National Science Foundation IG Slaps Down Cruz, Inhofe, Paul, Lankford For Attack On Climate Site

In the long and fraught battle to persuade Americans that the Earth’s climate is changing, scientists increasingly have relied on a stalwart ally — television weather forecasters. TV weather people increasingly have been connecting hotter days and nights, extreme weather events, even increases in poison ivy and pollen, to the the planet’s slow and steady warming. Many of those reports have been informed and powered by a nonprofit educational organization, Climate Central. While TV meteorologists have been gobbling up reports and camera-ready graphics on climate change, the work of the New Jersey-based group has alarmed those who seek to cast doubt on the science that defines global warming. Last year, four climate skeptics in the U.S. Senate demanded an investigation of the $4 million in federal funding provided for the Climate Central program, saying it “is not science — it is propagandizing.”

After a nearly yearlong review, however, the National Science Foundation‘s inspector general has rejected the claim by the four Republicans — Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and James M. Inhofe and James Lankford, both of Oklahoma. The inspector general’s review “did not reveal any evidence that limitations on political activity ... were violated,” a memorandum summarizing the investigation said. Ben Strauss, chief executive and chief scientist at Climate Central, said he was pleased but not surprised by the conclusions of the science foundation’s inspector general.

“We were always confident what we were doing was legitimate public education on science, with nothing political about it,” Strauss said. “Weather people are probably the closest thing that millions of Americans have in terms of daily contact with a person with science training,” added Strauss, a Princeton-trained biologist. “It’s obvious that our weather has been behaving in strange and new ways, and we are simply helping weathercasters to help their audiences understand why.”

A growing number of meteorologists have signed up to receive Climate Central briefings and graphics, which they often use on the air. The program started with 197 weathercasters in 2014 and jumped to 644 last year. A little more than halfway into 2019, about 750 meteorologists have requested Climate Central materials, the group said. (An additional 250 journalists also have received the information.)

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he four GOP senators wrote their letter of protest to the National Science Foundation in June 2018. It charged that the agency had “issued several grants which seek to influence political and social debate rather than conduct scientific research.” Addressed to NSF Inspector General Allison Lerner, the letter suggested the agency had strayed from its mission to support science and possibly violated the Hatch Act, the federal law that prohibits federal employees from taking public political positions. The senators said they found it suspicious that Climate Central targeted TV meteorologists, a group once shown in some surveys to have mixed views on the reality of human-caused climate change. The science foundation’s oversight of Climate Central was “egregious,” the senators said, because it supported work “designed to ‘recruit’ experts to a position they did not come to of their own accord as meteorologists.”

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https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-07-23/nsf-climate-central-gop-politicians