The Fifth Risk(36)

There was no way the Bush official could get across all he wanted to tell the new commerce secretary in a single meeting. “NOAA is a beast,” he said. “It’s twelve thousand employees and they are decentralized—out in these little tiny offices all over the country. But it does more to protect Americans than any other agency except for Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.” The Bush official did get to tell Ross his main point about NOAA. “It’s incredible value and everyone shits on it,” he said. “The people are great. They aren’t in it for the money. They’re in it for the mission.” And he asked Ross a question: “What’s your philosophy for running the department?”

“What do you mean?” asked Ross.

“It’s not really the Department of Commerce,” said the Bush official. “Its mission is a science and technology mission.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I want to be focusing on that,” said Ross.

“It was clear to me that he had not thought about what the science and technology meant,” said the Bush official. “He doesn’t have a scientific bone in his body.”

That was totally okay. The secretary of commerce could continue to pretend to be the Secretary of Business. But he badly needed to put people in place under him who understood the science. The Bush official assumed he’d been brought in for just this reason: to help the new administration find the right person to run NOAA. He knew qualified Republicans, inoffensive to Trump. He handed the Trump White House a list of half a dozen politically acceptable people who could do the job well enough.

Six months later, in October 2017, the White House announced its selection: Barry Myers.



Barry Myers hadn’t been anywhere near the Bush official’s list. He was the CEO of AccuWeather, one of the first for-profit weather companies. It had been founded by his meteorologist brother, Joel Myers, back in 1962. A third brother helped to run the company, which employed other family members, including Barry Myers’s wife, Holly. The company was still privately owned by the Myers family, so it was hard to know exactly how big it was, or how much money it made, or how it made it. Staffers in the U.S. Senate charged with vetting Myers’s nomination estimated that AccuWeather had roughly $100 million a year in revenue, and that it came mainly from selling ads on its website and selling weather forecasts to companies and governments willing to pay for them. Some weather geeks had recently discovered that the company had been selling the locations of people using its app, even when these individuals had declined to give AccuWeather permission to do this. At any rate, at his U.S. Senate hearings, Barry Myers estimated his AccuWeather shares to be worth roughly $57 million.

At first glance, the nomination made sense: a person deeply involved in weather forecasting was going to take over an agency that devoted most of its resources to understanding the weather. At second glance, both Barry Myers and AccuWeather were deeply inappropriate. For a start, Barry Myers wasn’t a meteorologist or a scientist of any sort. He was a lawyer. “I was originally enrolled in meteorology as an undergraduate,” he told the Wall Street Journal back in 2014. “I then dropped out of school because I was a horrible student. I was never interested in learning, which I look at now as sort of funny.”

Then there was AccuWeather. It had started out making its money by repackaging and selling National Weather Service information to gas companies and ski resorts. It claimed to be better than the National Weather Service at forecasting the weather, but what set it apart from everyone else was not so much its ability to predict the weather as to market it. As the private weather industry grew, AccuWeather’s attempts to distinguish itself from its competitors became more outlandish. In 2013, for instance, it began to issue a forty-five-day weather forecast. In 2016 that became a ninety-day weather forecast. “We are in the realm of palm reading and horoscopes here, not science,” Dan Satterfield, a meteorologist on CBS’s Maryland affiliate, wrote. “This kind of thing should be condemned, and if you have an AccuWeather app on your smartphone, my advice is to stand up for science and replace it.”

Alone in the private weather industry, AccuWeather made a point of claiming that it had “called” storms missed by the National Weather Service. Here was a typical press release: “On the evening of Feb. 24, 2018, several tornadoes swept across northern portions of the Lower Mississippi Valley causing widespread damage, injuries and unfortunately some fatalities. . . . AccuWeather clients received pinpointed SkyGuard? Warnings, providing them actionable information and more lead time than what was given by the government’s weather service in issuing public warnings and other weather providers who rely on government warnings . . .”

All AccuWeather’s press releases shared a couple of problems: 1) there was no easy way to confirm them, as the forecasts were private, and the clients unnamed; and 2) even if true they didn’t mean very much. A company selling private tornado warnings can choose the predictions on which it is judged. When it outperforms the National Weather Service, it issues a press release bragging about its prowess. When it is outperformed by the National Weather Service it can lay low. But it is bound to be better at least every now and again: the dumb blackjack player is sometimes going to beat the card counter. “You have these anecdotes [from AccuWeather], but there is no data that says they are fundamentally improving on the National Weather Service tornado forecasts,” says David Kenny, chief executive of the Weather Company, a subsidiary of IBM, which, among other things, forecasts turbulence for most of the U.S. commercial airline industry.