Taxpayer-funded college professors
and researchers who cite climate change to advocate regulations that would
raise energy costs for consumers have some explaining
to do, congressional investigators say.
A House committee wants to know more
about the relationship between taxpayer money received by the academics and
their urging of President Obama to use federal racketeering law to go after
businesses and other groups that oppose his aggressive agenda against climate
change.
The panel’s investigators also are
curious to hear a George Mason University environmentalist, leader of the
publicly supported researchers, explain a growing disparity between computer
models showing global warming and fresh scientific evidence suggesting
that Earth’s
temperatures have been flat for 18 years.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman
of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, cites “serious concerns” in a
stern letter to Jagadish Shukla, a professor at
George Mason University who specializes in atmospheric, oceanic, and earth
studies.
Taxpayer-funded college professors
and researchers who cite climate change to advocate regulations that would
raise energy costs for consumers have some explaining
to do, congressional investigators say.
A House committee wants to know more
about the relationship between taxpayer money received by the academics and
their urging of President Obama to use federal racketeering law to go after
businesses and other groups that oppose his aggressive agenda against climate
change.
The panel’s investigators also are
curious to hear a George Mason University environmentalist, leader of the
publicly supported researchers, explain a growing disparity between computer
models showing global warming and fresh scientific evidence suggesting
that Earth’s
temperatures have been flat for 18 years.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman
of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, cites “serious concerns” in a
stern letter to Jagadish Shukla, a professor at
George Mason University who specializes in atmospheric, oceanic, and earth
studies.
Shukla’s environmental institute,
Smith writes, “appears to be almost fully funded by taxpayer money while
simultaneously participating in partisan political activities by requesting a
[federal] investigation of companies and organizations that disagree with the
Obama administration on climate change.”
In a follow-up
letter dated Oct. 19, Smith asks
Shukla for financial documents as part of the congressional investigation. Smith is correct to be curious about
an apparent conflict of interest, free-market energy policy analysts and
scientific skeptics who question the validity of climate models told The Daily
Signal in interviews.
“As evidence mounts that the dire
predictions of catastrophic global warming are not confirmed by climatological
observations, the alarmist camp has had to resort to witch hunts,” said Bonner
Cohen, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Shukla is among 20 publicly subsidized academics who signed a
letter to Obama calling
for a probe of “corporations and other
organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks
of climate change.”
>>>
Commentary: Skeptical of Climate Change? These Academics Want You
Prosecuted
It turns out Shukla reaped tens of millions in climate-related grants
from U.S. taxpayers in addition to his university salary.
Shukla, 71, is the founder and
former president of the Rockville, Md.-based Institute of Global
Environment and Society, a nonprofit
that received $63 million in taxpayer funds since 2001, according to
financial data compiled by the Washington Free
Beacon.
The $63 million accounts for over 98
percent of his environmental institute’s revenue in that time. By
double-dipping between his university salary and his nonprofit, critics say,
Shukla appears to have violated George Mason University’s conflict
of interest stipulations and rules
that federal grant recipients who work for universities are expected to observe.
Steve McIntyre, a statistician noted
for challenging the data and methodology used in United Nations climate
reports, writes the Climate Audit blog. McIntyre offers a detailed analysis of Shukla’s compensation and how it squares with university
and government policies.
The India-born Shukla, who joined
George Mason’s faculty in 1993, made a university salary of $314,000 by 2014,
according to Climate Audit.
Shukla and his wife, Anastasia or Anne, continued to take in a substantial income from his
nonprofit environmental institute, which is connected with the
university’s College of Science in Fairfax, Va. Anne Shukla was listed as
business manager. The couple received more than $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014 in combined income from the
university salary and the environmental institute. A daughter, Sonia, was also employed by the institute, listed as both assistant business manager
and assistant to Shukla.
Colleague Cites ‘Some Evidence’
Beyond questions of nepotism and other
potential conflicts of interest, congressional investigators—as well as
policy analysts and scientists who differ with Shukla’s views on global warming—is
the appearance that taxpayers are financing the environmentalist’s political
activism. Some also argue that Shukla is in
lockstep with the policy directives of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. Shukla’s name tops a list of 20
signers of the Sept. 1 letter urging Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and
John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to
investigate corporations and other groups skeptical of climate change under the
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That law, known as RICO,
typically is used to pursue organized crime.
Also
signing the so-called RICO 20’s letter
were five colleagues at George Mason University and academics from the
University of Washington in Seattle, Rutgers University in New Jersey, the
University of Maryland, Florida State University, the University of Texas at
Austin, and Columbia University. All are publicly funded universities.
The academics’ request to Obama
specifically embraces Whitehouse’s
call for a RICO investigation of
those who dispute theories, advanced through the United Nations, that human
activity largely is responsible for warming during the latter half of the 20th
century.
In his Oct. 1 letter to Shukla,
Smith directs the climate scientist to preserve all documents and
electronic records going back to Jan. 1, 2009, which might be requested by
Smith’s committee as it looks into the allegations of the RICO 20. The
committee chairman also asks for a list of employees, interns, and other
associates in that period.
The Daily Signal last week asked
Shukla and the five other George Mason academics for evidence that scientific
skeptics had “knowingly deceived” the public about the risks of global warming.
It also invited Shukla to comment on his financial relationship with the
Institute of Global Environment and Society on campus, which some say violates
university and government policies. Shukla and most of the others did
not respond.
The Daily Signal also asked a George
Mason spokesman whether the university had any concerns about Shukla’s work
with the environmental institute IGES and whether it was confident Shukla
operated within its policies. As of publication, the university has not
responded. In a phone interview, however, one
George Mason professor who requested the probe of organizations that disagree
on climate change said he intended to call for a RICO investigation only if
hard evidence emerged that such groups knowingly were involved in an act of
deception.
David Straus, a professor of climate
dynamics, told The Daily Signal: My understanding is that there is
some evidence in books and editorials that the groups and organizations
mentioned in the letter may have knowingly deceived the public, and that the
letter was written in response to an editorial by Whitehouse that said if
evidence emerged that there was this deception, then the government had this
option.
The Daily Signal also asked
Whitehouse’s press office what evidence the Rhode Island senator had that
climate skeptics and the fossil fuel industry were “knowingly deceiving the
public,” and whether the senator had any concerns about the accuracy of the
U.N.’s climate models.
In an email to The Daily Signal,
Whitehouse said: The recent Exxon
series, the implausibility of companies
that big not comprehending the overwhelming science, the enormous financial
motive to mislead, and their lobbying agenda being so at odds with the
established science, as well as the evidence contained in recent books about a
pattern of industry schemes to distort science. Civil discovery would of course
be the time-tested way to find all the evidence. Any concerns I may have about
individual climate models are more than offset by the actual measurements we
are already seeing of ocean and atmospheric warming, sea level rise, and
acidification of the oceans. As a data set, the models appear quite accurate,
notwithstanding the variations among different models. The ocean effects are
very hard to deny as measurement of heat absorption, the law of thermal expansion,
and the chemistry of acidification seem beyond cavil.
Soviet-Style Tactics?
William Happer, a Princeton
University physicist, has another idea. Instead of launching RICO probes
against dissenting scientists and others who raise legitimate questions about
government-funded global warming research, Happer told The Daily Signal,
policymakers should take a hard look at the “Lysenko cult” that held sway in
the days of the Soviet Union.
“There are honest climate scientists
today who are trying to straighten out the contradictions between climate
models and observations, just as there were honest biologists in the Soviet
Union who had the courage to speak out against Lysenko’s cult,” Happer said in
an email.
Trofim Lysenko was a biologist who
directed the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. With the support
of Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin, he dictated scientific results in step with
the government’s political agenda.
“Lysenko’s biology was adopted as
official truth by Stalin’s communist party by about 1930,” Happer said. The “falsification” and “bogus
proofs” used to prop up Lysenko’s schemes is well-documented in the book “Power
and Science: The History of the Destruction of Genetics in the USSR,” the
Princeton physicist said. Happer added: Climate science has attempted to do
the same thing. In spite of a recalcitrant Mother Nature, which has refused to
warm for 18 years or more, grave government pronouncements continue to claim
that this month is the warmest on record [and] that the most recent storm or
last winter’s record snowfall in some locale was due to global warming.
‘Ironic and Hypocritical’
Given the failure of U.N. climate
models to accurately predict temperatures for almost two decades, the RICO 20
may be more vulnerable to their allegations than their intended targets, Cohen,
the senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The
Daily Signal. “It’s ironic and hypocritical that
those who blithely accuse skeptics of ‘knowingly deceiving’ the public on
manmade climate change have themselves engaged in systematic deception for
years,” Cohen said in an email, adding: They have deceived the public by
claiming that climate models, with their dire projections of impending
disaster, constitute science when, in fact, they are nothing but mathematical
exercises that can be easily manipulated to produce the desired results. When
the models turn out to be inaccurate, as they invariably do, the alarmists
simply produce new models projecting more warming, rising sea levels, etc. They
go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the essence of scientific inquiry: testing
their hypothesis against measurable climatological observations. It’s a tacit
admission that they know they have no case.
David Kreutzer,
a senior energy policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation,
expressed concern that some academics appear inclined to stifle scientific
debate instead of welcoming new avenues of inquiry. In light of the “climategate”
scandal that erupted in November 2009, Kreutzer told The Daily Signal, the
letter from the RICO 20 could backfire. In that scandal, emails leaked from the
Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain showed
that researchers appeared willing to manipulate data to account for predicted
catastrophic warming that didn’t materialize. “RICO lawsuits are no way to do
science or to resolve policy questions,” Kreutzer, Heritage’s senior research fellow in energy economics and
climate change, said. “However, if there were to be such lawsuits, it seems
like those who manipulated charts to ‘hide the decline’ [in temperature] and
conspired to prevent contrarian scholars from publishing in academic journals
would be first on the docket.”
‘Ethical Baggage’
To date, 2015 has been a big year
for political attacks on those skeptical of climate change and what might cause
it. As the Daily Signal previously
reported, Whitehouse and other members of
Congress sent
letters to fossil fuel companies and trade
groups asking if they funded scientists who questioned the validity of theories
that link global warming with human activity. The letters named Willie Soon, an
astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
In a peer-reviewed
paper published in January in a
scientific journal, Soon and co-authors found that computer models included in
the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were laced with
mathematical errors that greatly overstated the effects of carbon dioxide on
the climate. The research paper appeared in Scientific Bulletin, a bimonthly
journal co-sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National
Natural Science Foundation of China.
“As evidence mounts that the dire
predictions of catastrophic global warming are not confirmed by climatological
observations, the alarmist camp has had to resort to witch hunts,” said Cohen,
the senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Cohen cited the Environmental
Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and
other agencies as he added of climate change activists: Rather than debate Willie Soon on
the science, a fight they can’t win, they attack his source of funding.
Ironically, the alarmists’ funding dwarfs that of the skeptics, and [their]
funding comes with its own ethical baggage. It comes from highly politicized
federal agencies – EPA, NOAA, NASA, the Department of Energy, etc. – that have
a vested interest in keeping the scare going in order to justify their own
funding levels. They are in a position to steer taxpayer dollars to researchers
who are dependent on federal grants for their livelihoods, and who can be
depended on to produce the results their paymasters want to see.
Watchdog.org reported last week that
Smith’s committee wrote NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation
requesting “all documents and communications” related to Shukla and his
institute. Another element, Cohen said, is the
“nexus” between politicians in Washington, D.C., and the green energy industry. “Purveyors of alternative energy,
such as wind and solar, justify the subsidies, mandates, and other goodies they
receive by touting their ‘low-carbon’ credentials,” Cohen told The Daily
Signal. “They profit from, and participate in, the demonization of fossil
fuels, just as the alarmist establishment thrives on the demonization of those
who dare to question climate-change orthodoxy.”
‘Unwarranted Personal Attacks’
Shukla, leader of the RICO 20, has
acknowledged that there is a limit to what
climate models can predict accurately. “It has long been assumed that the
upper limit of weather predictably is one to two weeks,” Shukla said in a
paper he co-wrote. Members of the House and Senate who
cited Soon in letters to fossil fuel companies declined to respond to inquiries
from The Daily Signal about the accuracy of U.N. climate models. “Willie Soon and his coauthors have
pointed out how terribly the IPCC climate models are performing and offered an
explanation,” Heritage’s Kreutzer said, referring to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change. Kreutzer added: The apologists for those models have
taken to unwarranted personal attacks against Dr. Soon instead of using facts
and logic to defend the models’ poor performance. It is as though the little
boy who cried out that the emperor had no clothes was accused of working for a
tailor. It doesn’t matter. The emperor had no clothes, and the IPCC models have
done a poor job predicting recent temperature trends.
The Heritage Foundation has produced
several studies highlighting what the think tank characterizes as the “underestimated
costs” and “exaggerated benefits” of
the Obama administration’s environmental agenda.
Contrary to most reports in the
establishment media, no
scientific consensus exists on the connection between
human activity and climate change, Kreutzer and other experts note.
In fact, updated
research identifies natural influences as
the primary drivers of warming and cooling trends.
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