Scientists appear to be self-censoring by omitting the term “climate change” in public grant summaries.
An NPR analysis of grants awarded by the National Science Foundation found a steadily decreasing number with the phrase “climate change” in the title or summary, resulting in a sharp drop in the term’s use in 2017. At the same time, the use of alternative terms such as “extreme weather” appears to be rising slightly.
The change in language appears to be driven in part by the Trump administration’s open hostility to the topic of climate change. Earlier this year, President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, and the President’s 2018 budget proposal singled out climate change research programs for elimination.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency has been systematically removing references to climate change from its official website. Both the EPA’s leader, Scott Pruitt, and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry have said they do not accept the scientific consensus that humans are causing the planet to get warmer.
As a result, many scientists find themselves in an uncomfortable position. They are caught between environmental advocates looking to recruit allies and right-wing activists who demonize researchers and denigrate their work.
“In the scientific community, we’re very cautious people,” says Katharine Hayhoe, the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech. “We tend to be quite averse to notoriety and conflict, so I absolutely have seen self-censorship among my colleagues. [They’ll say] ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t say it that way, because whatever funding organization or politician or agency won’t appreciate it.'”
The NSF data appears to bear out the change in language. While the number of grants with the term “climate change” in the public summary has dropped, the number of grants with the terms “environmental change” or “extreme weather” has increased slightly. That suggests that, even if research topics remain the same, the words scientists use to describe them may change.
“Scientists I know are increasingly using terms like ‘global change’, ‘environmental change’, and ‘extreme weather’, rather than explicitly saying ‘climate change’,” Jonathan Thompson, the senior ecologist at the Harvard Forest, wrote in an email to NPR. Thompson has been the lead investigator on multiple research projects funded by the NSF in recent years. “This seems to be born out of an abundance of caution to limit their exposure to any political landmines in what is already an extremely competitive process,” he wrote.
Four other climate researchers acknowledged that they had personally removed the term “climate change” from funding proposals or public summaries in the last year, or had advised graduate students who had done so. All were concerned that if they disclosed their names, it could negatively impact their future funding competitiveness.
Much more here at NPR
What next? climate dis-ease? climate incontinence? I think climate injustice is already in use.
Climate-heimers.
They could just call it “bippity-boppitty-boo” and be done with it.
Climate with a ladder
Jeff Labute
Ouch! Another Dad joke tonight.
🙂
Jonathan Thompson, the senior ecologist at the Harvard Forest where money is for nothing and the chicks are free.
[And where all of the pee-reviewed papers are above average? .mod]
Oh yeah, “This seems to be born out of an abundance of caution to limit their exposure to any political landmines in what is already an extremely competitive process,”
No way could politics have had any influence on grants, huh? It’s other people’s money, and if the dire predicitons don’t come true in 50 years, then who ya gonna call? The grantees and grantors will likely be long gone.
And many of us noted the “change” from “global warming” to “climate change” at the height of the grants gold rush 6 or 7 years ago. I can recall “expert scientists” on NPR Science Friday that actually were recorded saying things like ” … and we must be concerned with the possible effects of global war….., oops climate change upon …”.
Lastly, I am not of the opinion that our EPA and DOE folks deny any climate change, they just do not feel most of any change is due to we puny humans, and have even proposed research to quantify any effects we humans have.
Gums…
Scare tactics don’t work when people don’t see any changes. And people tend to have short memories from one season to the next, much less year to year.
Yes the climate changes and no it’s not been significant in any historical patterns when compared. But the layman doesn’t know that. So they believe what the government and the media tell them. As politicians have pushed those scams- that they created. – to fill their bigger government pockets by the price distortions they made, that increased taxes on everything reliant upon fossil fuels.
You are very right of how the changes in language don’t change the facts of what they’re doing.
“In the scientific community, we’re very cautious people,” says Katharine Hayhoe, the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech. “We tend to be quite averse to notoriety and conflict, so I absolutely have seen self-censorship among my colleagues.” Oh good grief. Right! Who is she trying to kid. We can start with Mikey Mann but there were hundreds willing to risk notoriety and to step forth and push the “consensus”.
And no climate scientist has gone the notoriety route more than Hayhoe herself. Who is she kidding, indeed?
Dr Hayhoe is listed as a professor of political science and she “is a Professor in the Public Administration program at Texas Tech University and Director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech, part of the Department of the Interior’s South-Central Climate Science Center.” I guess she can say “we” when referring to “the scientific community”.
Larry Geiger
I think what she’s trying to say is, watch it, we can concoct even more alarming stories about climate disaster than we have concocted so far.
To imply a restriction of academic freedom is really something after what has occurred during the last 25 years! Everybody knows it was career suicide to express skeptic views or to even ask questions..
I’ll take honesty over caution any day.
Hayhoe also sez…
‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t say it that way, because whatever funding organization or politician or agency won’t appreciate it.’”
Which means for 20+ years they all did say “Climate Change”, whether they believe it or not, to get funding.
Science for hire by using the buzz words.
That’s why 97%, give or take 50 points, of climate papers support “Climate Change”.
I can recall a specific directive from the Obama administration that explicitly instructed that all government fund research must address the issue of climate changes and it’s negative impacts, and that furthermore all government agencies must incorporate fighting “climate change”, and in particular climate change den!al, into their policy directives.
Senior officials went so far as to openly state that “there better not be anyone working here who is a den!er”, or words to that effect/
The message was crystal clear and repeated loudly and often: Everything and everyone funded by government must be vocal climate alarmists, and anyone who has any doubts had best shut their yap or hit the bricks. No fence sitting, no staying out of it, at all, allowed. Period
And that was when it became a full-fledged sc@m, an actu@l hoax, complete with money for those in on it, and lies being de rigueur.
Extreme weather? What extreme weather? All observed metrics show nothing of the sort.
This is how you can know without any shadow of doubt that the movement has now left any pretence of scientific integrity lying dead in a ditch. They feel unashamedly free to squawk about any fantasy they choose without any kind of burden of evidence getting in the way. They are now living completely in model lala land and if in that virtual space the weather is getting more extreme – then the weather is getting more extreme regardless of what any trivial data sets may have to say about it.
This describes the essence of my training. I’m learning that climate scientists are endowed with climate privilege that gives them the ability to pull things out of orifices and declare them authoritative. I can’t wait for my next course taught by Dr. Perry Staltic on the synergies of climate, astronomy, and social justice and called Coping with Cosmic Climate Distress: Starting a Movement to Purge the Climate Injustice that Impacts Uranus
btw, our motto is, “This is the Royal Academy of Climate Science; we don’t have to prove anything!”
I am going to love the part where they are forced to wipe and cork their inane pie holes, then sit the hell down, shut the hell up, and let everyone watch them squirm.
On thing is for sure, when one of them comes knocking at your back door…do not even look through the peephole.
Where I live, it has been an extremely normal day, climate-wise…
Let me guess, you live on the Earth?
But it’s coming – the computers predict, no forecast, no project it. Be prepared.
Good now maybe scientist who where previously punished and shutout can get funding to research how our climate really works. It is time for junk science to be shutout and try to repair the public trust in the scientific community. No more lies, forced junk models, and manipulated data; time for some real scientific research with imperial data and unmolested methods that can be tested and recreated by other scientist
Sun cycles 24-27 return 400-year cooling grand minimum cycle…
it may happen, and if it does what might be result see here
vukcevic
Damn, I wish I could understand graphs.
Looks to me like after most of us are dead it is going to get really cold.
Vukcevic,
With all due respect, I do not think this graph is accurate.
I see several specific things which would seem to indicate that this analysis is faulty.
The fist has to do with the larger scale oscillation. The period of time before 1840 would be off the left side off the graph, and the sine wave plot seems to indicate that prior to the 1840 period, it was warmer than the period after 1840, and the scale of that wave would seem to lead one to the conclusion that it was a much warmer period prior to 1840.
Maybe there was, but there does not seem to be much reason to think so from existing reconstructions.
The next problem I see in the graph is in regards to the temperatures on the northern hemisphere from the 1930-1940 period until the end of the 20th century.
It appears to want to not only confirm all of the bogus adjustments made by NASA GISS to the records from this period, but even to exaggerate them.
There is no reason to think that it is at present far warmer in the northern hemisphere than during the 1930s.
The opposite is the case.
And the huge warming at the end of the plot is also problematic from a realist point of view.
Sorry to say, I do not think this graph is an accurate representation of the past few hundred years of temps in the NH.
It may well get colder over the next decade or two…would not surprise me on tiny bit.
According to this graph, a grand solar minimum would have a hard time getting us back to the temps of the 1970s, let alone the older and colder temps on the late LIA.
Just sayin’.
Just tell me when will be the peak UAH.
Oooohhh, now the Climate Scientologists are getting crafty and using euphemisms to disguise what they are up to, which is lying about climate. So essentially, they are having to LIE about what they are doing, which again is LYING. Not sure how long they think they can hide behind euphemisms though.
Oh yes==>How to keep doing the same old thing, and call it something different.
“Climate Scientologists” I like it. I’m looking forward to their new book “Climate Dianetics”
+1000.
Bruce Cobb: Climate scientists aren’t lying, they are resorting to alternate truths, taking their cue from the undisputed champion in that domain, Donald Trump.
Trebla Trump had a good teacher Obummer.
No the undisputed leaders in alternate truth are the Leftwing News Media, which Trump regularly excoriates.
All Trump does is tell the truth and the Left and the MSM can’t stand the truth.
I see where CNN is claiming Trump is trying to destroy freedom of the press by calling CNN Fake News. But Trump is just telling the truth, they *are* Fake News. Trump is not trying to destroy freedom of the press he is just pointing out that most of the press are a bunch of leftwing liars with a political agenda. It’s all true.
Throwing left-wing bombs on a science website is lame.
But isn’t “Climate Change” a euphemism for “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” And wasn’t CAGW a brand-name change for AGW, which was a brand-name change for GW? And all those changes were to keep the gravy train rolling.
Retired_Engineer_Jim
Climate Manoeuvre next.
Is there a breakout for climate change theater arts production funding and it’s decrease? We had seen some of that funding during the Obama over reach orgy. Also, redirecting renewable energy spending from projects at military bases and VA hospitals might help VA response times and military preparedness.
“Scientists appear to be”…manipulating and gaming the system all along
The most laughable aspect of all this is that these climate activists are the same Joes who are pushing diversity. As long as research funds are controled by the very few, there just won’t be any diversity of thought. Of course, the global warmning alarmists will claim that diversity only applies to skin color and sexual pursuasion and gender. In other words, it is meaningles and assumes
exactly what they condemn : judging and evaluating on the basis of skin color, gender, etc.
These people obviously are logically challenged. They also claim consensus where none exists.
arthur4563
Apparently it’s quite in order to refer to me as a white, right wing, bald, fat, fascist. It seems I’m also also allowed to be referred to as racist, misogynistic, religiously bigoted, wealthy and privileged (I wish) sexually inadequate, yet still deviant, a white supremacist, my parentage is questioned, and being a climate sceptic brands me a denier, a despicable and a heretic.
But god forbid I call someone who cuts me up in my car, who isn’t identical to me, and I refer to them in anything other than the most PC terms, I can be arrested, whist their driving incompetence goes unpunished.
Seriously, I feel like I’m tied to a dart board at a garden fete for the entertainment of any minority group member passing by.
I really feel for the remaining white Europeans. Make any complaint about the destruction of your ancient cultures by invading 6th century barbarians or people of different cultural background from other parts of Europe and you can be arrested and charged with a “hate crime”. The very foundation of free speech has been scoured from the continent. It really is as though those in government have taken 1984 as a manual rather than a warning.
I will keep that in mind as I clean the pot after our 5th meal of poormans… Sorry. Ergonomically challenged individual dish.
[“Economically”? -mod]
johchi7
Economically challenged perhaps?
Just being PC about Poormans Dish so as not to offend the Snowflakes. I do it in spite of those being PC, hoping to cause them to melt, because I call it Poormans.
It’s amazing that European politicians are importing the seeds of their own destruction. They seem oblivious to the danger that is upon them.
This is Merkel’s baby but she has had a lot of help from a great many European politicians. Only Eastern Europe is holding the line.
The Left would be doing the same thing here in the U.S. if given the chance. Trump is putting a halt to that.
Trump is the only one seeing clearly. The rest of these leaders are living in an alternate, delusional universe where religious fanatics will fit nicely into Western society, and humans are on the verge of causing a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth by burning fossil fuels.
Just think of the enormous costs to humanity of just these two delusions. Leaders who hold these delusions are not leaders they are fools.
Actually…I didn’t notice that spell check misspelled “economically.”
“right-wing activists who demonize researchers and denigrate their work.”
Irony is completely lost on this crew.
+100
97 is a much more believable number.
★★★★★
> “They are caught between environmental advocates looking to recruit allies and right-wing activists who demonize researchers and denigrate their work.”
Name names or this is just more NPR editorializing. It should also be noted that NPR receives grants specifically for reporting on climate change issues.
Interesting to hear that NPR receives grants for reporting on climate issues. I listen to NPR before going to sleep, again when I wake up for a bathroom break at 2:00 AM (which is then the BBC), and again when I wake in the AM. Over the past 10 years or so, since I’ve been studying GW, I have never ever heard a NPR piece on the skeptic’s point of view. On one occasion, NPR interviewed Born Bjorg (sp?), a believer in AGW, on his view that we should spend our resources on adapting to climate change rather than trying to prevent it. Professional journalism would require a news media to report on all sides of an issue.
Maybe it’s not “self-censoring.” Maybe it’s just getting harder to think of new things to blame on climate change?
This is a good money quote (pun intended)
It truly is all about the grant money or lack there of
I suppose that’s nothing new. There has always been an art to getting grants. Say the right things to the right people and get your money. It’s not much different in private industry either. Politics and brown-nosing make the world go round. Yeah, I’m infinitely cynical.
The biggest difference is in the private sector if you are wrong you don’t get any more money.
Bob,
I am not sure about that. Look at all the CEOs that have bankrupted their companies over and over again yet get hired for 6 or 7 figures over and over again because “they are experienced!”.
Well yes but that’s a total no-brainer. If you open the merest chink leading to the grant funding coffers the academics will stampede in there in hysterical slavering hordes with each and every one of them chanting and screaming the mantra du jour which opened the chink in the first place. That’s how things work in academia and always did. It’s way past time things were changed.
‘You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve WORKED in the private sector. They expect *results*.’
‘Back off man. I’m a scientist.”
Ghost Busters had it pretty well dialed in.
Never ever get between a CAGW scientologist and a bucket of money!
Hayhoe herself has claimed to be a Nobel Prize winner. Here’s a link to her bio from a speaking appearance by her at Bowling Green State Univ.
https://www.bgfalconmedia.com/gallery/dr-katharine-hayhoe-nobel-peace-prize-winner-lecture/collection_c71a885e-cf32-11e3-b69b-0019bb2963f4.html
Maybe she accepted that Rajendra Pachouri had the authority to make all IPCC contributors into co-winners by virtue of sending them all “certificates” via an e-mail message.
Does being a Nobel prize winner add a premium to your speaker’s fee?
I doubt that, politicians and that’s who we’re really talking about, are quite creative at coming up with spin and other forms of propaganda.
“The change in language appears to be driven in part by the Trump administration’s open hostility to the topic of climate change.”
Logically then, the previous over-use of “climate change” was driven by the previous administration’s obsession with “climate change” . Which then follows that all government sponsored research is inherently political and non necessarily scientific – ie – researchers are generating proposals (and probably conclusions ) which will be seen as politically expedient to keep their grant $s flowing. I can’t completely blame them – I am sure they have families to feed – it’s self-preservation … but it isn’t science.
It screams that a whole new model for research is needed – at the very least some sort of double blind funding process so researchers aren’t influenced by where their money is coming from – both in writing proposals and in coming to conclusions
Absolutely. We absolutely desperately need to separate science from state along with church.
“The change in language appears to be driven in part by the Trump administration’s open hostility to the topic of climate change.”
Note the words “open hostility” when the same could have been said neutrally as “administration’s position on climate change.”
Exactly. Opposing views are not “hostile” unless it is seen as an attack on mainstream ideologies of the media.
Excellent news.
Global climate models predict sufficiently catastrophic global warming when sufficiently catastrophic, though unrealistic, parameters are seeded into them. There are NO other reasons that ‘scientific’ projections of imminent future climate catastrophe can be forecast. The actual historical data record, unless it’s tortured with truncations, exclusions, deviations, and fabrications, simply does not support projections of imminent catastrophe. In order to hide this inconvenient truth, the catastrophists have invented new catastrophic names.
Thus, CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) has been replaced with terms such as ‘Climate Change’, ‘Extreme Weather’, Ice Free North Pole’, Sea Level Rise, etc., in order to support predictions of imminent catastrophe with some piece of cherry picked data. It is a fools errand. The entire field of imminent climate catastrophe is in its death throes, as adults are gaining a foothold in funding, research, publication, and analysis decisions.
Which is a shame because it’s the opposite of what should be happening. We need to understand the climate better. We are no longer hunter gathers who can move with the seasons. Our cities are fixed locations and many once great cities, even civilizations, have been brought down by climate change.
But now, thanks to alarmists and other assorted political activists, legitimate science is being undermined and we are left more vulnerable.
We know everything: We know that we know nothing and are far from consensus knowledge.
The science of climate science comes back to its origin in the weather and paleontology. There are still enough puzzles to solve before venturing into the far more difficult task of predicting the climate in 100 years. Although I’m sorry for the now no longer busy scientists. But they wanted it that way, at least 97 percent of them.
Good old National Propaganda Radio (or is it National Plaintiff’s Radio?) will never change its spots.
Well hopefully they are the next ones to lose their government money.
+1
Check out how climate folks are marketing their climate cred at this Snopes-like echo chamber for AGW.
https://climatefeedback.org/community/
Expertise samples: Climate history (I wonder if she follows Tony Heller), Climate-vegetation interactions, Climate Dynamics, Extreme weather (you mean how to hype it as CAGW?), Climate Predictability (how’s that going for you, champ?)
Oh dear. Those alarmist scientists don’t seem to be a very diverse group. I know how keen on counting brown faces the diversity-loving left are so I took the liberty for them.
Black male: 4
Black female: 2
White female: 51
White male: 205
I guess we are forced to conclude that climate alarmists are deeply white supremacist.
cephus-naught
There’s probably a 1/32 Cherokee in there somewhere who bills herself Spawn of Pocahontas.
Elizabeth Warren thinks it is racists to point out that she lied about having Cherokee indian heritiage. Isn’t that called “Cultural Appropriation”? The Left normally criticizes people for doing this. Heard any Lefties criticizing Warren for telling this lie? Of course not. The Lefties are all a bunch of hypocrites.
TA re Pocahontas and Warren. People don’t seem to know that Pocahontas was a traitor to her people and she married a whiteman. This puts a little pepper into Trump’s characterization of silly E Warren. Was Pocahontas a racist perhaps?
If you want to know exactly why a lying hypocritical POS Warren is, just type Pocahontas.com into a browser and see where it takes you.
Fact is more bizarrely weird than fiction, and few others have the galling hypocrisy of a committed liberal.
Still trying to figure out exactly what is racist about referring to someone by a well known name.
Ever notice how if someone wants to make up a funny name, it is almost always by adding an O or a Mc to some other word? Do you see the Irish wetting their panties over this?
No! Because we are not a bunch of freaking crybabies.
Is it anti-Semitic to called someone Einstein to make fun of how stupid they are?
Or antiwhite to call a liar Honest Abe?
No, because everyone knows that the person being insulted is not the one whose name is borrowed.
That name was only used because of the image it invokes…everyone knows it is just a name, albeit a Native American one.
Names aint racist.
For all anyone knows Pocahontas was the equivalent of Jane Smith.
Her other name was Matoaka, Pocohontas was a sort of nickname
“People don’t seem to know that Pocahontas was a traitor to her people and she married a whiteman. ”
I really doubt that it was a bad thing for a Native American to marry a European.
In fact, it seems like the most intelligent thing that one of them might have done.
Because their children’s children are now us, people like me.
Speculatively expect there are two distinct drivers at work here which pull in different directions. Firstly the academics will say whatever they think they have to say to get funding. They will say literally anything and slant research programs in whatever politically expedient direction they believe they have to in order to secure funding for their groups. It’s do that or die and it’s simply human nature to protect the immediate group at all costs. That’s just a sad fact of academic life. The second driver though is probably the overweening dominance of leftism in academia which will always seek to go down the human-caused catastrophe route since that is part of the leftist non-negotiable dogma.
So then since the current administration is way less keen on the ‘climate change’ bs it is inevitable that there will be a decline in highlighting that factor for research proposals. At the same time the left-driven dogma would be expected to be forced underground somewhat yet hang in there with ever-increasing tenacity and I see the change in nomenclature along with use of euphemism as indicative of that.
Starve the beast.
I don’t understand. If the science is settled, why should there be any money spent on research. Shouldn’t we reserve research funding for things that are still mysteries, like Alzheimer’s?
Alzheimers is settled too; we know there are genetic and physiological causes. So why should there be any money spent on research?
I do not think your assertion about Alzheimer’s is correct.
Who ever said Alzheimer is “settled”??? Care to give an example, please?
Oh you can’t because you pulled that nonsensical claim out of your hat.
Alzheimers research is about finding cure or at least ways to reduce its effect, without even worse effects.
AFAIK, climate science is indeed settled. Climate is untractable, NOT globally in human control. It is a train only a fool tries to stop, the wise man dodge and the even wiser gets in the train.
And even if humans do get some effect and control (indeed that’s the whole purpose of some human works like draining swamp and building homes –that we keep ~20-25° when we can; says it all), all opinions on whether it should be colder or hotter here or there are equally respectable. So climate change is NOT an excuse at dictatorship, as IPCC would have it. No one has any right to tax me and use my own resource to prompt or prevent a climate change I don’t care about, or even would rather have opposite.
Use your own resources as you see fit. Not mine, or my children’s.
I don’t mind people suicide themselves because they think there are too many humans on Earth, I don’t mind Al Gore and other CAGW believer having under world-average carbon footprint, or tin fold hat bearer banning any stuff made out of fossil fuel in their life. I don’t even mind their preaching the opposite of their doing.
I only mind people trying to impose by evil means (lies, threats, etc.) what they don’t even do themselves.
One of my colleagues was asked by his program officer to remove the term “climate change” from his climate change grant. Still, the grant is the same.
ReallySkeptical
So why was it in there in the first place?
“One of my colleagues was asked by his program officer to remove the term “climate change” from his climate change grant.”
Well, that’s progress, I guess.
Now if we could just get them to stop making unsubstantiated claims in their papers such as claiming that CAGW is already here and causing unusual changes to Earth’s climate and environment. They should also leave out claiming the majority of scientists agree with their CAGW claims. That would be a *real* good start.
Looked at another way, 40 percent of grant applicants had adapted their language and topic to fit the grantors’ expectations.
So, “Right wing activists…” were responsible for the bullet holes in the side of the building where Roy Spencer and John Christie work? What propagandist nonsense.
The other propagandist dead give-away is quoting Katheryn Hayhoe who has blamed both flooding and drought in Texas on global warming. Data shows the exact opposite. She isn’t even in the ball park of being a scientist, and her quote is unadulterated hypocracy.
Wasn’t it NPR that a recent analysis showed a 50:1 alarmist:scepetic viewpoint ratio of climate messaging? NPR is worthless on climate news.
This is merely marketing/advertising 101 as applied to money grubbing in the scientific sphere. The product is still the same, and probably will never change much. They are simply attempting to continue selling their products. They had discovered that by jumping on the bandwagon sales would increase.
How many buyers do you get if you advertise a product by depicting it as: “esoteric and probably of little value to your everyday life”?
How many buyers might you get if you sell the product as: “Must have or you are going to DIE!”?
It doesn’t get any more dripping wet with hypocrisy than that. Ms Hayhoe was is the same [snip…let’s just leave this out altogether. -mod] Chicken Little who was running around in 2011 to 2014 warning of Texas being in a near permanent drought because of her beloved climate change religion.
For a brief review of Ms Hayhoe’s garbage science:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/14/exploiting-human-misery-and-distorting-the-science-an-environmentalists-critique-of-years-of-living-dangerously/
and more discussion here on Ms Hayhoe’s pseudoscience:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/04/14/hayhoe-denies-the-science/
I will have to note that Ms Hayhoe has had to calm her rhetoric down. She no longer goes around talking of such nonsense, simply because she can’t. Nature gave her a good spanking and hopefully she’s learned, but I doubt it. She needs alarmism to keep the grant money flowing or else her little fiefdom in Lubbock will shrink. I suspect that is occurring already as the grant situation is looking thinner in the coming years.
Climate science needs about a 90% reduction in funding IMO. Such a waste of tax money.
Certain psychology departments will have to slink elsewhere for grant money.
Looking at that graph, ‘climate change’ has dropped 60% since 2010. If this trend continues, the ‘climate change’ issue might be ‘settled’ by the year 2021. /sarc
If you ‘cherry pick’ only the data since 2016, you might conclude that the new President has single handed defeated ‘climate change’. The bigger question is; what happened in 2011 that started this trend?
Wasn’t the 97% study around that time?
Even the most hardened scientist is now realising that the data dont support the hypothesis…
‘Both the EPA’s leader, Scott Pruitt, and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry have said they do not accept the scientific consensus that humans are causing the planet to get warmer.’
Watch the pea. Don’t accept what? This is the regular strawman.
“accept” like in the science motto:
“In god we trust. All other bring proof. Consensus, theories, models and other garbage not accepted”
From the article: “Both the EPA’s leader, Scott Pruitt, and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry have said they do not accept the scientific consensus that humans are causing the planet to get warmer.”
What scientific consensus? The scientific consensus is another lie made up to promote CAGW.
It looks like that ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Global Warming’ are just so Yesterday.
Two thumbs up.
Nonsense — Trump had no influence whatever until at least Nov 2016 (literally NO ONE expected him to actually win the Presidency)….and the grant writing/granting process is far longer than six months or so. The decline obviously started as early as 2011 and was well underway as of 2015.
The shift to “extreme weather” is no surprise, though it does not make up the short-fall in grants. Further analysis of the grants would be necessary to determine if the EW grants were focused on mitigations of effects of extreme weather, or were the worthless CliSci-style model-based pseudo-predictions of “more extreme weather in the future”.
Maybe things are getting better and we will see less money wasted on crystal-ball predictions of doom and more on how to deal with the actual weather we see today.
Kip parenthetically wrote: “literally NO ONE expected him to actually win the Presidency”.
That’s one of the things that’s amused me so much since last November. We had hope (for me it was literally Anybody but Hillary), but expectations were not high.
My leftist friends, and I have a few, seem to experience daily bouts of apoplectic anger along with 5 minutes of hate, which does amuse me, but I get concerned for their long-term health. The current news of bad behavior by privileged celebrities only exacerbates their angst. “But Trump!, but Moore! (ignore Bill!).
Tired of winning, yet?
Why is the tagline Anthony Watts? Perhaps posted by Anthony Watts plagiarist.
[???? .mod]
….. because it is Anthony Watts “reporting” what was said.
Is there a problem with that, or does it “trigger” you !
Try not to chuck a tantrum !!
wow that’s the best climate news I’ve heard in ages – the silence of this change speaks volumes – if you get my drift – and wow finally a drift that there’s a whole not more sceptics (skeptics if you’re American) that are keeping it under wraps I reckon – yeah and thanks for the good news Anthoony
sorry a lot more not not
It shows the moral fibre of scientists. The world wil end in a few years because of humans and they’re more concerned with feeding their children – how low can you go?
I love this. In 1996 I was offered a fully-funded PhD place with the title “Geophysics and Climate Change on the Gulf Coast of Mexico”.
I only remember because of the weird title (I decided against academia). Weird because this was a project on plate tectonics, on the analysis of a fault that follows that coast and possibly would affect a nuclear power station if it was still infrequently active. Climate change had absolutely nothing to do with it. As far as i could see from the field work I would have been doing it would have given no significant insight into the palaeoclimate of Mexico. This was grant fishing at its finest.
Straining to hear a tiny violin of planck-length.
There will always be a temptation for researchers to phrase their grant applications in a way that references the current fads and buzzwords. Not all of them will do it, of course. But I suspect that there could be some interesting psychological or sociological studies to be done on just how many grant applications use the equivalent of a clickbait headline to try and get more favourable attention from funding bodies. Indeed, it would be interesting to see how many applications there are from different eras which involve fundamentally similar research but which try to justify it in completely different terms to fit the prevailing dogma of the time. I suspect that we’d find as much “go along to get along” as we do in every other profession, and a lot of money intended for the fashionable topic of the day being spent on things that are at best only tangentially related to it.
“right-wing activists who demonize researchers and denigrate their work.”
Even on a sceptical blog warmer scientists get deference! They are already demons and they denigrate the meaning of both ‘research’ and ‘work’. We only supply the scepticism that they themselves are supposed to include as part of their work. R-wingers don’t demonstrate enough. The left is protesting daily. If the right demonstrate they get branded as klanners, гасisтs ог номорновеs even if it’s about their high electricity bills.
As a professional ecologist I have seen it all. Biodiversity was big until we decided that if you count beetles and bacteria there was no crisis. Then there was Invasive Species, which is an actual problem but didn’t have the cache to last. There was landscape, spatial, niche theory, and systems ecology which were all going to save the world until they didn’t. There was Acid Rain, green corridors, NEON, global warming, and more I forget.
The way to kill climate change nonsense is for Trump to find the next big thing and make that a funding priority at the expense of climate change research. In a couple of years move to funding another fad. Presto, climate change is defunded.