It is truly sad to see political appointees undermining the superb, life-saving work of NOAA’s talented and dedicated career servants. Scientific integrity at a science agency matters.
This rewriting history to satisfy an ego diminishes NOAA. We don’t want to get the point where science is determined by politics rather than science and facts. And I’m afraid this is an example where this is beginning to occur.
Until yesterday, Trump’s boo-boo and focus upon Dorian’s storm track was merely an amusing example of his incompetence and narcissism. With NOAA’s rebuke of its own scientists late Friday, however, it became something vastly more ominous: A scientific agency has been suborned to the protection of a madman’s vanity at the cost of plain facts in the public domain; it has become an accomplice in distorting and perverting reality.
Whomever issued that craven statement failed an ethical duty to resign, and ought to be fired just as soon as the next president is sworn-in.