NOAA emails show outrage and panic over Trump’s false claims on Hurricane Dorian

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were upset and outraged last year over a controversial statement issued by the agency that appeared to side with President Donald Trump over its own forecasters on Hurricane Dorian, according to internal emails.

“For an agency founded upon and recognized for determining scientific truths, trusted by the public, and responsible in law to put forward important science information, I find it unconscionable that an anonymous voice inside of NOAA would be found to castigate a dutiful, correct, and loyal (National Weather Service) Forecaster who spoke the truth,” Craig McLean, the acting chief scientist, wrote in a September 7 email to NOAA’s top officials.

His email was among a trove of documents released Friday by NOAA as part of a Freedom of Information Act request from CNN and other news organizations.

The documents show the inner workings of the agency as it grappled with the President’s false claims about Hurricane Dorian.

On September 1, Trump had falsely claimed on Twitter that Alabama “would most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by Hurricane Dorian.

The same day, the NWS’ Birmingham, Alabama, branch tweeted, “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.”

During a September 4 Oval Office briefing, Trump escalated the controversy by displaying an apparently altered map of a NOAA forecast that extended Dorian’s path into Alabama with a black marker.

The map prompted a flurry of media requests to NOAA, leading one agency spokesperson to write to his colleagues: “HELP!!!”

The documents released Friday also show that NOAA officials were aware that the map Trump used was “old and doctored to extend the core into Alabama.”

“Yep, crazy,” the NOAA’s deputy undersecretary for operations wrote in a separate email chain on September 5.

On September 6, NOAA issued a public statement — attributed to an unnamed NOAA spokesperson — disavowing the Birmingham, Alabama, forecasters’ report as “inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.”

The statement was met with swift backlash, as several wrote to criticize the statement as an antithesis to NOAA’s mission of providing accurate and objective scientific information devoid of politics.

In an email, NWS’ director lamented that “the mood out there is pretty ugly.”

“What’s next? Climate science is a hoax? Flabbergasted to leave our forecasters hanging in the political wind,” McLean wrote to NOAA and NWS leadership. McLean publicly announced in September that he would investigate whether NOAA’s backing of Trump over its own forecasters violated its scientific integrity policy.

“This statement is deeply upsetting to NOAA employees that have worked the hurricane and are not fully accurate based on the timeline in question,” a NOAA analyst wrote to the deputy director of communications.

One scientist’s criticism and demand from acting administrator Neil Jacobs to “address this crisis in moral leadership our agency is facing” prompted Jacobs to respond, “You have no idea how hard I’m fighting to keep politics out of science.”

“We are an objective science agency, and we won’t and never will base any decisions on anything other than science,” Jacobs wrote, adding that the “forecast office did the right thing to calm the nerves of citizens.”

The No. 2 official at NOAA, retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, wrote separately asking the scientist to accept Jacobs’ reply as “a sincere acknowledgment of a press release we did not approve or support.”

Emails previously released by NOAA in November showed that the NSW’s Birmingham office wasn’t trying to contradict the President as they were not aware of his tweet.

The New York Times reported back in September that acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney instructed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to pressure NOAA to disavow the NWS’ Birmingham, Alabama, office tweet. The Times also reported that Ross threatened to fire top NOAA employees, which the Commerce Department denied.