Home/BlogDr. David Legates has been Fired by White House OSTP Director and Trump Science Advisor, Kelvin Droegemeier
President Donald Trump has been sympathetic with the climate skeptics’ position, which is that there is no climate crisis, and that all currently proposed solutions to the “crisis” are economically harmful to the U.S. specifically, and to humanity in general.
Today I have learned that Dr. David Legates, who had been brought to the Office of Science and Technology Policy to represent the skeptical position in the Trump Administration, has been fired by OSTP Director and Trump Science Advisor, Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier.
The event that likely precipitated this is the invitation by Dr. Legates for about a dozen of us to write brochures that we all had hoped would become part of the official records of the Trump White House. We produced those brochures (no funding was involved), and they were formatted and published by OSTP, but not placed on the WH website. My understanding is that David Legates followed protocols during this process.
So What Happened?
What follows is my opinion. I believe that Droegemeier (like many in the administration with hopes of maintaining a bureaucratic career in the new Biden Administration) has turned against the President for political purposes and professional gain. If Kelvin Droegemeier wishes to dispute this, let him… and let’s see who the new Science Advisor/OSTP Director is in the new (Biden) Administration.
I would also like to know if President Trump approved of his decision to fire Legates.
In the meantime, we have been told to remove links to the brochures, which is the prerogative of the OSTP Director since they have the White House seal on them.
But their content will live on elsewhere, as will Dr. Droegemeier’s decision.
The left wants to shut you up. It has nothing to do with science. This is fascistic.
“The left wants to…”
The left? Dr Droegemeier was nominated by President Trump, and confirmed by the Senate on January 2, 2019. But he doesn’t like people misusing the authority of the OSTP for which he is responsible.
Legates is Deputy at NOAA in Commerce so Droggy cannot fire him. If he was on detail to OSTP he can just be sent back to NOAA. They can fire him.
David joins Pruit and Happer on the illustrious list of skeptics blocked by WH staff. Drog is a disgrace. I hope Biden keeps him on so we can cream him.
I’m always amused by the American definition of left and right. By international standards the Democrats are on the Right and the Republicans are further Right.
Yes we know that the Euros are left of our left and that is why we left. In our system the President is not even an MP much less PM. In America saying the Euros are doing something is often an argument against it. The Euros embrace tyranny.
But climate skepticism is a bit different. There was an international poll to gauge the degree of skepticism in each country and the US was not the winner. Greta’s Sweden was more skeptical! Maybe some others but I forget.
Did David Legates and Ryan Mue use the presidential executive office seal on those documents without approval?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/01/11/controversial-climate-skeptics-release-papers/
Using government seals without approval is a crime, apparently.
“(a)Whoever knowingly displays any printed or other likeness of the great seal of the United States, or of the seals of the President or the Vice President of the United States, or the seal of the United States Senate, or the seal of the United States House of Representatives, or the seal of the United States Congress, or any facsimile thereof, in, or in connection with, any advertisement, poster, circular, book, pamphlet, or other publication, public meeting, play, motion picture, telecast, or other production, or on any building, monument, or stationery, for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/713
could firing Legates and Mue have been a move to stave off a potentially harsher response?
David Legates has an email trail to document he followed protocol.
Ok, then I wonder why they weren’t published on the official website if they were intended to be part of the official records of the Trump White House.
I’m sorry for what is happening in the US just now.
My understanding was that the production of the pamphlets was approved, but he could not get permission to put them on the White House website. I suppose we need more details… was it because everyone there is jumping ship and has gone home? We will have to wait and see.
If he didn’t get permission to put them on the White House website then how was it legitimate to release them claiming that they were published by the OSTP, embazoned with White House logos? One can sort of see why that would be controversial.
If I worked for a company that told me not to publish something on their site but I then went ahead and published it anyway, claiming it was published by my company and with company headers on it, then I think I would expect to be fired. No deeper conspiracy required.
The impression I got from David was that he had permission to produce the brochures and that given the current turmoil either (1) someone thought it best to not post them or (2) there was no one available to make it happen. People there are jumping ship/going home until the dust settles. I have all kinds of material I generate and give to people that I don’t post on my website.
Kristina Baum, OSTP Communications Director, tweeted on Monday: “These papers were not created at the direction of The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy nor were they cleared or approved by OSTP leadership.”
““Science papers from NOAA follow a rigorous peer-reviewed process under agency regulations on scientific publications. NOAA was not involved in the creation or posting online of the climate change flyers that have been allegedly attributed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, nor does NOAA endorse the flyers. OSTP is investigating the issue,” Scott Smullen said in a statement.
Barry,
It is probably my poor eye sight but did you mean Great Steal or Great Seal?
Sometimes those predictive prompts can confuse me too.
Definitely your eyesight.
Watching all thats unfolding from “downunder” seeing free speech under massive attack
OMG who would have thought we would see this in America, the last 4 years were bad enough but now
Many of my American friends are just plain sad
Regards
Harry
This isn’t an issue of free speech. The issue is claiming that your speech has the authority of the seal of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, when it doesn’t. Misuse of the US seal. Which is a longstanding criminal matter.
They’ve been working there for how long? Were they playing tiddlywinks? This is a CYA move.
They were working there for just under 2 months.
Were these ever peer reviewed?
The article suggested they werent, violating NOAA policy.
The claim that NOAA only puts peer-reviewed articles on their web site is a brazen lie.
Much of their material was never peer-reviewed, and needn’t be. For instance, measurement data, and weather & tide predictions, etc., does not need to peer-reviewed.
Some of the articles and reports on their web site are well-done and valuable. But some of them are utter nonsense.
NOAA’s ridiculous Is sea level rising?” page is an example of the latter. It is blatant climate alarmist propaganda. It begins with a flat-out lie (sea level is rising at an increasing rate), and goes downhill from there, with multiple false statements, some of which no one conversant with the field would ever write, and which could never have gotten past peer-review (except, maybe, in the social sciences).
Oh, well. I tried to get fancy with this link and illustration, but WordPress just deleted it entirely:
https://sealevel.info/avg_of_harlingen_and_honolulu_1905-2018_vs_CO2_annot01.html
https://sealevel.info/avg_of_harlingen_and_honolulu_1905-2018_vs_CO2_annot01.png
this isn’t about what NOAA publish on their website, it is about what was ‘published’ with the seal of the Executive Office of the President.
Perhaps we should learn what policy Nate is referring to.
I wonder who Legates was corresponding with at the OSTP. The statement from the OSTP today said that Dr. Droegemeier first became aware of the documents by the press and presumably after they had been posted on unauthorized non-government websites.
NOAA just issued a statement.
https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/statement-on-climate-change-flyers-falsely-attributed-to-white-house-office-of-science
Science papers from NOAA follow a rigorous, peer-review process under agency regulations on scientific publications. NOAA was not involved in the creation or posting online of the climate change flyers that have been allegedly attributed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, nor does NOAA endorse the flyers. OSTP is investigating the issue.
Dr Spencer, did you mean to remove the links on the other page per your article here? They’re still there.
I see that the reposting of Dr Spencer’s article at WUWT has disappeared
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/08/white-house-brochures-on-climate-there-is-no-climate-crisis/
yes, I thought I had permanently deleted them from the WordPress media directory. I will look and try again if they are still there.
I downloaded all the PDFs right away and have been reading one every few days. I was concerned that a batch of PhDs had no chance of writing simple, concise, easy to follow articles.
So far that seems to be true. The first one I read was Dr. Spencer’s, and it was the best so far. Some of the others are much too long — one to three pages is enough.
So little is known about the precise causes of climate change that I’m always amazed about how much PhDs can write about the subject.
I think the reading material needs to be much simpler for any hope of changing minds of he general public.
For example:
The climate is always changing.
Always warming or cooling.
From the mid-1600s to mid-1700s, most people living at the time thought their climate was too cold. The climate is slightly warmer now — those people would have loved to have the more moderate climate we are lucky to live in.
Meanwhile, government bureaucrats with science degrees tell us the climate was ‘perfect’ in about 1750, and any change from that point is very bad news. That makes no sense. We don’t even have real time temperature and CO2 measurements from 1750 to KNOW what the climate was like then. There are just rough estimates. So the 1750 climate is estimated, and then claimed to be ‘perfect’ — that’s not science at all.
The causes of climate change were natural for 4.5 billion years. In the past 50 years, there are claims that natural causes of climate change no longer matter, and man made CO2 emissions “control” the climate. There is no attempt to prove that claim — it is merely asserted.
Attempts to forecast the climate have been far off for over three decades. Very expensive computer programs have not improved the forecasts. That means any claim of a coming climate crisis is just speculation. Speculation we have been hearing for the past 50 years.
Where is that climate crisis? Are warmer winter nights in Alaska a crisis? For over 50 years the “coming climate crisis” has existed only in the imaginations of people who like to get attention by predicting a coming climate crisis !
Hi Richard,
Are you able to upload and post a link to the PDF’s you have, without any WH identifying marks if you have the ability to edit PDFs?
Thank you.
Strop,
If you want to brochures. I have assembled into one doc. Request by email
“You can’t stop the signal, Mal”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVF9lZ-i_ss
A longer, cut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1tXlpRq-jY
It will be very interesting to see Prof. Legates Emails. Perhaps you could show the relevant ones you received
Oh yeah, don’t think that Prof. Legates and Dr. Maue were fired from OSTP, just that their being detailed to OSTP from NOAA was ended. Be curious to see what NOAA does.
Is the science being challenged? Those who disagree should have a chance to put up or shut up.
Tim S,
What science is that?
Okay. I will try. The brochures contain descriptions of several relevant scientific topics concerning climate and claims of a climate emergency. Some do not like these brochures and think they should not be published. My question is whether they disagree with the science, or simply want the information about climate science to be dominated by the so-called “consensus” reporting in the main stream media.
“Some do not like these brochures and think they should not be published.”
The issue about publication is the misrepresentation clearly stated in Dr Legates introduction:
“The Office of Science and Technology Policy is pleased to bring you these briefs to further your understanding of climate change by learning from these learned scholars.”
If their science is so convincing, why the use of unauthorised US Executive seals and false claims of OSTP copyright?
I have a better question: I the science is so wrong, why can’t someone try to refute them? If they are correct, what is the real problem?
Tim, the National Academy of Sciences, who is tasked by Congress to produce such reports. They7 have produced several related to Climate Change.
The Reports are intended to inform Congress and the public on science issues. They are therefore written (ideally) by a representative group of experts on the science.
This group is not representative of the field, it is a group selected, cherry picked, to represent only outlier views on the science.
IMO, the political people should not be picking the winners in science controversies, based on policy goals, and presenting them as accurately representing the ‘state of the science’ as they misrepresented. Do you?
It’s hard to say if the documents represent a legitimate challenge or not. Typically a scientific challenge is presented as a critique of the status quo followed by a model that does better at explaining and predicting reality. There is a lot of “nuh-uh” commentary in those documents, but I didn’t much if anything related to new a model or even new evidence above and beyond what we already know. In that respect I lean toward no; the documents do not typify a serious scientific challenge. What do you think?
Nothing new, but a change in tone from the old days. These brochures included a lot of valid science, but the message is lukewarmer. “These are the figures, but they are too small to worry about”
They also devoted a whole brochure to the insult that acceptance of climate change is a cult, which strikes me as an example of projecting their own thought pattern onto their opponents
There were some silly errors. Dr Spencer claimed an uncertainty in energy imbalance of +/-5W/m^2. NASA CERES, who process the satellite energy flow data, quote an EEI of 0.7 +/-0.1.
By chance came across of a bit of context. It seems president Trump was executing a purge over the last couple of months. David Legates got the job because the White House ousted Michael Kuperburg in mid-November.
“On Friday, the administration quietly removed Michael Kuperberg from his job as executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (GCRP), according to two sources with knowledge of the move. The program comprises the 13 federal agencies that conduct or use climate research.
Kuperberg has served in the role for years and was recently advancing the latest version of the National Climate Assessment even after it faced delays from the White House….
The appointment of Legates would come right as the climate assessment is recruiting scientists to work on the report. The recruitment of authors was delayed for months but has proceeded in recent weeks. Legates could bring in researchers who criticize consensus climate science and get contracts to perform work on the project even after Biden takes office in January. Ebell said a plan had been discussed to put Legates in place this week.
The National Climate Assessment has been a target for the Trump administration ever since the latest version was released in November 2018.
The administration tried to bury the report by releasing it the day after Thanksgiving, and Trump, who later said he did not “believe” the report, was angry that it had been released at all. The White House then planned a hostile “red team, blue team” review of the assessment, but that effort was later scrapped by administration and campaign officials concerned about political optics before the election.
The assessment is congressionally mandated to be produced every four years, and the next version will be its fifth iteration and is scheduled to be released in 2022. The report has a history with Republican administrations, starting when the George W. Bush White House interfered with the release of the first version.”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/trump-put-climate-denier-charge-key-us-report
Bit more detail from the NYT.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/climate/michael-kuperberg-climate-assessment.html
There is an arm’s length policy in my country between science and government, so that scientific advice is not a product of the political preferences of the ruling party. Is that not the case in the US?
Have you ever heard of Al Gore? The EPA declaring CO2 a pollutant? The Kyoto Treaty? The Paris Accord?
Stephen` Paul Anderson
What the heck does Al Gore have in common with science?
J.-P. D.
I know that despite changing US governments and their different views on climate change, the message from NASA and NOAA has been quite consistent.
Yeah, those are policies, not science.
It is interesting to wonder and delve more about this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/business/soros-charity-zuckerberg-gates.html
https://umoya.org/2020/12/13/control-bill-gates-periodismo/
An extract:
The Gates Foundation has turned down numerous requests to interview them for this story and did not provide its own version of accounting for their investments in journalism. In response to emailed questions, a spokesperson for the Foundation stated that “a guiding principle” for its funding of journalism is “to ensure editorial and creative independence.” The spokesperson also pointed out that, due to the financial difficulties suffered by journalism, many of the issues on which the Foundation works do not receive as deep and consistent media coverage as before If the highly reputed media are it gives the opportunity to cover little researched and little publicized topics, they have the power to educate the public and encourage the adoption, as well as the application, of performance standards based on empirical data in both the public and private sectors .
When from the CJR (Columbria Journalism Review) we were finishing checking the data on this article, the Gates Foundation offered a more direct answer: The beneficiaries of the journalism grants from this Foundation have been and continue to be some of the media from most respected communications in the world The focus of the questions asked to elaborate this article suggests that these entities with the funding of the Foundation have risked their integrity and their independence when reporting on global health, development and education. We strongly deny that this is the case.
The Foundation’s response also provided us with other ties they have with the media, such as “participation in dozens of conferences, such as the Perugia International Journalism Festival, the Global Editors Network or the World Conference on Scientific Journalism.” as well as “helping to create training through the Innovation in Development Reporting fund” [20].
The full scope of Gates’ donations to the media is unknown, as the Foundation only publishes the money given through charitable donations, not through contracts. In response to questions, Gates only disclosed one contract, the one for Vox, but he did describe how part of the money from this contract is invested: producing sponsored content and sometimes funding “non-profit non-media entities to support actions such as the training of journalists, press meetings and attendance at events .
Is umoya reputable? There are a couple of statements in there that are belied by the sources they cite. Eg,
“PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively, both recipients of grants from the Gates Foundation) have even used their ‘fact-checking’ platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” and ideas such as that the Foundation has invested in companies that are developing vaccines and other therapies against COVID. In fact, the foundation’s website and its latest tax forms clearly show that they have invested in these types of companies, including Gilead and CureVac.”
You click on the link to PolitiFact that they handily provide, and it says this:
“The Gates Foundation has pledged millions of dollars to companies developing potential novel coronavirus vaccines.”
That seems to be a contradiction. The next sentence is this.
“There is no evidence that the Gates Foundation stands to profit from these efforts.”
Is there something up with the translation, perhaps?
So I checked the gatesfoundation website, and the latest tax returns show Curevac getting a donation, not an investment.
https://tinyurl.com/y5p8ctf6
?
Tracked the author down and it seems he’s reputable:
https://about.me/tim_schwab
He seems to think companies should get serious about reducing the carbon footprint.
So why have you posted this, Adelaida? Does it relate to the topic at hand?
While I deleted the PDFs yesterday as soon as I got the notice, it sounds like some people still can see them. This could be because they are in your browser’s cache. I went ahead and also deleted the blog article that had listed the brochures.
Roy W. Spencer
Indeed, ‘Page not found’ exception. I guess that this never happened since I read your articles…
Luckily, I managed to at least download John Christy’s Tmax/Tmin paper; I would like to go a bit deeper into it, in the hope to show what happens when trying to extend its range from CONUS to Earth.
But I won’t upload it of course.
Regards
J.-P. D.
“I went ahead and also deleted the blog article that had listed the brochures.”
.
.
The internet never forgets.
Indeed so. You can find the deleted post, along with the “flyers”, here.
The bottom of each page indicates that it is copy-writed by the OSTP @2021. Can that be verified?
Confirmed the page is gone.
These brochures can still be downloaded as follows:
go to
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C2AOHY_enUS708US708&newwindow=1&safe=off&sxsrf=ALeKk02sakrLFWOl_2_YgfJ0kb1zwxaZEA%3A1610539936740&source=hp&ei=oOP-X_vEKpK50PEP8pWk4Ao&q=Roy+Spencer+brochures&oq=&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQElAAWABgzydoAHAAeACAAQCIAQCSAQCYAQCgAQaqAQdnd3Mtd2l6&gs_ivs=1&sclient=psy-ab
or google search: roy spencer brouchures
Then click on the small down arrow at the end of the first description.. Then click on “cached” …voila! Down load all the pdf’s.
But don’t wait…the thought police at google will be deleting these soon.
Allow me to try to reconstruct my comment from that post which has now been lost.
“Thank you Dr. Spencer for these thoughtful papers. Not only do they illustrate that the question is not yet settled, but the IPCC now acknowledges this also. Remember, in their last report the IPCC (which represents a large bulk of Climate researchers) estimated the ECS was given a 90% chance of being between 1.5 and 4.5C, with NO KNOWN “MOST LIKELY”
VALUE. Therefore 1.5 is just as likely as 4.5. This is a 300% possible variation in the most important single parameter of all…this is the very definition of a question not being settled.
It’s ok that the PDFs are archived. Roy is not going to be at fault for that.
“Remember, in their last report the IPCC (which represents a large bulk of Climate researchers) estimated the ECS was given a 90% chance of being between 1.5 and 4.5C, with NO KNOWN MOST LIKELY
VALUE. Therefore 1.5 is just as likely as 4.5. ”
Not quite. You are looking at a probability distribution.
IPCC are saying that there is a 10% probability that ECS is less than 1.5C, a 10% probability that ECS is greater than 4.5C and the most likely value is around 3C.
I’m always amused by the “The science is settled” straw man.
Science, by its nature, is never completely “settled” .
What you actually get is “settled enough to become a paradigm.”
Please show or quote the section of the last IPCC report that indicates a most likely value or the shape of the probability profile from which they can calculate such a median value.
Remember, in their most recent report the IPCC (which represents a large bulk of Climate researchers) estimated the ECS was given a 90% chance of being between 1.5 and 4.5C, with NO KNOWN MOST LIKELY VALUE. Therefore 1.5 is just as likely as 4.5 or as 3. This is a 300% possible variation in the most important single parameter of allthis is the very definition of a question not being settled.
A little voice told me to download them while I could.
Thank god I did.
We’re going to see a lot of “book burning” in the coming years.
Don’t be silly. Those PDFs can still be posted without the seal of the Executive Office of the President. That was the issue.
The truth hurts. I just hope we go into a definitive temperature down trend.
The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute reported snow accumulation of up to 60 centimeters (24 inches) in in northern Sweden.
In neighboring Finland, snow blanketed southern Finland, and warnings for poor road conditions have been issued for almost all of southern and western Finland.
YLE said the snowfall was expected to decrease Wednesday and would gradually be replaced by severe cold, with temperatures in the coming days dropping to -25 C (-13 F) in the south and -40 C (-40 F) in the Arctic region.
https://apnews.com/article/international-news-baltic-sea-finland-power-outages-sweden-7db26c5f0842798ceb48d9046ee97955
ren
Please calm down
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/6084680
J.-P. D.
Early support for Mongolian herders as extreme winter looms
Red Cross releasing funds to mitigate effect of severe weather with more than -50 degree Celsius temperatures expected.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/12/red-cross-releases-funds-to-mongolia-at-risk-of-extreme-winter
“Where Are We Today?
Most scientists agree that changes in carbon dioxide did not cause the ice ages but that the long-term change in carbon dioxide might, in fact, be due to the Milankovitch cycles.
However, with respect to climate change over the last 150 years, the effect of Milankovitch cycles is generally assumed to be relatively slow and gradual and most scientists look elsewhere an explanation of changes over the past two centuries.”
“Many different plausible TSI reconstructions exist. For instance, eight different estimates are plotted in the accompanying figure. Of them, four imply little solar variability since the 17th century. If any of these are correct, then it is unlikely that changes in TSI have played a major role in the climate changes seen since the 19th century. On the other hand, four of the estimates imply a highly variable Sun, with periods of increasing or decreasing solar activity over multiple decades. If these high variability estimates are correct, then it is plausible that much (or even most) of the climate changes since the 19th century might have been solar-driven. A big part of deciding how big a role the Sun has played in recent climate change depends on which TSI reconstruction used.”
Trump could only get confirmed people that McConnell would allow to get through the process. McConnell IS a leftist masquerading as a Republican in the same mold of John McCain and many other Rinos.
If Trump could have put who he actually wanted in confirmation-required positions it would not be these people.
Boy oh boy, that is a load of crap. The Dems HATE McConnell because he blocked Obama as hard as he could, prevented his mid to late term SCOTUS nomination while delivering 3 for Trump and one late in the term.
The pattern is pitifully obvious. Whoever isn’t loyal to Trump is a RINO. Slapping that label on McConnell is pure theatre.
Truth is, Trump is a RINO. He dragged the party well away from their roots, which is why Texas sued the federal court to change election results in other states. This is patently against the Repub manifesto of the fed staying out of states’ business. Trump wanted $2000 cheques to help people, the Republicans stayed on track this time and baulked at wasteful spending. Trump was all about Trump, not about Republicanism.
“Dragged the party well away from their roots????”……hmmm. Trump has stood almost alone against the leftist Marxist onslaught for four years while many Republicans routinely stabbed him in the back. He beat Hilary. He appointed conservative justices and conservative federal judges. He supported US sovereignty-built the wall. He annihilated Al Qaeda and ISIS. He strengthened the military. He eliminated odious federal regulations. The idea that Trump or anyone could have been more Republican by supporting spending cuts or shrinking the budget deficit died long ago. We are already way past the point of no return. Trump and anyone with half a brain know that.
What Republicans have stabbed him in the back?
Drunkymcrapeface?
I guess Trump forgot that you don’t get to boss supremes around after you give them the job.
TurtleMcConnell?
Who finally took his head out.
Mike Pence?
VP stand by your man!
“He annihilated Al Qaeda and ISIS”
Wow. Revisionist history.
What did he do about Al Queda?
ISIS was 98% smashed by Obama.
A balanced budget amendment, and free trade were very important to Republicans before Trump decided they werent.
GW
Who writes such a trash must be at the rightmost end of alt-right, hu?
Great.
Luckily, Trump and his stoopid riot fanatics won’t survive for long.
J.-P. D.
Legates is Deputy at NOAA in Commerce so Droggy cannot fire him. If he was on detail to OSTP he can just be sent back to NOAA. They can fire him.
David Legates joins Pruit and Happer on the illustrious list of skeptics blocked by WH staff. Drog is a disgrace. I hope Biden keeps him on so we can cream him.
Getting harder to keep the vermin off the table…but Dr S. keep in mind you have many who have your back and uphold objectivity over subjective twisting of objective facts.
Happily I downloaded the “Brochures” before Dr. Roy took them down.
I have not read them all yet but the common theme seems to be that there is no “Climate Crisis”.
Apparently such thoughts must be suppressed since they are at odds with Barack Obama’s views:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/president-obama-climate-action-plan
My guess is that the new administration will take Obama’s absurd vision to the next level. Brace yourself for serious attempts to implement crazy AOC’s “Green New Deal”. To make that possible the first step will be to silence all dissenting voices and that may be what this is all about.
That’s a dramatic read of it. Apparently a government seal was used on the documents without permsission. Those documents can still be posted here or anywhere else without the seal.
Roy, why don’t you and David LKegates post the documents again without the seal?
The ultimate decision on the seal is Trump’s. No one else.
He’s got bigger worries right now, like whether to pardon himself.
And he needs to find a legal team to represent him, and the cash to pay them.
He might be coming up short.
He could wear a gold jump suit instead of the usual orange.
“The ultimate decision on the seal is Trump’s. No one else.”
“The Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General said it will investigate how two former Trump officials posted dubious papers questioning man-made climate change using government logos but without the approval of the Trump administration.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/23/politics/david-legates-ryan-maue-trump-officials-climate-change-mazie-hirono/index.html
Barry,
I don’t see the contradiction you say …
I believe that foundations make donations and finance, but as you say, they do not make investments as such … it will be a translation error …
I try with my previous comment, to invite to deepen the current objectivity of the media in their transmission of reality …
This includes climate change logically, but with regard to this issue, in the context of my previous comment, neither the position of the original author, his magazine or the Spanish magazine Umoya, are important …
Another interesting article from the magazine that is not related in principle to the main topic of the blog:
https://umoya.org/2020/05/20/robert-kennedy-bill-gates-vacunas-experimentacion-humanos/
Wanting more objectivity from the media is a good thing. It’s not on topic here, but then a bunch of stuff often isn’t.
How hard would it be to recreate those pages without the ‘seal’?
Those pages are an awesome condensation of everything I’ve learned about climate change. It’d be a shame to simply destroy that work.
It would be incredibly easy to recreate them. Surely the pre-seal versions are still extant.
It should be very easy to recreate them.
Barry,
Surely more than 95% of the US media are and have been absolutely against President Trump from the beginning and not slightly biased against him …
Have you seen any message before January 6, on that day or after that Trump invited violence or a violent takeover of the Capitol? …
If you have seen it or someone has seen it, please send the video to the blog, because my 21-year-old son and I believe that we have seen them all and none of them was an invitation to violence … If not quite the contrary, an invitation to manifest meekly.
And when it was the Capitol, the message that Trump gave was for people to leave there calmly and return to their homes calmly …
However, what did Twitter do? … and YouTube, Facebook, etc etc etc … and almost any newspaper that you can read of course in the USA, but also abroad (in Spain of course)?
And despite everything, this man has obtained 74.5 million clean and irreproachable votes … a little less than those that Obama got, with all the media support on his side …
I don’t think so
” But I said something is wrong here, something is really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore”
and
“So we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue — I love Pennsylvania Avenue — and we are going to the Capitol. And we are going to try and give — the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote — but we are going to try to give our Republicans — the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help — going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”
we fight like hell … to take back our country
bob, if you believe that is a call for physical violence, then hopefully you won’t hurt yourself when you figure out what a useless idiot you are.
We have idiot confirmation and it’s ClintR.
Usually politicians don’t mean it when they say fight, but they usually don’t say fight like hell.
And they usually don’t say fight like hell.
Maybe you should enroll in an English for idiots class.
Us liberals are taking the US back from Trump.
He told his supporters over and over a Big Lie for two months. That
he actually won the election ‘by a landlside” and that ‘it was stolen’ from them, by evil Dems who committed ‘election fraud’. And they believed it, and got angrier and angrier, yet he kept it up the Big Lie.
Then he invited them all to Washington to try to disrupt another branch of government from doing its duty to count the electors. Then he told another Big Lie that the VP had the power to overturn it, which of course he didnt, because that would be unconstitutional. His underlings used inflammatory language like ‘trial by combat’ etc. The mob now wanted to hang the VP as they marched on his orders to the Capital.
What happened was predictable, inevitable, and a direct result of his Big Lies and attempts to undermine the will of the people, and a peaceful transition of power.
Troll Nate, you don’t know belief from truth.
1) The election was extremely close.
2) There was voter fraud.
Both statements are true.
Now whether or not the fraud tilted the election we will never know, because there will not be any meaningful investigations, since the beneficiaries won.
“Now whether or not the fraud tilted the election we will never know”
According to the courts and state officials, we know enough to certify the votes, as we always have done.
Speculation is not excuse for all of this.
In Bush v Gore, we cannot know what the real Florida vote would have been if the Courts let the recount continue. But Gore understood that with the SCOTUS ruling, for the sake of unity, it had to end.
I think we have all learned why we have the norm of the losing candidate conceding after due process. Weve learned why facilitating the peaceful transition of power is so important in our democracy.
Ren,
I think you did mention solar minimum when you predicted the Nina we’re in, although I’m not sure …
Perhaps the following links support your thesis?:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228907219_Using_the_oceans_as_a_calorimeter_to_quantify_the_solar_radiative_forcing
https://www-researchgate-net.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.researchgate.net/profile/Nir_Shaviv/amp?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQFKAGwASA%3D#aoh=16106451389472&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=De%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fprofile%2FNir_Shaviv
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020EA001142
Adelaida
The solar minimum is definitely not conducive to increasing the heat in the ocean. As the force of the solar wind increases at the beginning of the solar cycle, the jetstream becomes more latitudinal. As a result, the east wind along the equator increases, favoring the development of La Nina as the Peruvian Current drops its temperature.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/patterson=-138.47,-0.73,165
Bobdroege,
Have you seen the full speech? … Everything has to be seen in context …
I don’t see incitement to violence there.
Obviously, “Fight until hell” is said in the sense of:
Not giving up…
The context:
The incredible fraud, but real, that occurred in the 3N elections … for those who followed him closely and beyond the mainstream media (newspapers and TV) and who of course were protecting the Democratic presidential candidate …
Do you really think that a million people demonstrating peacefully in front of the Capitol is not enough pressure on congressmen and senators to certify the votes?
I didn’t see the whole speech, only parts, but I read the whole transcript, if I can trust the Washington Post to publish it accurately.
The key words are take our country back, not the fighting words.
Trump also said he would walk with them, he’s a liar, but we knew that.
I think a decent prosecutor could make an attempted murder charge stick with regards to the vice president.
If you are still for President Trump at this point I have a label for you.
The rioting at the Capitol started before Trump had finished his speech. It is more than a half hour walk from the speech location to the Capitol. Thus, the rioters could not have been egged on by Trump’s speech and those listing to the speech could not have reached the Capitol in time to invade the Capitol building. You obviously want Trump to be guilty of high crimes and will bend logic and truth to achieve your dream of the total destruction of Trump.
He set the date well in advance, and spread his election lies for two months.
If you have the PDFs, delete the cover page and post them somewhere.
Hi,
I am surprised by how you write many politicians are turning against the president for personal gain.
Did we not just see an attempt to a so called self-coup? Things we have seen in Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries where democracy is seen as less strong.
Wouldnt anything but turning against the president be supporting the coup?
Please enlighten me. I guess I am just a not-understanding Euro in your view.
Thanks,
Ola
Wave,
The best thing is that you judge for yourself after seeing the full speeches, … Although I don’t know if they will still be accessible …
My best greetings!
Looks like we’re going off-topic, but to answer your question on whether Trump incited or not: that is all about context, because this brewed over the 4 years of his presidency (and before).
I don’t think Trump had a coup in mind when he said what he said over the years. I think he has zero idea how to be the leader of a people. He is an excellent example of what happens when a populist demagogue becomes leader of a country.
What he said:
He said that there were “fine people,” among the white supremacist groups at Charlottesville. He told the Proud Boys to “stand back, and stand by.” This was not cultivating an insurrection, it was a populist leader trying to keep anyone who might be on his side onside. A true leader would never have given oxygen to right-wing extremists. It was these elements that led the charge on the Capitol, and they have made it clear they believed Trump was calling them to it.
His rhetoric was always that of hate and loathing for the other side, and winking at violence. Draining the “swamp,” “lock her up,” and encouraging physical aggression against protesters, whether at his own rallies or suggesting police could be rougher. He tweeted a doctored WWF video symbolizing a reporter getting body-slammed. Speaking of a Republican’s altercation with a reporter, Trump said, “Any guy that can do a body slam, he is my type!”
There is a much longer list of this type of thing, of this casual machismo and tough talk. Trump often had to walk back these comments later, but not always. Nevertheless, he kept saying them, again and again. They were met with a chorus of approval from many on the right, not just extremists.
In an already bitterly divided political landscape, a pugilistic salesman, for whom losing simply isn’t an option, and can never be seen to be happening to him, became president of the United States.
More specifically, his rhetoric about election fraud started even before he was elected president, continued afterwards, and ramped up in the months leading to the US election. Trump categorically said that if he lost, it could ONLY be a result of fraud. He said that months before the election. He had decided months before it happened.
The rhetoric heightened after November 3rd. “Stop the Steal,” your country has been stolen, we have to fight like hell.
A real leader would not habve invited a mob to Washington on January 6 to “stop the steal,” announcing that it would be “wild.” A real leader would have immediately and forcefully spoken against Lin Woods calling twice for Pence to be executed in the weeks leading up to Jan 6. Trump was silent.
A real leader would not have pointed his amped up mob at the Captiol and told them to head towards it. A real leader would not have incensed them, and lied that the vice president could invert the outcome of the business of counting the electoral ballots.
A real leader would have kept a hawk eye on an agry mob heading to the Capitol, and instantly called on the National Guard to help, instead of watching it unfold for an hour and then tweeting for calm. There were plenty of failures that day. This was his. A grave dereliction of duty. To think that he had helped stoke the conditions that led to a mob storming the Capitol and calling for the death of his own vice president. He still hasn’t spoken against that. He can’t even defend his 2nd in command. He is no leader.
As usual, he later followed his call for peace with the same rhetoric that got people riled up. The salesman just couldn’t resist his instincts in order to claim his power at any cost.
Donald Trump is not responsible for the political divide in the US that has deepened over the past few decades. But his complete lack of fitness for the position, his utter ignorance of what it means to lead a country, and his supreme self-regard and lust to retain power made him a populist demagogue that emboldened and invited the extreme elements of the American right.
Yes, he egged them on, by what he said and also by what he didn’t say. I think it is very clear myself, but I hope this very matter is brought beforfe a court of law (not impeachment) and properly weighed on the scales of justice.
Why is it so difficult for some people to realize that in spite of Donald Trumps abrasive personality his administration achieved a tremendous amount of good for the country. Before the pandemic we truly did have an economy unrivaled by anything in the last 50 years. Lowest minority unemployment ever. Is that so hard to comprehend? He led several countries to normalize relationships with Israel, an accomplishment that has eluded all other administration for 50 years! A feat John Kerry said could never happen without appeasing the Palestinians first which meant acknowledging their commitment to destroy Israel! He wisely extracted The US from the insane Paris Climate accords which gave China a tremendous and advantage over the world by not requiring them to began reducing emissions before 2030. He led America to a net Entergy producer for the first time in 75 years! Despise Trump if you want but you can’t deny he got thing done!
Of course the economy is great if you keep borrowing during good times, when you should have been saving for the next crisis. Short term populism, just like his climate policy.
Trump had a weakness which was not revealed until the pandemic came which is he can not handle a crisis he can’t control , and then this was further in evidence over the election results.
F- is his grade on those 2 items.
Prior to the pandemic Trump was dong quite well little did we know how he would end which was in a total mess.
He did great until the crisis came.
It’s an F on climate too, it was science ignorance exactly like his covid failure.
I would assume then you would give and F- also on the rest of the world for the pandemic since no country seems to have miraculously avoided it and since Biden has so far done nothing significantly different than Trump. As far as ignorance in science, I think no one can take that prize away from the Left.
The Republican administration lost about a hundred times more people to Covid than did the Chinese Communist administration.
The proper definition of the left/rigjt is that right are pro-establishment and left are anti-establishment. Indeed the current american definition of the left/right dichotomy is the complete opposite of what it should be.
ah, the mibile version seems to post comments not where they were intended but append them to the end of the stream
I overlooked one of the most terrifying comments I ever had to read on this blog:
Stephen Paul Anderson
January 12, 2021 at 4:19 PM
The left wants to shut you up. It has nothing to do with science. This is fascistic.
Here you can see what people write who live in a country that has supported real fascism always and everywhere in the continuation of World War II, especially in its backyard, in Central and South America.
Anderson doesn’t know ANYTHING about fascism.
He was never in Germany between 1933 and 1945, nor in the German ‘Democratic’ Republic, with its far weaker fascism variant from 1945 till 1989, nor the USSR or in China or in Cambodia or in North Korea.
Let alone was he ever in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Honduras, Guatemala.
Fascism, Anderson, is where people are fetched by the GESTAPO and tortured till death just because they don’t want to answer to ‘Heil Hitler’, or are gassed because they are Jews, or are flown over the Atlantic in airplanes and dropped from there from several thousand meters.
You are such a poor guy, Anderson.
Be happy to live where you are!
J.-P. D.
Reading Will Happer’s “brochure”, one finds ample reason for the value of peer review. There are some glaringly obvious errors which most any reader with familiarly of the science would notice.
First off, Happer points to the solar constant, averaging about 1360 Watts/m^2 above the TOA, then offers a comparison with his calculated value of the effect of doubling of CO2 at ~3 Watts/m^2. This comparison is bogus, since the ~3 Watt/m^2 number represents a local value for surface area, while the 1360 Watts/m^2 is that of the Earth’s disk area. The proper comparison would divide the 1360 by 4 to give a 340 Watts/m^2 average for the entire surface. He has also ignored the effects of albedo where some fraction, perhaps 30%?, of that 340 Watts/m^2 is immediately reflected away from the Earth by clouds and snow and ice at higher latitudes. Thus, his “very small” 3 Watts/m^2 is actually a significant fraction of the actual amount of energy trapped within the Earth’s climate system.
Worse, his 3 Watts/m^2 doesn’t include the added impact of water vapor as the Earth warms. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is generally a function of temperature, as Happer points to with his graphs on page 7 for different locations, and any increase in temperature would lead to more water vapor, producing a stronger net Greenhouse Effect. His graph on page 8 intentionally displays the effect of doubling CO2 from 400 ppm to 800 ppm while holding water vapor constant, obviously a pointless comparison.
But, what about his value of 3 Watts’m/^2? He describes it as the result of his calculation of increasing the CO2 concentration from 400 to 800 ppm, but humanity began adding CO2 in massive quantities only since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, at which time the concentration was about 275 ppm. Back calculating his value for “S” gives 4.33 and calculating the change from pre-industrial to his arbitrary 800ppm at the end of the century gives an increase in 4.62 Watts/m^2. This value represents a much more appropriate comparison, as it incorporates the warming which has already happened but which has yet to appeared in the system due to the thermal inertia of the oceans.
It’s good thing that those brochure were pulled, IMHO. Now that Trumpy and his clan are headed out the door, maybe some factual science can begin to reach the public to counter the wide spread denialist misinformation.
Entropic man
You are a bright poster. I would agree that more water vapor will enhance the GHE but water has other functions that oppose this function. More water vapor in the air also means more evapoarative cooling of the surface. How much? What is the balance between this cooling and warming from more GHE? Also water vapor produces clouds that cut off solar power reaching the surface. How is this predicted to change with an increase in Water Vapor, this is also a negative effect on surface warming.
I think the key word here is “net”.
Some aspects of the increase in water vapour, such as evaporative cooling and increasing low cloud have a cooling effect on the surface. Others, like the increased greenhouse effect and increased high cloud have a warming effect.
When up put numbers on the different effects and add them up, you find that the total NET effect is increased warming.
The “very small” argument is like “very little” CO2 argument.
1 K is a small increase compared to 310 K.
It still means you have a fever.
So, E Swanson, I am wondering whether you or anyone else in your pre-conceived CO2 warming world could provide a Delta S of the solar insolation reaching the earth’s surface on per square meter of surface since the beginning of the satellite record to compare with the record of LT temperature change…same thing with cloud cover, which could tell us what changes have occurred with LW and SW radiation at the earth’s surface thru time.
Without this information, how can you delineate what fraction of the total radiation spectrum is responsible for the warming in the temperature record?
It looks like to me until you answer these questions and fill in the blanks, what you consider to be proper “climate science” is nothing more than blather and pure speculation.
The founding principles from atmospheric science DO NOT draw a conclusion that atmospheric CO2 is controlling on temperature.
There is no excuse…NONE.. for what these climate loons now in the White House are doing to energy jobs or our energy independence by following failed climate models and the hand waiving nonsense you write here that has not proven CO2 is responsible for changing the earth’s climate.
Barry,
The first thing: Thankyou for your answer.
And after that:
I’m sorry,
I don’t agree with you because what I have seen in this short period of time since the coronavirus pandemic began in the United States until now is different, and the blog does not let me post the long comment where I tell it.
I just tell you that before the pandemic I thought similar to you, based on information from moderate newspapers in my country …
And the exhaustive follow-up that I did with my son about what was happening in the USA and the president,
They have made me change my mind.
I hope you will excuse me and that this difference in vision does not prevent me from asking you about weather related issues and also revere the work of Dr. Spencer.
No problem. I’ve also done a lot of reading on the subject of COVID.
The first thing to know is that the whole world has been at least one step behind the disease the whole time. Information has changed with more study. There is no worldwide conspiracy – because that is impossible. The world is reacting to this issue, not controlling it. We’ll see how well various countries have done in the long run.
Agree Barry.
“The Commerce Department’s Office of Inspector General said it will investigate how two former Trump officials posted dubious papers questioning man-made climate change using government logos but without the approval of the Trump administration.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/23/politics/david-legates-ryan-maue-trump-officials-climate-change-mazie-hirono/index.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20210111233049/https://www.ceres-science.com/content/climate_change_flyers.html
ClintR
1. ” In the quotes you provided, Newton was clearly talking about libration. ”
Wrong, as usual. This is a simple lie, and you know that.
A look at the source shows the evidence:
https://tinyurl.com/ycokq9ys
Planetarum motus diurnos uniformes esse, et Librationem Lunae ex ipsius motu diurno oriri.
Translation:
The planets’ daily movements are uniform, and Moon’s libration arises from its daily movement.
And what he means with ‘daily movement’ clearly has to be understood as ‘rotation about an own axis’:
” Jupiter utique respectu fixarum revolvitur horis 9. 56', Mars horis 24. 39'. Venus horis 23. circiter, Terra horis 23. 56', Sol diebus 251, et Luna diebus 27. 7. hor. 43'. >/i> ”
Simply because when Newton mentions Earth, he writes : Terra horis 23. 56', what certainly does not mean its orbit around the Sun.
Thus, with ” et Luna diebus 27. 7. hor. 43' “, he can’t suddenly mean Moon’s orbit around Earth.
In the footnote, he writes:
” Quoniam enim Luna circà axem suum uniformiter revolvit eodem tempore quo circà Tellurem periodum suam absolvit… ”
Translation:
For the Moon uniformly revolves around its axis in the same time as it orbits around Earth…
*
I know, ClintR: you will never accept you are wrong.
***
2. ” When he mentioned lunar rotation, it was in relation to the stars. ”
And that is the same nonsense as that endlessly written in 2019 by… JD*Huffman.
*
No astronomer describes movements ‘in relation to the stars’.
Astronomers measure the exact duration of movements ‘in relation to the stars’.
Simply because when you measure the duration of a movement in relation to an object being itself in movement, you inevitably will obtain an erroneous result.
As opposed to the ignorants ClintR and JD*Huffman, Newton has perfectly understood the problem.
He wrote that with respect to Earth, the spots on the Sun rotate in 27 1/2 days, but they do that in 25 1/2 days with respect to the fixed stars.
*
And here too, you will never accept you are wrong.
You will repeat your nonsense all the time, exactly as does your friend Robertson.
No one – excepted some people like you and Robertson – knows why you do that…
J.-P. D.
Very interesting details you have noted , appreciate it for posting . “The only thing worse than a man you can’t control is a man you can.” by Margo Kaufman.