There's been a lot of beating up on NOAA--the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--for squelching the viewpoints of some of its scientists on issues such as global warming and global warming's relation to hurricanes. And there certainly has been some troubling stuff reported on this front in the past by major newspapers. But that doesn't mean NOAA can't clean up its act, and this press release is clearly a huge step in the right direction. Let me quote:
May 1, 2006 -- The region of the tropical Atlantic where many hurricanes originate has warmed by several tenths of a degree Celsius over the 20th century, and new climate model simulations suggest that human activity, such as increasing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, may contribute significantly to this warming. This new finding is one of several conclusions reported in a study by scientists at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., published today in the Journal of Climate.
As I said, NOAA has had problems in the past. But moving forward into the future, it will certainly be a lot harder to make a case that the agency is engaging in routine censorship if it's putting stuff like that into a press release....
