Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t JoNova – Climate Scientist Daniel Alongi has been indicted by Australian authorities, and accused of falsifying half a million dollars worth of expenses.
A CLIMATE scientist who did research on the Great Barrier Reef for the Federal Government is accused of ripping off taxpayers to the tune of $556,508 by claiming bogus expenses related to his research – for seven years.
Authorities have frozen the superannuation and long-service leave of former career public servant Daniel Alongi pending a trial.
Police allege Alongi, from Townsville, created an elaborate ruse to claim bogus expenses while working for the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Alongi, who was well regarded in the science industry, allegedly pretended he was paying for “radioisotopes” imported from the US and to have samples analysed in US laboratories for his Great Barrier Reef research.
He told his boss he could “get a discount” on isotopes because he was a US citizen, and he claimed he was measuring carbon levels in “sediment core samples” taken from the Reef.
He has admitted to police that he made false invoices, credit card statements and created fake email trails to claim expenses over seven years, court documents state.
Read more (paywalled): http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/crime-and-justice/queensland-climate-scientist-accused-of-falsely-claiming-expenses/news-story/94a67f8d863a6a94c2578e04402622ed
More background (not paywalled) here.
There is no suggestion at this stage that Alongi produced fake results for research papers, but in my opinion this has to be considered a possibility, if the charges against Alongi are upheld. After all, if Alongi falsely claimed to have spent half a million dollars on radioisotope testing, it would look pretty strange if he didn’t produce any false test results, to justify the expenditure of all that money. According to Research Gate, Alongi has helped author 140 publications, and has been cited 5,861 times.
All in the last few months has been bad for the image of mainstream climate science. First we had the the Shukla 20 scandal, and now we have the Alongi fraud case.
I’m not saying climate scientists are just in it for the money. I think there is substantial evidence that many of them truly believe. But clearly there is an awful lot of money on the table, which predominantly seems to go to scientists who support the position favoured by politicians. More than enough money to tempt the unscrupulous.
What if these cases are just the extremes? What if for every climate scientist who flagrantly breaches the rules, there are a host of less openly dishonest climate scientists who are just bending the rules a little, say spending a little more than they should on the odd perk, toning down adverse results, not rocking the boat, making sure they keep their well paid jobs?
If unscrupulous scientists are producing distorted or fake results, to stay safe, or to cover inflated expenses claims and, in the worst cases, outright theft of government funds, how many honest climate scientists have been deceived, by this ongoing contamination of the world’s climate knowledge?
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…ROTFLMAO…..
That is all I had to say by the end!
Actually his most cited paper looks quite reasonable.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Alongi2/publication/231955066_Present_state_and_future_of_the_world's_mangrove_forests/links/54811a2f0cf263ee1adfaeb5.pdf
Colour me unsurprised! No doubt his ‘research’ touted the AGW meme too?
Kev. Me too. It seems the major problem (other than big government raging and running amok) is that so much money has been made available to soft or pseudo sciences, i.e. sociology, “climate scientists”, etc., that there is little control or accountability of the money sloshing around. Robbing science to pay leftist activists has never done anything but harm.
Actually his research DIDN’T tout CAGW. Perhaps there is more to this investigation.
https://appliedecology.cals.ncsu.edu/absci/wp-content/uploads/Alongi-2008.pdf
That doesn’t matter; if he’s committed fraud, he taints every one & everything
I agree, but half a million dollars for isotope work on the Great Barrier Reef? That’s A LOT of isotope work to fake. My guess is that he did have isotope work done but must have had a huge volume in order to have sneaked $500,000 by.
What ever happened to Jagdish Shukla? Are there any developments?
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2016/01/11/irs-complaint-filed-against-rico-20-think-tank
Jan 11, 2016
“The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a research institute, and Cause of Action (CoA), a government watchdog organization, have filed a complaint with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that requests the agency investigate Jagadish Shukla, a climate researcher at George Mason University, and revoke the tax-exempt status of the Institute of Global Environment and Society, Inc. (IGES), an organization Shukla founded.”
Thank you and ristvan for that update.
Rep. Smith’s Congressional Oversight committee announced a two pronged investigation. One into the quality of oversight of NSF grants, because Shukla was violating the investigator salary rules. Second, into Shukla for double dipping (paying himself through his tax exempt foundation for administering the NSF grants), a separate violation of NSF policies.
And Virginia could (don’t know if it has) open a criminal investigation of violation of state disclosure laws comcerning the double dipping since Shukla is a state employee.
Virginia has a democrat governor and attorney-general. What do you think the odds of that happening are?
Phil R,
About the same odds of my winning the Powerball lottery.
But – But, but
db could win it – if he buys a ticket . . . . .
Auto
Was he also on paid leave from the EPA at the time?
I hope this is the tip of the iceberg as to the auditing of the so-called “climate science”. Science in general will not recover from the abuses in the so-called “climate science” until/unless truth and justice prevail in what appears to be the greatest academic and economic scam in history.
It is past time for all those associated to be either a ‘whistle blower’ or a defendant. Act now before the indictments come down.
Dishonest in small things, dishonest is large things. If a priest of Global Warming will defile truth and propagate a lie professionally, there is no limit to his or her willingness to lie and cheat and steal.
Immorality yields immoral behavior at all levels.
An indictment is not a conviction, but I am happy the global warming lying-class got a black eye.
In France, truth is an excuse against defamation, except in some cases.
Is evidence of fraud an excuse for “conspiracy ideation”?
Since the radioisotopes were faked is it fair to assume the data for his research were faked as well?
Very probably, we can’t just assume his data is good based on an assumption of sound scientific ethics any longer. He published 140 papers and has been cited over 5000 times, all of those are now tainted to varying degrees.
In Australia, The Great Barrier Reef is almost a sacred cow. The greens love to use it to scare people. The greens, WWF and Greenpeace, always claim the Reef is going to die in 5 years and global warming etc is the cause.
Galilee Coal mine is 600 kms away and on the other side of the Great Dividing Range to the Reef, yet they say the mine will damage it.
The GBR is a great source of funding for all studies. The sensible oones say the reef has never been in better shape. The warmist ones find some dead coral and immediately blame warming, farmers, coal mining, really anything they can think of.
Oeve Hohlberg is the chiefest calamity spruiker. He has extracted millions from governments, yet not 1 of his predictions has come true. No doubt he is one of the major citers of Alongi. Hohlberg is a prominent warmist.
SO when Alongi crumbles, you can bet your bottom dollar, others will go with him.
On a side note, when Alongi’s photo was published people compared him to Newman from the Seinfeld comedy show.
Correction, Professor OVE HOEGH-GULDBERG, Director, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland.
Yet another warmist at University of Queensland, home of John Cook and how to disprove sceptics, where the hockey stick is alive and thriving in the Sociology department..
He would make a great mining engineer or an asthma expert for EPA. Either one or both interchangeably
His real job was for the CIA! No wait… that was the highest paid civil servant at the EPA.
I wish I could remember how to spell schadenfraude, as I am defintely feeling it.
Eric Worrall
Hello,
“It’s worst then you thought”. (always wanted to use that line) Any paper any study any government policy or regulation or high school class assignment must now be held suspect (and most likely be redacted.)
Lovely way to start out the new year don’t you think?
Michael Duhancik
Pardon, I meant in which Daniel Alongi ‘s work is cited, or had his “radioisotopes” used. This may not be just him. With the type of sweetheart arrangement he pretended to have, other researchers’ may have seen the utility be processing their own needs through him.
(gleeful laughter)
michael
I was thinking the same thing. It would be nice if the authors of the 5,861 papers that referenced the subject “research” were impacted in some way, and secondary references to the 5,861 would also need to be annotated having flaws.
My guess is the corrections/annotatons don’t happen; “The reference was not of significant importance to my paper so it is O.K. that the reference is biased … I don’t need to waste my time correcting my paper” will be the norm, and “peers” that review papers with secondary references to the subject “research” won’t care.
worse
It’s worse than we thought. We can’t explain the decline in the funds and it’s a travesty that we can’t. Hey! Can any of you remember what Mike’s Nature trick was all about again?
Dunno but howsabout we say the missing teat is in the ocean?
The most distrusted people in the world are used car salespeople, real estate agents, insurance agents and lawyers. If you have not done so already you may want to add climate scientist to that list.
I think it’s a little unfair to tar all climate scientists with the same brush – there are good guys out there as we well know. Basically, I would contend that any paper written in such a language as to lean towards AGW/CO2, etc, without due diligence and actual science (for example, proper reporting of results, error bars, supplementary information, etc) would lend one to conclude that the authors are a) not real scientists and b) simply following the grant trough via the touted meme.
There are also good car salesmen, insurance agents, realtors, and lawyers out there too. But a trend is a trend (unless the climate scientists don’t like it; then it is an adjusted trend).
DonM. Don’t forget to add Congress members from the US. Their level of trust seems to bounce around in single digit figures.
Ranging from 0 to 9 ?
I believe Australian politicians are in the same range. I personally put them in negative trust, but that’s just me.
Of course climate “scientists” are in it for the money. Whether or not they “believe” in what they are doing is besides the point. Any doubts they might have are simply quashed. Doubts are inconvenient to an ideology. They are essentially climate whores.
+ 1
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years an uncompromised climate scientist will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what an honest scientist is,” he said.
/sarc
A visit to notrickszone is warranted. The last quote is germaine to this discussion.
There are other cases of academic misconduct ‘down under’. Lewandowski. O’Leary on sudden sea level rise. Fabricius on coral reefs. Exposed in essays By Land or By Sea, and Shell Games.
You don’t have to commit fraud to carry out climate science research,
but it helps…pg
He has admitted to police that he made false invoices, credit card statements and created fake email trails to claim expenses over seven years, court documents state.
Read more (paywalled):
Oh yeah. Pay walling court documents is a great step forward in transparency.
Needed to help pay back the $556,508?
Rob Dawg January 13, 2016 at 10:28 am
No Rob, just a news organization not giving it away for free. See the link. Its just an example of good business sense
No foul, just smart for the Couriermail .Its how they make their living; honest living, unlike others
michael
..Ummm, most news organizations do not paywall their sites, that’s why they have advertising !!
And most news organizations lose money off their free content. Internet advertisements bring in terribly small quantities. A lot of papers, including the NY Times, Dallas Morning News, and my own Houston Chronicle have subscriber-only sections of their sites.
It’s how they get their bail money???? 🙂
Is this perhaps a way for the politicians to jump off the train before the wreck of CAGW, without losing face ??
Prosecute a few corrupt climate scientists then they can say ‘we trusted the scientists, gave them money & they duped us, so vote for us & we’ll pass draconian laws to make sure this never happens again….trust us.’ & a large % of the sheeple will instantly agree; just as they did after 9/11, the London bombings & the early Global warming scares.
Not that our glorious leaders would be so devious……
Or that intelligent.
Oh come on, a few priests may be corrupt, but that’s just the fallability of man. The Dogma is still sound!
Although I agree that this doesn’t say anything about other climate scientists, I wonder if there are any statistics on probability of giving in to temptation as the sum involved increases? I’ve often heard some remark on a petty theft that gets discovered: “What, they did that for twenty bucks!! I wouldn’t run that risk for under a million or so.” I guess Alongi was gunning for the million.
This is a flip side of the late climate icon Stephen Schneider’s advice about how dishonest one should choose to be in hyping their climate science results.
(stuff on noble cause followed by:) “So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/21/stephen-schneider-and-the-%E2%80%9Cdouble-ethical-bind%E2%80%9D-of-climate-change-communication/
I have no doubt that Schneider’s statement, made back in 1989, relieved most of the climate warming klatch from the disciplines of morality and honesty and set the stage not only to conceal caveates and uncertainty, but to do even fraudulent science as well. The free rein they had until the pause set in and until skeptics got more deeply into the fray, erased all scruples for many and the press and the establishment and the institutes, scientific journals, NGOs and all. Indeed, when the corruption is complete, morality is not even a question. This is Stephen Schneider’s legacy, not the one they wrote on Berkley’s web site on climate change for him. Peter G. Michael M, Kevin T., the UEA mafia, the NOAA/NASA/NCAR and family, IPCC, all are ‘beneficiaries’ of Schneider’s admonition for expressing uncertainty. Now, you don’t like the pause? Irradicate it!
The irony should be noted that Schneider had been a big deep freeze projector up until a few years before this and having switched horses after being so wrong, wouldn’t you expect him to be more tentative and uncertain – at least in 1989 when nothing had happened yet.
I think this taxonomy of climate science is telling us, yes, check out financial fraud and fraudulent research across the science. There can be little doubt this guy also cooked results using imaginary isotopes, otherwise what supposedly happened to these isotopes. Steve McIntyre has already outed a number of fraudulent cli sci papers that used invalid statistical techniques and made claims not even to be hinted at in the data. Shukla must be guilty of nepotism and taking money above and beyond what is allowed per year with not a lot of research written up in recent years despite $66million from one agency of government. The civil servants managing these contracts should also be investigated. I think there is a lot of worry among the minions about the coming election.
eradicate irradicatiom!
Remember also the CARB scientist who wrote the rules on diesel emissions who got his Ph.D. from a mail order degree mill? Or Peter Gleick in the Heartland case? There are no penalties when you fraudulently support the government’s position.
$556,508 was the fraudulent amount. How much was his legitimate take, twice that?
And since he wasn’t actually getting any results back from a US lab, did he just make up data or results to use in his work? That calls into question if any of his grant or university income was legitimate.
Is $556,508 just the tip of the ice berg, so to speak? Keep us posted, Eric Worrall.
Just the tip of the climate “science” iceberg
No, CAGW is the Titanic of science and reality is the iceberg !!
Hey! Lets be accurate with our silliness….Science is the Titanic, the iceberg is AGW theory but in this story, the ship is still about two miles from it, the view is clear, and it appears that someone on board might have better binoculars. Oh…and hundreds of us are floating around the iceberg in little rafts with our Mag Lights shining directly at it while screaming ICEBERG at the top of our lungs.
I wonder if Mann, Cook, and Lew played stringed instruments…..they might need to warm up to play later…
I guess when you are in the business of ripping off grant money by fudging data and publishing ‘pal reviewed’ papers, a padded expense account or two is no big thing.
“Another Climate Scientist Accused of Financial Fraud”
I know it is rather a fine distinction for these parts, but he isn’t actually a climate scientist. He worked for the Australian Institute for Marine Science. According to the Guardian:
“His most recent role was a level eight senior research scientist looking at the biogeochemical functioning of tropical coastal and marine ecosystems, particularly mangroves and coral reefs.”
I’ve been confused for a long time now. Since you bring it up, what is the appropriate definition of “climate scientist”. Anybody?
DonM,
“…. what is the appropriate definition of “climate scientist”. …”
My answer to that would be somewhat sarcastic so I will pass. 😉
However one appropriate definition to “climate science” could be anything that anyone could possibly dream up that purports to prove CAGW. Hell, you could even claim that it will cause webbed feet on humans?
Definition of a climate scientist is someone who mentions prominently in their research papers, or is quoted in the media, that “this will make climate change worse in the future”.
Funny how for a couple of decades many people were given the description of climate scientist by the mass media and institutions, even though they had no qualifications and guess what no one complained.
A railway engineer, a failed politician, etc. everybody in climate alarmism turned a blind eye.
Nick says, “but he isn’t actually a climate scientist.” Clicking the link at the beginning of this post produces the following result:
Daniel M. Alongi
Australian Institute of Marine…, Townsville
Geochemistry, Geology, Paleoclimatology
But I guess Paleoclimatology isn’t ‘actually’ climate science?
but he isn’t actually a climate scientist.
I guess we can just ignore his paper from less than a year ago then?
Article: The Impact of Climate Change on Mangrove Forests
Daniel M. Alongi
[Show abstract]
Full-text · Article · Mar 2015
” just ignore his paper”
He studies mangrove forests. Climate change affects many things. People write about how the things they study are affected. That doesn’t make them climate scientists.
He studies mangrove forests. Climate change affects many things. People write about how the things they study are affected. That doesn’t make them climate scientists.
How convenient. When physicists, statisticians, biologists, chemists, etc point out errors or discrepancies in the climate “science” they get dismissed with a wave of the hand because they aren’t “climate scientists”. But Cook et all would have gladly accepted this paper, would they not?
But it matters not. Turns out we don’t know if he actually studied mangrove forests or not….
+100
Then who is a climate scientist?
Someone with a “climate science” diploma?
Nick Stokes January 13, 2016 at 6:08 pm
“A Yankee just like me.”
So the heading should be
“Another Yankee accused of ……
No . Never heard of ah, Benedict Arnold? Hes yours just like Arnold was for the Brits, why they even made him a General in their army. Where are your standards? Why aren’t you advocating a promotion for him.
Live with it. Its your camp. Not ours. Cheeky remarks only show you have nothing solid to cling to.
I understand its just you against all of us here, and I respect you for it. Take a little more time, you can do better.
BTW have you ever had the privilege of attending a “Fife and Drum Corps” muster? Eastern U.S.A. and Canada have wonderful Bands. If you haven’t you may want to consider it . All of them do a good “Yankee Doodle
With a good heart
michael
Nick Stokes January 13, 2016 at 11:17 am
I know it is rather a fine distinction for these parts, but he isn’t actually a climate scientist.
Wrong again Nick, Daniel Alongi is an American. A Yankee just like me. Never hear the song the Brits sang a couple hundred years ago? Yankee Doodle Went to town… stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni !
Yup if one of us says we’re a General then we’re a general. So if Daniel says hes a Climate scientist then by the almighty and the Continental Congress he is. Your stuck with him! .enjoy
michael
“A Yankee just like me.”
So the heading should be
“Another Yankee accused of financial fraud!”
“A Yankee just like me.”
So the heading should be
“Another Yankee accused of financial fraud!”
Nope, that Yankee was working in Australia as a “climate scientist”, with apparently NO supervision or accountability.
I don’t know of any of us Americans who call ourselves Yankees except some proud New Englanders. In the American south, it’s a derisive.
Interestingly enough, the Australians do call us Yanks, and usually without derision.
YANKEE, n.
In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See DAMNYANK.) – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
So….wait….are you saying that MARINE SCIENTISTS don’t qualify as climate scientists???? Because NOAA would like to discuss that with you I’m sure!
Nick Stokes January 13, 2016 at 2:56 pm
Aw Nick such disloyalty are you and the Brethren going to give the poor guy the ISIS cold shoulder?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3395220/ISIS-burns-alive-fighters-losing-Ramadi-Iraqi-troops-fled-terror-group-s-stronghold-Mosul.html
I mean you are going to stand shoulder to shoulder with him come what may. Right? Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden and all that right? Hes part of the team after all.
michael