First, this press release today from the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and chair Lamar Smith . Some material obtained from George Mason University today via FOIA shed some light on the IGES/COLA organization and its founders and director.
For Immediate Release | October 1, 2015
Media Contacts: Zachary Kurz, Laura Crist
Smith: Taxpayer-Funded Climate Org Allegedly Seeks Criminal Penalties for Skeptics
Washington, D.C. – Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today sent a letter to Dr. Jagadish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University who founded the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES). IGES is a non-profit organization that has received millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA.
According to media reports, IGES is responsible for circulating a letter to the president and senior White House officials requesting a criminal investigation of organizations who question the risks of climate change. Specifically, the letter seeks a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) investigation that would allow the government to impose criminal penalties. The letter was posted to the IGES website and later removed and replaced with a note saying it had been “inadvertently posted.”
Chairman Smith: “IGES appears to be almost fully funded by taxpayer money while simultaneously participating in partisan political activity by requesting a RICO investigation of companies and organizations that disagree with the Obama administration on climate change. In fact, IGES has reportedly received $63 million from taxpayers since 2001, comprising over 98 percent of its total revenue during that time.”
In light of the non-profit’s decision to remove the controversial letter from its website, Smith directs IGES to preserve “all e-mail, electronic documents, and data created since January 1, 2009, that can be reasonably anticipated to be subject to a request for production by the Committee.”
The full letter can be found here.
h/t to Mike Bastasch for the PR from the House
Also today, I have been given some materials obtained by attorney Chris Horner of CEI, who made a request to The Virginia Governor’s Office for materials related to Shukla and IGES/COLA. Props to the Virginia Governor’s Office, as they responded very quickly to the request.
Of most interest is a document that answers the question I raised yesterday about what, if any, separation exists between the Shukla family enterprises IGES and COLA, especially since it was announced (in place of the disappeared letter) that IGES would be dissolved while COLA was getting NSF grants active through 2017. This is what replaced the disappeared letter to Obama:
The Schedule A attached to the 2012 through 2015 Statement of Economic Interests from COLA director James Kinter removes any doubt about any separation of IGES/COLA, and further, since the last dated Schedule A was of May 31st of this year, it suggests that “dissolution” of IGES really wasn’t in the cards at all:
Above, 2015 through 2012 (top to bottom) Schedule A’s from Kinter.
Source: FOIA obtained documents – PDF’s are linked below:
Horner, Chris – Horner Law – GMU Professor Request
Sec Commonwealth GMU Faculty Statements of Economic Interests Records Request
Shukla, Jagadish – SOEI – 2012
Shukla, Jagadish – SOEI – 2013
Shukla, Jagadish – SOEI – 2014
Shukla, Jagadish – SOEI – 2015
Note: shortly after publication this story was edited to correct the order of and some captions of the Kinter Schedule A screencaps
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I hope what doesn’t get lost in this sideshow is the RICO demands in the first place. Demanding the state remove people with contrary opinion from society places these monsters with the worst actors in all of history. How is this acceptable to any of the institutions these animals work for? The double dipping professor deserves to be investigated but where is the scorn for the others? Where are the protests from peers? Where are the administrators and their code of conduct and ethics policies?
The RICO20 names are added to the dubious role call of others who have advocated the same techniques. Trenberth, Stalin, The Inquisition.
“Where are the administrators and their code of conduct and ethics policies?”
Follow the money, also know as Indirect Costs.
Incase Dr. Shukla has not done so already, it is now time to ‘lawyer up’.
Yeah…I’m sure there are a few lawyers in the family that they can hire, and find a way to have the taxpayers take care of their expenses too.
Funny that there has been total silence from Mosher, Stokes and Zeke!!
No-one should be expected to defend anyone save themselves, their family, close friends and their mentors/mentees.
The sides aren’t that well defined. We ain’t all buddies.
Just coincident in interests; coincident in understanding of the truth.
I noticed that too. Crickets……………..
Paul, to get that gang here just tie Shukla to temperature adjustments…
Huh,
investigate and prosecute. Ive already said the RICO thing was stupid and probably better aimed at Big Green and what it does to corrupt the EPA.
some people forget who caught Glieck.
I have not forgotten, Mosh
Steven Mosher
Thank you.
michael
Can anyone point to any publicized Congressional investigation of possible criminal activities by Gov’t officials, or related entities in last six years which resulted in any criminal prosecution, at all?
Not possible withe current or recent AG. Remember one of them was involved in selling pardons, what can we expect.
I’m still waiting for a banker to go to jail.
Or a governor. Remember it was Cuomo, as head of HUD, that forced Fannie and Freddie to purchase 55% of their mortgages from the “subprime” market. The Federal Government was the creator of that whole market and forced banks to make the garbage mortgages in the first place, i.e., take anybody and give them a mortgage even when they couldn’t realistically afford it. That became essentially a government mandate and the banks reluctantly complied. The mortgage securities market became littered with the garbage mortgages intermingled with good. It all crashed following the month with the largest number of 3 and 5 yr ARM rollovers that couldn’t be paid on regular terms. Sure, bankers made mistakes, but politicians created the whole thing. Even Barney Frank finally admitted it wasn’t such a great idea to force banks to give loans to people that couldn’t afford to pay them…
Thank you for the correction and additional info, and yes, I completely agree. Tho I’m not sure how “reluctant” the banks were, given that they now had a guaranteed revenue stream since the subprime loans were backed by the government.
If you want more insight into how all of THAT mess started, go check out Penny Pritzker.
“Congress can stem the flow of $s if they have evidence of criminal activity.”
Hah. Sure they can. You assume that Pelosi and company would do what is right, rather than doing what it is that “their side” wants. Obama and his cohorts in congress called the Constitution’s bluff. Without a supermajority in both houses of congress, Congress has no power whatsoever.
In this case Republicans will demand that funding cease. Democrats will resist it. An impass will happen, and the press will repeat Democrat talking points that republicans are willing to shut down the government to continue to funnel money to Big Oil.
Yep. And that all changes with Trump as commander and chief. It IS going to happen you know. And oh how entertaining it will be. 90% cut in climate research funding. The warmistas will instead be employed to deport illegals. At much lower pay I might add.
Jagdish Shukla Ponzi Scheme quickly unravelling! Checked with DoS, India and Pakistan have extradition treaties with USA. That leaves China for Shukla and family and subbordinates to flee to before DoS contacts DHS (TSA) to confiscate his green-card and visa’s at the border.
The RICO20 and Holdren are going to get black-eyes on this.
Remember that ‘Report Waste Fraud and Abuse NSF’ thingy a few years ago! Woooo!
Calling Major Bang Ding Ow, Major Bang Ding Ow, Urgent. Dis e Major Bang Ding Ow …. Wa Da! Hoooooreeee Fug. Mi To Waite. Mi Out A Her. By By.
Ha ha
I suggest the Hillary approach and don’t show up to congressional hearings when called and start deleting emails and wiping servers now.
You mean, like, with a rag?
/sarc off
I think we should crowd source a file on the whole thing for use of the Congressional committee:
1) Money, income by source and actors involved, tax returns, 3rd party payments (eg. Shuke’s own foundation, etc.)
2) List of papers published (it should be $63million worth).
3) Tie ins of the signatories to the request for RICOing skeptics (Trenberth!!! chin in this trought, too??)
4) Grant providers, people okaying them, the oversight (or not) on the work on the grant, any perks – holidays in Bali, cruises or some such.
By focusing on IGES/COLA, attention is straying from the real issue. Remember, the RICO letter was given the blessing of some 20 of Shukla’s peers (as in “peer review”). And many in COLA did not even sign the RICO letter – Kinter did not. For the questionable practices to have continued for so long, they had to also be given the blessing of the NSF and other federal agencies. So the root issue lies with those bureaucrats who diverted buckets of taxpayer dollars to parties who, by signing the RICO letter, admit to being passionately tied to the UN’s political agenda – one side of a contentious issue. A light should be shined on how much the same bureaucrats invested in the other side of the issue, in climate efforts that were not predisposed to that agenda. Otherwise, you could eliminate IGES, COLA, and the entire RICO 20. But they would only be replaced by other well wishers.. err.. climate scientists.
kcrucible Maybe. Maybe not. These people are booked for the Paris party. Who is paying? Not all Dems are okay with graft. Many of them work for a living.
Now are they allowed to use grant money to fly off to “GAY PARIE” .
This is about turning the BEAN COUNTERS LOOSE!
They have been pooling grants. They may not have have gotten the okay to do so.
Lets say a grant is approved, you pool money to it Now You have just proven that you did not need the full grant. Also the Orgs that give grants base them on need and ability. Was another app refused based on a false app? Something that would have helped mankind?
anger anger anger.
michael
sorry
Don’t apologize for anger. Perfectly warranted here.
He does look a little bit like Lois Lerner.
It seems to me that the principle focus of AGES was lobbying the government for grants both for itself and its associated research centres (probably why Shukla was looked upon so favourably by george mason). Essentially meaning the government was spending money to lobby itself into spending more money on lobbying itself to spend more money.
What this shows is that the government funding agencies are really just focusing on the area of research and not the actual outcome of the funding, unless the outcome they were seeking was more funding for climate science in this case.
I request more funding to study this…um…funding problem !!!!!!
The RICO inquires, if conducted, would uncover the largest misappropriation of funds in the history of the US. Ironically it will be the clime syndicate that will be brought up on charges.
How many papers did $93 million get us taxpayers in the last 14 years?
I work in a research lab that gets has received about $20 million in that same span and has published about 250 papers. Hard to tell, but looking online it doesn’t seem like these guys publish very much. Would love to know the $$$$/paper
Not all grants are aimed at producing peer reviewed papers. I arranged a $1.8m two year grant from ONR. About $800k to the Center for Applied Energy Research at U. Kentucky for materials development, and $1m to ONR for materials full characterizarion and testing. Output from the beginning was a materials characterizataion report for the Navy and Marine Corp. neber intended to be public. One would have to read the various grant documents to know what the deliverables were.
Did not take a penny for myself, since held the patents. The grant meant I did not have to raise and spend dilutive capital.
ristvan, yeah – Lockheed and General Dynamics do what you are saying. Climate science isn’t building things – well not so much – some buoys and such – but most of this stuff, satellite instruments are generally gov jobs in climate. This ‘discipline’ puts out words. 63 million bucks!! what could they have built for that? No it comes out as words, as reports.
“And the walls came crashing down”
Climategate was not enough, obvious falsification of the temperature record is not even noticed. What will, or could stop the Global Warming juggernaut?
I remember a time, allow me to digress:
Facilitated Communication
This was said to be a means of helping children with severe autism communicate with the outside world. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was most trendy, with large government sums going to groups providing “child care services” in this area. In many states, there were even programs to put severely autistic children in mainstream public schools, constantly accompanied by their paid “Facilitator”. For some, it was a time of great hope, severely disabled children imprisoned by a total inability to communicate, now set free by their “Facilitators”. For others, a time of great doubt. How could children, completely lost in their own world, suddenly know things from The Bible, Shakespeare, and TV shows?
Then It Happened
For reasons still unknown, the autistic children through their facilitators started accusing their fathers of sexual molestation and even rape. The charges were sensational, and as attention was gained, more and more charges were uncovered. All of course, to more attention and sensation. Even, in the state of Maine, one farther was imprisoned on sexual abuse charges. Finally, one brave Attorney General opened an investigation into ” Facilitated Communication” in general. At first, he focused on the “facilitators”, and saw the lie. Then he turned his attention to how, where, and by whom, the “facilitators” were trained. After all, serious charges of felony criminal conduct were being made in abundance. If those accusations were false and/or malicious, that in itself would be a criminal act. The young woman responsible for the father in Maine being imprisoned, was herself tried, convicted, and sent to prison.
Radio Silence
After years of “Rock Star” status of fame and funding with child service, education, and health agencies, all would change. All of a sudden, nobody had ever heard of “Facilitated Communication”. Nobody knew what it was, nobody knew who might be doing it, nobody knew where such a program might be, nobody knew where one might get training in the field. In short, nobody knew nothing. At all. Ever.
For the low level, “in the trenches” workers, nothing fixes the attention like watching one of your own get sent to prison, for doing exactly what you are doing.
And Facilitated Communication sank without a trace
Maybe the same will happen with the Climate Wars.
Sometimes you “Follow The Money”, perhaps sometimes you put the fear of the “Wrath Of God” into the foot soldiers.
Wiki’s last paragraph on FC, sound familiar?
Many people believed FC had passed its peak,[41] dismissing it as a fad[41] and characterizing it as pseudo-scientific.[4][42] However, despite these findings, FC proponents continued their adherence to the technique, dismissing empirical investigations as irrelevant, flawed or unnecessary, characterized FC as an “effective and legitimate intervention” in pro-FC literature,[40] and refused to change their minds or admit their mistakes.[29][43][44] The FC movement has retained popularity in some parts of the United States, Australia and Germany,[22] and is used in many countries to this day.[3]
Its always difficult to completely stop the true believers!
Remember a contemporaneous phenomenon? “Recovered memory therapy”? Late eighties through mid-nineties, women who had gold-plated health plans were accusing their parents of having diddled them. Insurance companies were spending mega-bucks on extremely dubious new-age hypnotherapists who were living large on ruining lives. Public opinion began to turn with a handful of big-time exposes. Eventually, I believe insurance rules were re-written by Congress and psychotherapy was handed over to the pill-pushers. The low-life’s evaporated like the Somali pirates and now we have a generation of mass murderers on mental meds shooting up schools and theaters left and right.
Could use some of that medicine in the IRS, DOJ. Secret Service, …hell the whole government!
Schadenfreude on Shukla
I dont know if there is a connection, but 649 million people in India do not have access to a toilet!
What about the other signatories of the RICO letter? I’ll bet they all have their own corrupt non-profits.
Yes. Trenberth’s is called NCAR, a part of NOAA, a part of the US government. At all levels corrupt (Lois Learner, IRS), and given chronic deficits for sure non-profit.
still waiting for the MSM to pick this up–will it make the 10:00news???
http://www.iges.org/people/PubList_201312.htm
this is a list of papers of which Shukla was author
– first paper co-authored with Kinter in 1988
– Cola climate reports 1994 to 2006 and nothing thereafter(?)
– a paper by Dirmeyer and Trenberth in 2014 – a connection with IGES?
Shukla’s 2013 statement is going to leave a mark. On January 6, 2014 he answered “no” to the following:
Offices and Directorships.
Are you or a member of your immediate family a paid officer or paid director of a business?
The IRS 990s from 2013 show otherwise.
Then he’s in trouble, as I posted above a former colleague of mine did that and was fired as a result.
was this the first “outing” mentioning “trillions”, now part of everyday CAGW language?
Climategate 2.0: Model Quotations: Gerald North on Climate Modeling Revisited (re Climategate 2.0)
By Robert Bradley Jr. — November 30, 2011
[Jagadish] Shukla/IGES: [“Future of the IPCC”, 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.
https://www.masterresource.org/north-gerald-texas-am/gerald-north-on-climate-modeling-revisited-re-climategate-2-0/
2 pages: April 2013: Forbes: Larry Bell: Global Warming Alarm: Continued Cooling May Jeopardize Climate Science And Green Energy Funding!
Gosh…Where Did All of Those Expensive Climate Models Go Wrong?
A scientist who commented in a Climategate email was badly mistaken when he observed: “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.” As it turned out, our policymakers did make those horrendously costly decisions based upon highly speculative model projections, mostly reported by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/04/30/global-warming-alarm-continued-cooling-may-jeopardize-climate-science-and-green-energy-funding/
Why is it that I keep on thinking of what appears to be rapidly developing and marked parallel between the debacle of “Shukla 20’s RICO fantasy” destruction of skeptics and the Paris COP in less than two months time and the destruction of public belief in the absolute trustworthiness of climate scientists wrought by ClimateGate in the lead up to the hugely heavily and over hyped Copenhagen Conference of 2009.
It seems that climate alarmists scientists have this rather unique ability to shoot themselves in both feet when the heat is really on.
And the higher their profile, the bigger the guns that they use to do it!
Or maybe there is a God in Heaven after all who gets a good chuckle out of seeing that “the best laid plans of mice and men oft go astray!”
They are just getting more desperate, and as the pressure is on they do what they always do, act without actually doing any thinking or checking of data. The just assume that they can “adjust” the facts to match their position. it has worked in the past and they are stupid enough to believe that they are infallible.
“captured the attention of Congress, and FOIA documents are coming out”
Awwwwww – ain’t that just too bad.
I’m order another boxcar of popcorn. 😀
as for George Mason Uni, worth a re-run:
first survey pdf is broken, use this one: http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/images/files/TV_Meteorologists_Survey_Findings_%28March_2010%29.pdf
2010: Grist: Randy Rieland: TV weathercasters and news directors are distorting climate coverage
Just a few months ago, we learned that one out of four weathercasters surveyed [PDF] thought global warming wasn’t really happening, and another 21 percent weren’t sure yet. Now a new survey [PDF] reveals that 21 percent of TV news directors don’t think climate change is real, and 26 percent are unsure…
This latest survey — conducted, like the earlier one, by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication — shows that the TV newsrooms of America aren’t exactly havens of scientific discourse. Only 10 percent have a full-time science or environmental reporter, which means that the job often falls to the person who points to cold fronts on colorful maps. And despite the overwhelming recognition by top climate scientists that global warming is human-caused, 90 percent of the news directors said their coverage of climate change must reflect a “balance” of viewpoints…
I am blogger, hear me roar: Andrew Freedman, a member of The Washington Post‘s Capital Weather Gang, blames the blogosphere — or, more specifically, the fact that a number of big-name meteorologists have found second careers there as climate skeptics:
‘In my view, the perception that there is significant scientific disagreement about the causes of climate change can be traced in part to the rise of the blogosphere as a medium of scientific communication (and misinformation). Climate skeptics dominate this medium, and many are current or former weather forecasters, such as former TV meteorologist Anthony Watts of the popular “Watts Up With That” blog, and Joe D’Aleo, who runs icecap.us.’…
http://grist.org/article/2010-07-01-tv-weathercasters-news-directors-distorting-climate-coverage/
kudos to Anthony and other meteorologists who have dared to question CAGW.
There were 19 other signatories on that petition; do they also believe it was put up on the web site by mistake?