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Simple Minded

Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

noddy wrote:
governments want less polluting cars, the people that pay for them tend to want sporty fun cars, one could argue the manufacturers dont have much choice.
Art thou sayething that consumers.... not corporatists and oligarches influence markets? The buyer determines the sale price and the Earth revovleth around the sun thou sayeth?

Don't go too far with this heresy or you'll get a free ride in a dunking chair or a rat cage strapped to yer face......

unless they are yoked together, how will the selfish commoners knoweth the common good?
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Typhoon
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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I find three issues re AGW depressing:

1/ How easily a small group of no-rate scientists were able to promote the AGW speculative hypothesis agenda for fame, influence, and fortune.

2/ How easily professional societies such as the Royal Soc, NAS, IEEE, and APS, have gone along for the ride, without consulting their memberships,
mainly due to the massive funding that became available.

3/ How any open expression of dissent is a professional career killer. Even in unrelated fields.
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Parodite
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Deep down I'm very superficial
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

Parodite wrote:Recommended by Judith Curry

Doubt and certainty in climate science (pdf)
Thank you for the links.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
Simple Minded

Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

Typhoon wrote:I find three issues re AGW depressing:

1/ How easily a small group of no-rate scientists were able to promote the AGW speculative hypothesis agenda for fame, influence, and fortune.

2/ How easily professional societies such as the Royal Soc, NAS, IEEE, and APS, have gone along for the ride, without consulting their memberships,
mainly due to the massive funding that became available.

3/ How any open expression of dissent is a professional career killer. Even in unrelated fields.
You are describing either corruption or a religious cult.

Interesting, but disappointing to witness how popularity of an idea can establish and reinforce "validity" among humans.
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Doc
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Kind of in the same vein
CPvyygkWoAAnh_X.jpg large.jpeg
CPvyygkWoAAnh_X.jpg large.jpeg (72.13 KiB) Viewed 2245 times
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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http://dailycaller.com/2015/09/29/myste ... -skeptics/


MYSTERY: Scientists Remove Letter Asking Obama To Prosecute Global Warming Skeptics


There must have been some major blowback against the scientists and researchers who recently sent a letter asking President Barack Obama to prosecute global warming skeptics, because the group’s letter to Obama has been quietly removed from their website.

Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise posted on her blog NoFrakkingConsensus.com that the Institute of Global Environment and Society has taken down its letter signed by twenty scientists and researchers. “There’s no explanation, no apology – just open space where this anti-free-speech document used to reside,” Laframboise wrote.

IGES’s removal of its letter urging skeptics be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act comes after huge backlash from skeptics and reports of the millions in government funding the letter’s lead signatory has gotten over the years.

Now when the public goes to view the letter claiming that various organizations “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change” all they will see is a blank page with a note that the URL “was not found on this server.”
igesletter

Source: http://www.iges.org/letter/LetterPresidentAG.pdf

Nearly two weeks ago, IGES published a letter, signed by twenty academics, echoing the calls of Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse for global warming skeptics to be prosecuted under RICO, using the same strategy the government used to take down the tobacco industry.

“We strongly endorse Senator Whitehouse’s call for a RICO investigation,” the scientists wrote to Obama. “The methods of these organizations are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry. A RICO investigation (1999 to 2006) played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking.”

The letter gained a lot of media attention and was derided by those skeptical of man-made global warming. Constitutional law expert Walter Olson argued that prosecuting groups for scientific disagreements would harm free speech.

“If the government takes up this kind of thing as its own cause, the government can apply a lot of pressure against its adversary in litigation,” Olson told Vermont Watchdog. “It can threaten to cut off government contracts, and it can threaten unrelated litigation… But if you give the government the means to blow people up for lobbying or advocacy that it considers to be one-sided or misleading, then you’ve given the government power to determine who’s taking part in public debate.”

What gained more attention, however, was the fact that the letter’s lead signatory, IGES president Jagadish Shukla, was getting a six figure salary for doing part-time work at the science non-profit. University of Colorado researcher Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. wrote IGES pays Shulka “and wife $500,000 per year for part-time work.”

Pielke’s claims backed by blogger Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit who found that “the numbers are even worse than Pielke thought.”

“Pielke had quoted Shukla’s 2013 university salary, but his university salary had increased more than 25% between 2013 and 2014: from $250,816 in 2013 to $314,000 in 2014,” McIntyre found. “In addition, the ‘non-profit’ organization had also employed one of Shukla’s children”

“IGES transferred $100,000 from its climate grants to a second corporation controlled by the Shukla family (the Institute for Global Education Equality of Opportunity and Prosperity, Inc.), which in turn transferred $100,000 to an educational charity in Shukla’s home town in India, doubtless a worthy charity, but one that Shukla could have supported from his own already generous stipend,” McIntyre added. “Over a million dollars in total in 2014 alone.”

Shukla did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment on why the letter was taken off IGES’s website.
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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If they did criminalize global warming skepticism does that mean they would burn books skeptical of MMGW as well?
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by noddy »

http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/opinion ... 7555674611

A MATHEMATICAL discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.


A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.
Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades”.
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Simple Minded

Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

noddy wrote:http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/opinion ... 7555674611

A MATHEMATICAL discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.


A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.
Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades”.
But even if CO2 is causing only 8/1000th of a degree increase per year, it is still not a bad vehicle to use to milk, er, uh, I mean spook the herd.
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by noddy »

it was in one of our large syndicated newspapers, which made it relevant.

the anti anti global warming people have a hit piece on him https://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.co ... vid-evans/ that paints a picture of a conspiracist loon.

another place has http://www.skepticalscience.com/david-e ... -cold.html a debunk post.

me personally, i have no idea. i just watch the political football.
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Simple Minded

Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

noddy wrote:
me personally, i have no idea. i just watch the political football.
I used to think one had to be truly stupid to believe that AGW is real. Now I see is more as just another popular fad, brilliant marketing. And like other fashions or rock stars, it has limited shelf life.

What's the difference between humanity and insanity?

Hum-ins!
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by noddy »

Simple Minded wrote:
noddy wrote:
me personally, i have no idea. i just watch the political football.
I used to think one had to be truly stupid to believe that AGW is real. Now I see is more as just another popular fad, brilliant marketing. And like other fashions or rock stars, it has limited shelf life.

What's the difference between humanity and insanity?

Hum-ins!
i see it as a convenient tribal label for those on 'team environment'.

read any anti anti global warming comments section and its chock full of pollution, over fishing, deforrestation, environmental destruction rants - cow farts just happen to be the team colour.
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

I'm like Simple Minded. I used to believe in AGW and put a lot of faith in the academic science establishment. Tried to follow this thread back when it was Col. Sun and someone with a Stewie icon playing catch, but it was too detailed for me to follow.

My critical eye opened up when I read about the collusion and data fakery in the pro AGW team. I recently found this little video, which makes sense without needing a specialist's background.

TCy_UOjEir0
“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

Nonc Hilaire wrote: . . .

My critical eye opened up when I read about the collusion and data fakery in the pro AGW team. I recently found this little video, which makes sense without needing a specialist's background.

TCy_UOjEir0
Exactly.

A very clear exposition.

The foaming-at-the-mouth comments in the comment section are quite something.

A N Am friend of mine wrote me about his recent holiday trip.

As part of the trip he visited a nuclear power plant on the shore of Lake Huron: Bruce Nuclear Generating Station [BNGS].
It is currently the largest nuclear power plant in the world.

BNGS produces 6,500 MW of electrical power. That's about 1/3 of the requirements of the Canadian province of Ontario.

The last time he was there was as a little kid.

The one big difference he noticed was that the site was now surrounded by wind mill turbines "as far as the eye could see".

The largest wind project in the area is the Underwood Wind Farm
consisting of 110 installations and is rated to produce 181.5 MW. However, last year it's average rate of electrical energy production was 48 MW.
A drop in the Great Lakes in terms of the energy requirements of his province.

One point that caught his eye was the number of windmills that appeared to be down. He estimated one in ten.
Not surprising given the very large and highly variable stresses each wind turbine is subjected to.
The maintenance costs will probably be exorbitant.

On the other, three such BNGS could provide all the electrical power requirements of the province with spare capacity for export.

As my friend put it,
"Why are we investing billions in a medieval technology that our ancestors dropped as soon as more reliable and efficient sources of energy became available?"

http://media.cns-snc.ca/ontarioelectric ... icity.html
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Simple Minded

Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:I'm like Simple Minded. I used to believe in AGW and put a lot of faith in the academic science establishment. Tried to follow this thread back when it was Col. Sun and someone with a Stewie icon playing catch, but it was too detailed for me to follow.

My critical eye opened up when I read about the collusion and data fakery in the pro AGW team. I recently found this little video, which makes sense without needing a specialist's background.

TCy_UOjEir0
I never believed in AGW, probably due as much to age as intelligence. By the time AGW started to be the chic doomer porn du jour, I have already lived thru the Coming Ice Age, the DDT, the ozone hole, the Population Time Bomb, and the acid rain scares. And even the kids remember Y2K!

But I can herd as well as the rest, back in high school, the Coming Ice Age scare seem reasonable. Especially during a few harsh Rochester, NY winters.

Having worked outside for years, growing up without AC, and studying physics/heat transfer/engineering/numerical modeling in college, destroyed any chance of buying into the scam of AGW.

The buyers mostly seem to be those who have grown up with AC, never worked outside, and never taken a college level physics course.

And of course the old hippies. AGW is the ultimate "I'm disgruntled and dislike everything that breathes movement" for the "enlightened idealists."

As a guilting tool, it seems similar to "original sin," if you are breathing, you're are guilty. Lucky for you, "we" are selling salvation!
Simple Minded

Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

Typhoon wrote: As my friend put it,
"Why are we investing billions in a medieval technology that our ancestors dropped as soon as more reliable and efficient sources of energy became available?"
:D Your friend has an excellent succinct summary. They may have been noble savages, but sometimes the ancients weren't smarter! :)

http://www.entergy-arkansas.com/content ... nd_Use.pdf
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Doc »

LOOKS LIKE MMGW IS DEAD
http://www.news.com.au/national/western ... 7555674611
Miranda Devine: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate
October 5, 20151:34pm

Dr David Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science. Picture: Thinkstock
MIRANDA DEVINEPerthNow

Email a friend

A MATHEMATICAL discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.
Miranda Devine. Picture: Peter Brew-Bevan

Miranda Devine. Picture: Peter Brew-BevanSource:Supplied

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says.

“Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades”.

Dr Evans says his discovery “ought to change the world”.

“But the political obstacles are massive,” he said.

His discovery explains why none of the climate models used by the IPCC reflect the evidence of recorded temperatures. The models have failed to predict the pause in global warming which has been going on for 18 years and counting.

“The model architecture was wrong,” he says. “Carbon dioxide causes only minor warming. The climate is largely driven by factors outside our control.”

There is another problem with the original climate model, which has been around since 1896.

While climate scientists have been predicting since the 1990s that changes in temperature would follow changes in carbon dioxide, the records over the past half million years show that not to be the case.

So, the new improved climate model shows CO2 is not the culprit in recent global warming. But what is?

Dr Evans has a theory: solar activity. What he calls “albedo modulation”, the waxing and waning of reflected radiation from the Sun, is the likely cause of global warming.

He predicts global temperatures, which have plateaued, will begin to cool significantly, beginning between 2017 and 2021. The cooling will be about 0.3C in the 2020s. Some scientists have even forecast a mini ice age in the 2030s.

If Dr Evans is correct, then he has proven the theory on carbon dioxide wrong and blown a hole in climate alarmism. He will have explained why the doomsday predictions of climate scientists aren’t reflected in the actual temperatures.
Dr David Evans, who says climate model architecture is wrong, with wife Jo Nova, Picture: australianclimatemadness.com

Dr David Evans, who says climate model architecture is wrong, with wife Jo Nova, Picture: australianclimatemadness.comSource:Supplied

“It took me years to figure this out, but finally there is a potential resolution between the insistence of the climate scientists that CO2 is a big problem, and the empirical evidence that it doesn’t have nearly as much effect as they say.”

Dr Evans is an expert in Fourier analysis and digital signal processing, with a PhD, and two Masters degrees from Stanford University in electrical engineering, a Bachelor of Engineering (for which he won the University medal), Bachelor of Science, and Masters in Applied Maths from the University of Sydney.

He has been summarising his results in a series of blog posts on his wife Jo Nova’s blog for climate sceptics.

He is about half way through his series, with blog post 8, “Applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Earth”, published on Friday.

When it is completed his work will be published as two scientific papers. Both papers are undergoing peer review.

“It’s a new paradigm,” he says. “It has several new ideas for people to get used to.”
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

If only.

I don't think that the "underlying physics is correct" as much of climate models are

1/ Incomplete. New phenomena regarding the earth and it's climate are being discovered all the time.

2/ Not based on 1st principle physics, but mostly ad hoc empirical parametrizations. Clouds, for example.

3/ Too crude in the spatial resolution - gridding

With the caveat that I'm not familiar Dr. Evans work, I'm a bit skeptical regarding claims of AGW are dead.

Too many have too many vested interests in keeping the AGW meme going.
It's become a multi multi billion dollar a year business where business here includes government grants, loans, and tax breaks.

This confederacy of dunces will happily slime anyone, including some of the smartest people on the planet, who dare question the dogma.
People such as Giaever, Happer, Singer, LIndzen and especially Dyson come to mind.

Freeman Dyson on climate change and other matters.

An interesting cultural observation:
Register: You were being invited to help solve problems in an era when things looked pretty grim, and those problems looked insoluble, during the Cold War, and before Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution. Now we've conquered a lot of these, but there seems to be an unquenchable thirst for apocalypse.

Dyson: [Laughs] Yes. I don't know why, it's a mood of the times. I don't understand that better than anyone else. It is true that there's a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don't think that's the full explanation.

It's like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we'd gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it's in the air today.

The years before 1914 were a tremendously promising time. Russia was getting richer, [but then] the whole thing fell apart. It's comparable today – we've done a much better job with feeding the world and if you look at the number of desperately poor people, it has been decreasing quite steadily.

The most important thing at the moment is China getting richer. What the rest of the world is doing doesn't really matter.
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Simple Minded

Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

Typhoon wrote:If only.


Freeman Dyson on climate change and other matters.

An interesting cultural observation:
Register: You were being invited to help solve problems in an era when things looked pretty grim, and those problems looked insoluble, during the Cold War, and before Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution. Now we've conquered a lot of these, but there seems to be an unquenchable thirst for apocalypse.

Dyson: [Laughs] Yes. I don't know why, it's a mood of the times. I don't understand that better than anyone else. It is true that there's a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don't think that's the full explanation.

It's like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we'd gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it's in the air today.

The years before 1914 were a tremendously promising time. Russia was getting richer, [but then] the whole thing fell apart. It's comparable today – we've done a much better job with feeding the world and if you look at the number of desperately poor people, it has been decreasing quite steadily.

The most important thing at the moment is China getting richer. What the rest of the world is doing doesn't really matter.
True enough. The infrastructure has been created, and there is toooooo much money in flux to allow this boogeyman to die quickly. I think the Pope buying in may be the high water mark in popularity for AGW, but with this much mass, it may take a generation for the myth to disappear. Young AGWers have no concept that their generational predecessors bought into The Coming Ice Age belief in the 1970's.

In the above quote, Dyson sounds like he is referencing Elliott Wave Theory. Pessimistic social mood creates depressions, wars, and a huge appetite for doomer porn, belief in magic, religious extremism, and a dominance of irrational thinking.

In this quote: "Climate change, he tells us, "is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?" Dyson sounds even more like he is describing EWT.

AGW has little to do with science, but is more a social or psychological phenomena, like a religious cult, tulip bulb mania, or the belief that the DJIA is going to 36,000. Similar current phenomena (that fascinate me) are Western Hemisphere guilt, white privilege, eternal victim status, obsession with group identity/labels, man is destroying the planet, and identity politics. All seem to be variations on self-loathing, or more accurately, in the current zeitgeist, group loathing.

Robert Prechter and crew agree with Dyson's assessment of current phase. We are still in the early phases of the pessimistic mood.

This question made me laugh: "Is theoretical physics still possible?"
I would have answered "Theoretically... yes!"
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"Largest science scandal in US history"

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

General MO of the corruption of US science by industry. AGW is more politicized than pharmaceuticals or agriculture, so it is first to get political attention.
The plan by climate alarmists to have other scientists imprisoned for their ‘global warming’ skepticism is backfiring horribly, and the chief alarmist is now facing a House investigation into what has been called “the largest science scandal in US history.”

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX)60%
, Chairman of the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, has written to Professor Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University, in Virginia, requesting that he release all relevant documents pertaining to his activities as head of a non-profit organization called the Institute of Global Environment And Society.
Smith has two main areas of concern.

First, the apparent engagement by the institute in “partisan political activity” – which, as a non-profit, it is forbidden by law from doing.

Second, what precisely has the IGES institute done with the $63 million in taxpayer grants which it has received since 2001 and which appears to have resulted in remarkably little published research?

For example, as Watts Up With That? notes, a $4.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to one of the institute’s offshoots appears to have resulted in just one published paper.

But the amount which has gone into the pockets of Shukla and his cronies runs into the many hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2013 and 2014, for example, Shukla and his wife enjoyed a combined income in excess of $800,000 a year.

Steve McIntyre, the investigator who shattered Michael Mann’s global-warming ‘Hockey Stick’ claim, has done a detailed breakdown of the sums involved. He calls it Shukla’s Gold.

In 2001, the earliest year thus far publicly available, in 2001, in addition to his university salary (not yet available, but presumably about $125,000), Shukla and his wife received a further $214,496 in compensation from IGES (Shukla -$128,796; Anne Shukla – $85,700). Their combined compensation from IGES doubled over the next two years to approximately $400,000 (additional to Shukla’s university salary of say $130,000), for combined compensation of about $530,000 by 2004.

Shukla’s university salary increased dramatically over the decade reaching $250,866 by 2013 and $314,000 by 2014. (In this latter year, Shukla was paid much more than Ed Wegman, a George Mason professor of similar seniority). Meanwhile, despite the apparent transition of IGES to George Mason, the income of the Shuklas from IGES continued to increase, reaching $547,000 by 2013. Combined with Shukla’s university salary, the total compensation of Shukla and his wife exceeded $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014. In addition, as noted above, Shukla’s daughter continued to be employed by IGES in 2014; IGES also distributed $100,000 from its climate grant revenue to support an educational charity in India which Shukla had founded.

The story began last month when, as we reported at Breitbart, twenty alarmist scientists – led by Shukla – wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to use RICO laws to crush climate skeptics.

Shukla’s second big mistake was to send the letter not from his university address but from his non-profit, the IGES.

But his first, far bigger mistake, was his hubris in organizing the letter in the first place. It drew the attention of Shukla’s critics to something which, presumably, he would have preferred to keep secret: that for nearly 14 years, he, his family and his friends have been gorging themselves on taxpayers’ money at IGES; and that this money comes on top of the very generous salary he receives for doing much the same work at George Mason University (GMU).

It’s the latter detail which has led former Virginia State Climatologist Pat Michaels – one of the skeptics who might have been affected by Shukla’s proposed RICO prosecutions – to describe this as “the largest science scandal in US history.”

Under federal law, state employees may not be remunerated for doing work which falls under their state employee remit. As a Professor at GMU, Shukla is definitely an employee of the state. And the work for which he has most lavishly been rewarding himself at IGES appears to be remarkably similar to the work he does at GMU as professor of climate dynamics.

If GMU was aware of these extra-curricular payments, then it was in breach of its own policy on “financial conflicts of interest in federally funded research.”

If it wasn’t aware of them, then, Shukla legally may be required to send half of that $63 million in federal grants to his employer, GMU.

For many readers, though, perhaps the biggest take-home message of this extraordinary story is: Who do these climate alarmists think they are?

Perhaps $63 million in federal grants is just peanuts if you’re gorging on the climate-change smorgasbord, but for most of the rest of us, that constitutes a serious sum of money. Especially when we know it is being taken from us in the form of taxes.

Do they really feel under no obligation to spend it well?

Do they actually feel so sanctified by the rightness of their cause that they deserve to be immune from scrutiny or criticism?
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Simple Minded

Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

Nonc,

I once asked a Jewish friend "What is the definition of chutzpah?" His reply "Monumental brass."

Gotta love it when the keepers of the faith get burned at their own stakes.

Now it remains to be seen well the gods of AGW protect the True Believers?
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Typhoon
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Re: Climate and the Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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