Tag Archives: bahamas

NOAA picked Trump over science. Here’s why that’s a big deal.

Hurricane Dorian has come and gone, but the irrevocable upheaval it brought on the Bahamas continues. In Washington, a different kind of debacle is brewing in Dorian’s aftermath.

On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued an unsigned statement that defended President Trump’s baseless assertion that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama “(much) harder than anticipated.” Trump originally made the claim in a tweet on Sunday, September 1, and has continued to try to justify it on Twitter and with a doctored hurricane map in the week since. NOAA’s statement also rebuked the National Weather Service’s Birmingham division for contradicting the president in a tweet that clarified, “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”

“From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama,” read NOAA’s statement. “The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.” The New York Times is reporting that political officials at NOAA put out the statement after Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross threatened to fire them.

The unsigned statement — along with an earlier internal directive telling NOAA staffers not to “provide any opinion” on Trump’s tweet — seems to have set off a firestorm within the agency. NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Craig McLean, is investigating whether the agency’s response to Trump’s claims about Hurricane Dorian constituted a violation of policies and ethics, according to the Washington Post. And the head of the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA, publicly defended the Birmingham forecasters at a meeting of the National Weather Association.

For NOAA scientists, and meteorologists outside the federal agency, the organization’s apparent willingness to bend the truth for political reasons undermines their integrity.

“This is the first time I’ve felt pressure from above to not say what truly is the forecast. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around,” said a meteorologist the Post spoke with on the condition of anonymity. “One of the things we train on is to dispel inaccurate rumors and ultimately that is what was occurring — ultimately what the Alabama office did is provide a forecast with their tweet, that is what they get paid to do.”

Elbert Friday, the former director of the National Weather Service, went even further, calling the unsigned statement “deplorable” in a public statement on Facebook: “This rewriting history to satisfy an ego diminishes NOAA.”

For some meteorologists, NOAA’s independence is a matter not only of scientific integrity but of life and death. The agency’s statement is “concerning as it compromises the ability of NOAA to convey life-saving information necessary to avoid substantial and specific danger to public health and safety,” McLean wrote in an email to NOAA employees obtained by the Post. If people stop trusting NOAA to provide unbiased forecasts during severe weather events, the thinking goes, the confusion could put them at physical risk.

After all, as Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School, told to BuzzFeed News: “There’s enough uncertainty in a hurricane forecast as it is. We don’t need to introduce a whole lot more.”

See original article – 

NOAA picked Trump over science. Here’s why that’s a big deal.

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on NOAA picked Trump over science. Here’s why that’s a big deal.

Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

For decades, Florida’s Cuban exile community has ensured that the United States maintained its tough policy toward the island nation. From Miami, these fierce opponents of Fidel Castro plotted to overthrow the Cuban dictator and channeled funds to dissidents. This made them logical allies of communism-denouncing Republicans, and the exile community’s wealth and political savvy made it a crucial voting bloc, not to be crossed by either party, in a state that can decide presidential elections. But attitudes have shifted. The embargo doesn’t hold the same importance for younger Cubans and those who left Cuba for economic reasons. The major players now fall into three categories: hardliners who continue to oppose any change in policy until the Castros are out of power; reformers who have long pushed for normalization; and converts whose views have softened.

The Hardliners

Sen. Marco Rubio, though his parents came to Florida before the Cuban Revolution, has made anti-Castro opposition central to his political career. He vows to roll back Obama’s efforts to normalize relations once he is in the White House.

Jeb Bush, whose political roots lie in Miami’s Cuban exile community, has called Obama’s policy a “tragedy.” But his opposition has been less aggressive than Rubio’s, a reflection of changing attitudes in Florida and disagreement among his own advisers.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who fled Havana when she was eight, began her political career in the Florida Legislature in 1982, when a tough position on Cuba was a political necessity. The Republican has slammed normalization with Cuba as a “propaganda coup for the Castro brothers.”

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, another Republican, hails from a powerful Miami family—his father was a Cuban politician before Fidel Castro seized power, and his aunt was Fidel’s first wife. A member of the House appropriations committee, he has tried to undermine Obama’s policy by attaching riders to spending bills—including a provision blocking flights and cruise ship routes to Cuba.

Gus Machado, a wealthy Miami auto dealer and Republican donor, is the treasurer of the US-Cuba Democracy PAC, the main political advocacy group opposing normalization.

Remedios Diaz-Oliver, the Miami-based CEO of a major plastic container company and a board member of that PAC, has called Obama’s policy of normalization “Bay of Pigs II.”

Mel Martinez, a former GOP senator from Florida who fled Cuba as a teenager, supported Obama’s 2009 decision to lift travel restrictions for people visiting relatives in Cuba, but he has blasted the president’s decision to normalize relations.

Al Cardenas, the former head of the Florida GOP, is now a lobbyist and adviser to Jeb Bush. His opposition to normalizing relations has put him at odds with others in Bush’s inner circle.

The Reformers

Ricardo Herrero, the onetime executive director of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, cofounded #CubaNow in 2014 to pressure the White House to normalize relations with Cuba—part of a lobbying campaign spearheaded by the Trimpa Group.

Mike Fernandez, a Cuban exile billionaire, is a big GOP donor and an ally of the Bush clan. But on Cuba, he’s in Obama’s corner. “I am not a fan of President Obama, but after 50-plus years, this is long overdue.”

Manny Diaz, a lawyer who was born in Cuba, rose to prominence representing the Miami relatives of Elián González, thereafter becoming the city’s mayor.

Jorge Pérez, Florida’s “Condo King,” supports lifting the embargo and says doing so may lead to a real estate boom on the island: “Demand for second homes will be much bigger than the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, or Dominican Republic.”

The Converts

Carlos Saladrigas, a Miami millionaire who was once a fierce advocate of the embargo, now says the old policy has held the Cuban people back. In 2000, he cofounded the Cuba Study Group, an organization of Cuban business leaders to promote engagement.

Carlos Gutierrez, who fled Cuba as a child, was George W. Bush’s commerce secretary and is now a Jeb supporter. Gutierrez recently embraced normalization, penning a New York Times op-ed titled, “A Republican Case for Obama’s Cuba Policy.”

Alfonso Fanjul leads a vast sugar and real estate empire with his brothers. For decades they bankrolled anti-Castro efforts. But Alfonso shocked the exile community last year when he said he was open to doing business in Cuba. His brother Andres has also mellowed, and is on the board of the Cuba Study Group, which calls for normalization. Meanwhile, his brother Pepe, a major GOP donor, has not joined his brothers in calling for change.

Link:  

Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Miami Nice: Are Florida’s Power Brokers Mellowing on Cuba?

Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills

Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills

Shutterstock

The Bahamas, where unspoiled beauty soon will be spoiled.

Catch ya later, unspoiled beaches of Bahamian paradise. It’s been real.

Offshore oil drilling will soon be allowed in the heavenly West Indies archipelago of the Bahamas, which is made up of thousands of islands and cays off the Floridian coast. Initially, the drilling will be exploratory only — an experiment that will punch a bunch of holes in the ocean floor to see what goop lies beneath.

The Bahamas environment minister said the option of allowing large-scale commercial oil drilling would be put to the nation’s voters after results of the exploratory drills are known, perhaps in 2015.

The government had previously said that even exploratory drilling would require the support of the voters before it could begin. With this move to allow exploratory drills, the government is being accused by The Tribune, a Bahamian newspaper, of breaking promises:

According to a statement released by Environment Minister Kenred Dorsett, the government has determined that “we need to find out first, through exploration drilling, whether we do indeed have oil in commercially viable quantities.”

This is in direct contrast to his position less than four months ago, when Mr Dorsett assured this newspaper that no form of drilling would take place ahead of the referendum, planned for sometime before July this year.

The drilling plan is controversial, for obvious reasons. From the Associated Press:

Offshore drilling is sensitive in the Bahamas, where many fear a spill could devastate the fishing and tourism industries. The previous Bahamian government had delayed issuing exploration permits. Prime Minister Perry Christie, who was voted back into office in May, has said he supported exploration.

Dorsett said the government would seek new regulations to protect the environment and cannot ignore the potential economic benefits of oil for a country that now imports fuel. “The discovery of oil in the Bahamas would almost certainly prove to be economically transformative for our nation for many generations to come,” he said in a statement.

Transformative, you say?

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

, and

blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

.

Read more:

Climate & Energy

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

Continue reading – 

Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills

Posted in ALPHA, Amana, G & F, GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills