From The Washington Post Via MSN News
Juliet Eilperin
A State Department intelligence official who was blocked by the White House from submitting written congressional testimony on climate change last month is resigning from his post.
Rod Schoonover — who worked in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of the Geographer and Global Issues — spoke before the House Intelligence Committee on June 5 about the security risks the United States faces because of climate change. But White House officials would not let him submit the bureau’s written statement that climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,” after the State Department refused to cut references to federal scientific findings on climate change.
Individuals familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity to speak frankly, said Schoonover is leaving voluntarily. But the incident that led to his departure underscores the extent to which climate science has become contested terrain under the current administration.
Andrew Rosenberg, who directs the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a phone interview Wednesday that federal experts should be free to provide their expertise with policymakers, even if it is at odds with the views of whoever occupies the Oval Office.
“This isn’t carrying forward your political opinions,” Rosenberg said. “This is bringing the work you’re hired to do in a policy setting.”
President Trump has repeatedly questioned the scientific consensus that human activity is driving recent climate change and that the planet’s warming poses a major security risk to the United States.
Asked about the matter Wednesday, a State Department official confirmed that Schoonover would step down Friday.
Schoonover, who has served in the federal government for roughly a decade, could not be reached for comment. Before working at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, he had served as director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council and as a full professor of chemistry and biochemistry at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.
Three divisions of the White House, the Office of Legislative Affairs, the Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council, all raised objections to parts of the State Department intelligence bureau’s testimony, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Ultimately, the Office of Legislative Affairs made the decision not to submit the document to the House Intelligence Committee.
One of the statements White House officials objected to was this observation: “Absent extensive mitigating factors or events, we see few plausible future scenarios where significant — possibly catastrophic — harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change.”
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Pll research based on the *presumption* of apocalyptic climate change should not only be audited by someone with a high school diploma but should also be considered criminal in nature.
One does not *presume* that the laws of physics do not apply to one’s causation premise.
God, he looks just like I would have imagined. So concerned!
I wonder if Rod read this baloney from 1989:
U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
PETER JAMES SPIELMANN
June 29, 1989
Excerpt:
A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.
″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said.
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
Looking through Schoonover’s written testimony, he claims early on that, “Fundamental characteristics of the global climate are moving outside the bounds experienced in human history…” which is flat wrong, and shows that Dr. Schoonover did no research in preparing his testimony.
He goes on to show a plot of global air temperature without any uncertainty bounds, making the usual consensus naive-freshman error of presuming that the historical thermometers are perfectly accurate and have infinite precision.
One would think that Dr. Schoonover never took a lab course during his training. But he did, of course, which would make his freshman error puzzling in the extreme, but for the fact that his blindness to measurement error is common among consensus climate scientists, even those who have degrees in physics. The lobotomizing effect of group-think?
Dr. Schoonover then shows the CO2 record going back 800,000 years, but does not show that changes in atmospheric CO2 lagged air temperature changes through every single ice-age swing.
Finally, the story does not mention that Dr. Schoonover’s testimony was critically evaluated and shown seriously wanting. The downloadable pdf has the marginal notes.
If anything, perhaps Dr. Schoonover resigned out of chagrin for having been so foolish, after his critical mistakes were pointed out to him.
The critical refutations in the marginal notes would have been available to the UCS people, too, making a mockery of their grave pronouncements of alarm.
Yes, everyone here should read the PDF, especially the comments, which are precious!
I am going from memory only, but Schoonover’s (selected) summary of IPCC’s probabilities (High, Med etc) of climate events caused by Global Warming seem higher than what I recall from the original report. Anyone else notice this?
Even if that was what was originally published, the definitions of high, med, low etc in terms of percent probability were badly skewed to the scary side. And of course they readily admitted there was no data behind those probabilities, only subjective opinions of members of a subcommitte.
the IPCC confidences are in the consensus, not the event itself. A subtle but important difference.
Probably already has a better paying job lined up. He’s got his good government credentials, now it’s time to cash in on the NGO circuit.
“Probably already has a better paying job lined up. He’s got his good government credentials, now it’s time to cash in on the NGO circuit.”
In France.
May be Trump should ensure all Federal employees watch this, that might get rid of a few more …
Clouds utterly destroy climate models …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THg6vGGRpvA
Best laughs… hand held calculators match super-computer models… 12:28, climate model uncertainty (error bars)… 24:25
“Cloud error is 114 times larger than the variable they are trying to detect”
Also to note is a recent paper called
‘No experimental evidence for the significant anthropogenic climate change’
Jyrki Kauppinen, Pekka Malmi
(Submitted on 29 Jun 2019)
Abstract
A pdf (1.7MB) for download is available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.00165
“…One of the statements White House officials objected to was this observation: ‘Absent extensive mitigating factors or events, we see few plausible future scenarios where significant — possibly catastrophic — harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change’…”
The lying spin in the media is that the simple mention of “possibly catastrophic” is what made it objectionable.
Hey, is now warming in the realm of intelligence services ?
Sober-up, how hot is that, last week in the climb over Lower Saxony we had to hit the anti-icing !
Shields-up climbing over Germany in July ? Beats me how that qualifies for hot sizzling warming.
So where’s the trick? Cooling is now the new warming of sorts ? Yep, precisely a thing for the secret services to sort out.
Or is it that they overcooked the “Energiewende” and now we’re about to freeze because of all efforts invested in fighting the terrible global warming ?
“Possibly catastrophic”
As H.L. Mencken said: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary”.
When government reports and testimony are absurd, they should not be looked upon as legitimate.
Preventing lies from being sprea would seem to be part of the President’s job.
“sprea” = “spread”
Maybe his calculation included the likelihood of a Trump re-election. If he thought Trump would be impeached or lose the election to a Democrat, surely he would have the patience to stick it out for a while longer.
Do the Democrats know something the rest of us don’t?
Buh-bye, @ssh0le. Don’t let the door hit you in the @ss on the way out; you don’t need any more brain damage.
Regards,
Normal People
Intelligence aide? Yes, I agree his intelligence could use some aid.
For much that I can be content with this kind of news, my rational part does not agree with this procedure. The bad science (or any science) is to be refuted and discussed and not blocked. Otherwise we are precisely having the position that we criticize, as skeptics, promoted by the alarmists, to block publications unfriendly to global warming of anthropogenic orighem. If we want to have some reason we can not support positions and procedures that we criticize so much on the most alarmist side. This is the most elementary position of a true scientist.
Discussion is one thing; presenting biased, opinionated propaganda to Congress as factual is something entirely different. There were discussions, with differing views presented in the comments section of his paper by others in the Administration. He was basically told that his paper was not presentable, as is. Was there any attempt by him to address the criticisms or discuss the science? If not, then he was the one unwilling to discuss it. If his attitude was, do this my way or forget it, then forgetting it was the proper action.
JN of July 2. is right. He should have been extensively questioned as to how he came to this opinion. We are fighting a war, and the enemy the Obama administration has placed a lot of “Land Mines”” in key positions, such as the EPA.
There is a very true saying in a war situation, “”Know thy enemy””
His statement should have been challenged and he should have been told to prove all of his points that Climate Change was as dangerous as he said it was If of course he continued to chum out all of the usual rubbish, he should have been told that his opinions made no sense and that he best seek employment elsewhere, but in the process we might clearly know how he e nemy really thinks. Such as he is apparently enjoying a carbon rich lifestyle.
The question which needs to be asked is “What was a chemistry
Proffer doing in a intelligence sector, “poison gas perhaps.
MJE VK5ELL
Exactly!! Block the guy is just make him another CAGW martyr…The stupidity is to be asked and refuted.
Yea, everyone knows CO2 is a poison gas!
Fades compared to Novichok. Ask anyone at Porton Down!
Did anybody else catch this side-note in the link to the actual testimony?– “A consensus of peer-reviewed literature has nothing to do with truth.”
Now isn’t that the truth in the modern world!
POP QUIZ
1.) Why is there a “Center for Science and Democracy”?
2.) How are democracy and science coherent?
3.) Can one trust a “Union Concerned Scientist” to work unsupervised, or will he spend work time on union business?
4.) Why did they let Moonbeam join their union? Is he a scientist, or just concerned? Maybe he has experience as a union clockwatcher.
Oh, I bet Jerry Brown was a Political Science major. That makes him ideal as a science union guy. 😉
Jerry went into a Jesuit seminary, but dropped out. He then went to Yale U for law. His name and connections served him well.
So the faithful acolytes of climate alarmism object to the White House challenging a statement that is clearly an opinion without any foundation in observed reality:
“Absent extensive mitigating factors or events, we see few plausible future scenarios where significant — possibly catastrophic — harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change.”
We “skeptics” can identify numerous benefits to more CO2 and/or the moderate warming we have seen so far. The alarmists are so wed to their religion that they can only see their manufactured reality. It’s bizarre, but it’s real to them, just like the alien invasion was real to many listeners of the famous 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles.
Like Joey Ramone sang:
Glad to see you go, go, go, go – goodbye.
Well son, don’t let the door hit you on the azz on the way out. Bye, bye.
The Prof. will probably soon turn up at the UN where Ms May is heading, but with a complete new hairdo, maybe even a ‘stache!
Really!?
Neither John Holdren nor Obama would have ever allowed contrary opinions. Both were very vindictive when dealing with employees and people who stated positions opposite to their “official” dogma.
Bernie, Harris, Warren and other democrat presidential candidates have demonstrated vicious retribution towards employees whose actions or statements conflict with the candidate. Even for actions as trivial as disagreeing with a graphic pushed by the candidate.
It’s politics. Just because the previous administration was willing to pay good taxpayer dollars to someone to stand at the corner and yell “the end is nigh” doesn’t meant the next administration must do the same.
+1
I hear there is work available cleaning boats for John Kerry.
And good riddance to the jerk.