Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Mann has accused the Trump administration of trying to bury climate reports, because some reports don’t get their own press release.
Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change
The Trump administration has stopped promoting government-funded research into how higher temperatures can damage crops and pose health risks.
By HELENA BOTTEMILLER EVICH
06/23/2019 05:04 PM EDT
Updated 06/23/2019 10:37 PM EDT…
The administration, researchers said, appears to be trying to limit the circulation of evidence of climate change and avoid press coverage that may raise questions about the administration’s stance on the issue.
“The intent is to try to suppress a message — in this case, the increasing danger of human-caused climate change,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “Who loses out? The people, who are already suffering the impacts of sea level rise and unprecedented super storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves.”
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who has expressed skepticism about climate science in the past and allegedly retaliated against in-house economists whose findings contradicted administration policies, declined to comment. A spokesperson for USDA said there have been no directives within the department that discouraged the dissemination of climate-related science.
“Research continues on these subjects and we promote the research once researchers are ready to announce the findings, after going through the appropriate reviews and clearances,” the spokesperson said in an email.
“USDA has several thousand scientists and over 100,000 employees who work on myriad topics and issues; not every single finding or piece of work solicits a government press release,” the spokesperson added.…
Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/23/agriculture-department-climate-change-1376413
Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Nobody is suggesting the Trump administration is suppressing publication of the studies, what Mann is complaining about is that taxpayer’s money is not being spent promoting and sensationalising every product of government employed scientists.
Why should government scientists get a free appeal to authority, just because they work for the government?
If the study is any good, if it is any use to anyone, it will get the circulation it deserves.
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barry at 09:40 AM on 25 June 2019
Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?
Here is an extract regarding Wind turbine fatalities for comparison(world wide i’m afraid)
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf
Of the 192 fatalities: 120 were wind industry and direct support workers (divers, construction, maintenance, engineers, etc), or small turbine owner /operators. 72 were public fatalities, including workers not directly dependent on the wind industry (e.g. transport workers). 17 bus passengers were killed in one single incident in Brazil in March 2012; 4 members of the public were killed in an aircraft crash in May 2014 and a further three members of the public killed in a transport accident in September 2014.
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[DB] Comparing global supposed wind turbine fatalities to supposed similar numbers in just the US is disingenuous.
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Non sequitur snipped.
“The intent is to try to suppress a message — in this case, the increasing danger of human-caused climate change,” said Michael Mann”
The message has been wrong for 30 years, why not stop this scamming message instead?
Michael Mann and Helena Evich (politico ?) could provide a few examples of the research that has not gotten the circulation and press coverage.
But I also note a lack of originality and specificity.
“ . . . suffering the impacts of sea level rise and unprecedented super storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves.”
This is standard boilerplate phrasing of activists and the United Nations, and the programmed children. This “scientist” that has received much funding from the tax payers and is considered a “leading climate scientist”, has poor communication skills.
There is one serious and useful thing that the Government could do to right this ship. Fund a lot of Climate Science which will look into natural variation. When the money starts flowing into showing that natural variation actually exists and researchers can make money on demonstrating that, money will begin to turn this ship around. Right now natural variation studies are seen as denialist studies. But it is really hard for scientist, though not environmentalists, to suggest that adding to the knowledge and supporting research projects are bad things Right now environmentalists and climate research are hand in hand.
(the government.) “has stopped promoting”
Why the only science that desperately needs government promotion has to be climate related ?
I mean, face it, have you ever heard string theory physicists asking for congress hearing and lobby for law enforced validity of their findings ?
Or leftard math guys going down the streets to block commuters and claim extinction?
Dr Mann, please supply a list of names of those people who are “already suffering the impacts of sea level rise”.
While you are at it, please provide a specific description of each of those “impacts”.
One of the best way to turn this ship around is for the government to provide a lot of funding for research into natural climate variability. Right now legitimate research into climate variability, aside from the ones which say it is unimportant, is viewed as denial propaganda. However, were the gov to pour money into such studies, universities and researchers will follow that money. Right now environmentalists and climate researchers are marching hand-in-hand after the government and foundation funds. If the money flowed the other way, we would begin to see a divergence and a healthy tension in academia between those who believe it is all man made and those who think they have other ideas. It was, after all, a stroke of genius when the IPCC was chartered to study MAN MADE climate change, not climate change in general.
“Bury”? “Suppress”? Well, I guess Mann can’t really complain about people hiding things, can he? That’s probably not a word that Con Mann Mike likes to use, anymore:
https://sealevel.info/climategate.html#naturetrick
Anyhow, he must surely know that manmade climate change has not worsened the impacts of sea level rise, storms, & droughts. He’s just lying.
Coastal sea-level rise hasn’t detectably accelerated since the 1920s:
Droughts have not worsened, either. (In fact, they’ve actually slightly declined, in frequency and severity):
Plus, higher CO2 levels mitigates harms from droughts, by making crops more water-efficient and drought-resistant.
Hurricanes have not worsened:
Tornadoes have declined:
https://www.woodtv.com/weather/bills-blog/strong-to-violent-tornadoes-in-the-u-s-trending-downward/
Here are more threats to free speech!
21:52 PM on 25 June 2019
Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?
Barry,
A bit of advice from someone who has posted at SkS for a long time:
If you continue to complain about the moderation they will ban you forever. It is a very hard job to moderate and they get little in return for their hard work. If you limit your comments to what you think is important you will be more effective in the end.
The facts speak for themselves. Adding moderation complaints detracts from your posts.
Here are more threats to free speech!
21:52 PM on 25 June 2019
Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?
Barry,
A bit of advice from someone who has posted at SkS for a long time:
If you continue to complain about the moderation they will ban you forever. It is a very hard job to moderate and they get little in return for their hard work. If you limit your comments to what you think is important you will be more effective in the end.
The facts speak for themselves. Adding moderation complaints detracts from your posts.
Here are more threats to free speech!
21:52 PM on 25 June 2019
Is Nuclear Energy the Answer?
Barry,
A bit of advice from someone who has posted at SkS for a long time:
If you continue to complain about the moderation they will ban you forever. It is a very hard job to moderate and they get little in return for their hard work. If you limit your comments to what you think is important you will be more effective in the end.
The facts speak for themselves. Adding moderation complaints detracts from your posts.
The people are already suffering the impacts from the non-stop climate hype and propaganda, and the higher costs of electricity and pretty much everything because of said climate hype and propaganda. They are already suffering the impacts from having countless acres of land covered by hideous bat-and-bird blending machines busy driving up their price of electricity. They are already suffering the impacts from the science and democracy-killing ideology of Warmism.
Lord, haven’t we suffered enough?
Sea level rise is an easily dismissed ‘alarm ‘ and discredits all the other Mannite scares . Why has everyone forgotten Climategate and the shocking behaviour of Mann and his conspirators? ‘Distinguished’ by fraud, but loved by the BBC and it’s ‘Climate – Change the Facts ‘ TV feature.
From the article: “The intent is to try to suppress a message — in this case, the increasing danger of human-caused climate change,” said Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “Who loses out? The people, who are already suffering the impacts of sea level rise and unprecedented super storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves.”
Here’s Michael Mann blowing the climate change situation completely out of proportion. He couldn’t prove anything he said in that paragraph above. Who is suffering the impacts of sea level rise? 3mm? Who is experiencing unprecedented super storms, or droughts or wildfires or heatwaves?
Michael Mann, as usual, is just making things up out of thin air and attributing them to CO2.
So if you want to complain about the Media lying about CAGW, you first have to complain about their sources, like Michael Mann, and his fellow travelers on the CAGW promotion tour. Unsubstantiated claims is the name of their game.
Sounds like we need to created a “CENSORED” directory.
Mann and his cronies go to all lengths to fight FOIA requests…now he is not only all about public availability but wants it to be promoted.
In Helena Bottemiller Evich’s tweet: the “how” should have been “ whether”
Otherwise the research presumes the conclusion and should not be funded.
I suspect a lot of research projects suffer from this syndrome.
Michael Mann should not talk about immoral actions. He’s the one that fabricated the infamous hockey stick graph of suddenly rising temperatures by falsifying data to fit his narrative. He has no place to complain now that the shoe is on the other foot.
It’s worse than that, RB. Six times as bad, to be precise.
Mann was not “the one“ who committed the deed. It was a group effort, a true international conspiracy.
Michael Mann was the one who Phil Jones credited with the idea for the “trick,” but it was Jones who actually spliced instrumental measurements into graphs of proxies, substituting real temperatures in place of the plainly wrong proxy-derived temps, even matching the colors and smoothing the splice points to disguise the splices, to “hide the decline” in the proxies which (would have) discredited their methodology. Ray Bradley, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn were all in on it, too.
If it had been only Mann, that would have been bad enough. But six of the world’s “leading” climate scientists, at four different universities, on two continents, were all in on the fraud. That shocked me. It showed that the corruption ran wide and deep in the troubled field of climate science.
“the corruption ran wide and deep”
Gee, you’ve really talked yourself into a twisted reality there Dave. Most scientists actually concord with Mann’s research.
“six of the world’s “leading” climate scientists, at four different universities”
Y’know, just maybe they’re right and your wrong. Are you leaving any room for doubt?
And that’s “Exhibit B.”
The fact that so many climate activists are untroubled by flagrant fraud is more proof of how wide and deep the corruption is in the field of climate science.
Thanks, Dave, for reminding all of us as to how we got here. A few dishonest people in positions of authority have conspired together and caused all this CAGW insanity.
None of these dishonest people would want me on their jury.
This is a typical tactic of the GreenBlobs in that they accuse the opposition of practices which they rigorously indulge in themselves, without justification.
Curtailment of sceptical research is rife, right across the board.
Exactly right. It was Mann and his cronies who were doing all they could to prevent the publication and peer review of any academic paper they did not approve of, as exposed in climategate emails. And it continues.
Amusing, seeing that Michael Mann has been burying his own study which shows that nearly half the warming last century was natural.
I think this is the link that you intended, Bruce.
Dave – Thanks. I should’ve looked at the comment properly before I hit the button.
It’s his paper which shows the persistence of the ~60 year cycle, which contributed something like 0.4 C to global temperature in the IPCC century 1906-2005.
Well, “his” paper is kind of a stretch. Mann was listed as the fifth of five authors. I think that, on most papers, the first one, or two, or perhaps three authors are the ones who did most of the work.
“If the study is any good, if it is any use to anyone, it will get the circulation it deserves.”
In this case, the studies all get top billing by the media goons, who have no capability to evaluate the usefulness or correctness of the studies.
This is an orchestrated event, period. They only cite Trump as a pretext to supporting their pre-determined agenda to pump these stories beyond what they deserve.
They act like a government press release is more powerful than a week-long 24/7 news cycle pumping these carefully selected bullet point studies. Meanwhile, the same media is utterly silent on the inappropriate citation by Democrat committees of old disproven bunk press releases by the UCS hacks.
Not really much of a journalist are you Eric. More like a cheer-leader for the opposite: censorship. Then you insert Michael Mann’s name in the headline to make it more click-baity. Here is what you could have posted if you had any commitment to science, you obviously don’t. The real story is about scientific censorship.
“The administration’s moves flout decades of department practice of promoting its research in the spirit of educating farmers and consumers around the world”
“Since Trump took office in January 2017, the Agricultural Research Service has issued releases for just two climate-related studies, both of which had findings that were favorable to the politically powerful meat industry.”
“in the case of the groundbreaking rice study USDA officials not only withheld their own prepared release, but actively sought to prevent dissemination of the findings”
“Researchers say the failure to publicize their work damages the credibility of the Agriculture Department and represents an unwarranted political intrusion into science.
“Why the hell is the U.S., which is ostensibly the leader in science research, ignoring this?” said one USDA scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid the possibility of retaliation. “It’s not like we’re working on something that’s esoteric … we’re working on something that has dire consequences for the entire planet.”
“You can only postpone reality for so long,” the researcher added.
He got that bit wrong – more like reject reality.
Concern troll is concerned.
Unprecedented super storms.
The superlatives keep on coming and coming. Next: totally unprecedented super duper hyper storms.
Meaning: sometimes the wind blows and keeps you from doing things.
Mann is sneakily asking for a pay raise.
“Government scientists” – I think that says it all. ;->
Hey I have to share this novel idea with you.
We all accept (hopefully) the uneconomic nature of wind turbines when compared to virtually any other source of energy conversion device.
However, a friend who lives on the shore line is having trouble with sea gulls becoming interested in nesting on the roof of his house. The noise and mess from gull droppings is not something you can ignore. The solution would be to simply shoot the birds, but they are a protected specie here in the UK (honest) so that is not allowed. However following the excellent examples of culled birds we have seen in and around wind farms, the obvious answer is to erect a bird chopper, sorry I mean wind turbine on his roof. That will produce the occasional electron flow but more importantly remove the sea gulls from the roof, permanently.
Has anyone else used this option to control sea gull infestation?
I would be interested to hear of working examples, would a 1 MW unit be sufficient to do the job?
Put on menu.