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Winds of Trumpian change begin freezing Obama’s climate legacy

Winds of Trumpian change begin freezing Obama’s climate legacy

New chief, new laws, and renewed investigations chill climate alarmism.

The political climate of the EPA can be expected to change more rapidly, now that its new head has started his first day at the agency.

Scott Pruitt told EPA employees Tuesday that he’s committed to protecting the environment and upholding the agency’s core mission, but he also signaled that major changes are ahead as he begins to dismantle much of former President Obama’s climate change agenda.

In his first address to the agency workforce, Mr. Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general who was confirmed as EPA administrator last Friday, said he intends to keep an open mind and draw from the experience of those inside the department….

“We ought to be able to get together and wrestle through some very difficult issues and do so in a civil manner. We ought to be able to be thoughtful and exchange ideas and engage in debate and make sure we do find answers to these problems,” he said. “I seek to be a good listener. You can’t lead if you don’t listen.”

It does not appear that Pruitt required a federal marshal escort into the building.

As Pruitt was meeting and greeting his new staff, US Senators passed the NASA Transition Authorization Act to transition our space agency back to a focus on….space!

At a House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing yesterday, Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said he wants a “rebalancing” of NASA’s mission. The lawmaker told E&E News he wants the agency to reprioritize its mission because the Obama administration cut space exploration funds.

Specifically, that could mean NASA’s work on climate change would go to another agency, with or without funding, or possibly would get cut. Smith and other Republicans avoided laying out specifics but acknowledged that earth science at NASA would likely face some significant changes in the near future.

“By rebalancing, I’d like for more funds to go into space exploration; we’re not going to zero out earth sciences,” he said. “Our weather satellites have been an immense help, for example, and that’s from NASA, but I’d like for us to remember what our priorities are, and there are another dozen agencies that study earth science and climate change, and they can continue to do that. Meanwhile, we only have one agency that engages in space exploration, and they need every dollar they can muster for space exploration.”.

Senator Smith has been busy. Legal Insurrection readers will recall the “Pause-buster” data manipulation scandal by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, which was revealed by a whistleblower.

Smith is renewing demands to see the data collected.

Republican Lamar Smith, who chairs the influential House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology, announced the inquiry last week in a letter to Benjamin Friedman, acting chief of the organisation at the heart of the MoS disclosures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He renewed demands, first made in 2015, for all internal NOAA documents and communications between staff behind a controversial scientific paper, which made a huge impact on the Paris Agreement on climate change of that year, signed by figures including David Cameron and Barack Obama.

I suspect the Trump administration will demand that NOAA be more responsive to the new request.

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Comments

Suspend federal funds for warmist sanctuary universities until Michael Mann reveals ALL of his data and at least one of the computer models shows some relevance to reality.

    MattMusson in reply to Dimsdale. | February 22, 2017 at 9:12 am

    The key to these models is the interpolated data. Today we may have 10,000 reliable temperature recording stations. Two hundred years ago we may have had 100. So, using those 100 stations, modelers ‘create’ data for the other 9,900 stations. They try to do this making educated guesses. But, if they guess 1 degree low – Global Warming. 1 degree high – Global Cooling. No interpolation at all – models are useless due to lack of coverage.

      Bruce Hayden in reply to MattMusson. | February 22, 2017 at 2:03 pm

      The other part of this is that the temperature recording stations are nowhere near evenly distributed around the land mass of this planet (they tend to correlate very strongly with population density) and land is far better measured than the oceans. And, hence, the need to interpolate.

      Exactly right, and the level of hubris involved is astounding. I monitor a lot of these stations (work related) and even within a small geographic area there is surprising variability in the temperature. It’s not unusual to see a 5 or 10 degree F variance in temperature between two weather stations that are just a few miles apart. And when the weather man says “Austin got 1 and a half inches of rain yesterday” that might mean some of the stations in the Austin area got 2 inches, some got one inch, some got none, etc.

      So for these clowns to claim that they’ve got a network of 10,000 weather stations around the world and they can calculate the “global average” temperature it is in reality an astonishingly retarded thing to say. And when they start reaching for my wallet based on such Fake Science it makes me want to punch somebody in the throat.

    Exiliado in reply to Dimsdale. | February 22, 2017 at 10:10 am

    They will not reveal the data.
    Apparently, they are now claiming that the data was lost because of a computer crash.

    Grants generally have a reporting process back to the agency. So, demand the report and the supporting documentation.

    For the accountants, there needs to be complete financial statements as well as the supporting documents or an audit of these numbers.

    For the science portion, demand the data and the computations. When I was in school, I was taught that good science practice meant showing your data,the methodology, and having it replicated by others. If someone couldn’t repeat the experiment, then it was back to the lab.

      notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital in reply to Liz. | February 22, 2017 at 3:43 pm

      RE: “For the accountants, there needs to be complete financial statements as well as the supporting documents or an audit of these numbers.”

      Those should be specifically “fraud audits” imo.

        We passed into RICO territory a few hundred billion dollars ago.

        I started out as an auditor – we usually did an audit in two parts. First was mid year review, testing procedures and controls. The results of the this review decided how we did the year end audit. But, at any point in time, if things didn’t look good, we expanded the audit and charged the client for the time.

        And, every audit is a “fraud” audit since we don’t want the responsibility if we missed something!

        As an accounting manager, it was correct or they didn’t get a check.

The biggest crock lies in the ‘adjusted’ data, particularly when the original data seems to just vanish. The first thing (of many) that Pruitt needs to do in the EPA is to permanently archive original data, from both physical datasets to (ahem) email servers. It’s just amazing how such inconvenient data can just fade away or get overwritten. Let’s get a little less amazed.

The artificial green blight and their environmentalist lobbies are already pushing back. The inertia of entrenched special and peculiar interests is huge, but the double-edged scalpel of environmentalist propaganda cuts both ways.

Photosynthesis: Plants/Plankton turning Sunlight/CO2/H2O into Plant Food/O2 – the Foundation of Life on Earth. Neither animal nor blade of grass would exist, absent CO2. It extends growing seasons & lets plants move higher in altitude & Latitudes; just as it shrinks deserts, plants using H2O more efficiently. Rising temperatures extend growing seasons, help babies of nearly every species, increase net rainfall & save lives. As CO2 levels rise, photosynthesis flourishes & plants take in more CO2, sparking more plant growth, photosynthesis & CO2 uptake; win-win for Gaia. Mankind’s CO2 production may be extending the length of this Glacial Interstitial, because ‘Winter Is Coming’ (Ice Age).
This Cradle of Life is greener, more fertile & life sustaining than it was 30 years ago.

    Bruce Hayden in reply to Icepilot. | February 22, 2017 at 1:59 pm

    Nice summary of the basic flaw in AGW scaremongering. The reality is that mankind has historically done best when the climate was warmer, and worst when it was colder – including a higher death toll through epidemics. Estimated sea level increases are grossly over exaggerated, and, even so, don’t take into account that economic obsolescence of buildings, etc is much quicker than any realistic rise in sea levels (i.e. The solution, if ithere is a problem, would be to rebuild the next generation of buildings on higher ground, for essentially no increased marginal cost). Crops have moved with climatic changes for thousands of years – but now they can be shifted within several years, instead of decades or centuries, as used to be the case, thanks to modern transportation. And, thanks to the distribution of land around the globe, pushing the frost line north would open up far more ariable land than could ever be lost to flooding. In short, we should be praying for global warming, not panicking over it.

It’s 83 degrees here today and the college girls are wearing shorts. Damn that global arming.

oops! warming

The only money that should be spent on Gobal Warming is for an experiment to prove or disprove this theory.

Develop a method of measuring the climate with out the data being fixed as the advocates of this theory do.

Record the theory’s climate predictions for the next thousand years. Make sure that the different models predictions are identical.

Compare the theory’s predictions with the real world measuments and if the match for a thousand years we can assume that the theory is valid.

As this theory is independent of the Sun I don’t see how it could be valid.

Uh oh, he’s attacking a government sponsored religion. Must be a scumbag, poor old maxine is going to stroke out one of these days.

Watt’s Up With That blog has documented many temperature stations which are not in the proper location. Issues are the locations are in parking lots, next to air conditioners, at airports were the jets are blowing exhaust at the station and it goes on. https://wattsupwiththat.com/

In Oklahoma, the state supports the Mesonet. Here is the link for the site that I check. http://www.mesonet.org/index.php/weather/local/okcn There is a button that will take you to the actual site photos and all sites that I have looked at are in fields. So, there is less impact of the urban heat island effect on the temperature records.

The “official” OKC weather from the airport is always higher than the weather sites near the airport.

The state has at least one station per county and the system is used for education, public safety, fire management and agriculture. This is a weather measurement system that I would support being implemented around the country.

Since Pruitt is from Oklahoma, I hope that he is aware of how temperature stations can be sited and maintained.

Pruitt is essentially irrelevant. He can’t wholesale fire the career leftists under him, nor can he dismantle the corrupt consent decrees the EPA has set up. The bureaucracy will resist him at every turn and their insubordination will be publicly cheered on by the media.

    mailman in reply to randian. | February 23, 2017 at 5:50 am

    The importance of Pruitt is that he is the conduit from the President in to the EPA. Through the President he sets the direction of travel and is responsible for the implementation of that plan.

    This is why the next 8 years is going to be delicious for conservatives…all those beautiful sweet liberal tears 🙂

    Mailman