Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has “warned” President-elect Donald Trump not to interfere with their climate activities. Schmidt maintains the GISS global temperature series, arguably the most adjusted of all the global temperature products.
‘Global warming doesn’t care about the election’: Nasa scientist warns Donald Trump over interference
Senior Nasa scientist suggests he could resign if Donald Trump tries to skew climate change research results.
A senior Nasa scientist has told Donald Trump he is wrong if he thinks climate change is not happening and warned the President-elect that government scientists are “not going to stand” for any interference with their work.
Mr Trump has described global warming as a “hoax” perpetrated by China, vowed to unratify the landmark Paris Agreement and appointed a renowned climate-change denier to a senior environmental position in his transition team.
The science community and environmental campaigners in the US have already begun efforts to persuade Mr Trump that climate change is actually real before he takes office next year.
Dr Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, signalled they would have allies among the federal science agencies.
…
In an interview with The Independent, Dr Schmidt, who was born in London, said: “The point is simple: the climate is changing and you can try to deny it, you can appoint people who don’t care about it into positions of power, but regardless nature has the last vote on this.
…
Asked if he would resign if the Trump administration adopted the most extreme form of climate change denial, Dr Schmidt said this was “an interesting question”. It would not cause him to quit “in and of itself”, he said.
“Government science and things generally go on regardless of the political views of the people at the top,” Dr Schmidt said. “The issue would be if you were being asked to skew your results in any way or asked not to talk about your results. Those would be much more serious issues.”
…
But he added: “Trump is obviously unique. It’s not just the same as Bush again.”
…
President-elect Donald Trump has already stated that he intends to refocus NASA on its original mission of space exploration.
“I will free NASA from the restriction of serving primarily as a logistics agency for low Earth orbit activity… Instead we will refocus its mission on space exploration.”
The needless duplication of climate work between multiple federal agencies has been noted before – in 2015, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, introduced a bill calling on NASA to spend more of their time and effort exploring space.
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Now that the warmistas have stopped using “global warming” and substituted “climate change” they have completely changed their position. It’s like saying a person is alive so his heart must be beating. Of course there is climate change – it has been happening for millenia and will continue to happen as long as the earth exists. But anthropogenic global warming is what President-elect Trump is skeptical of. And I think Trump knows BS when he sees it.
I don’t think nearly enough is made of this point by the sceptic community. Whilst it was ‘global warming’ that was fine. A hypothesis that co2 is the primary driver of global temperature and co2 is always positively correlated with temperature. The hypothesis makes a prediction and if temperatures stop going up while co2 continues to do so then the hypothesis has been falsified.
To move the goal posts to ‘climate change’ when it is a scientifically verifiable fact that the climate has always changed is to render the hypothesis completely and forever unfalsifiable and therefore not even lying within the remit of science at all.
Gavin is right. There is no debate. There can be no debate because what has been proposed is not a scientific question. You may as well propose that tiny little pixies are responsible for pushing water molecules around in waterfalls and as each and every eddy and whorl materialises you exclaim in rapture that it is clear supporting evidence for your conjecture. Poor old Russell though his teapot was the clincher for these types of argument – but apparently not.
…or, Unicorns have been proposed…
Well Schmidt, perhaps you need to go out into the private world and find financial backers who will pay for your research with their money. Then you would only have to answer to them. I am quite sure there are enough wealthy believers in AGW that you should have no problem finding them.
Tommy Steyer and Geo Soros come to mind.
They both have billions to spend on trying to rig our election so let them give it to Gavin to spend to try to prove CAGW.
They’ve got a few years til they can try to get Chelsea Clinton elected president.
Mike, you ruined a perfectly good day by bringing up Chelsea Clinton. Only two things could keep her off our backs. She got: 1) her father’s ugly looks; and 2) her mother’s nasty temper.
So, he has conspirators in government science(?), to come to his aid? I suspect, if they are half as smart as they think they are, they see Schmidt’s Alligator mouth just overloaded his Hummingbird ass. He may have a lot fewer friends than he believes
Right up there with Mikey Mann.
@Flyoverbob
November 17, 2016 at 5:49 am: Just like Mann. I look forward to seeing how he goes.
What people like Gavin seem to fail to understand is that climate skeptics agree climate change is real, we even understand the climate is, on average, warming. The question “Do you believe climate change is real?” is somehow supposed to be equivalent to “Do you believe human emitted CO2 causes major problems with Earth’s climate”. If Climatologists were really honest, they would be correcting EVERYONE who conflates the two. Only skeptics openly admit they are totally different questions that have completely different policy implications. Skeptics understand that if CO2 is such a problem, every month of every year should be setting new hot records – that we don’t see this tells us that natural variability is significant.
I lost all trust in Climatologists when I looked for the same trends that datasets like GISS show in the raw station data – and yes, I cherry picked my stations by picking remote rural ones that were least likely to be affected by UHI. I haven’t yet found one which doesn’t show that natural variability is huge compared to any long term trend. All rural stations I have seen show small, slow, steady upward trends entirely consistent with a world still slightly warming after the end of the last ice age. Sea level shows the same trend. Volcanoes, earthquakes, pandemics, asteroids and zealots scare the crap out of me. These are the forces that shape our world. We, as a mostly rational species, have attained a level of consciousness that allows us to control, or at least mitigate, many of the catastrophic risks our species and our planet face as a result of those things. But based on the temperature evidence, I see nothing that persuades me the human component of CO2 emissions is worth any time worrying about at all.
If I were to create a temperature index I would select stations on islands that have little urbanisation and simply add all the raw hourly data together. Missing data is the problem with all these aggregation exercises though. Probably safest to take the average of the equivalent month in the two adjacent years. If you could pick enough from the Northern and Southern hemispheres then any seasonality would largely cancel out. But as you point out Nick – such an exercise takes time and most of us just can’t be bothered, what good would showing such a trend do? Is the Climate establishment suddenly going to turn around and say “Sorry, you’re right, we got it wrong!” and dismantle hundreds of bureaucratic enterprises, small businesses that count carbon and large ones that service renewables? No, they’d attack as they like to do. We would be accused of cherry-picking, or being too simplistic, or any number of possible criticisms that subject-matter experts can level against intelligent non-specialist. Nope, better just to sit back and let nature have the last word, although I tend to think it will be the markets that really sort this out long before nature really plays its hand.
Not to be argumentative, what defines the end of the latest ice age? Is it possible that the latest ice age has yet to end?
And if you start from the 1930’s, we are not in a warming trend at all, we are in a cooling trend. The highpoint of the 1930’s was 0.5C hotter than 1998, and the highpoint of 2016 is one-tenth of a degree hotter than 1998, which makes 2016, cooler than the 1930’s. A downtrend.
You are correct.
Right now the earth is in another interglacial of the current ice age.
Earth has warmed since the depths of the Little Ice Age during the Maunder Minimum over 300 years ago, but the long-term trend of the past more than 3000 years is cooling.
My bet for the most likely conversation between Trump and Schmidt is:
You’re fired!
Perfect.
NASA gas been infested with rent seeking swamp people for a long time. Time to drain the swamp (NEPA not required).
I don’t care who has the data. I don’t even care much if they are adjusting it. Tighten the belt. Just one agency should have the data and should be responsible for giving us accurate weather reports of what was, and are trying to improve predictions of what weather will be.
It seems to me that the rocket men and women of NASA should not be spending my dollars on weather and instead should be working on their space mission. If Gaven has a role to play in that endeavor to get us back in space fine. If not, he should be reassigned to the one weather agency. And then please, please, leave climate research to the Ivory Tower universities. Maybe Gaven can become an associate professor somewhere in some university. As a government employee he does not appear to be making the grade in my opinion because weather prediction accuracy sucks. Come on Donald, say it: You’re fired.
Sorry Pam, I disagree with you on two points. First, science depends on honest data. Adjusted data is biased and can be trusted only in the area for which the adjustment was made.
Second, Gaven Schmidt has demonstrated his poor judgement. Poor judgement in climate science brought us AGW. Poor judgement in technology brought us Challenger.
Schmidt needs to be completely out of any government operations.
“Gaven Schmidt has demonstrated his poor judgement.”
It is more than poor judegement. It is dishonesty. A deliberate dishonesty that has cost the U.S. and other nations untold billions of dollars in wasted effort. It’s Fraud on a grand scale. People go to jail for committing fraud.
I see value in a government-funded weather department if only for the protection of interstate trade. Meaning that weather prediction at the federal government level should be drastically reduced in focus and then done only to support the interstate infrastructure of our nation, meaning airports, road ports, water ports, rail ports, and the ocean shores, rivers, roads, and railways that connect us together and lead out/in from/to our borders.
So folks that are hired to do this may indeed need to re-adjust data in order to improve their predictions. That seems reasonable given the deplorable conditions of the data sets. But do it for the reason I have given above.
Bottom line, the governmental creep of what each department is responsible for can be compared to an uninvited yet intrusive nonetheless invasive species that we need to seriously check. Then hire the best available for the renewed and narrowed focus to clean up and get moving in the corrected direction.
Great idea. End the massive redundancy that exists across so much of government. The arrogance of a civil servant rudely telling the President Elect his demands and instructions should be condemned by anyone who cares about civil society.
Gavin Schmidt and his fellow Global Warming of Doom cultists have victimized millions of people with unaffordable energy prices and loss of jobs. It’s time for Trump to remove Schmidt and other GWOD hogs from the government feeding trough.
If I were the president, I wouldn’t “mess” with their Climate Change division, I’d audit them and make ALL of their emails and data and source code public, then I’d defund them.
http://www.davegranlund.com/cartoons/wp-content/uploads/color-nasa-moon-budget2-web.jpg
Maybe Cher will give him a ride.
LOL
STOP ! THINK !
Gavin Schmidt, public employee, is setting the stage for his up-coming Congressional
testimony before Republican controlled House and Senate committees, with a
Republican executive branch that may not have his back.
Mike Mann, Jim Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, et al. have STILL never testified under
oath and under penalty of perjury as to how they arrived at Mann’s “hockey stick”
depiction of climate change.
All his bluster is an advance platform for screaming “harassment of the messenger”,
in an attempt to influence their unwanted depictions of “global warming/climate
change”.
In baseball, the Schmidt interview could be considered a brush back pitch to warn
batters to stand back from the plate.
Schmidt and his guru Hansen recently publicly disagreed regarding a mayor issue (ESS) over at RealClimate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/09/the-snyder-sensitivity-situation/#comment-660760
Yes, Trump better watch out. He has allies! Look at them all over there – edging away – hey! Stop that! Get back here! Careful, I might just maybe perhaps quit, or something. Then you’ll be sorry!
Hopefully Trump will defund it and shut it down.
I don’t think the GISS temperature anomaly series is an official NASA data product (I could be wrong). In any case, NASA GISS should NOT be in the business of publishing that index, but rather leave it to NOAA and specifically the NCDC. Moreover, the raw data and ALL processing codes should be in the public domain, with extensive documentation on how the data are “corrected”. Transparency!
Meanwhile, since the U.S. is suffering from massive government debt and deficits, we should institute cost cutting measures and reduce redundancy in the government sector. For example, NASA GISS should NOT be in the climate code writing business (their code is crappy anyway). Let NCAR take the lead – their code is MUCH better and probably more accurate. Next, move GISS out of their VERY EXPENSIVE New York City office and put it somewhere less expensive, such as Minot, ND. NASA employees could then move to North Dakota and experience a new life outside the liberal urban bubble.
If anyone reading the blog has a personal relationship with Senator Sessions, please have him put in a suggestion for Dr Christy to head NOAA and Dr Spencer to head GISS. This is the leadership we need for those agencies.
If Trump simply required that they maintain a raw set of data in addition to the adjusted data, including the historical datasets, I think that would be a great service. Rather than asking him to “skew” his results, that would provide the evidence to determine whether he is doing his job in a straight up, unbiased fashion. It would be good policy for all agencies for that matter: EPA, Labor, Education, Commerce, etc. Let’s look at the data both before and after it has been “digested.”
If I told my boss not to interfere with what I was doing, I wonder how much longer I would be employed?
Not sure of the relevance to climate, just a basic point about science. I guess it’s nice your for boss never to hear anything they don’t want to hear. But I can’t help worrying it will end badly.
Maybe I’m misreading, but the quote – that is what Schmidt is alleged to have actually said – from the above article is “The issue would be if you were being asked to skew your results in any way”.
If Schmidt is skewing results then getting politics out is the answer, not getting different politics in.
Gavin Schmidt: “The point is simple: the climate is changing and you can try to deny it, you can appoint people who don’t care about it into positions of power, but regardless nature has the last vote on this.”
I find it incomprehensible that anyone could possible take Schmidt seriously. Embedded in this absurd statement is the revelation that any vestige of introspection is long gone. The blatant hypocrisy of his utterance boarders on the insane.
I am hoping that the type of great folks at NASA and its myriad supporting organizations (you know who you are) that are responsible for the breathtaking success of the Mars Rovers, Pioneer and Voyager Spacecraft (among many others), will be emphasized as the core of this once great agency. There is nothing quite like the reality of either smashed expensive bits of technology strew across the universe, or practically unending streams of data returning from distances and environments that boggle the mind. Successful understanding of the complex reality around us is demonstrated by only one thing: Can you successfully predict some element of the future within previously stated and understood limitations? If you can’t do that, then whatever you are doing is defective …and we will be taking pictures of the debris with something that did work. True scientists relish this set of circumstances because it is a very humbling and extremely effective learning experience.
This is what is so typical, what he said is exactly true, he just uses it to imply humans are the cause, while I’d rather understand what the data says, and the data says co2 does not effect cooling in any measurable way (and no, ir spectrum is not proof of an effect from that same ir).
They actually believe their own propaganda.
“They actually believe their own propaganda.”
This is true.
Last minute news
The UK has just ratified the world’s first comprehensive agreement on tackling climate change.
vuk: When I heard that this was on the cards – via the BBC – I wrote to my MP to ask how (according to BBC) the Paris COP21 agreement could become ‘law’ in the UK, bearing in mind there had been no vote in the HoC to make it so. This is the reply he sent me (which I have fisked and replied to):
Mr. Passfield, thanks for the that
“The UK played a critical role in securing that deal, indeed, the British minister was there at the start of the conference and helped created the crucial momentum needed.”
It just confirms what I suspected for a long time that the British ministers are just as if not more ‘guilty’ as the rest of them. The Brexit or no Brexit and regardless of the Trump’s action or no action, I expect that the green and carbon taxes will stay on for a foreseeable future.
There is so much WRONG with that response one is hard pressed to respond short of writing a book! But here is the worst (IMHO) – “There will also be $100 billion mobilised from private and public sources for vulnerable nations in order to mitigate and adapt to the effect of climate change.” THAT is sickening! Who decides the definition of “vulnerable”? And when does a nation become “vulnerable”? And how much does “vulnerable” nation A get as compared to “vulnerable” nation X? And what qualifies a “nation” to be considered for vulnerability status? Etc., etc., etc. It’s all BS and the $100 Billion will never be enough. It’ll become $300-500 Billion. Global redistribution of money! Nothing more. An attempt at Global Socialism/Communism, one world-ism at it’s worst. Excuse me, but I have to go take an anti-nauseous pill.
What I find interesting, but not surprising, is that he didn’t bother to answer your question.
Like most leftists, if the goal is good, any method is justified.
Markw: I found out later that all that was needed to make the PA law in the UK was for the agreement to be ‘laid before parliament’ for 21 days and if no-one objected to it it became law.
Someone once said, we get the government we asked for/deserved (?) Seems we have a spineless one in the UK.
and the French have announced they will phase out coal power by 2023.
and Griff believes anything he is paid to believe.
MarkW
Why is it the right always think someone with an opinion must have been paid to have it? Me thinks they give away too much of how their own world operates.
Wow, are you serious?
http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2016/11/france-follows-uk-in-naming-coal-phase-out-date.html
“French President Francois Hollande has announced his country’s target for complete phase-out of coal-fired power.
He made the announcement that France will phase out the fossil fuel by 2023 at the COP22 Climate Summit in Marrakesh, providing further momentum to the campaign to get governments to set target dates for phasing out the most carbon intensive fuels from their energy mix.
The French target is two years ahead of the British who stated 2025 as their due date for ending coal power.”
The French dont have any significant coal power Griff. 2.5GW at best.
I cannot even begin to express how depressing I find this. Really did think that Theresa May had more about her. Even if she privately believes in cagw I thought she would have sufficient sense to understand that there is absolutely nothing the UK could even in principle do about it and just go for lip service like many others. But no. After all that’s happened the UK is still in the business of gold plating bureaucratic insanity as a means of virtue signalling to the World while our industry runs away to the east. Bravo.
Are we sure about this? She was fast out of the blocks to dump the climate change department so could it not still be possible she plays some canny game here?
absolutely
The Foreign Secretary and the Brexit leader Boris Johnson signed the document with relish
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38014611
and enthusiasm
http://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/17FE6/production/_92487289_mediaitem92487288.jpg
“After all that’s happened the UK is still in the business of gold plating bureaucratic insanity as a means of virtue signalling to the World while our industry runs away to the east.”
An excellent way to put it.
Sounds like you guys need an internal Brexit, like happened in the U.S.
Responsible, clear-sighted poiticians is what you need.
Drain GISS with the rest of the swamp. Drain baby drain!
Let’s all pray to Cloacina that it is so.
O Cloacina, Goddess of this place,
Look on thy suppliants with a smiling face.
Soft, yet cohesive let their offerings flow,
Not rashly swift nor insolently slow.
CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.
(Twice! After WWII (CO2 UP), cooling. After industrial CO2 production waaay up and climbing (1990’s on), no warming after 1997/98 El Nino effect dissipated.)
Game over.
Janice
”
CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.”
What? Janice what planet are you on? Three warmest years in a row.
You’re new here I see!
Simon: I guess (assuming you’re an adult) you have stopped growing, but I bet the last three years of your life were the tallest you’ve been. Let me know when you plan to get to seven feet tall (try modelling it).
No warming this century before the NON-CO2 El Nino transient.
And please , don’t use the much fabricated GISS garbage.
nope 1936 still
michael
Seems a perfect time for a GISS audit, no? How about a Trump submitted FOIA on internal communications? Hummm, Gavin may have to delete his Yoga emails first since a precedent has already been set.
I think he should be forced to sit next to Dr. Spencer, just for good measure, at the next congressional hearing.
Perhaps Trump should invite Gavin and leading skeptics to a debate with the outcome of the debate to determine Gavin’s funding. No show to the debate = no funding.
He knows it’s toast at this point and that explains the defiance now.
http://www.quotehd.com/imagequotes/authors7/norman-mailer-quote-he-bears-an-unmistakable-resemblance-to-a-cornered.jpg
8″ of snow here in north central WY today and still snowing. CO2 is still up there at 400 ppm and we could use a little global warming.
Global warming doesn’t care about the election
The environment doesn’t care about Gavin Schmidt.