Congress: Obama Admin Fired Top Scientist to Advance Climate Change Plans

BY:

A new congressional investigation has determined that the Obama administration fired a top scientist and intimidated staff at the Department of Energy in order to further its climate change agenda, according to a new report that alleges the administration ordered top officials to obstruct Congress in order to forward this agenda.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas), chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, released a wide-ranging report on Tuesday that shows how senior Obama administration officials retaliated against a leading scientist and plotted ways to block a congressional inquiry surrounding key research into the impact of radiation.

A top DoE scientist who liaised with Congress on the matter was fired by the Obama administration for being too forthright with lawmakers, according to the report, which provides an in-depth look at the White House’s efforts to ensure senior staffers toe the administration’s line.

The report also provides evidence that the Obama administration worked to kill legislation in order to ensure that it could receive full funding for its own hotly contested climate change agenda.

The report additionally discovered efforts by the Obama administration to censor the information given to Congress, interfering with the body’s ability to perform critical oversight work.

“Instead of providing the type of scientific information needed by Congress to legislate effectively, senior departmental officials sought to hide information, lobbied against legislation, and retaliated against a scientist for being forthcoming,” Smith said in a statement. “In this staff report based on lengthy record before the committee, much has been revealed about how senior level agency officials under the Obama administration retaliated against a scientist who did not follow the party line.”

“Moving forward, the department needs to overhaul its management practices to ensure that Congress is provided the information it requires to legislate and that federal employees and scientists who provide that information do so without fear of retribution,” Smith said.…

Study: Hollywood-like dramatic style, not science content, brings citations to climate papers

One of the recent Phys.Org titles that I couldn’t overlook yesterday was

What makes influential science? Telling a good story

Assuming a common (non-scientific) definition of a story (and this is the definition they mean, as we will see later), this headline basically says that influential research papers should try to emulate the style of the demagogic pop-science writers who work to impress the stupidest readers in the population. Well, if that would be the case in a scientific discipline, the scientific discipline would surely be absolutely rotten – it would cease to be a genuine scientific discipline. It would be a pop-science superstition masquerading itself as science.

So I was curious what was hiding behind the headline – which discipline demanded researchers to resemble pop-science writers and why. Well, it wasn’t so hard to find the answer. The headline wasn’t supposed to apply to all of science, even though Phys.Org tried to create this impression. Instead, the Phys.Org article was promoting a PLOS ONE study whose title says

Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science (full PDF).

So it’s not really “science” that the Phys.Org article should have talked about. Instead, it is climate science. A big difference!

OK, what did the authors – Ann Hillier, Ryan P. Kelly, and Terrie Klinger (obviously climate alarmists themselves) – find? It’s truly damning for climatology.

They defined a quantity that reflects how good a paper is according to your eighth-grade teacher of writing, as Phys.Org helpfully said – something that measures how much they would like it at Hollywood. The quantity was named the “narrative index”. When you look at these charts from the paper, you will quickly see that the “narrative index” is a combination of some “virtues” that people doing comparative literature might be familiar with, namely with

setting, narrating perspective, sensory language, conjunctions, connectivity, appeal to reader.

These six quantities are evaluated in a certain way for each of the 732 climate change papers in their ensemble. They find a clear positive correlation between almost all these variables and the citation count of the climate change article.…

World’s Hottest Desert Sees Snow For First Time In Nearly 40 Years

An amateur photographer captured photos Monday of snow canvassing the dunes of one of the world’s hottest and driest deserts for the first time in 37 years.

Snow last fell in the small Saharan desert town of Ain Sefra Feb. 18, 1979, when the snow storm lasted for less than an hour. Ain Sefra is 3,280 feet above sea level and is nestled between the Atlas Mountains in Africa.

The Sahara Desert has gone through seismic temperature and moister shifts. It is expected to look greener over the next 15,000 years thanks to natural shifts in climate.

Photos of Sahara Desert covered in snow for first time in 40 years (photo courtesy of Karim Bouchetata)

Study: Solar activity, oceans cycles, & water vapor explain 98% of climate change since 1900 — NOT CO2

Solar activity, oceans cycles, & water vapor explain 98% of climate change since 1900, NOT CO2!

Climate Change Drivers

by Dan Pangburn, MSME

Summary

Thermalization and the complete dominance of water vapor in reverse-thermalization explain  why atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) has no significant effect on climate. Reported average global temperature (AGT) since before 1900 is accurately (98% match with measured trend) explained by a combination of ocean cycles, sunspot number anomaly time-integral and increased atmospheric water vapor.

Introduction

The only way that energy can significantly leave earth is by thermal radiation. Only solid or liquid bodies and greenhouse gases (ghg) can absorb/emit in the wavelength range of terrestrial radiation. Non-ghg gases must transfer energy to ghg gases (or liquid or solid bodies) for this energy to be radiated.

The word ‘trend’ is used here for temperatures in two different contexts. To differentiate, α-trend is an approximation of the net of ocean surface temperature oscillations after averaging-out the year-to-year fluctuations in reported average global temperatures. The term β-trend applies to the slower average energy change of the planet which is associated with change to the average temperature of the bulk volume of the material (mostly ocean water) involved.

Some ocean cycles have been named according to the particular area of the oceans where they occur. Names such as PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation), ENSO (el Nino Southern Oscillation), and AMO (Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation) might be familiar. They report the temperature of the water near the surface. The average temperature of the bulk water that is participating in these oscillations cannot significantly change so quickly because of high thermal capacitance [1].

This high thermal capacitance absolutely prohibits the rapid (year-to-year) AGT fluctuations which have been reported, from being a result of any credible forcing. According to one assessment [1], the time constant is about 5 years. A likely explanation for the reported year-to-year fluctuations is that they are stochastic phenomena in the over-all process that has been used to determine AGT. A simple calculation shows the standard deviation of the reported annual average measurements to be about ±0.09 K with respect to the trend. The temperature fluctuations of the bulk volume near the surface of the planet are more closely represented by the fluctuations in the trend. The trend is a better indicator of the change in global energy; which is the difference between energy received and energy radiated.

The kinetic …

Disturbing research about the use of ‘narratives’ in climate science papers

Summary: A new paper provides valuable information about climate science — evidence of the politicization that helped collapse the public policy debate. The authors conclude that narratives are “used to positive effect” in peer-reviewed papers. It puts science on the slippery slope to becoming propaganda (or, in today’s jargon, “fake news”). Scientists achieve career success but destroy the public’s esteem accumulated over centuries.

Clocks

Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science

By Ann Hillier, Ryan P. Kelly, and Terrie Klinger.
From PLOS ONE, 15 December 2016. Red emphasis added.

Climate change is among the most compelling issues now confronting science and society, and climate science as a research endeavor has grown accordingly over the past decade. The number of scholarly publications is increasing exponentially, doubling every 5±6 years. The volume of climate science publications now being produced far exceeds the ability of individual investigators to read, remember, and use. Accordingly, it is increasingly important that individual articles be presented in a way that facilitates the uptake of climate science and increases the salience of their individual research contributions.…

Trump Wants To Know How Much Taxpayer Money The State Dept Gives Environmental Groups

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is asking the Department of State how much it gives to environmental groups for global warming programs.

“How much does the Department of State contribute annually to international environmental organizations in which the department participates?” reads one question on a list sent to the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, multiple sources told The Washington Post.

It’s not clear what groups Trump is looking at, but before the election, Trump said he’d “cancel billions of dollars in global warming payments to the United Nations” and reallocate that money to domestic environmental projects.

Trump’s team clarified he would “cancel all wasteful climate change spending,” including funding going to the U.N. Trump’s team claims cutting this spending could save $100 billion over eight years. Auditors estimated federal agencies spent $77 billion on climate programs from 2008 and 2013.…