House GOP Pressures NOAA Over Promotion of ‘Global Warming’ Narrative

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) is facing scrutiny from Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives over its promotion of data which falsely claims that so-called “global warming” is real.

As the Daily Caller reports, a letter was sent to NOAA Administration Richard Spinrad on Wednesday by members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The letter demanded information from the agency on its “billion dollar disasters” (BDD) dataset, which has been frequently cited by the Biden-Harris administration as evidence that all future natural gas deals and other similar ventures must be halted due to fear of global warming.

The congressional letter further warned that the existence and the use of the BDD data could constitute a violation of NOAA’s own rules on scientific integrity, prioritizing a political agenda over empirical fact and scientific struth. Members also demanded that NOAA provide clarification with regards to its methodology, as well as an explanation of why its dataset does not adjust for variables such as gross domestic product (GDP).

“Since the 1990s, NOAA has published annual reports showing the number of disasters that have cost more than a billion dollars in damages,” the letter reads, in part. “Debate around the validity of the reports’ methodologies has resulted in NOAA making incremental but important changes. Since 2011, the reports’ cost estimates of all past disasters in the dataset have been updated annually to account for inflation in today’s dollars.”

“However, despite adjustments for inflation, the reports have not been adjusted for increases in population or wealth in the same capacity,” the letter adds. “Due to these increases in population and wealth, even mild storms can sometimes appear to cause greater damage today. The lack of updated, comprehensive data in these models raises considerable concern given that these reports have been cited by both Congress and the President as the justification for different federal government actions concerning climate change.”

As recently as 2023, BDD data was cited by the Biden administration in a report on the current state of the climate, and thus was used to justify the administration’s decision to halt all new natural gas exports.

The letter was written by Congressmen Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), Max Miller (R-Ohio), and Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.).

A similar request for NOAA to correct its dataset based on certain variables was made back in January by Roger Pielke Jr., a former professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. The NOAA released a statement in response to Pielke’s request, and referred to that statement when asked to address the more recent congressional criticism.

“NOAA notes that the [request for correction (RFC)] did not identify specific data points that need correcting. In conducting its review of the RFC, NOAA has not identified any data inaccuracies in the Billion Dollar Disaster data set,” said an NOAA spokesman in January. “NOAA has determined the U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters data set meets the threshold for influential scientific information (ISI) under NOAA’s Information Quality Guidelines. As a result, NOAA will review and update its management practices for the data set.”