Let’s wait until they actually revise something, this may just be the USA equivalent of us Canadians setting up a Royal Commission to study it in the hopes we all die in the meantime.
The money shot here is;
“ NOAA asserts that its claims that the dataset demonstrates the detection and attribution of changes in climate are a matter of policy and not information quality”.
Right there, data doesn’t matter where the narrative is concerned.
Here I will enter my usual "complaint." Please spell out or at least point to what should be done instead. How should "Billion (20xx) Dollar Disasters" be redesigned?
And maybe a nod of the head at how the redesign would be used to improve mitigation and adaption _policies._
Why does Roger or anyone need to do anything to prove something isn’t happening?
Shouldn’t you have to prove something is happening?
Despite all rumors to the contrary, wealth is expanding, I had a reminder on Friday, I received an email from a luxury sports marketing group to attend the Masters in 2025
Just for Sunday, 4 people, $25k usd.
In 2012, 3 days was $18k
If you do the math, per person day has jumped from $1500 to over $6k
I think from a policy perspective, if NOAA was just honest and stated there hasn't been a statistical detection in the increased frequency of extreme weather events and the primary reason why billion dollar disasters are increasing is due to more people, property, and wealth, especially in higher risk areas. Then maybe more policy attention is given to the real cause of the problem instead of the made up cause. If you just compare aerial photos of Southern California, the Florida coastline, and Houston, Texas, from 1980 to today, it becomes very obvious what's causing the increase. The United States has increased its population by about 120 million people since that time, and the median home price has increased by $365,000 (much faster than CPI), and all Metropolitan areas and most rural areas have seen significant growth in infrastructure. NOAA is being deceitful in order to support climate alarmism, and they have no intention of "redesigning" the report. We clearly have an integrity problem with science, journalism, and education. It's very totalitarian.
Roger, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon on the NOAA website. It's an extraordinary piece of work that seems reasonably well organized and straight forward to navigate and find information. It's difficult to imagine the time and money spent on developing and maintaining the site. From a user standpoint it is money well spent.
It was straightforward to search the website and confirm that NOAA has QA processes defined that should address all of the issues concerning the BDD raised here at THB and in your recent paper. A document like the BDD (if developed and maintained by NOAA) should be subject to the highest level of QA which is actually defined to be well beyond the type of peer review associated with publishing a paper in even the most prestigious journals.
Your work makes it clear that NOAA has not met their own QA requirements in any significant way. Their 10 page response to your inquiry confirms these shortcomings. They have dug themselves a deep hole. It will be interesting to watch them try to wiggle out of it.
NOAA doesn't care. It's clear they intended to be deceitful with the BDD report in order to influence popular opinion and policy...and promote the religion known as climate alarmism. Just the simple fact that NOAA combines extreme weather data with totally unrelated economic data (data influenced by more people, more property, more wealth, and way more inflation above and beyond the CPI adjustment), in order to "prove" that extreme weather events are increasing makes this ridiculous report laughable in terms of peer review. I can review it in less than one minute and conclude that it's 100% pure crap. It's propaganda disguised as science. But I do applaud Roger for his work in defense of scientific integrity. I wish the mainstream media would cover this story.
In looking through the NOAA website it seems that there is an overwhelming message of climate alarmism permeating just about everything. The BDD is referenced repeatedly.
After downloading and reading the 10 page response, my head is spinning. There's so much information, so many links, and so many variables and ways of quantifying and qualifying data. My impression remains that what I am witnessing is motivated reasoning. Peer review is surely needed, but peer reviewers themselves will most likely be overwhelmed and retreat to their fallback position and biases. Kudos to Roger P. Jr. for illuminating and trying to make sense of this thorny subject that claims to inform policy, but which, in my opinion, is is more about shaping than informing policy..
One of the great things about Substack and THB is that it allows me to share a bit from inside the sausage factory that is science in policy and politics.
Doug, you are absolutely correct that there is so much information and complexities, along with healthy doses of motivated reasoning all around, for all of us.
Make no mistake, NOAA's admissions here are significant.
Glad you heard back and this is a really interesting continuing story for me. Two questions: 1) Do you think NOAA will actually implement any of the changes you suggest or address the transparency problem? 2) As you claim “The dataset is a clever public relations gimmick, to be sure, but it should never be used in scientific research, climate assessment reports, or as a grounding for policy.”, I do agree with you that a dataset without unknown origins or information about it makes a scientific study severely flawed. But, what do you think happens to all the published journal articles that have inevitably used this dataset?
A small but important win. Congratulations! As others have noted, the response is mainly in the vein of "we made a formal error but it does not matter" - they seemingly do not understand that you have removed a wheel from their wagon. and while they scurry to one corner to balance on the three remaining wheels, they have yet to realize that the next bump is going to re-arrange their world dramatically.
The BDD can no longer be used as basis for peer-reviewed research. That NOAA seem to not understand the implications of this is remarkable. But you know.
Keep chipping away at them. The wagon will topple.
You have made progress when others like me have failed attempts.
One attempt in Australia has been about routine daily temperature records used eventually by agencies like Hadley and GISS to compile global average temperatures. I am trying to discover if Australia's Bureau of Meteorology sends adjusted or raw data. If adjusted data are sent, then presumably there would need to be justification under some form of mandated quality checking as you have shown with insurance.
There does seem to be a strong residual desire by NOAA in its responses to you to preserve its comfort.
If Human life were their highest value, and their belief “climate change” posed the ultimate threat to Human life, how could the scientists at NOAA justify a nonchalant approach to a possible error in identifying “climate change.”
What's interesting to me is to watch the encroachment of "climate scientists" on other sciences.. like redefining indirect costs and hoping no one notices. I wonder how often this happens for other sciences in documents that don't have a Pielke, Jr. reading them?
Your tenacity is commendable but dealing with crap like this response has to be demoralizing to say the least. Do you see any alternative to declaring this a win and moving on? The Bureaucracy always finds a way to have the final say. The response to your request for correction was not prepared by NOAA scientists, it was prepared by functionaries who get paid to make problems go away, not solve them.
Science may be self-correcting but bureaucracies are self-perpetuating. At the end of the day NOAA is a government bureaucracy that employs scientists but is run by politically accountable functionaries.
NOAA admitting that they violated their own procedures and failed to conduct a peer review for a decade and that detection/attribution are policy not science are very big deals.
I don't think its remotely valuable that NOAA responded to your set of questions; they essentially ignored them by rehashing its methods as a claim rebuttal. That is neither valuable nor honest. A friend of mine who taught philosophy in some fine departments once told me that the value of sincerity is vastly overblown when you're dealing with someone who is comfortable with not telling the truth. That they respond and seem to do so soberly matters not one bit if they don't admit failure and change. NOAA just sounds like every other captured outfit. The news media is famous for never apologizing for anything it says regardless of how tendentious or revolting; it will simply say in response to a request for apology, "we did our best with the information we had. Our organization always acts properly and we repudiate any fallacious reporting or maligning of individuals WE cover!" NOAA is actually worse than that. It doesn't even tacitly admit its failure through misdirection; it just buries its institutional head in the sand and plows on. It is sort of nice that it says it should align itself in some manner with IPCC.
The bureaucratic art of writing a response like this is to ensure that there are no quotable quotes. On that the bureaucrats succeeded, but make no mistake the response is devastating - taken seriously it really means the BDD should not be used in research or policy.
Here on THB we have often discussed the idea that science is self-correcting. Actually, this Billion Dollar Losses situation proves the opposite. Scientists are all too often married to MIMB behavior. (My idea, my baby) They are no more eager to admit their faults than any other class of homo sapiens. Science is corrected only when external critics like Roger prove the original authors are fooling themselves and the public.
Let’s wait until they actually revise something, this may just be the USA equivalent of us Canadians setting up a Royal Commission to study it in the hopes we all die in the meantime.
The money shot here is;
“ NOAA asserts that its claims that the dataset demonstrates the detection and attribution of changes in climate are a matter of policy and not information quality”.
Right there, data doesn’t matter where the narrative is concerned.
They just said it out loud?
Here I will enter my usual "complaint." Please spell out or at least point to what should be done instead. How should "Billion (20xx) Dollar Disasters" be redesigned?
And maybe a nod of the head at how the redesign would be used to improve mitigation and adaption _policies._
What Mike said.
Why does Roger or anyone need to do anything to prove something isn’t happening?
Shouldn’t you have to prove something is happening?
Despite all rumors to the contrary, wealth is expanding, I had a reminder on Friday, I received an email from a luxury sports marketing group to attend the Masters in 2025
Just for Sunday, 4 people, $25k usd.
In 2012, 3 days was $18k
If you do the math, per person day has jumped from $1500 to over $6k
More money means more gets destroyed
Nothing to do with climate.
No matter how they try.
I think from a policy perspective, if NOAA was just honest and stated there hasn't been a statistical detection in the increased frequency of extreme weather events and the primary reason why billion dollar disasters are increasing is due to more people, property, and wealth, especially in higher risk areas. Then maybe more policy attention is given to the real cause of the problem instead of the made up cause. If you just compare aerial photos of Southern California, the Florida coastline, and Houston, Texas, from 1980 to today, it becomes very obvious what's causing the increase. The United States has increased its population by about 120 million people since that time, and the median home price has increased by $365,000 (much faster than CPI), and all Metropolitan areas and most rural areas have seen significant growth in infrastructure. NOAA is being deceitful in order to support climate alarmism, and they have no intention of "redesigning" the report. We clearly have an integrity problem with science, journalism, and education. It's very totalitarian.
Roger, I spent a couple of hours this afternoon on the NOAA website. It's an extraordinary piece of work that seems reasonably well organized and straight forward to navigate and find information. It's difficult to imagine the time and money spent on developing and maintaining the site. From a user standpoint it is money well spent.
It was straightforward to search the website and confirm that NOAA has QA processes defined that should address all of the issues concerning the BDD raised here at THB and in your recent paper. A document like the BDD (if developed and maintained by NOAA) should be subject to the highest level of QA which is actually defined to be well beyond the type of peer review associated with publishing a paper in even the most prestigious journals.
Your work makes it clear that NOAA has not met their own QA requirements in any significant way. Their 10 page response to your inquiry confirms these shortcomings. They have dug themselves a deep hole. It will be interesting to watch them try to wiggle out of it.
NOAA doesn't care. It's clear they intended to be deceitful with the BDD report in order to influence popular opinion and policy...and promote the religion known as climate alarmism. Just the simple fact that NOAA combines extreme weather data with totally unrelated economic data (data influenced by more people, more property, more wealth, and way more inflation above and beyond the CPI adjustment), in order to "prove" that extreme weather events are increasing makes this ridiculous report laughable in terms of peer review. I can review it in less than one minute and conclude that it's 100% pure crap. It's propaganda disguised as science. But I do applaud Roger for his work in defense of scientific integrity. I wish the mainstream media would cover this story.
In looking through the NOAA website it seems that there is an overwhelming message of climate alarmism permeating just about everything. The BDD is referenced repeatedly.
On Colorado Public Radio this morning:
https://www.cpr.org/2024/08/21/denver-hailstorm-in-may-caused-nearly-2-billion-in-damage
It is an effective gimmick!
"Climate change is also supercharging a number of these different extremes that lead to billion-dollar disasters"
It really is!
After downloading and reading the 10 page response, my head is spinning. There's so much information, so many links, and so many variables and ways of quantifying and qualifying data. My impression remains that what I am witnessing is motivated reasoning. Peer review is surely needed, but peer reviewers themselves will most likely be overwhelmed and retreat to their fallback position and biases. Kudos to Roger P. Jr. for illuminating and trying to make sense of this thorny subject that claims to inform policy, but which, in my opinion, is is more about shaping than informing policy..
One of the great things about Substack and THB is that it allows me to share a bit from inside the sausage factory that is science in policy and politics.
Doug, you are absolutely correct that there is so much information and complexities, along with healthy doses of motivated reasoning all around, for all of us.
Make no mistake, NOAA's admissions here are significant.
Glad you heard back and this is a really interesting continuing story for me. Two questions: 1) Do you think NOAA will actually implement any of the changes you suggest or address the transparency problem? 2) As you claim “The dataset is a clever public relations gimmick, to be sure, but it should never be used in scientific research, climate assessment reports, or as a grounding for policy.”, I do agree with you that a dataset without unknown origins or information about it makes a scientific study severely flawed. But, what do you think happens to all the published journal articles that have inevitably used this dataset?
A small but important win. Congratulations! As others have noted, the response is mainly in the vein of "we made a formal error but it does not matter" - they seemingly do not understand that you have removed a wheel from their wagon. and while they scurry to one corner to balance on the three remaining wheels, they have yet to realize that the next bump is going to re-arrange their world dramatically.
The BDD can no longer be used as basis for peer-reviewed research. That NOAA seem to not understand the implications of this is remarkable. But you know.
Keep chipping away at them. The wagon will topple.
Well done Dr. This is why I am happy to support your work. Keep going!
Roger, You are a gem.
You have made progress when others like me have failed attempts.
One attempt in Australia has been about routine daily temperature records used eventually by agencies like Hadley and GISS to compile global average temperatures. I am trying to discover if Australia's Bureau of Meteorology sends adjusted or raw data. If adjusted data are sent, then presumably there would need to be justification under some form of mandated quality checking as you have shown with insurance.
There does seem to be a strong residual desire by NOAA in its responses to you to preserve its comfort.
Thank you Geoff Sherrington
Your aim is true, Roger.
I'm sorry. NOAA's response is inadequate. If it's hosed, fix it!
If Human life were their highest value, and their belief “climate change” posed the ultimate threat to Human life, how could the scientists at NOAA justify a nonchalant approach to a possible error in identifying “climate change.”
If they can’t find it they have to create it.
“For the greater good”.
What's interesting to me is to watch the encroachment of "climate scientists" on other sciences.. like redefining indirect costs and hoping no one notices. I wonder how often this happens for other sciences in documents that don't have a Pielke, Jr. reading them?
Your tenacity is commendable but dealing with crap like this response has to be demoralizing to say the least. Do you see any alternative to declaring this a win and moving on? The Bureaucracy always finds a way to have the final say. The response to your request for correction was not prepared by NOAA scientists, it was prepared by functionaries who get paid to make problems go away, not solve them.
Science may be self-correcting but bureaucracies are self-perpetuating. At the end of the day NOAA is a government bureaucracy that employs scientists but is run by politically accountable functionaries.
NOAA admitting that they violated their own procedures and failed to conduct a peer review for a decade and that detection/attribution are policy not science are very big deals.
It would be logical for you to participate in, if not lead, the peer review.
That will never happen
That said, I have this Substack
I don't think its remotely valuable that NOAA responded to your set of questions; they essentially ignored them by rehashing its methods as a claim rebuttal. That is neither valuable nor honest. A friend of mine who taught philosophy in some fine departments once told me that the value of sincerity is vastly overblown when you're dealing with someone who is comfortable with not telling the truth. That they respond and seem to do so soberly matters not one bit if they don't admit failure and change. NOAA just sounds like every other captured outfit. The news media is famous for never apologizing for anything it says regardless of how tendentious or revolting; it will simply say in response to a request for apology, "we did our best with the information we had. Our organization always acts properly and we repudiate any fallacious reporting or maligning of individuals WE cover!" NOAA is actually worse than that. It doesn't even tacitly admit its failure through misdirection; it just buries its institutional head in the sand and plows on. It is sort of nice that it says it should align itself in some manner with IPCC.
The bureaucratic art of writing a response like this is to ensure that there are no quotable quotes. On that the bureaucrats succeeded, but make no mistake the response is devastating - taken seriously it really means the BDD should not be used in research or policy.
I should say kudos to you for going to bat for the scientific method!
Here on THB we have often discussed the idea that science is self-correcting. Actually, this Billion Dollar Losses situation proves the opposite. Scientists are all too often married to MIMB behavior. (My idea, my baby) They are no more eager to admit their faults than any other class of homo sapiens. Science is corrected only when external critics like Roger prove the original authors are fooling themselves and the public.