Yesterday, Shukla and GMU got notice that they have piqued the interest of a congressional committee, and via a written notice are required to preserve documents for an impending Congressional investigation and to provide proof that all employees of IGES/COLA have been notified that they are aware they can’t destroy documents. As we follow the unraveling behind the scenes and new FOIA documentation, rumors of some aberrant behavior in the past have begun to surface from former colleagues that suggest we might be dealing with the same sort of ego induced blindness that led to the downfall of IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri. The combination of information WUWT is being given behind the scenes suggests to me that this episode is going to get far worse for Shukla and GMU before it gets better.
At issue is at leastĀ 63.5 million dollars from the National Science Foundation, and where it went, whether it was used for the purpose intended, and who benefited from that money. The problem at hand seems to be that there may have been more than a little “double dipping” going on with that grant money as Steve McIntyre pointed out in Shukla’s Gold:
NSF policies purportedly regulate research compensation for members of university faculties by limiting their compensation in the academic year to their university salary, while permitting them to top up their university salary in summer months, but set their compensation at the monthly rate of their university salary (the ātwo-ninths ruleā, as follows:
Ā 611.1 Salaries and Wages
- All Grantees. All remuneration paid currently or accrued by the organization for employees working on the NSF-supported project during the grant period is allowable to the extent that:
- total compensation to individual employees is reasonable for the work performed and conforms to the established policy of the organization consistently applied to both government and non-government activities; and
- the charges for work performed directly under NSF grants and for other work allocable as indirect costs are determined and documented as provided in the applicable Federal cost principles.
- Colleges and Universities. Section J.10 of OMB Circular A-21 establishes criteria for compensation work performed on government projects by faculty members during and outside the academic year.
NSFās policy is:
- Academic Year Salaries. To be based on the individual faculty memberās regular compensation for the continuous period which, under the policy of the institution concerned, constitutes the basis of his/her salary. Except as provided in GPM 616.2, āIntra-University Consulting,ā charges to Federal grants, irrespective of the basis of computation, will not exceed the proportionate share of the base salary for that period.
- Periods Outside the Academic Year. During the summer months or other periods not included in the period for which the base salary is paid, salary is to be paid at a monthly rate not in excess of the base salary divided by the number of months in the period for which the base salary is paid. NSF policy on funding of summer salaries (known as NSFās two-ninths rule) remains unchanged: proposal budgets submitted should not request, and NSF-approved budgets will not include, funding for an individual investigator which exceeds two-ninths of the academic year salary. This limit includes summer salary received from all NSF-funded grants.
Andrew Dessler, who, like most climate academics, has consistently denied that research funding has any impact on alarmism, summarized the above policy as follows:
Texas A&M pays 10 months of my salary to teach. The other two months of my salary are paid out of grants for doing research, but the University sets the amount I receive during those two months equal to the m$158.06onthly rate that the University pays me the other 10 months. Thus, the vast majority of my salary is completely disconnected with research.
There are many other obligations on recipients of federal research grants, many of which are summarized in the NSF Grants Manual.
George Mason University Policy
Shukla has been on the faculty of George Mason University since 1993 (1984-1992 University of Maryland) and, during that time, has obtained federal grants both in the name of George Mason University and the Institute for Global Environment and Security Inc. discussed below).
George Mason, like Ā most universities, has aĀ policy on conflict of interest, Ā including a detailed policy onĀ conflict of interest in federally funded research. Ā Under such policies, ānon-profitsā are classified as ābusinessā, a protocol that seems very apt when large salaries are withdrawn by insiders from a closely-held ānon-profitā:
āBusinessā means a corporation, partnership, sole proprietorship, firm, enterprise, franchise, association, trust or foundation, or any other individual or entity carrying on a business or profession, whether or not for profit.
The University conflict of interest policies require comprehensive and formal disclosure of personal and family financial interests to the Office of Sponsored Programs.
This policy applies to any person who is responsible for the design, conduct, or reporting of any research funded by a Federal agency.Ā The responsible parties listed in this policy act as institutional officials for purposes of policy implementation, enforcement, and reporting.
Financial Conflict of interestā (FCOI) means a significant financial interest (SFI) directly and significantly affecting the design, conduct, or reporting of the federally funded research.
āSignificant financial interestā means a financial interest consisting of one or more of the following interests of the investigator (and/or those of the investigatorās spouse and dependent children) that reasonably appears to be related to the investigatorās institutional responsibilities:
Investigators who apply for any federally funded research must disclose certain financial interests related to that research.Ā Specifically, each investigator must provide a list of his or her known SFIs (and those of his or her spouse and/or dependent children) related to the investigatorās institutional responsibilities.
As a part of the universityās application for federal funds, each investigator must certify (1) that he or she has no such interests or (2) that he or she has such interests and has disclosed them through the institutionās disclosure process.Ā The Office of Sponsored Programs maintains custody of the investigatorās certification.
So, as you can see, there are strict rules on how that money can be used. McIntyre addsĀ commentaryĀ that suggests in addition to nepotism, there’s a quantity friends and family all feeding from these NSF grants:
Shukla Compensation
Despite the various changes in grant structure, one constant (or rather steadily increasing amount) has been the several sources of compensation to Shukla and his wife.
In 2001, the earliest year thus far publicly available,Ā in 2001, in addition to his university salary (not yet available, but presumably about $125,000), Shukla and his wife received a further $214,496 Ā in compensation from IGES (Shukla -$128,796; Anne Shukla ā $85,700). Ā Their combined compensation from IGES doubled over the next two years to approximately $400,000 (additional to Shuklaās university salary of say $130,000), for combined compensation of about $530,000 by 2004.
Shuklaās university salary increased dramatically over the decade reaching $250,866 by 2013 and $314,000 by 2014. Ā (In this latter year, Shukla was paid much more than Ed Wegman, a George Mason professor of similar seniority). Meanwhile, despite the apparent transition of IGES to George Mason,Ā the income of the Shuklas from IGES continued to increase, reaching $547,000 by 2013. Ā Combined with Shuklaās university salary, Ā the total compensation of Shukla and his wife exceeded $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014. Ā In addition, as noted above, Shuklaās daughter continued to be employed by IGES in 2014; IGES also distributed $100,000 from its climate grant revenue to support an educational charity in India which Shukla had founded.
Discussion
There is a surprising link between the George Mason department and one of my earliest adversaries at NSF, David Verardo, Mannās handler at NSF, who told him in 2003 that he didnāt have to provide data to me ā that Mann was entitled to his view of climate and I was entitled to mine. Verardoās wife, Stacey Verardo, is a colleague of Shukla, Kinter, Klinger and the others in the AOES department at George Mason, while Verardo himself is a member of the Adjunct Faculty at George Mason.
The most important point about all this?
There’s apparently an $800,000 annual salary and an organizationĀ full of Shukla family members that has produced next to no results for the millions received. Even NSF on their own web page acknowledges that only one paper has been produced out of a 4.2 million dollar grant.
Just think of what climate skeptics could do with money like that if we actually got it rather than the purported proverbial “big oil check” we are so often accused of getting?
In addition to the Federal law related to NSF grants, the other real teeth of the matter here is the law governing state employees: state employees may not be compensated by another employer for work that falls under their state employee remit. In this case that would include scientific research by a Professor (a state employee) i.e. Shukla himself.
It seems this went overlooked by GMU for awhile, but there are indications that somebody might have seen the looming problem that threatened to derail the gravy train, and made some changes.
From what can be ascertained at this point, prior to 2013, all the NSF grants flowed through Shukla’s IGES organization to the subsidiary organization COLA. Now, the NSF grants apparently bypass IGES and go directly to GMU and COLA.
WUWT commenter “lokenbr” noted yesterday:
Itās almost as if someone recognized the inappropriate nature of the previous arrangement and shut it down.
Though given the Schedule A filed in May 2015 along with a statement of financial interests by COLA director James Kinter it seems like they are still one and the same entity:
Source:Ā Kinter, James – SOEI – 2015Ā (PDF)
Former Virginia State Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels quipped on WUWT yesterday: (bold mine)
It would appear that thereās about $31.5 million in overhead (1/2 of 63 million) that should have gone to GMU, but the grants were run through the consulting company, in clear violation of the rules for state employees. This is money that the taxpayers of Virginia had to pony up instead.
IGESā Form 990 shows Shukla worked 28 hours per week for it. That can only happen if the Dean approves an overage beyond the eight hours allowed.
GMUās faculty Dean had to know about the magnitude of the money flowing through IGES and into the Shukla family.
GMUās Provost had to know this, because no Dean would permit that all that overhead to not go to the university on his or her own.
Perhaps the President knew.
NSF had to know this.
NOAA had to know this.
NASA had to know this.
Apparently each one of these entities felt they were above the law. You may be looking at the largest science scandal in US history.
Note: initial publication of this post was missing an image and quote from Pat Michaels due to operator error of the Publish/Save button. The missing elements were added within a couple of minutes. Some spelling and formatting corrections and a link to Kinter’s SOEI have also been added.
What is the likelihood that Shukla will ever have to pay this money back?
Zip.
Correct, we have a government that does not care about corruption from certain quarters.
We have a government that typically awards corruption and has a CAGW-oriented agenda. However, the electorate is now aware of it, much to the dismay of the government. Time for a big, big reset.
In a plea bargain arrangement it’s very high, just the fact that there’s a potential fraud case here, with penalties that include 20 years of incarceration, tends to drive the defendant to a plea bargain. Also a good chance GMU needs to can him, to protect their backside.
I worked in the defense industry for 6 years, and I can tell you that the Fed Bean Counters are some of the most tenacious creatures on earth.
Are you kidding? NOTHING will come of this. Some will go through a Kabuki theater of concern and outrage, and it will dwindle down to nothing. Absolutely guaranteed. If for no other reason than the people involved are “too big to fail”. But another big reason is that they are on the āright side of historyā.
In the past I worked in aerospace and also managed a large lab at a major research university. During my aerospace days the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) tended to conform to your description. The NSF audit function was a joke. The university had a significant amount of DoD research funding, enough to have resident DCAA representative. There was also an Office of Naval Research resident representative. They were all congenial folks but would never make it beyond AA level to use a baseball metaphor. We can only hope that the good Congressman will send in the Government Accountability Office. (Hint hint!)
Let’s see, entering the final year of a presidential election race. The Democrats are already looking down for the count even against a field of anemic insubstantial Republicans.
A) The Democrats can throw the Shukla’s under the bus and claim the moral high ground.
B) The Congressional Republicans are no fools and as Texas Rep. Lamar Smith (R) has already demonstrated, neither lazy nor slow.
C) The Democrats can turn a blind eye, using their illegal partisan agency approach to stifle prosecution at least temporarily.
D) Don’t worry about the Republicans, there is liberal blood in the water and both houses of Congress will be looking for their share.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has taken the National Science Foundation (NSF) to task before for sloppy accounting and results tracking. It isn’t likely that the OMB will allow this caper to slip by without making some glorious public examples.
Then there is the Office of Inspector General (OIG) which by itself sounds simple, but is anything but. Depending on the specifics of who, where and what, there can be quite a number of very interested glory hunting Inspector Generals.
e.g. Just at the Federal level;
Department of Education
The Honorable Kathleen Tighe, Inspector General,
Government Accountability Office
Adam Trzeciak, Inspector General,
National Science Foundation
Allison Lerner, Inspector General,
are just the opening interest players. Any IG who thinks their territory might have some Shukla or GMU trespass footprints will show interest and demand paperwork.
How tenacious are the Fed Bean Counters when the beans they’re counting are their own?
This affair will change the AGW machine only if a spotlight is shined on it by politicians and the MSM.
I’m with Bill on Kabuki theater.
Aren’t US Congressional committees where important bills go to die? Or at least get buried.
Even if the IRS or other US Federal auditors get involved, we’ve seen recently how high-placed IRS bureaucrat idealogues can persecute other ideologies and get a pass from their “overseers” in Congress.
We can only hope. But fraud in the sub-$1M range is probably noise to US Federal “regulators”.
When they’re looking OUTSIDE.
Inside the gov?…not so much.
FREE JON CORSINE!!! In order for there to be a plea bargain, there must be a prosecution from the Obama regime. Won’t happen.
Nada
My experience with a NASA investigation in a similar case is that he will most likely have to pay back those amounts deemed to have been fraudulently used. Also I would expect the university to take action if any of their rules have been circumvented (which seems likely), although I’m not very confident that GMU will do so.
No, it will be swept under the rug to protect their reputations.
Noble Cause Corruption makes this case very different from a NASA or Defense Department investigation. In those cases the MSM would be all over the story looking for whistleblowers, and wagging their fingers at the evil-doers. They would and have lit a fire under the appropriate prosecutors.
Can anyone see that happening when government grantee is a global warming alarmist? Ain’t gonna happen. Outside of a very few right-leaning news outlets, the major players in the MSM will entirely ignore this story. It goes against the whole nature of the narrative they pitch every single day.
1000i
* for those who don’t know i is the imaginary number, it’s value is the square root of negative one.
> i thought that was j ?? or izzat a 90 degree left turn ??
g
in any case, the exact value of pi is : – Ln(-1) .sqrt(-1)
g
Mmmmm…pi!
It’s = it is or it has; its is the possessive. It seems that this distinction has been lost, somehow.
There should be no doubt any a rational mind that the whole AGW “Climate Change” Alarmism is being driven by the Largest Scientific Scandal in Modern History.
Virginia is also one of the states piloting a reenvisioning of higher ed tied to the reenvisioning of K-12 called Common Core is many states originally. (Virginia did not need because it adopted the Common Core of Learning back in the 90s). In other NSF grants I have researched tied to the constructivist Math and Science Partnerships that are controversial, the PIs would brag to officials from other states on how to get administrators throughout the university systems to comply with pushing the desired vision. In the 2009 minutes I have from a DC NSF meeting, a Georgia PI brags about the system telling adminiistraors at all the unviersities and colleges that their promotions, raises, and contract renewals will be tied to the ability to bring in research grants. The NSF grants tied to education and Climate Science are viewed as the easiest to get because you do not need to have the expense of a lab. The grants are primarily for advocacy.
Of course. There is obviously an enormous gravy train here, completely outside of people who really do climate science (who are probably, for the most part, honest about their work and working within the rules). Otherwise we wouldn’t see the endless parade of papers on how global warming (predicted by models, not observed) will affect butterfly populations on particular hillsides in California (without any actual observational work being done on the actual butterfly population or whether or not it is being affected by climate change or the fact that all the trees on the hillside are being cut down to build houses).
In the end, even the 2/9ths rule fails to display the dependency. Yes, you can only get 2/9ths of your salary (summer salary, basically) from a typical academic grant, although there are exceptions. However, the University almost always makes far more than your salary from the 54% indirect costs charged to the grant. For example, if you have a salary of (say) $100,000 (including benefits) and have a grant for $250,000, the University gets over $130,000 for indirect costs, you pay yourself 2/9’s or $22,000 out of the $120,000 remaining, and you have enough left over for a student or two, a postdoc partially supported by teaching, and some equipment. The University pays you the remaining $78,000 “for teaching” and maybe pays your postdoc to teach a course and reduce the burden to your grant, but even allowing for actual overhead — lab space that already exists in buildings long since paid for, electricity, bookkeeping, computer/network services outside of line items in the grant — you can see that they are likely to break even to win a bit. From what I understand it is break even or lose a bit, but even so it is usually a myth that the faculty person is really supported “by teaching”. It’s complex — money flows from here and there out of the tuition stream, any endowments the University might have, and indirect cost money on grants, and is rearranged to “keep the University alive” because in the end, a big-science physics or chemistry lab with a $2 million budget ($1 million of which is indirect cost money for the Unversity might end up de facto subsidizing the Philosophy department, whose faculty really is supported by teaching/tuition as getting anything but tiny grants is difficult indeed.
This system “works”, for the most part — I don’t want to criticize it too harshly because it does work in the public interest to keep higher education alive and (incidentally) the US as one of the premier industrial powers on the planet as we produce a steady flow of well-educated humans and new ideas and technologies. But, like all open systems of this sort, it generates self-organized structures that exploit the cash flow and use it to grow. There are all sorts of rules intended to prevent this, and to ensure that research paid for by grants is done honestly and well, but the system has many incentives for abuse as well as disincentives. Duke is downright fascist in policing their grants, as they have to be — if you get blacklisted by the NSF or NIH it is sayonara for any research university. I don’t even have grant support any more but I fill in a conflict of interest form every year with explicit questions that would detect nepotism, vested interest in companies that do business with Duke, and so on. Duke is enormously intolerant of this — they are still smarting (and probably still under scrutiny) from an incident involving a medical researcher faking data a few years back.
I have no idea what George Mason was thinking, if indeed they were turning a blind eye to nepotism and featherbedding galore with federal grant money, but the consequence of this if proven could be devastating to the University. They could have their ability to administer federal grants at all revoked, indefinitely. If this happens, it could literally destroy the school. Unfortunately, they are way, way over a threshold of sanity here. If $63 million in grants is involved and congress is looking, there will be no protection from the righteous wrath that will descend on them. That’s not chump change (although it is over a fairly long time).
On the other hand, both George Mason and Shuklas deserve due process. Which I’m sure that they will get. In the meantime, I’d suggest not rushing to judgment no matter how attractive the prospect of the perfect karmic balance that would result from a letter suggesting RICO be applied to skeptical funding that had the direct outcome of RICO being applied to the funding of the letter writer.
I’ll say one thing. I’ll bet that the outside (of GM and IGES) signers of this letter are deeply, deeply regretting the fact that they let themselves be talked into it. Because in the fullness of time the grant investigation will — quietly — descend to their own funding as well. If they’ve received money or support through IGES there will likely be harsh words and scrutiny from the grant officers involved.
rgb
rgb,
Thanks for your insights into this facet of higher ed.
Concerning your comment about the RICO20 signers:
Once Iāve read some of Prof. Shuklaās tin-eared, self-aggrandizing materials and saw the signs of nepotism, I started thinking he cannot possibly be very popular in the climate science community. The stuff on his IGES web pages simply looks bad even before anyone starts digging into the details.
I have no doubt the signers now regret joining Shuklaās RICO appeal but why in the world did they go along in the first place? Iām glad they did because it gives the taxpaying public a chance to get some sunlight into the whole complex, but what were they thinking?
To be clear, Iām not asking you to speculate but to me this is the most mysterious part of the ugly affair right now. It looks so stupid it defies explanation even when one considers the self-righteous politicization, hype and habitual overreach in todayās climatology.
I can see how these 20 came to believe signing the “Rico Letter” addressed to the President. They have had support for their fraud from some of the biggest institutions and people in Government and thought that nothing would happen to them. Their heads were bigger than their common sense. They’ve gotten away with all this for so long it became normal to them and, in their minds, acceptable and accepted.
For the lesser involved of the 20, they just got sucked into the hype, but probably also have some fingers in the honey pot. Regret now.
Now, for those people at NSF, NASA, NOAA who were aware of what was going on, when will the investigation get to them. That is an even more serious problem IMHO.
Correction:
I can see how these 20 came to believe signing the āRico Letterā addressed to the President was okay and wouldn’t become a problem for them.
“””””….. ā I donāt want to criticize it too harshly because it does work in the public interest to keep higher education alive and (incidentally) the US as one of the premier industrial powers on the planet as we produce a steady flow of well-educated humans and new ideas and technologies. …..”””””
I thought we imported (immigrated) all of those knowledgeable people from the third world, on H1B visas ??
According to a study done by AIP or some similar Physics organization, of all of the PhD physics graduates “produced” by USA universities, only 30% ever get a full time job applying their well education, and new ideas and technologies.
5% get a part time job doing that but then have to change fields to keep working.
65% of them never ever get a full time paying job doing their very well educated thing.
It seems that the thing that they are good at, and did the pioneering work on in their PhD thesis, is of no earthly interest to anybody else but them. They are the world’s leading authority on something that absolutely nobody else has any interest in; to the point that they would pay money for somebody to do that for them.
They typically end up as post doc fellows at some think tank or institution swilling at the public trough or bleeding some well endowed foundation.
So if you want to be the leader in your field; beware, you might be the only one in your field.
But note: 30% did have the good sense to do their thesis on something practical that somebody else would pay money for them to do.
I thought of getting a PhD in ice cream making; but it seemed to be an already well occupied field. I decided it was more fun, and useful to be an Engineering Physicist, or maybe that’s a Physicist Engineer.
g >> G
I would love to be an engineer.
Out there on the open prairie, no one to bother you…all that open sky and those two gleaming tracks stretching off into the distance…
This is corruption of academia on a massive scale.
Orwell’s 1984: your future is dependent on your collaboration
Anyone else notice a pattern with the current US administration and cronyism/favoritism, to the point of the FBI investigating and raiding the offices of US Fed government’s “CTO” friends’ businesses and offices?
Does the US Fed government really need a politicized office of the “CTO”?
I’m w/George E. Smith’s comments above, on US government-preferred immigrant classes and political pandering. To add specific names and organizations:
Search for yourselves:
Aneesh Chopra, Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Vivek Kundra
Sushal Bansal
FBI
Optimal Solutions and Technologies
GRPA
And I’ll bet foregivenous only applies to Universities that have signed onto the “sustainability” agenda.
It is about time somebody stepped up to the plate to bring these criminals down.
Throw the RICO act at them [RICO20]
RICO requires racketeering.
RICO is intended to combat ‘organized crime’, not nepotism or even bad book-keeping. However, regularly collude with an organized (loosely defined) group to commit injury (also loosely defined) in support or defense of the organization; especially in regards to pecuniary interests and one comes close to RICO boundaries. Something that other ‘climate team members should pay attention to.
Rico was not nor is not intended to be used against anything but organized crime.
A RICO prosecution and conviction requires:
1. That a person”
2. through a pattern”
3. of racketeering activity (organizational)
collection of unlawful debt (funds)
4. directly or indirectly-
(a) invests in, or
(b) maintains an interest in, or
(c) participates in
5. an enterprise
6. the activities of which affect/cross interstate commerce.
All elements of a RICO offense, including the
two or more state or federal offenses which constitute
“racketeering activity,” must be proved beyond
a reasonable doubt.”
Shukla and GMU are not RICO candidates; though their ‘RICO letter’ does come under collusion, but there must be a history of similar activity. One whinging finger pointing letter is not RICO.
The original RICO statue “was” instituted to deal with organized crime, aka Mafia style racketeering, but the law has been broadened on a Federal level and each state also has it’s own RICO laws that can be applied on a state level.
But, no one here, that I can see, has suggested that the “whinging finger pointing letter” that these 20 people signed constitutes a RICO offense. That would be stupid. What constitutes a RICO offense is the “pattern” of their behavior over decades of work in their “scientific” fields, of funneling Federal and State grant money through their own personal “organizations” so that they can “participate in activities that affect, cross interstate commerce”. Such as using NSF grant money for scientific research to fund a school in another country, or to pay friends and family members to run your “foundation”, instead of doing actual scientific research with that money. Every grant they misapplied constitutes “one act/one Federal or State offense” and there are more than enough to establish the “pattern” required by RICO.
Precisely. Mr. “industrial-strength stupid” Eschenbach fails to perceive that “the climate consensus” of alleged “scientists” has been (and continues to be) colluding in theft of value by deceit.
Peculation in Kreis Shukla (masculum et feminam creavit eos) particularly, but more generally in the knowing statement of falsehoods in the climastrologists’ applications for grants to fund their Cargo Cult “research.”
Hasn’t anyone reading here ever been advised about the harrowing liabilities to which a scientific investigator subjects himself simply by signing a grant application containing assertions which he knows to be false?
Bear in mind that the members of this “#RICO20” cadre – like most of the self-anointed “climate consensus” clowns – are not only men of the authoritarian left but are beyond doubt classifiable as Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), demonstrating the pathognomonic traits of all such gibbering “political correctness” puckers.
It’s also worth drawing upon Vox Day’s same work for element #7 of the proper formula by which to address the climate catastrophists who are exercising the Alinsky playbook to which all Social Justice Warriors hew:
Forcing the public and private enterprise,
1. through a pattern of force or harassment (racketeering), with the additional gun of government,
2. based on fraudulent lies
3. to follow practices which enriches themselves.
Shukla is guilty.
His money did not come from freely donated money, people who chose to and agreed with him.
His funds came from taxpayer funds to enforce a pattern of lies to enrich himself and his family.
.
I have put in for several NSF grants – very small amounts.
One was capture of contaminants in drinking water systems ($6,000).
Another was carbon capture of flu gasses in power plants. ($12,000)
Another was near-net carbon-carbon material play dough that becomes harder than diamond. ($22,000)
Another was final prototype test of slurry to capture of contaminants in fracking fluids for recycling. ($15,000)
.
I actually would have produced something that had a purpose and reedy to be commercialized for a very small fraction of the money he received.
.
Imagine how many other ideas and projects out there got thrown out into a dumpster because this grandiose toad needed to buy a new home.
The way the scam works is as follows:
1. Government agencies ‘grant’ money to a not-for-profit organization.
2. The executives allocate a large portion of the grant to themselves as salary.
3. A portion of the grant or the salary is further allocated to 1 or more not-for-profit organizations.
4. The latter organization donates money to a political entity supporting the campaigns of 1 or more politicians who voted to fund the grant money.
It’s an elaborate kickback scheme, or circle of corruption.
In many cases, they don’t even disguise the kickback. In the case of Universities, many are the largest contributors to political campaigns themselves.
While that may have been true at one time, the use of RICO has strayed far away from organized crime.
“Today, federal prosecutors use RICO routinely to win easy convictions and prison terms for individuals who in the course of business run afoul of federal regulations. For every John Gotti who is brought down by RICO, many obscure business owners and managers are also successfully prosecuted under this law.”
More here:
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=215
Everyone is due their chance for rebuttal. But this appears to be a very ugly tip to a very large iceberg of hubris, self denial, and corruption. Thank you Anthony and contributors for turning over a rock and allowing some sun to shine on this festering sore.
Perhaps if we lance this boil we can begin to heal the broken aspects of the scientific community before the rot reaches a point of no return.
Thank Roger Pielke Jr. and Steve McIntyre, they got the ball rolling.
Yes, they deserve a huge thank you also.
WUWT has carried the word to the next level. We shall see if the next level of media are open-minded enough to give this some exposure, or if they will continue their tradition of motivated activism and selective reportage.
Hear hear!
I’m still waiting on the BBC picking up the story…
Thank you, gentlemen. What about the 19 others who signed the document. Are they being committed to an insane asylum?
van Loon, they might not be heading for an asylum, but I suspect many are also being considered for detailed audits. If there’s one bad apple, there’s probably others.
Cheers
I agree. I’m sure they are all very, very sorry they signed. I don’t quite know what people like Trenberth were thinking. Overall, I tend to respect him as being basically honest and comparatively objective. But yes, I’m guessing they will all get audited in time, especially if they received any money or support through IGES itself. Most of them are probably pretty safe, if they are at a University that takes its grant administration rules seriously, as most do AFAIK. There could be some question if they got money for “consulting”, though. That’s something that is legal under most University policies and as long as there is no vested interest or conflict of interest, not a problem for grants. For example, I’ve done and continue to do a bunch of consulting work or entrepreneurial work over the years for companies doing stuff completely irrelevant to my research interests and as long as I limit the time I spend on it to stay within certain permitted levels and clear any IP that Duke might have an interest in Duke, and the granting agencies, do not care. But if it is used to redistribute grant money through a loophole outside of the rules regulating grant support… that might be a problem. If favors (like signing a sketchy document) were exchanged (even if there was no clear quid pro quo) there could be a problem. Or not. It gets pretty complex somewhere in there…
Absolutely! Than you Roger Pielke Jr and Steve McIntyre!
What would make for a great follow up is an analysis of value for money. What did the NSF get for their $63 million?
” I donāt quite know what people like Trenberth were thinking.”
I do not pretend to know what they were thinking, but the letter itself gives us all a very big clue.
Just taking the letter for what it requests, what they were thinking that they could use their influence as bigshots to call down the unfathomably might and wrath of the justice department to steamroll people, who had the temerity to disagree with them, into oblivion.
Put another way, they wanted to have terrible things happen to people they dislike. Things like jail, or huge fines, or perhaps merely career ending criminal investigations. Bad things. While they sat back and patted themselves on the back for being so clever to think of such a grand way to punish other scientists, academics, and anyone else who was on the opposing side of a loaded political propaganda issue.
Very simply…they wanted to harshly punish people for getting in the way of their plans and schemes.
Or maybe not…maybe it was all just an innocent attempt to punish people for the criminal act of being skeptical.
Yes, Big kudos to Roger Pielke Jr, and Steve McIntyre. Excellent work guys. Thank you.
Another point…This is big enough that you guys may want to ask the distinguished Arctic researcher, Prof. Wadhams how to stay out of trouble with all this going on. Get some pointers from him… ; )
1/2 sarc
. . . yes, Roger Pielke Jr, and Steve McIntyre were the initiators of disciplined and carefully considered revelations . . .
John
A first step would be to not allow universities to contribute in any way to political campaigns. They subsist primarily on public money.
It could be a pun. Maybe Shukla wasn’t getting any cost of living adjustments from the University?
or royalties from a sex novel.
What a wonderful gift this is to tax paying citizens. Finally we get a glimpse into the deep, dark hole that criminal embezzlers pour our hard earned money into. Let’s hope the truth will be completely exposed here and appropriate measures taken to reimburse the public treasury. Thank you Anthony, Steve and all the others for bringing this issue to light.
Thank you Mr Watts, Tony Heller, Paul Homewood, Mcyntire ect., for pursuing this to the end! LOL
The VW software did it.
That can’t be. they’re spewing filth whether they’re on the test stand or not.
Hope there’s lots of competent computer forensics and forensic accountants available.
I imagine there will be alot of “dog ate my private mail server” and sgt. Schultz “i know naaaating” coming out of this
You guys realize, I hope, that the response from the believers will be something along the lines of “This doesn’t change the science.” Although I always like to see shysters go down, and this is big, I’m not sure this is a true science scandal if it only affects the funding, rather than providing proof of biased outcomes.
Hopefully if one stops the funding then there will be less pseudo-scientific papers.
True. It’s not going to affect anything on our debate, though it does undermine the “poor underfunded environmentalists versus the rich evil oil companies” meme, which people still trot out despite the laughable falsehood.
However, if it gets more scrutiny of funding, then that’s good for all of us as taxpayers, and it’s good for getting rid of corruption.
Ah, good points, I only briefly thought about that aspect and then just as quickly forgot about it.
True. However, the Shukla case will hopefully show to the public corrupt nature of the agencies that fund science and tchnology. And this is grat and eeded development…
Well there are two thoughts that occur.
First of all, if there is one ‘Black hat’ in the climate community, how many more are there ?
Secondly, if inquiries show that a lot of public money isn’t actually going on the science, how much public funding will they keep dishing out to science that is – ahem – ‘settled’?
Personally, the whole thing hasn’t been about the science for over 10 years. Its been about political and economic expediency. Pork barrel politics to the Greens and the renewables boys.
If the grift associated with teh political part of climate change can be exposed, that’s the end of the politics of climate change, and it can go back to being an arcane corner of science,
In the UK, the Daily Telegraph Earth section, that used to be 90% stories about climate change, this week only has one.
And we are in the run up to Paris FFS!
Climate change simply isn’t interesting any more.
While it isn’t a ‘black hat’ so to speak, GMU is a Virginia State college.
Yes, every other Virginia State college is on the hot seat along with GMU. It is prudent for any investigator to look over the paperwork for similar colleges.
a) especially if there is a trail of communications or discussions regarding interesting topics
b) oddly, if there is a distinct absence of expected communications or suspicious blank spots.
One does wonder about UVA and their ‘circle the wagons’ over past emails. A history of Shukla or GMU communications to various UVA staff/members regarding FOIA topics just might prove interesting.
It does answer the “why would they do this [falsify data]?” objection from the believers.
Ah, yes, I can see what you mean.
No, I’m sadly certain that this will be used as an example of how climate change disbelievers attack the good, hardworking scientists that are fighting so hard to save the world from the 3%.
I think you are wrong. At least I hope so.
The reason i think that is because everyone is familiar with greed and graft.
They are not theoretical things to most people.
People know that other people getting rich on government pork means less money for other things.
Or at the very least, higher debts and deficits.
And most people do not get fat raises every year, or have two huge income streams, at least one of which appears to be for doing little if anything to actually earn it.
No, I think most people will hate the sound of this.
It will make them literally sick to think of their hard earned tax dollars going to fund a lavish lifestyle for a greedy and corrupt cabal of snobbish fat cats.
Fat cats in the private sector are one thing.
Fat cats on the public dime are quite another.
Let’s not forget too that the Foundation in question was financed not to produce ‘science’ but to research means of making the propaganda pushing false ‘climate science’ more effective.
In effect, the taxpayer has been paying vast sums to enable the liars to find improved and more effective ways of lying to them! That in itself is a major scandal, never mind the personal nest-feathering.
Who cares what the believers think, say, do. It’s futile to try to convert them at this point. What exposing this stuff WILL do is keep the majority of the public not trusting scientists, keeping their minds open…sceptical! And Cook and Lew and Nutty and others will continue to scratch their heads and dream up even wackier theories for why the public just will not accept their faked consensus.
( Hint for “science communicators”, if people can’t trust the way you behave as a person, or find the things you do and say outside of your office/lab to be offensive/stupid/condescending /illegal/ unethical etc…they ALSO won’t trust anything you do or say as a “scientist” either.)
Every single event like this is another hole in their boat. None of them is going to sink them on its own, but each one helps and they are riding low in the water these days.
+10
Truth be told, there is not a lick of value in ANY of the handful of climate science papers I have viewed. I’m going to extrapolate and say that this applies to virtually all of them. They are virtually all conjecture. There is no way to get valid data to judge validity of hypothesis, without waiting a lifetime (or two or three…). Thus they instead rely on climate models, which themselves are not proven (in fact early indications are that they are crap!). It’s freakin unbelievable! How the morons administering grants don’t see this – oh wait, I forgot, they are in on it. All the way to the top, obummer and his bozo chief science advisor. The good news is, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. This is a deep and incestuous rathole, and the Rightous Right is going to rain a holy shitstorm down on them, leaving no orifice unexplored. Mainstream media will finally figure out they have been had. And that’s when all hell breaks loose on climate science as a whole. Federal funding goes to zero overnight for this malignant field. No more cli sci papers. No more funding for any universities supporting this crap field. The whole lot of them having to get real jobs where they actually produce something of value (burgers anyone?). The only thing anyone will notice is how nice it is to not have to listen to these chicken littles anymore. Oh man, this is better than a wet dream!
A happy day it will be.
From your keyboard to Lamar’s eyeballs.
“How the morons administering grants donāt see this ā oh wait, I forgot, they are in on it.”
Agree. The sheer intellectual dishonesty of climate change of the magnitude it has become doesn’t likely happen without the ‘ol boys’ in charge at all levels also being intellectually dishonest when doling out the billions they control.
+1
Hope this snowballs and gets big enough to actually make the media start doing their jobs. Time for the nonsense to end. $63 million? For what? I’d like to know. Go Lamar go!
This will come to nothing, unfortunately.
Look at what libs are doing about the Planed Parenthood baby-parts-supermarket and you’ll know what I mean.
In Brazil, we say that “this is going to end in pizza”.
Just spread it around to everyone you can and let the chips fall where they may. We got an election coming up, and people are sick to the point of puking about this noise.
Remember to check for tire tracks on the hard drives.
Dont the Feds keep copies of emails of citizens? They do according to Edward Snowden, they do!
They do! I even have a newest best friend that seems to do the scrolling for me on this site. What a time-saver.
Tip of the iceberg: See for example Duke University Prof. Robert Brown’s comment regarding Paris’ looming COP 21, posted just yesterday in WUWT.
Tens if not hundred of billions disbursed to deviant Warmists over decades have produced only contrived data-sets, invalid statistics, patently fabricated inputs (read, “adjusted”, “smoothed”, etc.– absurdly anti-scientific, biased, one-way only propaganda exercises) constituting fraudulent Grand Theft immune to any honest institutional accounting whatsoever.
Recalling the U.S. Weather Service’s “Blowtorch Winter” forecast issued 10/20/2015, in light of the Old Farmers’ Almanac 2016 projection of “super-cold with heavy snow” throughout New England we await with interest whatever purblind asininities this criminally-deficient agency excretes two weeks from now.
Issued 10/20/15?
This will be all over every front page in every major newspaper and on every tv news channel won’t it?
That was a lovely dream I was just having, back to reality now.
The reality is an invite to the WH.
Ah, if only someone in the Obama administration had thought of that earlier. A shot of Obama and Shukla together in front of the WH would have been priceless.
Some have been able to record this mischief for posterity, so don’t give up the dream.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/09/29/rico20-letter-to-president-obama-disappears/
Another important question is why is so much cash being handed out to the climate change proponents.
The NSF is just throwing money around like it is candy – millions of it at a time that is.
Dicktasterships do not have to accede to the con-scent of the misgoverned.
How did that one skip past the censors?
IGES also distributed $100,000 from its climate grant revenue to support an educational charity in India which Shukla had founded.
===============
that is certainly generous of the NSF to approve funds marked for scientific research to instead be diverted offshore.
Is this allowed? His brother appears to be the manager at that college too.
I looked up IGES on the US System for Awards Management (SAM) and COLA is IGES. Its a dba (doing business as) not even a registered subsidiary. It’s just a brand. IGES is listed on Maryland corp lookup as a non-stock (non-profit) corporation with Jagadish Shukla as the principle and registered agent.
Please – principal. I don’t think any principles are involved here. š
ha. Shukla is THE principle. Now state the theorem….
don’t not-for-profit organization have rules as to insider salaries and compensation? otherwise what is to prevent the tax free status being abused and simply used as a mechanism to avoid paying taxes?
http://www.iges.org/aboutiges.html
The Institute of Global Environment and Society, Inc. (IGES) – a non-profit, tax exempt research institute, incorporated in the State of Maryland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-profit_laws
If an organization is to qualify for tax exempt status, the organization’s (a) charter ā if a not-for-profit corporation ā or (b) trust instrument ā if a trust ā or (c) articles of association ā if an association ā must specify that no part of its assets shall benefit any of persons who are members, directors, officers or agents (its principals).
As I understand it, salary is exempt from those rules. So as long as IGES didn’t directly pay for their plane trips to Cancun, Copenhagen, or Lima, I doubt that part has been violated.
501c3’s routinely have staff and pay them from unrestricted contributions. Else, how could they function? Restricted contributions may not inure to the benefit of trustees, officers, employees, etc. However, I presume the NSF grants have restrictions and the salaries paid at IGES may have been in violation of restrictions.
Can you say “David Suzuki”? He took tons of money out of his foundation. He finally resigned due to Canadian Revenue Agency looking at his lobbying efforts which aren’t allowed by a “Charity”.
Seems to be a bit more common than we would like to think. Just look at how much of funds donated to charities are used in “administration” a opposed to disbursed to the “recipients”. United Way is awful. The Salvation Army distributes the highest amount of their receipts compared to other organizations to the poor and needy.
I suspect that some people feel that no amount of received money is too much for Saving the Earth (TM)
Especially if it goes into their own pockets.
+127 and a trip to Paris.
That is a very large part of it in a nutshell. Cause-driven mentality forgives you for things you haven’t even done yet. It justifies any damage you might do, people you might step on, any tactics you might employ. This is why these types are the most dangerous – they won’t stop. It’s the sort of mentality that fed the Inquisition, Eugenics, and witch-burnings – you are not swayed by screams if you have the courage of your cause. And very few people will run across a field with a bomb strapped to their back who believe they are in the wrong.
This is what scares me – warmists have essentially convinced a large portion of the world that humanity itself is destroying the planet – particularly the US – and basic survival activities too – heating homes, food production, transportation – the sorts of things we’re pretty much going to have to keep doing for as long as we’re all here. And I routinely hear humanity described as a ‘scourge’ or a ‘plague’ – and in particular I don’t like that ‘ninety-percent population reduction’ chorus. In this environment, lunacy such as genetically-altering humans thrives.
I’ve always said the biggest threat from Global Warming is what people might do to ‘save’ us from it.
For the “common-good” are indeed very old and often used arguments and used to justify just about anything.
Oh, yes, people who torture us for our own good will never rest. At least those who do it for evil purposes will take a break now and then.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– C. S. Lewis
And this is just one, previously unknown,
deceiverreceiver of government funds for global warming research. What about the other billions?And prosecuting systematic and widespread peculation of this sort under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute is still somehow supposed to be “industrial-strength stupid”?
Indeed it is industrial strength stupid. Look at the well-deserved opprobrium and vituperation directed in this and other threads at the people who suggested using RICO to settle scientific questions … and you want to deliberately go out and get exactly the same opprobrium and vituperation directed at YOU for making exactly the same suggestion?
Not much industrial strength smart in that …
Now, I’m sure you’ll say something like “but we’re aiming it at the right people” or “we’re prosecuting people who are wasting US government funds” … but that’s just what the people who want to use RICO on the skeptics are saying.
w.
Agreed, RICO has been abused by prosecutors for what amounts to political persecution. This is what Shukla et. al. were encouraging with their letter to Obama. RICO needs to be repealed and replaced with legislation that will focus on organized crime as the original legislation intended. Anyone, good or bad, can be abused by RICO. As you imply, be careful what you ask for.
A point well taken. But by treading too lightly, one risks being involved in a bazooka fight armed with only a fly swatter.
Willis I’m a big fan and still waiting on you to write a book.
I agree that the RICO venue is a bad idea, I do think prosecution of some sort for fraud (theft) of public money is warranted. As well I understand that many of our problems stem from our asking government agencies to help us. We almost always regret having asked.
How would you propose to remedy the situation? I have yet to see relief for skeptics from any government agency and don’t expect to either.
cheers
@ Willis Eschenbach
October 2, 2015 at 10:43 am
It has taken 35 plus years for the warming meme to take on a life of its own. It will take another 35 years and a few nasty winters to reverse the trend. I believe in “Climate Change”. My kids believe in “Global Warming” because that is what they have been taught in school, in their “environmental” and forestry classes, and they are constantly inundated with EXTREME Climate Change events by the media and politicians. So they become “believers” just as I have always been a believer in “Climate Change” because I studied it for years as a personal interest and later on as an educational and business interest in engineering and farming. Plus I learned about weather and climate at the knee of my grand parents and great grand parents.
Belief systems will take a long time to change.
Thanks for keeping a cool head Willis.
Sorry, but I would advocate the opposite approach. Investigate both sides for RICO violations and let the chips fall where they may. A side-by-side comparison of $xxx,xxx,xxx,xxx tax payer dollars possible being used criminally vs $xx,xxx,xxx dollars of private money possibly used illegally would at least shut some people up as to who is “buying” scientist to produce certain results.
And leave the science, itself, out of it.
I have no problem with private sector pay being set at whatever the business can afford, but it is about time that there was serious scrutiny of the amount of money paid out of the public purse. In my opinion this needs complete overhaul.
I do not see why anyone who is being paid out of public funds should be paid more than $200,000 per year (no matter how clever the accounting is). If someone on the public payroll has in addition a private source of income, then the amount paid by the tax payer should be reduced so that the total income that that person does not include any state/public money that would bring the annual salary above $200,000.
why is the government taking money from people making less than $50k and giving it to people making $200k? has the government taken on the role of Reverse Robin Hood. Take from the poor to give to the rich.
ferd
I understand (and basically agree) with your point, However, just for the record, people making under $50k (in the USA) do not pay much in taxes (Social Security FICA withholding, yes; taxes, no)
you only just noticed this ferd ?
@ Chip Jarvert
Any chance I can get you to prepare my federal income taxes Chip?
“For the record”: A married couple making $40,000/yr with no adjustments to gross income and taking the standard deduction has a taxable income of $19,700 and an “Income Tax” bill of $2,051.
That $2,051 is pretty darn significant to folks trying to scrape by on $40k/yr.
I’m bothered by the idea that people get investigated and incarcerated for expressing their views on a political subject. If he hadn’t written this letter, no one would have noticed.
Oh, really? Now that people have “noticed”, how is it that you call these financial shenanigans, political?
As Old fighter pilots say: ” Tracers work equally well in both directions !! ”
g
George,
That is an infantry saying.
By the time a fighter pilot sees tracers he is probably already hosed.
Actually if a fighter is flying really fast he might be shot down by his own tracers. Documented in Korea – Sabre jets in a dive could be hit by their own ammo traveling in an arc while they were accelerating downward in a straight line.
Looks a bit like Shukla may have been hit by his own bullet.
Soooooooooooooooooooooooooo, you kind of lost me here. How is committing fraud (allegedly) considered political speech?
Too bad for Mr.Shukla that he made the poor decision to stand up, wave and yell “LOOK AT ME” and is shocked to find that people did.
MikeN, isn’t double dipping is illegal?
He’s not being investigated for expressing his views and if he is incarcerated, it won’t be for expressing his views.
He’s being investigated because he recently pronounced to the world that he was flagrantly violating the law.
Why do you desire to change the subject?
Of course it is criminal actions. I don’t like the idea that because someone says something people don’t like, then people go hunting for if this person has done something criminal
MikeN October 2, 2015 at 10:07 am
Seriously? This joker proposed throwing my friends and allies in jail because he doesn’t like their science, and in response people looked into his own actions … and you find this somehow wrong?
If the reports are true, he’s a crook. Not only that, he’s a stupid crook, because he stood up and waved a flag and shouted “All my enemies should be thrown in jail!” … and now you’re surprised when people investigate his past?
Really? Neither you nor he saw that coming?
I mean, I can see him being that deluded, but what on earth did you expect to happen?
I’m sorry, but your attempt to cast him as the victim in this piece simply doesn’t work.
w.
You see, people are simply saying stuff that the “RICO20” “didn’t like”. So the RICO20 asked the President “to go hunting for if those people had done something criminal”. That indeed, was a nasty idea, but let me officially welcome you to Earth.
The hilarious part is that THEY were engaging in the exact type of behavior that they want to accuse others of.
If you don’t engage in criminal behavior, you have nothing to worry about.
MikeN: Isn’t that EXACTLY what Shuklas and the Rico20 were calling for … criminal investigations and incarceration of people for expressing their views on what has become a very political issue?
They petitioned the President of the United States to use RICO (which was designed to go after mobsters) in order to shut down debate on global warming!
How does that differ from what you are complaining about???
So much so that I was not sure just which side Mike N was referring to.
MikeN, have you never heard the expression, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones? This result should always be expected, and there are no exemptions for greenhouses.
That’s the way the world works. If you want to keep your illegal actions hidden, then don’t stand up and proudly declare them to the world.
I strongly suspect that it’s not the investigation that bothers you, rather who is being investigated.
It’s a bit like Ward Churchill at the U of Colorado. He made some pretty offensive comments about people killed in 9-11, and an investigation figured that was academic freedom. But the investigation also put Churchill on the radar screen, and found evidence of plagiarism and fraud. Churchill was canned. He got his tenured job by claiming he was Native American. In reality he was as Indian as the Lone Ranger’s Tonto, but the University didn’t want to touch that issue, what with affirmative action, discrimination, diversity, and all those worm cans that would put a university with zillions of federal bucks on the federal diversity radar. I don’t think Churchill ever had to pay back any of his questionable pay. He filed a countersuit on the grounds that the original investigation was a violation of academic freedom, but the findings of plagiarism stood and he’s still canned (now doing the leftie speaking circuit).
There’s other cases of non-tenured faculty not being fired, but, er, not being renewed, either, for presenting non-politically correct lessons (from intelligent design to faulting corporate donors). In those cases there was no investigation or evidence of fraud or plagiarism, so someone just forgot to renew their contracts.
There was a later situation at the same university of an employee being investigated for presenting data in class that was allegedly encouraging students to disbelieve global warming and was “inappropriately polical”. Worse, having a disbeliever on board could jeopardize the university’s ability to cash in on the global warming gravy train. But a faculty committe found no evidence of fraud or plagiarism, only that the offensive data was not what they wanted shown in class. He wasn’t canned, but simply never asssigned to teach that particular class again (so they haff ways….).
In Shukla’s case I don’t think it really matters now how the case was discovered – even if by his own arrogant blabbering – but now that it has, he’ll enjoy the facts of the case.
I wonder if other RICO Twentysomethings are having paper fires in their backyards today?
MikeN
Gee, Mike. I doubt these guys’ political views are being investigated – I suspect it’s their fraud.
You appear to be advocating that these clowns should get some kind of immunity for the consequences of their political statements. You need a lesson in “free speech” is different than “consequences of free speech”.
It is ironic they stepped in this coup while advocating to curtail free speech via Federal RICO prosecutions.
As you dig for gold, the hole can get too deep to crawl out of
Bearing in mind that there has been no advance in the range of Climate Sensitivity since the inception of this ‘science’ it would appear that no progress in relation to the most important factor has been achieved these past 25 or so years, not withstanding the billions (probably trillions) poured into this ‘science’
it is time for a refund..
You’re not kidding. People reading blogs like this have more of an idea of the range of climate sensitivity than this self-annointed morally superior wannabe collection of thieves and incompetents.
“David Verardo, Mannās handler at NSF, who told him in 2003 that he didnāt have to provide data to me ā that Mann was entitled to his view of climate and I was entitled to mine”
Amazing, back in 2003 someone agreed you could have an opposing view on climate.
I guess he missed the orders ” the science is settled”
No, Sir. This is upside down… David Verardo of NSF awarded large funding to Prof Mann of Penn State on the basis that “science is settled” instead of considering opposing views. And, when his puppet was asked for explanations, Mr. Verardo suggested that they are entitled to their view. Well, this is actually strange: Mann and Verrardo backed by the he NSF are entitled to their views on your and everyone else’s dime!!! Read Leo Szilard’s The Mark Gable Foundation…. It’s time to disband NSF and other funding agencies. They are unfixable and damage our science and higher education.
It is time to disband pretty much all federal agencies except the DoD. All the rest can be re-consolidated into a single agency, forever limited to a cap of 10,000 employees and a budget cap of 3% of the previous year’s GDP. With no contract support.
I agree 100% Walt. As long as the major funding agencies remain under government control, Ike’s predictions will be the outcome. The federal government may have to control funding for “strategic” (read military or security) research, all the rest should to be given to independent and diversified granting agencies without political direction as to where the emphasis lies in research. Research funding has to be returned to the strength of the proposal and the record of the researcher, with some reserve for new scientists. This, of course, would be fought by the corrupt universities who skim overhead off of all the “institutes” that have proliferated in the last 30 years. Way too many PhDs have been turned out solely to proliferate the current system. Join the club and perpetuate the system. Want a job? Promote what the government asked for and maybe you can continue the deception that science is actually being done. Politically defined objectives obviate independent research.
As we enter a long cooling cycle (low sunspot activity is one major indicator of this) the frauds will be obvious to everyone.
I perfectly agree with the previous comment, ‘there should be no doubt any a rational mind that the whole AGW āClimate Changeā Alarmism is being driven by the Largest Scientific Scandal in Modern History’.
Prof Shukla is only a small fish from a large sample of big big fishes. I think he is a scapegoat of this bigger scandal. The financial benifits of all those scientists who are responsible for propagating the scary AGW agenda need to be thoroughly investigated. It should be done at an urgency basis.
Their career upsurge and funding benifits for last 10 years should be made public. In turn, another similar record should be published for those who are not supporting scary AGW agenda and questioning that.
It is the time now to raise voices and remove such disparity within scientific communities and reward true scientists. At the same time the propaganda provocing, unethical scientists should be punished and penalised. Their interest and benifits should be disclosed openly.
Well, there are hidden scandals in just about every realm of modern science: nonlinear optics with their nonlinear Schrodinger equation, astrophysics with their dark energy and dark matter, quantum mechanics with their string theory…. Heavy domination, grabbing all the money, expelling opposing views… Nothing new of this dirty academics politics. Same since Newton times, except for public funding – we pay for all this dirt!!! We, the people, must defund the agencies that fund science by giving money to Shuklas.
The problem is that no human can actually judge who is a true scientist or which theory is correct. History proves this again and again. By the what all these theories are incorrect…. The “settled science” doesn’t exist!
No human can directly prove which theory is correct. But every human can demonstrate a theory as false. That is the beauty of the way in which science is supposed to progress. š
No human can directly prove which theory is correct. But every human can demonstrate a theory as false.
==================
doesn’t this argue that we should never fund science that seeks to prove a theory true and only fund science that seeks to prove a theory false? Otherwise we are funding things that are impossible at the expense of things that are possible.
How on earth is Shukla a “scapegoat”. Do you mean that someone called him in the dead of night and ordered him to write that petition? I’m sorry, but this is paranoid nonsense (default reasoning of a sort).
Ok, so what will this one be called?
Perhaps… “Shuklagate”?
Perhaps… “RICOGATE”?
How about Climategate 2
Correct – the ClimateGates are the biggest sources of scientific scandal on AGW, until a high level insider comes clean with proof. This ShuklaGate is a good addition.
Ignoredbymsmgate
How about we give the “Gate” thing a rest?
RICOchet?
Matthew, I share your sentiment but I’d like to see at least some consideration:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b7F3woI05UA/T25Bs7YE5dI/AAAAAAAADKk/w1_i6TG4UaA/s1600/oregon-state-pen-1200.jpg
> Leo Smith
> October 2, 2015 at 8:49 am
RICOchet?
I like it. Pity there’s no Chet involved though.
Heh, RICOchet is good, but I like StevieMac’s ‘Shukla’s shillings’.
===============
An earlier reference to RICOchet:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/29/climate-activists-want-us-prosecuted-under-rico/#comment-2037512
kim
September 29, 2015 at 9:32 am Edit
RICOchet.
========
I think RICOchet is much more descriptive than “Shuklaās shillings.”
Heh, Ric; the good ones are all susceptible to independent invention. See ‘Piltdown Mann’.
==================
Haha…PrisonGate!
“I like it. Pity thereās no Chet involved though.”
well ric, that would depend upon how you pronounce “chet”
I am partial to “Shulkanado”
Shulka’s Goldenballs
Shukla Con
I suggest RICO2. (Notice the embedded “CO2”?)
And yet, they go after Dr. Willie Soon?
@joe matais
It’s called ‘projection’ in psychology.
The whole RICO20 BS is projection. The speed at which Congress got on it makes me wonder if there’s a back story here, and they were already onto him, causing him to “project” everyone else being the bad guys. All he did was put his head above the parapet some more, along with those of some other doofuses.
… and why, if a RICO action is valid, why didn’t they just file one? It’s chump change out of $63.5 Million.
Actually, this is quite important in the debate over CAGW. The “sky is falling” crowd have consistently said skeptics are paid shills for Big Oil and we are holier than thou. And some of the public believe them. If this turns out to be a case of financial corruption of science, the holier than thou aura will be deflated.
When asked why scientists would lie about climate change, the answer will “for the money.”
It will only be deflated if the public actually hears about it.
So far none of the major media have covered this story, and I’ll be surprised if they ever do. Even if the guy ends up going to jail. The most they might do is mention that he’s been convicted of misusing public funds, without ever mentioning what funds and why.
Whenever there is free money without oversight and accountability you have the potential for the trouble. I wonder who is monitoring the other $22 Billion spent on global warming related expenditures a year. One can see now why there is such an urgent attempt ( via the RICO letter) by the alarmists to shut down all information and debate on global warming .
I thought Sherriff Joe, otherwise known as the Vice President had been put in charge of that?
Actually, they need to stop true scientists like Dr. Willie Soon by hook or by crook. Attacking and demoralising them they try to serve their own purpose. This is the only way they can maintain their scary propaganda longer.
There should be an open list of publications of these two groups for last 10 years. Baised on bias among referees their publications are subjected to rejection, delay etc. In terms of citations also they are the sufferer as everything is linked up. The overall system needs to be investigated thoroughly.
What about the other side that hasn’t been heard from? NSF, NOAA, and NASA gave grants to the same GMU organization for work that was essentially redundant. Could the grantors be involved in the scheme? Were kick-backs involved? I suspect that the process of AGW grant awards is incestuous at best.
This may be the real meat. However, it will take a congressional investigation to get to the bottom of this. Will anyone in Congress have the necessary cahones?
The short answer is “NO” and the long answer is “NO.”
Ok when am I going to see this in the main stream media? No evidence that they’ve mentioned it at all; please correct me if I’m wrong.
With the GOP hearings, it will make the news eventually. The NYT will be very defensive about it, of course.
According to the report below
āThe National Science Foundation (NSF) provides funding for academic basic research across the entire spectrum of the sciences, engineering, and the social sciences. NSF USGCRP support totals $326 million in the 2014 Budget. ā
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/legislative_reports/fcce-report-to-congress.pdf
Possible legal avenues that should be investigated:
1. Conspiracy to defraud the United States:
http://www.justice.gov/usam/criminal-resource-manual-923-18-usc-371-conspiracy-defraud-us
2.” Federal and state false claims acts, whistleblower laws and qui tam statutes allow private citizens with knowledge of fraud against the government to bring what is known as a qui tam or false claims act action against the person or company engaged in the fraud.”
http://classactionconnect.com/whistleblower-lawsuits/federal-whistleblowers-report-fraud-against-the-federal-government/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qui_tam
Great idea! But he’s tied up with Benghazi.
Skidance October 2, 2015 at 9:42 am
Great idea! But heās tied up with Benghazi.
=======================================
Yeah, and how’s that going?
The FBI is now retrieving email from the server that Hillary wiped with a cloth.
They are being forwarded to the committee.
Yes and so?
Until the MSM and media matters tells their people to get outraged, nothing will become of it.
It’s one of the reasons Clinton wanted her own server and claimed to have wiped it clean. Too bad she didn’t know any more about computers than “What….wipe it with a cloth or something?”
WOW.
The Shukla $63.5 million dollar Pyramid scheme! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme
Righteous Baby.
Ha ha
IGES has some really tough questions to answer. I don’t have any interest in defending their actions but there’s no reason to pile on.
Anthony writes, “Thereās apparently an $800,000 annual salary and an organization full of Shukla family members that has produced next to no results for the millions received.” His link suggests that only one paper resulted from grant 1338427. Although his point is well made – the Center is not a model of financial efficiency – a search of the IGES website suggests that it produced more than one paper for that grant.
They do produce regular progress reports that show many papers emerged each year. The following link, which also supports the claim that there was a split from IGES, provides information about the 2014-15 results from COLA.
ftp://iges.org/pub/kinter/Projects/omnibus/COLA_2014_2019_Progress/Kinter_COLA_MAPP_briefing_May2015_handout.pdf
And the following presentation claims that the Center produced >500 papers between 1993 and 2011.
ftp://iges.org/pub/kinter/COLA_SAC/2011/Kinter_future_plans_SAC2011.pptx
Steve Mcintyre has this to say at Climate Audit, “Steve: the center did legitimate work.”
THAT may be the case. (legitimate work, etc.) The link provided seems to show a powerpoint demonstrating that they have produced more results than what has been claimed here. Most of the information in that powerpoint ought to be easily verifiable by someone with access to an academic library. So we’ll probably get a report on the veracity of that document.
HOWEVER; double dipping and self dealing using government grant money is the real topic at hand. If half of what has been alleged is true, he could have a huge problem on his hands.
Of course, given the current (highly corrupt) state of our federal government, he, like Hillary Clinton, may have clearly demonstrated wanton violation of federal law, and yet go un-prosecuted for it.
Or there could be a whitewash. Even that might be difficult, given the nature of what he is alleged to have done.
(i.e. if he was receiving more than his salary, he was double dipping, kinda hard to whitewash that, further, if his organization hired his relatives and paid exorbitant salaries for little or no actual work, very difficult to make that okay. )
Interesting that the first pdf shows that they are in to Climate Modelling, in particular training for it.
Bob K
I think the real issue is whether or not they were motivated to call for a criminal investigation of something that is the figment of their own imaginations, with a view to securing themselves as the bell ringer for climate alarm, and then to reap benefits from what look like some pretty soft grants.
The magic of endless public money seems to have been in part driven by a ham-fisted attempt at misdirection.
The idea of a RICO investigation into the unholy alliances that permeate the tiny climate science community is very attractive. Bandwagoning is to be expected, but there is a cabal at the centre of this nonsense and they have definitely conspired to enrich themselves both with grant monies and honoured positions.
The big mafia investigation was called “clean hands”. Let’s call this one “clear air”. Assign a special prosecutor, start asking questions.
I haven’t come across ANY significant reporting of this in the MSM. Certainly doesn’t seem to have penetrated Joe public’s attention yet. If it isn’t reported widely, it will be swept from view, like climategate. All conscious Americans should be writing their representatives demanding answers.
Donald Trump needs to use this corruption and practice as a spear point. GK
The MSM haven’t mentioned a Republican was president during the Civil War, either.
Please make sure this story keeps dripping all the way through the Paris climate talks. But, please also be aware that it is veering dangerously close to too-complex-for-the-public-to-understand. The facts, to date, need to be sorted out — graphically, if possible, from most significant to least — with ramifications for public taxpayer money spelled out. Why should the common taxpayer care about this? The message should be something that readers can successfully repeat to others, from memory.
Whatever needs to be done, please make it easy for the public to understand the issue, before the clean-up crew comes in and starts distracting the public. They’re trying their best to ignore the controversy right now; this is the best time to define the issue for the public.
Rampant nepotism as an entire clan raided the cupboards of taxpayer money is easy to understand. This is why the media is NOT covering it.
Hope this is brought to the attention of NSF’s Inspector General too:
http://www.nsf.gov/oig/
Wow, I may run out of popcorn on this storyline!
Your Global Warming Alarmism and Fraud dollars at work!
Apparently, I’m in the wrong business!
Me too. Let’s present the US gov with an innovative solar panel that is ball shaped.
O.K. so cylinders didn’t work.
But, I’m sure that with some fancy sounding pseudo tech speak and some claimed of over-unity efficiency and negative cost, we could bamboozle the US taxpayer out of a few billion $.
one thing that I have learned in my travels, NO IDEA IS TOO DUMB TO OBTAIN A GOVT. GRANT.
From what I could gather, Solyndra’s cylindrical solar modules were workable and fairly efficient energy producers, especially on a white roof (since their circular tubes could face the reflective roof surface at the same time they faced outward toward the sun. According to more than a few people (investors, I suppose), Solyndra’s problem was that it was made in America and could not compete with an explosion of Chinese solar panels suddenly being manufactured at a fraction of the cost, and likely without environmental restrictions. The Chinese presumably won that battle based on cost. Whether gigantic government subsidies are fair for the Chinese and not for us is a logistical, economic and ethical problem for bigger hat sizes than mine. Here’s a comment from a reader reviewing the article “Solyndra: Its Technology and Why it Failed”, posted online here in 2011:
http://www.edn.com/design/power-management/4368710/Solyndra-Its-technology-and-why-it-failed
When this ultimately hits the headlines the warmistas will be very quick to proclaim that the Shuklas really weren’t faithful AGW followers after all and that as far as they are concerned nothing has changed.
And what did the taxpayers get for 4.2 million dollars? One single make-believe paper filled with unverifiable speculation about “what would happen if…”
Read this tragic waste of money paper here:
http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci-discuss.net/12/879/2015/hessd-12-879-2015-print.pdf
Return on investment is zero. Waste waste and more waste. The NSF should not be allowed to disperse millions of other people’s dollars with no oversight and no due diligence. The NSF needs to have its powers frozen until auditors can examine what the people’s money is getting in return value.
Enough is enough.
But how many other AGW “scientists” are there slurping at the trough?
Shukla wasn’t the first, last or only one to work the system in this manner.
This examination of his modus operandi may help us to identify a few more.
Several years ago I exchanged e-mails with, and eventually met and interviewed, a dendrochronologist who was researching forest fire history at a local University. I was doing some research of my own and he was generous with his time and quite helpful. As I became aware of the magnitude of the funding for CAGW, curiosity got the better of me and I took a look at his CV, which was posted on his personal website.
Over a dozen years he had received perhaps 3-4 million dollars to head various programs, most in 100,000-sized increments. A couple of his grants topped a million.
I don’t know how many profs post such information about themselves, but I came away with the impression that grant recipients view their grant history as a sort of badge of honor, or an advertisement, stating, in effect, “Look what I can bring in for the good of the old Alma Mater!” Universities, in turn, rank themselves on how much they can bring in annually for research. Under such a system, it would seems likely that professors develop a reputation for success at bringing in funds. Success once means higher likelihood of success in future applications – like the “hot hand” in basketball. Ultimately, in answer to your questions, there’s a less intrusive way to see these figures, since all NSF and NOAA grants, recipients, and recipients’ research subjects are listed in the agencies’ budgets somewhere – we’ve seen the numbers on this and other web sites.
The particular teaching scientist I spoke to was receiving (earning, if you like) several million. The funding was ongoing to provide for programs of multi-year research. I believe his grants were typical for those targeting programs across the U.S. which insinuate (or blatantly state) a belief in anthropogenic global warming. I know that some unbiased scientists are receiving funding by NSF, NOAA or NASA, but it also seems painfully obvious that young scientists today must toe the line if they expect governmental help. My nephew, a geology graduate, has received tens of thousands in scholarship help at University of Arizona, multiple paid-for trips to South America and Nepal, and has just received his first 100,000 grant to be paid out over the new few years for his endorsement of the alarmist talking points, as he researches warming. When you are young, how hard it must be to resist this siren song. Older researcher should know better, in my opinion.
I came upon the term Omnibus twice today. It sparked vivid memories of my first introduction to the word and my own paradoxical mental images of a bus that was actually a train.
Researching “Ocean Acidificationā (A term and field of study that drives me crazy!), I came across the US Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009:
The second occasion was in an IGES publication (Science Review 2002-2006) where President J. Shukla described its funding arrangement as an Omnibus Grant:
*I stand corrected, the term Omnibus (Which was occasioned by the mental image of gravy trains) appeared more than twice š
I remember a 1950s TV program “Omnibus.”
Not to be confused with the 80’s TV show, “Supertrain.”
I don’t remember āSupertrain.ā
It was supposed to a “Love Boat” on rails, didn’t even last one season.
Where is the oversight of the contracts by NSF?
According to Scopus (free version) Shukla hasn’t published anything since 2013 and # of citations has dropped to 0:
http://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.url?authorId=7102486629
They must have published a lot in 2006. IGES paid host to
Institute of Global Environment and Society – IGES
Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies – COLA
Center for Research on Environment and Water – CREW
http://web.archive.org/web/20060610040410/http://iges.org/
http://web.archive.org/web/20060615025233/http://crew.iges.org/donate.html
“The fact is that we canāt account for the lack of funds at the moment and it is a travesty that we canāt”
Never mind chaps we’ll all help you find the missing teat.
NSFgate
All the IRS Forms 990 filed by Jagadish Shukla are public. They should be examined for evidence of perjury or false declaration.
There is at least false declaration on his Virginia employee discloser form. See below and the evolving comments thread at Climate Audit. His arrangements apparently also violate Virginia state law independant of false declaration. Both he and the NSF are in a heap of trouble.
They have. I haven’t looked at them, but Roger Pielke Jr. has, and probably several other people.
Shukla has been receiving NSF grants since at least 1998.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=102934
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
…The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite”
Farewell from Dwight D Eisenhower
Don’t overplay the hand.
Alarmist “Arctic sea ice may disappear in 2015”
Alarmist “Maybe the biggest scandal”
Learn. At least frame it thusly “Will this too be whitewashed”
I don’t know… Paris is upcoming. Seems to me that the headline “Climate science funding thieves descend on Paris ” is one I would invite… as per the PR disaster called Copenhagen, rather, Climategate.
Listen to what Mosher is saying.
It is an interesting story line.
If any wrong doing is proved, it will certainly be an excellent example of karma.
The opening track is as Steven points out – will it get ignored, swept under the rug, whitewashed? Because if it does, there goes your scandal. Of whatever size.
As far as any impact on the Paris dealings – about as much as peeing in the ocean. As far as the US is concerned, what matters is not what American representatives agree to at the conference, but what Congress agrees to fund. It is possibly that arena where proven illegal activity at IGES might have an impact.
If all the efforts of all the people who read and comment on this website were invested in a whistleblower recruiting effort, using the Federal False Claims Act, the scam would have been exposed, prosecuted, and collapsed many years ago.
“The False Claims Act (31 U.S.C. Ā§Ā§ 3729ā3733, also called the “Lincoln Law”) is an American federal law that imposes liability on persons and companies (typically federal contractors) who defraud governmental programs. It is the federal Governmentās primary litigation tool in combating fraud against the Government.[1] The law includes a qui tam provision that allows people who are not affiliated with the government, called “relators” under the law, to file actions on behalf of the government (informally called “whistleblowing” especially when the relator is employed by the organization accused in the suit). Persons filing under the Act stand to receive a portion (usually about 15ā25 percent) of any recovered damages. As of 2012, over 70 percent of all federal Government FCA actions were initiated by whistleblowers. Claims under the law have typically involved health care, military, or other government spending programs, and dominate the list of largest pharmaceutical settlements. The government recovered $38.9 billion under the False Claims Act between 1987 and 2013 and of this amount, $27.2 billion or 70% was from qui tam cases brought by relators.”
There are many lawyers just waiting, with their motors running, to take on qui tam cases against Federal contractors.
The entire AGW scam is run, supported, advanced by federal contractors–that’s what Mann, Shukla, and every one of the fraudsters is.
This is their achilles heel.
We can crowdsource the search for whistleblowers and accelerate their downfall.
Gosh, you make this sound like a trivial task.
Guess you’ve never worked with Federal court procedures and rules of evidence, Much less, a decided bias on the part of the decision-making parties.
Good luck.
Some additional information. I used the state of Viginia employees directory to confirm that as a Prof at GMU, Shukla is a state of virginia employee. Over at Climate Audit, someone checked with the UVA about Shuklas arrangements and was told that is illegal under Virginia state law. Moreover, SM has now obtained his Virginia state employment disclosure forms for 2013 and 2014. His sole ownership of IGES was not ( to the mandatory do you? question he answered no.), and therefor no Schedule F was filed stating financial interests including income. It seems now quite clear that Shukla has at least broken Virginia state law. And it certainly appears GMU is complicit given their admited knowledge since 2013 celebrating the integration of IGES and of its DBA COLA (not a separate entity for federal grant purposes) into GMU. The Virginia Attorney General and or OIG need to be brought into the loop
And SourceWatch! Don’t forget SourceWatch!
ālargest science scandal in US historyā
is an exaggeration I think. See comment from Mosher.
“see comment from Mosher”
No thanks
The larger issue is this may prove that proponents of AGW have had and continue to have strong bias to keep alive the impression of AGW in spite of evidence to the contrary. AGW advocates unfairly accuse skeptics of bias when they are ones with motivation for bias. The exorbitant compensation that can be realized form AGW research would bias anyone against proving the hypothesis wrong.
Regardless of the legal issues which may be very real in this instance, I believe this demonstrates the moral disintegration, greed, and disregard for truth that can come from conversion of public funds to personal benefit.
If this is an isolated occurrence then it will be nothing more than the failure of a single scientist or organization and little else will come of this. I fear this type of activity is much more widespread in the academic community and if so will be a catastrophic event for CAGW advocacy reaching much farther than climate-gate.
realized “from” not form
“The exorbitant compensation that can be realized form AGW research would bias anyone against proving the hypothesis wrong.”
As was memorably said long ago here, “A conspiracy is unnecessary if a carrot is sufficient.”
My bet is NCAR s the center of the AGW racket. Anyone with the time and inclination to follow the money into and out of this organization could have a huge story.
http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=12809
This will go nowhere – except into our quiver as another arrow to fire at fence-sitters, the ‘undecided’ and those to come new to this (non)debate.
It is a drop in the vast ocean of funding to support a science that was settled in the past century – round about the time global warming stopped(again).
Feynman, Vonnegut and Crichton, working together, couldn’t have spun a more fascinating piece of science crime fiction.
I doubt that we will ever be hearing from the likes of Mosh, Zeke, Phil, Stokes, ect once this is finalized as they are in the loop (I presume paid to work for AGW). I would not be surprised to see their AGW related websites “disappear” in the next few months. Me thinks Shukla will in fact go to jail for this.
Meh — I googled “Jagdish Shukla” in relation to this “scandal”, and the only web sites this came up in were this blog, a few other blogs, and a conservative site or two. No MSM. Looks like he’ll get a free pass. š
It’s usually a mess when folks gather round the government honey-pot. Once you’ve established your position at the rim of that pot, you’re expected to elbow out a bit of room along side you for friends and family. Multiple hands dip faster than only a single pair and the “Miss Manners” becomes a distant memory.
Unfortunately for the ordinary technically and economically literate citizen, his money is taken from him in the form of taxes and then spent by technically and economically imbecilic bureaucrats.
I was just perusing the smug official Whitehouse document describing their Recovery Act disaster and came across the following:
“With over $787 billion in funding, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is one of the single boldest
and largestinvestments in the U.S. economy in the nationās historyThe Recovery Act is supporting breakthrough innovations in both solar and wind”.
It then goes on to say shortly after the introduction; “FloDesign in Massachusetts is developing a novel shrouded wind turbine design with advanced aerospace technology that should reduce the cost and noise of wind energy dramatically. ”
Sounds brilliant to someone with the mentality of an excitable schoolchild.
But – will it this magical turbine acheive that goal?
Answer – NO.
Since putting shrouds around wind turbines is neither a novel idea, nor a good idea, as explained below.
This is not innovation, this is simply theft from the state by charlatans.
Anyway – the proof of the pudding – the FloDesign turbine was being touted in 2008.
It is 2015 – where are their revolutionary game-changing turbines? Where are the figures that back up their initial claims? See the link below for a more detailed analysis of why this investment is a disaster:
http://www.wind-works.org/cms/index.php?id=43&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=2944&cHash=be02eb02d7e684e2e8a9394fa03c15e3
And the link to the most moronic document in the history of moronic documents. Straight from the theiving cash guzzling morons at the Whitehouse:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/Recovery_Act_Innovation.pdf
indefatigablefrog October 2, 2015 at 10:14 am
There is a graph in that document showing the billions thrown at various technologies that supposedly would jumpstart the new high-tech, green economy (huzzahs!). Coincidentally, I also heard today that 94 million Americans are out of the workforce, putting us at a rate second only to the Great Depression, I believe.
Where are all those high-tech green jobs? The actual results from all of those billions that were shoveled out are… disappointing.
With any luck and a bit of persistence by the investigators we may be able to chalk another one up to a case of arrogance by the self righteous.
This whole exercise is the textbook definition of poetic justice and irony. I hope this guy’s fall from grace makes other climate scientists think twice about how they perform their jobs going forward. I doubt it will, but who knows, fear is a powerful motivator.
If he doesn’t go to jail now or pronto, he would be thinking of getting back to India with the whole family for sure. He can have some drinks with Pachauri at the local LOL
A headline I expect to see any day now. Breaking News! Jagdish Shukla just admitted he is FOIA of climate gate fame and his obvious RICO “own goal” was a continuing effort to derail the AGW gravy train.
Anthony, I’m a lurker around these parts, but I’d like to put in my two cents.
Right now is a confluence of events that may allow us to show this fraud to the world and actually have it pay attention outside of the climate change doubter community. Today there is a minor uproar over how poorly the American GFS weather model performed in relation to the the ECMWF or European weather model in the forecast track of Hurricane Joaquin. This caused the National Hurricane Center to make official forecasts that had my home state of Virginia in the cross-hairs of a CAT 4 Hurricane. Then it was NJ, then NYC/Long Island, etc. At the same time the ECMWF was consistently predicting that the Hurricane would never come close to the Atlantic Seaboard. People are irate up and down the East Coast over the number of events cancelled or postponed and the people inconvenienced by a busted forecast. Even the NY Times is paying attention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/upshot/hurricane-joaquin-forecast-european-model-leads-pack-again.html?_r=0
If we can let people know that if the United States spent our science research money on the right things, like upgrading our operational weather models rather than things like the alleged fraud by Dr. Shukla, IGES and others in the mess, then we could have operational weather models as good as if not better than the ECMWF. My biggest message is that there is plenty of money for Scientific research, but that it is being siphoned off and wasted (sometimes criminally as may be the case here) on Climate Change research.
A supporing tidbit from footnote 1 of my guest post here on climate models last month. In 2014, the US spent $2.66 billion on direct climate research. The NOAA NWS weather research budget was $82 million.
Is the general public confused and think that climate research is the same as weather research so willing to spend huge sums on climate research?
Has this subject ever been polled?
No; but it’s been modeled.
(tee hee)
I’m sure our forecasts get much better when the timeframe is 50-to-100 years. /sarc
ukmet
http://flhurricane.com/images/2015/storm11/plot20151001-1300.gif
http://flhurricane.com/modelanimator.php?storm=11&year=2015&title=11
Ref. Wikipedia: Collusion is an agreement between two or more parties, sometimes illegal and therefore secretive, to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading, or defrauding others of their legal rights, or to obtain an objective forbidden by law typically by defrauding or gaining an unfair market advantage. It is an agreement among firms or individuals to divide a market, set prices, limit production or limit opportunities. It can involve “wage fixing, kickbacks, or misrepresenting the independence of the relationship between the colluding parties” [That puts NSF in jeopardy all the way back to the Clinton (if not H.W. Bush) Administration!]. In legal terms, all acts effected by collusion are considered void.
How many of the RICO20 were grant reviewers to Shukla’s NSF grants?
How much in the way of ‘kickbacks’ did Shukla dole out to the ‘reviewers, aka RICO20’?
How much of the $63.5 million USA dollars went to support Shukla’s ‘enterprises’ that are supported by the India Government. Without a Memorandum Of Understanding between the USA Department of State and the Government of India, Shukla and the RICO20 (and George Mason University’s entire administration) could be in more than just Felony jeopardy.
Ha ha
I wonder if there is a way to see just how deep this scandal goes? Who else is feeding at the trough? How much money are they getting? This professor is not exactly well known. The only reason I heard of Shukla was because of his demands for RICO investigations.
I’m thinking that they’ll come down hard on Shukla and that will be it… no investigations into NSF, NOAA, NASA, EPA or any other gov’t agency promoting the whole climate fear meme in order to increase their own funding and power over the citizenry.
I have only just now encountered another very impressive and very extensive blog documenting the vast scale of the green stimulus disaster. In all its hideous details.
Recommended reading and reference: http://greencorruption.blogspot.co.uk/
” As our nation drowns in debt, the Obama’s Energy Department has already disbursed in excess of $252 billion. Meanwhile, since 2009 the president’s aggressive and deceptive plot to “save the planet” already exceeds $200 billion of U.S. taxpayers, which factors in both stimulus and non-stimulus funds.
These funds are not only being dispersed out of the DOE and the Ex-Im Bank of the United States, but also the Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Defense (DOD), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as other federal, state, and local government agencies and programs that are giving out “green” subsidies.
And let’s not forget that unknown to the American public is another green government freebie blowing out of the stimulus package. The 1603 Grant Program “offered project developers the option to select a one-time cash payment in lieu of taking the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) or the Production Tax Credit (PTC), for which they would have otherwise been eligible.ā Administered by the Treasury Department, as of August 3, 2015, this program that was also touted as a jobs creator (yet most are temporary), has dished out $24.5 billion of free taxpayer cash.
Still, hundreds of billion of green energy spending is not enough because this scheme works in conjunction with the ongoing climate change mandates, rules, regulations and executive orders in order to control every aspect of our lives āā all surrounded by an enormous fear-mongering campaign to scare the masses into submission.
However, these figures don’t account for how U.S. agencies, this past February, “committed some $4 billion for solar energy companies to build up green energy in India.”
And what about the billions of dollars that the Obama administration has spent to “save the developing world from the presumed ills of global warming, mainly through a program called Global Climate Change Initiative, which was recently documented by Judicial Watch.”
Some enterprising soul should report this to the Inspector General for the NSF. Here is the IG’s website: http://www.nsf.gov/oig/
does any one know the situation of Dr Murry Salby, who was accused of mishandling NSF grant at U Co? We should make serious noise if these two situationjs are treated differently
Indeed we should.
Murry Salby was the subject of a long investigation by the US National Science Foundation.
The investigation, which was finished in February 2009, concluded that over a period when Dr Salby was working at the University of Colorado, he had likely fabricated time sheets in relation to research paid for through NSF money. The NSF OIG concluded that:
“the Subject (Dr Salby) has engaged in a long-running course of deceptive conduct involving both his University and NSF. His conduct reflects a consistent willingness to violate rules and regulations, whether federal or local, for his personal benefit. This supports a finding that the Subject is not presently responsible, and we recommend that he be debarred for five years.”
The NSF subsequently decided to only ādebarā Dr Salby for three years, preventing him from accessing any NSF research grants or being involved in work related to them.
I would expect that the NSF OIG and other relevant organizations would carry out similar investigations into Shukla’s activities.
And what the NSF claimed about Salby eventually fell over. More interesting is why they went after him.
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/08/murry-salby-responds-to-the-attacks-on-his-record/
No it didn’t, Salby denied it, surprise. I take it you will adopt the same approach should Shukla be investigated and deny it you will accept his version? After all Joe was asking that they both be treated the same.
Of course the Emperor has clothes.
As I have come to observe repeatedly; “CAGW, created ,orchestrated and protected from investigation, by our bureaucrats.
This policy based evidence manufacturing could not have happened without the connivance of our “civil servants”.
Thank Maurice Strong for being their frontman but this new manifestation of the Emperors New Clothes, required committees and the wisdom of “committee think” to have ever emerged as a tax syphoning meme, let alone a fear based government policy that has lasted over 30 years.
The blessing of the bureaus be upon you.
Or as Kipling put it, The Lords of the Copybookā¦.
“… we might be dealing with the same sort of ego induced blindness that led to the downfall of IPCC chairman Rajenda Pachauri. ”
Maybe I’m wrong, but this raises suspicion that Shukla is Pachauri’s strawman and possibly brib… eh… paid by him?
Lewandowsky…
It seems to me that cross-discipline efforts are ripe for abuse. As an example, consider a [sic] psychologist entering into the climate science sphere by way of polling skeptics as the phrenologist Lewandowsky keeps trying to do.
I would postulate that he is mining funds from astrology/psychology sources and UN sanctioned sources, private Soroses š and Obama government sources. I would further postulate that his various applications look very similar. I wonder if he is also double dipping?
Anyone FOI this “scientist”?
Or any other of the wacko cross-discipline fund scavengers?
The House can investigate all it wants. The Senate can investigate this scandal until their blue in the face. Official reports can be published and recommendations can be made. Congress, however, cannot prosecute. For Shukla it is race against time. If the GOP wins in 2016, will a Republican DOJ spend time and resources indicting and prosecuting him? I doubt it.
This episode might be embarrassing. But, that humiliation will be limited to the blogesphere and Drudge. The MSM will ignore it. And Republicans feed at the Beltway trough as deeply as anyone. No one inside the Beltway wants to see a nickle of taxpayer money being lost because of a scandal involving a rather unknown and unstable professor.
“Congress, however, cannot prosecute.”
But it can send a recommendation for prosecution to the AG. If he doesn’t act on it, then that’s something he and his party will have to answer for, or at least be on the defensive about.
The only way they can “answer” for it, is if the public punishes the party at the next election.
Why would the public punish them for not prosecuting a case the public has never heard of?
Shukla may well be the sewage here, but far worse is the sewer, the NSF
You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to even consider pulling this kind of crap.
From President Eisenhower’s farewell address:
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research ā these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs ā balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages ā balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face of threat and stress.
But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise.
Of these, I mention two only. (The military/industrial complex is the first of the two, the second is….)
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present ā and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
___________________________________________________________________________
I would posit the opposite danger is in play as well, that public policy and the scientific technological-elite are walking hand in hand for their mutual goals….
A Two Party Evil Money Cult in Washington D.C. fraud funding their re-election with our tax money.
The Two Party Evil Money Cult in Washington D.C. self funding by fraud its own re-election with our tax money.
Finding out how stuff works has always been my passion. Sixty years ago, as a youth, like many other scientists, I thought I could most usefully pursue this passion by studying physics. And indeed, a physics degree served me well over the course of a long career, during which from time to time I learned lots more about how stuff works. Some, but not so much, about how people work.
But there was a special time five years ago when I learned a lot about how stuff doesn’t work. Following the “Climategate” revelations of skullduggery in the handling, presentation and obscuration of climate science data, there were about five formal inquiries (in the U.S. and U.K.), supposedly looking into the propriety of what had been revealed by Climategate emails.
The ways in which the “investigators” were selected, and their “results” prearranged, astonished me. From these farcical investigations I learned a lot more about how stuff works. I realized I needed to learn a lot more about how people, universities and bureaucracies can smoothly slide through a krypto-legal proceeding, with not one of the apparent wrongdoers needing ever to don a striped suit.
Like others on WUWT, I am expecting some investigations of the “RICO20” signers. I am afraid I may find myself dumbfounded by the course of such investigations. Maybe I’ll learn more about how stuff works. Or doesn’t.
If only the witnesses you want are called then you get the results you want. Done all the time.
NSF, NASA, NOAA. Here is the real problem. If government is dolling out cash like it’s gone out of style, you can’t fail to get schemers who circumvent rules to get as much of the cash as possible. That such a naive scheme as this survived for 20 years or so, means it was the product of winks and nods from the grantors. It is an unbelievable culture, revealed by climategate and the general demeanor and hubris of the annointed in climate science. The recent manual correction of the pesky pause is also a reflection of it.
By all means ask the hard questions (with self evident answers) of Shukla. But don’t forget to ask the even harder questions of NSF, NASA and NOAA. What is in it for them? Or are they rewarding friends with the knowing sanction of those in higher government. Sixty-three million bucks seems to me, perhaps 60 million too high. These people aren’t building anything like Lockheed or General Dynamics are in their contracts. I would like to see the breakdown of salaries and expenses that were submitted for this work, the output of which is just words!!! Did they have to build a satellite? Collect samples in the Mariana Trench? Drill 50 holes through the ice at the South Pole? 63million should be enough for this kind of work for the entire academia in such an essay-type science. They even try to avoid going out and collecting empirical information. M.Mann said to update the tree ring data was a huge and time consuming task and so it hasn’t been done (what else have they got to do?)
Given their animosity toward skeptics, that’s probably something we should be thankful for…
Research funds are actually harder to get these days than formerly, at least in the areas where I have worked. In my labs about 75% of the funding went on salaries, this is how it works: about 30% benefits + 50% overheads on that which means about double the salary. To hire a staff member at $50k you have to raise $100k so as you can see a million dollars doesn’t go very far. As I’ve said before the cases I’m aware of involved faculty who had their own companies outside the university and therefore didn’t have the same degree of oversight that exists within the university system.
You wish! It is usual business for the NSF and, actually, most of the Program Managers there are the Universities faculty. Now, convince me that this is not biased system!
Which advocacy group is pulling the strings at NSF for this kind of grant award?
How about these?
http://www.cfact.org/2015/08/31/governors-billionaires-secretly-promote-obamas-crippling-energy-agenda/
Of course these people knew what they were signing. Any sentient life form could see that it’s a bald faced attempt to prosecute, or cow into silence, those who disagree with them on matters of a few tenths of a degree. After all, if you’re a Lead Author for the IPCC with unfettered powers of censorship and information manipulation, you’ll quickly develop the pig-faced arrogance to think you can be the Minister of Truth.
I know and have worked with some of these people, and it is sad to see what they have made themselves. Perhaps Mann (not Mikey) could update his novel about these folks…
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34440.Doctor_Faustus
This mess has been fermenting for a long time in science in general. Read Daniel Greenberg’s award-winning Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (2001), at:
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Money-Politics-Political-Triumph/dp/0226306356/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1443816911&sr=8-2&keywords=science%2C+money%2C+and+politics
Here’s the silver lining. All this easy money has perverted climate science into catastrophism, and they are simply wrong. The dark cloud is the catastrophic, colossal, towering cumulus, of wasted money.
================
No, it hasn’t perverted it that way, politics is warfare by another name. Money is politics. Those dedicated to their ideology always gravitate towards politics, the more aggressively they pursue their ideological agenda, the more duplicitous the means they employee to achieve those ideological ends.
Those who pursue Marxist ideological agenda’s accept and adhere to only one moral or ethical standard. The End Justifies the Means. Science has been an easy mark for Marxist ideologues since the the creation of Marxism, since Marxism pretends to be a scientific conceptualization of politics. Marxism baths its followers in the arrogant narcissistic and pseudo belief of their own intellectual superiority.
It is a opiate for those who prize their own intellectual aggrandizement, as irresistible as heroin to an addict. For those within the scientific community the accolades of peer acceptance is a temptation akin to addiction, worthy of almost any transgression.
In our modern society the risks taken by Galileo Galilei against his reputation and fortunes are inconceivable, all that matters is the social statues and wealth that the accolades of peer acceptance promise.
There was never any possibility that the Global Warming/Climate Change Ponzi Scheme would survive a Forensic Auditing. The whole thing is and always was a Marxist scheme to defraud Western Nations that had not yet succumbed to Marxism/Socialism/Communism. Just as Greenpeace was infiltrated and taken over by Marxists using environmentalism as a mask to hide their true Marxist agenda behind. So likewise the United Marxist Nations willfully, intentionally and knowingly inflicted this fraud on the Western Nations of the world.
Marxism is the most evil, vile and ruthless political ideology ever conceived of by men, the only thing more evil, is those who cling to it and subscribe to its moral and ethical code that “The End Justifies the Means” which in reality means, that no lie or atrocity is too vile or evil to be employed in gaining their objectives. This Global Warming/Climate Change scheme is just one of their many attempts to create/foist upon the world their perverted and evil concept of Utopia.
Those who do not understand this, or who live in denial, refusing to understand this, don’t have the intellectual don’t have the honestly or brain power to light a 1 milliwatt LED.
doriangrey1
Not sure about the claim “is and always was…Marxist”. Doesn’t mean it hasn’t evolved into that, but unclear how you determined it started out that way.
There is nothing secret about this, it has been exposed many times, though, the memory hole keep trying to swallow it.
IPCC Official: āClimate Policy Is Redistributing The Worldās Wealthā
The quote here by Ottmar Edenhofer seems to suggest that Marxists infiltrated and took over the Climate Change movement, but that simple is not the case. From the very beginning with Rajendra Pachauri the Marxists were always the driving force behind Anthropocentric Global Warming/Climate Change. It has always been about collapsing Western constitutional representative governments in order to replace them with Marxist Governments.
Searching Google News for shukla turns up a lot of unrelated stuff but searching for shukla climate shows articles by Daily Caller, Breitbart News and National Review Online.
And the most important question here…….
If the grant allocation system is this lax, and able to be manipulated quite so easily — how many other Shuklas are there out there? How many other climate grants are being skimmed? How much government money is simply falling into the vast black hole of Climate Corruption?
We had Global Warming, then Climate Change, then Climate Disruption, and now Climate Corruption. What next? Climate Meltdown?
R
ralfellis
Plainly this means the NSF et al need significant funding increases to strengthen their compliance functions. A few billion dollars should get us started. Don’t expect results right away.
“Perhaps the President knew…”
The State Department should’ve known.
Reed Schuler, Climate Change Treaty Negotiator for the State Department, is listed as a participant at the Shukla Symposium.
The George Mason University may get into a lot of trouble as well.
An NSF grant is typically divided in 3, with 2/3 going to the recipient, and 1/3 given to the school PRECISELY FOR THE JOB of making sure that the grant is used properly. There is no such overhead on big instrumentation money, which goes 100% to the grantee.
That is, congress through the NSF decided not to police grant use (an immense enterprise on a national scale), but instead pay the universities a hefty chunk to police it.
From time to time, more than a decade apart, the NSF does a full audit of one institution, akin to the IRS compliance check. I remember that Duke was subject to such a probe in math, about 15 years ago, with the use of every dollar checked. After that (which did not come out that well) the NSF changed a lot of policies.
Needless to say, in the case at hand the university did not really earn its millions.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
Shukla’s own goal demonstrates that ‘sceptics’ to him, pose a greater threat than any ridicule he can inflict upon himself. Ouch.
I will be very surprised if this isn’t picked up by Drudge. This is exactly the type of thing that captures their attention, especially if it’s ignored by the MSM.
It’ll never make the news on the Ministry of Truth (aka BBC) or other mainstream media.
[snip – inappropriate language -mod]
My father was a DCAA auditor for 20 years. Tenacious is an apt description. In the days before databases, I wrote a program for him on my Apple II, just so we could input invoices to catch double billings that were not obvious. I can tell you it worked and shortly after that incident, his office got computers.
Oh RICO!!
Is it Shukla or Shmukla?
Do we know anything about the foundation that was set up in India? Do by chance more relatives work there? Doing what and for how much?
The corruption inherent in the climate change industry is complete and absolute. Watch 10:40
https://youtu.be/0LbqU3spW90?t=10m40s
I’ve always stated that once they look behind the curtain and one of these crooks is forced to do a perp walk, all this climate change nonsense will evaporate and you will never hear of it again. The fraud exists because all these activists masquerading as scientists feel they are being shielded from the legal system, and that their corruption is being condoned by those in power, which is has been and is. None of this stuff would pass the rigors of a real science, that is why they rely on “peer” review and not reproduciblity. They have reworked the entire scientific method to conform with their corruption. Problem is, when they take down the climate science departments, they will take down everyone. Real scientists, statisticians, mathematicians and economatricians sat silent knowing of the fraud being committed. The silence will be viewed as an accessory to the crime and everyone will have to deal with greater regulation and oversight by the Government.
Watch 54:00 into this video, the corruption is absolute.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=54m
Eisenhower warned us about the threat of corruption of government contracts: Watch 1:02:07. Also watch the parts immediately before it.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=1h2m7s
Mr. Verardo has replied at Climateaudit . I read this as that NSF may actually be worried now.
agreed . for a while now i have noticed people appearing on sceptic blogs that would not normally visit them. a sure sign some are getting worried. not just about this incident ,but the entire meme.
Well, we now have a video of a scientific model which was created to simulate the response of climate realists to warmista bloodsuckers.
In the video, the warmista bloodsucker is represented by a nematode worm, and the climate realist army which seeks to call them to account for their dastardly deeds are represented by the horde of eosinophil white blood cells:
http://imgur.com/K70FQ9n
THE TIMELINE
2007-2008 Climatologists from the CRU realize that there is something terribly wrong with their climate models, as global temps do not go up as predicted.
[CRU email #2007] Wils:āØ What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?āØ Theyāll kill us probably.
[CRU email #0850] Barnett:āØ [IPCC AR5 models] clearly, some tuning or very good luck involved.Ā I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer
Shukla too sees that the models are entirely inadequate
[CRU email #5131] 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.
The honest thing to do for any science and scientists would be to come forward and say publicly that the models are still very primitive and need at least another decade or two to become predictive.
Such a situation is common. In my field, physicists try to model two black holes spinning around each other but they cannot yet do it, after decades of trying. Their talks always start by mentioning this inability.
But this is not science and these are not scientists. Itās climate science and they are climate scientists.
Shukla realizes that bad models need even more propaganda to cover up their failures, so his institute dedicated to such propaganda is more needed than ever. He is not disappointed. The NSF pumps $65m into the Institute. He hires his wife and daughter.
2015 Making, together with his family, $1m/year, by knowingly pushing inadequate climate models as good, Shukla asks Congress to prosecute as organized crime those who dare to mention what he knows is true, namely that the climate models are inadequate.
Instead, the Senate informs him that his businesses are now under forensic investigation.
Good post.
I often mention that email (CRU email #2007). It is clear to me that by the mid 2000s, the Team were well aware that the role of natural variation may have been underestimated, and that there was a real possibility that what had been observed in the 1980s and 90s was nothing more than natural multidecadal variation.
Given that it is almost certainly the case that much of the perceived warming set out in the land based thermometer record is an artefact of UHI (bear in mind that the satellite data shows no warming during this period; in that record temperature is flat between 1979 to 1996, before the run up to the Super El Nino of 1997/8), and the longer the present day ‘pause’ continues, the more likely it becomes that all that was being observed is natural multidecadal variation. the strength of this case is growing year by year, and if there is no return to warming before 2019, it will be very difficult for the IPCC to ignore.
Ah, but does anyone reading here doubt that the policy statements of the IPCC will continue to ignore “the strength of this case”?
If an idea is corrupt and immoral, its institutions can only be corrupt and immoral. That is a natural law.
Guys – make as much noise bout this out case as possible – print it out , and encourage school and university students to study the case : at the very least this will help fight the brainwashing of students ?