability to speak to the media. Climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who had worked at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory for thirty years and had been its second director (after Smagorinsky) from 1984 to 2000, was quoted as saying to the New Republics John Judis: “I know a lot of people who would love to talk to you, but they don’t dare. They are worried about getting fired.”
Internally at GFDL, meanwhile, Mahlman’s successor, Ants Leetmaa—an oceanographer perhaps best known for his successful long-range prediction of the extremely strong El Nino event of 1997—watched the gathering media storm. In an e-mail about the New Republic article to a number of agency officials, Leetmaa voiced his frustration:
This is an embarrassment that NOAA could have easily avoided
by inserting something like “impacts of global warming cannot be precluded” in the various press releases and Hill testimonies.
A “one-NOAA” approach to press releases would have prevented this from happening. A more humble-not knowing
everything approach would also have enabled us to highlight our research program, e.g. we are actively trying to understand the phenomena.
“One NOAA” was Vice-Admiral Lautenbacher’s slogan to signify how the agency ought to be unified across its many disparate branches. In the e-mail, Leetma also bluntly called into question the assertions of the hurricane specialists about natural cycles:
It is also disconcerting scientifically that synoptic meteorologists were making decadal hurricane projections based on a phenomenon (Atlantic Decadal ‘Oscillation’) of which they know nothing and which might or might not in recent years be forced by anthropogenic effects. The arguments on both sides of this “debate” rely on correlating hurricane activity with tropical Atlantic SST anomalies. We were taught early in our careers that correlation does not prove causality.
This e-mail powerfully demonstrates that a very distinguished scientist at NOAA dissented from the “party line” that had been articulated by the agency. But the GFDL perspective was not getting into the media nearly as easily as the other point of view. Judis’s reporting, and the work of other journalists following the story, had been right on the money in this respect. Following the New Republic story, GFDL modeler Tom Delworth even drafted an internal critique of the NOAA Web site article that claimed a “consensus” on hurricanes and global warming. The cautiously written note warned that “to state in absolute terms that greenhouse warming has no role is premature at best,” especially given the strong evidence of warming seas due to climate change. “To the extent that ocean warming plays a role in modulating hurricane activity, the role of greenhouse warming cannot be excluded,” Delworth continued. He recommended that the NOAA Web site posting be updated to reflect a more complete view of the science, or to state that the positions it expressed weren’t a matter of consensus at the agency.
Reporters couldn’t see all of this activity going on behind the scenes, but they heard the rumors and smelled blood. The media couldn’t necessarily be counted upon to avoid misleading the public—and jerking it around—by episodically bringing up the subject of global warming in the context of land-falling hurricanes. As Andrew Revkin has put it, journalists succumb all too easily to the “tyranny of the news peg,” and Katrina was about as big a news peg as they come. Yet at the same time, reporters excel at exposing wrongdoing and malfeasance in government. And now they had NOAA in their sights.
All the reporters needed to break the story wide open was a source, a way of substantiating the claims that scientists were being suppressed. In short, they needed a courageous whistleblower. It was only a matter of time before more revelations appeared, and NOAA higher-ups seemed to get the hint. Lautenbacher (“the Admiral,” as internal e-mails dubbed him) soon sent out a message to NOAA employees saying the reports of muzzling were false and encouraging the agency’s scientists to speak “freely and openly.” Meanwhile, the offending NOAA Web site article was changed through the addition of an online editor’s note, which backed away from the previous claim of “consensus” on the hurricane-climate relationship.
All of this, however, seemed something of a forced concession. The update to the NOAA site, for example, ungenerously added a hard-to-see clarification at the very bottom of the Web page containing the article. As the GFDL scientists e-mailed the revised link around, they noted the placement. “You will find near the bottom of the article a newly inserted Editor’s note,” wrote Tom Delworth. “Look carefully because it is easy to miss.”
Lautenbacher’s assertion that no agency scientists had been discouraged from speaking was also about to be undermined. In a February 16 article in the Wall Street Journal, Antonio Regalado and Jim Carlton reported the first on-the-record allegations from NOAA scientists regarding agency efforts to control their statements to the media. Their story prominently featured Tom Knutson, who had several troubling tales to relate. In October 2005, Knutson said, public-affairs officials turned down a request from CNBC television to interview him after calling and asking how he would respond to questions about hurricanes and climate. One question concerned whether a trend was emerging in Atlantic hurricanes. “To that, I said I would respond that I think there’s a possibility of a trend emerging, even in the Atlantic,” remembers Knutson. “And this person said they would get back to me, and then I just got a voicemail a few minutes later, saying, ‘Tom, about that interview, it’s been turned down.’” On another occasion, Knutson had been invited to appear on Ron Reagan’s show on MSNBC. But after notifying public affairs, he says he got another voice mail saying, “The White House said no.”
Later, e-mails exposed by Salon.com showed what had happened to Knutson’s CNBC interview. The media request had passed on from NOAA public-affairs officials to the Department of Commerce, where another official, Chuck Fuqua, had asked to know “what is Knutson’s position on global warming vs. decadal cycles? Is he consistant [sic] with Bell and Landsea?” An e-mail from NOAA’s Kent Laborde replied:
He is consistant [sic], but a bit of a different animal. He’s purely a numerical modeler. He takes existing data from observation and projects forward. His take is that even with worst case projections of green house gas concentrations, there will be a very small increase in hurricane intensity that won’t be realized until almost 100 years from now.
To this Fuqua responded, “Why can’t we have one of the other guys on then?” In addition to being an empiricist on matters of science, Fuqua had previously been in charge of running media for the Republican National Convention.
When he learned of this smoking-gun e-mail, Landsea—to his credit—was outraged. In an interview, he said, “I would hope that this [Department of Commerce] guy would leave or be fired or something, ’cause that’s just not appropriate for scientists to be censored like that.” Landsea added, “I feel like I’ve been kind of used like a little pawn in this . . . I didn’t know what was going on.” What was going on was this: Through the public-affairs process, NOAA and the Department of Commerce had made it much easier for Landsea to express his scientific opinion than for Knutson to do so. While Knutson had interviews turned down when he sought clearance, Landsea had been given free rein to answer any and all press calls. “I was instructed, basically, if a reporter asked you, you just do the interview, and you let us know about [it],” he told me. In fact, Landsea had been all over the media, including high-profile appearances on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and CNN.
If only by their starkly unequal treatment of interview requests concerning these two scientists—who were both leading experts on the subject of hurricanes and global warming—NOAA and the Department of Commerce were gaming the release of information and trying to shift debate in their favored direction. At the time he told his story to the Wall Street Journal, however, Knutson had nothing but his word to back up what had happened to him. Still, his decision to talk to the media had been partly inspired by Hansen’s example. “I felt a certain sort of kinship to that, that here he was being muzzled, and it had happened to me as well,” Knutson explained. Knutson was younger than Hansen, however, and not as famous—differences that were not lost on Hansen himself, who e-mailed Stouffer when the news came out: “Very courageous of Tom, as a mid-career person, to come out so strongly!”
And in effect, by talking to the media, by drawing attention to abuses and forcing the Bush administration to deal with the subsequent storm of negative press, Hansen and Knutson won out in the long term. They had gone public, and they had not been fired (after all, firing them would have generated even more negative publicity). Instead, they had generated outrage as well as solidarity.
And so, citing Lautenbacher’s statement about NOAA scientists speaking “freely and openly,” GFDL and its researchers stopped cooperating with any preapproval process for their interview requests. (They did not participate in one for this book.) The apparent contradiction between the official NOAA public-affairs policy and the loftier statements of “the Admiral” about speaking “freely and openly” still left them in a “crappy situation,” as Stouffer puts it—at least as long as that much criticized policy remained in place. (As this book went to press the Department of Commerce had just released a new policy that triggered further controversy.)
Still, the scientists had learned to fight back. Furthermore, at least if Lautenbacher’s words were to be taken at face value, NOAA would be cleaning up its act. Scientists would be allowed to speak, and the agency would no longer try to control the flow of information on controversial subjects. After all, the bad publicity should have made it obvious that trying to artificially shape the way knowledge gets released, though it might be essential at a government intelligence agency, is quite simply bad policy at a scientific one. Soon enough the press finds out, and the ensuing scandal causes far more trouble than it’s worth from a public-relations standpoint—not to mention damaging the credibility of the agency as a whole.
Revelations during the 2006 hurricane season, however, would subsequently prove that NOAA had not, in fact, learned this most obvious of lessons. Or perhaps the agency’s leaders had learned it, but simply lacked the power to rein in politicos at the Department of Commerce. Either way, the hurricane-climate fight, in addition to setting scientists against one another, would further contribute to the undermining of one of the leading scientific agencies of the U.S. government.