A couple of interesting things in that report.
The spaghetti models are produced/updated every 15 minutes and are, specifically, not forecasts. They’re simply raw data that meteorologists use to make forecasts. Now, that’s a valid mistake, I wouldn’t have known that, but as I mentioned way upthread, I also wouldn’t have attempted to predict the path of a hurricane.
At some point in there, in seems that Trump may have conflated hurricanes and tropical force winds. But that still means, especially in a case like this, he needs to listen to the experts and parrot what they say. We need to know what’s going to happen, not what he thinks might happen. People will likely be losing their lives and many will lose their homes as the hurricane hits land, it’s not the time for him to attempt to interpret raw meteorological data.
Then there’s that last paragraph, about Coast Guard Rear Adm. Peter Brown (Homeland Security Advisor). I’m not entirely sure if Brown is trying to explain that Trump simply misunderstood the difference between the hurricane and tropical force winds (and their associated maps) or if he was thrown under the bus. We’ll have to see if Trumps tweets start to lay blame on Brown and/or if he still has a job in the near future.
The funniest thing about the sharpie addition - IF the NHC were trying to forcast the future direction - the cone would not have gotten NARROWER at that point of the prediction -
Whether Trump was “working” off a valid forecast that was three days old, or just misremembered a forecast is irrelevant. It would have been a big “nothing-burger” like Obama’s “57 states” or Biden’s “Dayton whatever.”
What made Trump into an utter laughing-stock was his doubling-down. Instead of shrugging and saying “harmless gaffe. Ha ha!” he turned the mistake into Alabamagate by focusing attention on it. A real President would have made sure that victims in Georgia and the Carolinas were getting the help and moral support they needed. Trump preferred to make it his White House priority to churn out fake maps, and to call newspapers “fake.” Genuine suffering of hurricane victims was irrelevant, all he could do was play Captain Queeg and brag that he’d proved “with geometric logic” that the storm might have impacted Alabama.
To me, his performance during Alabamagate has seemed both hilarious and contemptible. Does your mileage vary on this, Magiver?
That’s his thing though. Back when he said “Tim Apple” instead of “Tim Cook” he could have just ignored it (and ignored all the questions about it). Instead, he later told people that he actually said Tim Cook [and] Apple, but said “cook” so fast that we just didn’t hear him. He later changed that story and told people that he said Tim Apple on purpose, to save time.
Well, I mean, it was always pretty scary that the most powerful man in the world is so vain and narcissistic that he would consider this a sticking point, but now that fear has materialized in ways that could actually hurt other people, as it so often does:
So yes - the organization responsible for telling us about weather emergencies has bent the knee and put out false information in support of Trump. I should not have to explain why this is bad.
Let’s not blame NOAA, let’s blame some coward at the head of NOAA who caved in to Trump instead of spitting in his face and calling it an Alabama hurricane.
This the real story. This isn’t Trump lying about the size of his inauguration crowd or something else that doesn’t really matter. This is Trump lying about the path of an approaching hurricane. (And even if his initial statement was a mistake, his follow-up statements were lies.)
The President of the United States decided it was a higher priority to deny he made a mistake than it was to convey accurate information about a natural disaster which threatened people’s lives.
And to make it even worse…It’s not just that warning Alabama could cause them to panic and spend money preparing for no reason, it also means that the people in the actual path may be un/under prepared. Look at the sharpie map again. It shows the hurricaine hitting Northern Florida and then traveling West along the Northern coast of the gulf. If we assumed that was fact, people in the Carolinas and other places along the East coast of the US might breathe a sigh of relief as they see they’re going to be spared and go back to their normal lives.
As I once heard someone mumble under their breath as a climate change denier made a comment about the cold weather we’re having, “that’s why you shouldn’t get your weather reports from a politician”.
Speaking of “cats”, Trump retweeted a video of him with the famous Sharpie poster and a cat sitting there while he moves a laser pointer and Yakety Sax plays in the background:
The cat is sitting on the CNN logo, so presumably the video means that Trump is leading CNN around wherever he wishes with the laser pointer/Sharpie poster.
In other words, Trump is now openly admitting that he’s trolling like some basement-dweller. :rolleyes:
More precisely, what happened apparently was that Ross told the head of NOAA that if they didn’t issue a statement chastizing the forecasters who had contradicted the President, then he and the other political appointees at NOAA would be fired. So, basically, that statement that NOAA issued Friday night was made under duress.
In related news, the Director of the National Weather Service was at a conference where he broke with his NOAA bosses and commended the forecasters…In fact, he had all the NWS forecasters stand up and the crowd at the conference gave them a standing ovation. Also, the Acting Chief Scientist at NOAA basically said that the NWS Birmingham forecasters were correct and he is investigating whether NOAA’s statement saying otherwise violated NOAA policies and ethics.
And, the Head of NOAA, who is himself a scientist, is scheduled to give a talk at that conference tomorrow. There is talks of protests to his speech. (I actually feel a little sorry for him…He did apparently try to push back against Ross’s demands until Ross lay down the law that he and his staff would be fired if they didn’t capitulate. And, now I bet he is regretting that he capitulated and trashed his reputation. This Administration is destroying the reputations of a lot of people.)
