Opinion: Write Your Senators to Oppose NOAA Nomination
In late 2017, President Trump nominated Barry Myers to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, a choice that was seen as controversial, even for an administration that was voted in on being unconventional. Earlier this month, Jane Lubchenco, the NOAA administrator from 2009 to 2013, wrote an editorial in the New York Times opposing Myers’ confirmation.
“The safety and economic well-being of Americans will be put at risk if the Senate confirms Barry Lee Myers as the next administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” wrote Lubchenco, who is a marine ecologist and professor at Oregon State University.
The former CEO of AccuWeather, Myers ran a company that has been accused of fostering a culture of sexual harassment. The environment was “so severe and pervasive, that some female employees resigned,” U.S. News reported, citing a 2018 Department of Labor report.
Among the many concerns about Myers, Myers has long sought to privatize NOAA’s weather forecasting, which would directly benefit companies like AccuWeather.
“As the former chief executive of the private weather-forecasting company AccuWeather, which relies on data from NOAA’s National Weather Service, he spent years trying to privatize NOAA’s public weather information so his company could profit from it,” Lubchenco write. “His family continues to run the family-owned company, raising concerns that they could benefit from decisions he might make as NOAA’s administrator.”
If you oppose Myers’ confirmation as NOAA Administrator, please consider writing your senator to say as much.
Thank you – emails sent to both my senators!
I encourage anyone interested in this nomination to get and read Michael Lewis’s book: “The Fifth Risk” in which an entire chapter is devoted to an examination of Barry Meyers and how he has made a fortune using (I should say “raiding”) all of the free information on weather provided by the Federal Government and NOAA for free, and turns that information into a commercial enterprise know as Accuweather. He gets the weather statistics and information from NOAA, information which we taxpayers have paid for initially when funding NOAA, and the turns around and sells it back to us again through subscriptions to his company’s services. The book is also a great read in itself. (Lewis wrote Money Ball and has written other exposes of the Market)
As a professional in the environmental consulting industry with 35 years of experience in stormwater sampling, I use various weather services for forecasts of rainfall in order to place crews for field sampling of rain runoff. Accuweather is one service I never use for the simple reason is that it is laughable in the results it generates. The National Weather Service (NWS) makes forecasts for probabilities and amounts of rain about three days into the future at most. Accuweather makes them up to 45 days out. Further, the service has no problem presenting that there is a 37% chance of 0.32 inches of rain occurring between 2pm and 5pm at some location on a day five weeks in the future. Prognostications like this are worthless because NO ONE can forecast the weather that accurately that far into the future, including Accuweather. That alone for me is a reason to keep Mr. Meyes out of NOAA.
I absolutely congratulate Mr. Arndt (owner of L 38) for opposing this nomination and notifying the readers at Latitude Nation. We should all be outraged that a person with his background and personal issues has been nominated. He definitely should not be confirmed and I’m writing both of our senators right now.