RUTHFULLY YOURS

Less than 72 hours after a federal whistleblower exposed shocking misconduct at a key U.S. climate agency, the CEO of the nation’s top scientific group was already dismissing the matter as no biggie. On February 7, Rush Holt, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told a congressional committee that allegations made by a high-level climate scientist were simply an “internal dispute between two factions” and insisted that the matter was “not the making of a big scandal.” (This was moments after Holt lectured the committee that science is “a set of principles dedicated to discovery,” and that it requires “humility in the face of evidence.” Who knew?)

Three days earlier, on February 4, John Bates, a former official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — he was in charge of that agency’s climate-data archive — posted a lengthy account detailing how a 2015 report on global warming was mishandled. In the blog Climate Etc., Bates wrote a specific and carefully sourced 4,100-word exposé that accuses Tom Karl, his ex-colleague at NOAA, of influencing the results and release of a crucial paper that purports to refute the pause in global warming. Karl’s study was published in Science in June 2015, just a few months before world leaders would meet in Paris to agree on a costly climate change pact; the international media and climate activists cheered Karl’s report as the final word disproving the global-warming pause.

But Bates, an acclaimed expert in atmospheric sciences who left NOAA last year, says there’s a lot more to the story. He reveals that “in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets, . . . we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming.” Karl’s report was “an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” Agency protocol to properly archive data was not followed, and the computer that processed the data had suffered a “complete failure,” according to Bates. In a lengthy interview published in the Daily Mail the next day, Bates said:

They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did — so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.

Anything that James Baker proposes…is wrong….from the time that he was a student….vile man…vile Secretary of State (1989-1992)…rsk
‘Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” Barack Obama declared after Democrats’ disastrous losses in the 2010 midterm elections. That shellacking finally killed off the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. From it was born the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration’s war on coal, in turn a contributory factor to Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’ retaining control of the Senate. Now the grandees of the Old Republican Establishment, led by former secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker, are calling for President Trump to put the new Republican majority at risk by enacting an escalating $40-per-ton carbon tax.

Where they are right is that a carbon tax is economically superior to cap-and-trade and EPA regulation. Their proposal addresses one of the big weaknesses of the latter two approaches by preventing “carbon leakage,” the migration of energy-intensive production to developing nations. It does this by reimbursing carbon taxes incurred in making goods for export while imposing a tax on imports from countries that did not price carbon, although it glosses over the vast expansion of the IRS that would be required to make such a system watertight.

The package is topped off by giving away the entire proceeds of the carbon tax to anyone with a Social Security number. The political bet is that the lure of free money for all — a reprise of a ploy first used by environmentalists in the 1930s, when the Green Shirts marched through the streets of London demanding payment of the national dividend to all — will be enough to induce wary Republicans who opposed cap-and-trade and want the Clean Power Plan nixed to embrace carbon taxation.

All government interventions to decarbonize impose an economic penalty. The best that can be said for a carbon tax is that it is the least bad way. A government-created market distortion that discourages the use of efficient hydrocarbon energy shrinks the economy’s productivity frontier — its potential output at the current state of best practice — and subverts consumer choice, so that for the same income families are forced to consume less than they would otherwise. This in turn shrinks the Gross Domestic Product, hurting consumers and increasing the deficit — effects ignored by carbon-tax advocates.

In that regard, the Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends produced by the Climate Leadership Council is disingenuous and dishonest. An American receiving as much in carbon dividends as he pays in carbon taxes would end up worse off because the economy would be smaller and his consumer preferences suppressed. So a carbon tax would not contribute to economic growth but detract from it.

Almost sixty years ago, officials at California’s transportation department unveiled a plan to build a six-mile freeway extension in Los Angeles County.

They are still working on it.

During the 1960s, the road plan appeared on track. In the 1970s, new environmental laws required voluminous studies and sparked legal fights between the neighboring towns of South Pasadena and Alhambra, which lie along its intended path. The project remains under review.
“I am totally for the national and statewide environmental laws,” said Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, who supports the extension project. Still, “sometimes it gets to be ridiculous.”
Many lawmakers and economists agree with President Donald Trump that America needs to fix a backlog of infrastructure needs, which the Transportation Department pegs at $926 billion. There’s a similar agreement that conservation and preservation laws have helped mitigate damage on neighborhoods and the environment.

A tour through of the nation’s thorniest infrastructure struggles shows how these two goals are often in conflict. As a result, long, costly reviews and legal battles will likely confront Mr. Trump’s efforts, just as they delayed much of President Barack Obama’s 2009 economic-stimulus efforts.

“You would have to fix some of these issues” said McKinsey & Co. partner Tyler Duvall, a DOT assistant secretary for policy in the George W. Bush administration, “in order to get the money into the system in a productive way.”

The president has yet to reveal details of his plan. On Jan. 24, Mr. Trump issued an executive order calling for expedited reviews on “high priority” projects. Before signing, he said: “We can’t be in an environmental process for 15 years if a bridge is going to be falling down or if a highway is crumbling.”

Any significant new infrastructure-spending package would have to clear Congress. And executive orders alone won’t do much to change a well-entrenched four-decade-old regulatory process, said Philip Howard, chairman of Common Good, a think tank favoring looser federal regulation. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

GeoengineeringWatch.org

The public has been trained and conditioned to believe that federal agencies like the EPA exist to watch over them and warn them of any potential dangers. This notion could not be further from the truth. Though there are honest and caring people within these agencies (like the scientist who has drafted the statement below), the institutions as a whole exist to hide threats from the population, not to disclose them. The majority of the public continues to convince themselves that if there was really anything they should be concerned about, someone, somewhere, in some federal public protection agency would tell them. The statement below should be a sobering wake-up call for us all. It is yet another confirmation of all that has been stated above. From global geoengineering, to Fukushima, to toxic fluoridated water and lethal vaccinations, the public health and the health of our biosphere is being decimated. Where are the official warnings from official agencies? The truth continues to be hidden by the government agencies that are tasked with hiding it.

Michael Davis is now a former EPA scientist who is working with GeoengineeringWatch.org in an effort to get the truth out, his full resume is at the bottom of this article. Michael was recently terminated from the EPA for daring to tell the truth about two extremely dire public dangers, the highly toxic fallout from climate engineering, and the willful contamination of the public water supply with industrial waste. I had the pleasure and honor of working with Michael for over a year, he has participated in conference calls directly with the Geoengineering Watch legal team (Legal Alliance to Stop Geoengineering, LASG). Upon being terminated from the EPA, I asked Mr. Davis if he would draft a statement for GeoengineeringWatch.org, that statement is below.

A Statement For GeoenigneeringWatch.org From Scientist Michael Davis

My name is Michael Davis, I was employed as an Environmental Engineer for nearly 16 years in the National Pollution Discharge Elimination Systems (NPDES) Programs Branch of the Water Division in Region 5, Chicago of the USEPA. I was terminated as a public servant performing a public service for raising the issues of anthropogenic deposition of aluminum due to atmospheric geoengineering.

In addition, I brought up the industrial hazardous waste byproduct of fluoride known as HFSA (being sold primarily by the phosphate fertilizer and aluminum industries) to drinking water utilities for disposal into the nation’s drinking water systems. This does not include pollutants that are discharged from wastewater reclamation facilities into receiving waters.

The issue regarding anthropogenic deposition of aluminum due to atmospheric geoengineering came up in May 2013 when a colleague in the NPDES Programs Branch sent a general email to everyone regarding “NPDES and Climate Change”. I sent a six (6) bullet point one – sentence response to my colleague. Nearly six (6) weeks later my supervisor (at the time) set up a conference call to inform me that I would be receiving a Letter of Reprimand for making false, malicious and unfounded statements against colleagues, supervisors, management and elected public servants. Furthermore, my then supervisor claimed that my statements damaged the integrity and reputation of the agency.

In April, 2014, my last supervisor assigned me to the Beloit, Wisconsin wastewater reclamation facility DRAFT permit review. I asked the permit writer why fluoride (a poison) was be disposed of in Beloit’s drinking water supply? She could not provide an explanation. Approximately two (2) weeks later my supervisor placed a “gag order” on me barring me from having any communication written or verbal with anyone unless he approved ahead of time and was present on all conference calls. It was claimed by my supervisor (and management) that the “gag order” would remain in place to prevent me from making statements that would further damage the integrity and reputation of the agency.

Furthermore, my supervisor kept giving me assignments like Beloit, Wisconsin where fluoride, along with other pollutants knowing that I would describe the adverse human, animal health effects along with adverse environmental effects of them in my DRAFT Permit review reports. The adverse human, animal and environmental effects were completely ignored by my supervisor. This was even more profound when it came to the issue of fluoride as HFSA being deposited into the drinking water system. This is in violation of (1) EPA’s Policy on Scientific Integrity, (2) The Precautionary Principle, (3) 5 U.S.C. §2302(b)(8) and (4) Informed Consent. My supervisor informed me that the EPA does not regulate fluoride in the drinking water systems under either the Clean Water Act (CWA) or the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). However, FDA under Health and Human Services (HHS) regulated fluoride in the drinking water systems.

John Bates, former principal scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lab at the National Climatic Data Center, is accusing the agency of cooking the books to disprove the theory that there has been a “pause” in global warming and alleging that the motive for manipulating the data was to buttress the Obama administration’s EPA carbon rules and build support for the Paris Climate Treaty.

To absolutely no one’s surprise.

Washington Times:

In an article on the Climate Etc. blog, John Bates, who retired last year as principal scientist of the National Climatic Data Center, accused the lead author of the 2015 NOAA “pausebuster” report of trying to “discredit” the hiatus through “flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards.”

In addition, Mr. Bates told the Daily [U.K.] Mail that the report’s author, former NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information director Thomas Karl, did so by “insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximized warming and minimized documentation.”

“Gradually, in the months after [the report] came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’ — in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets — in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy,” Mr. Bates said Saturday on Climate Etc.

The June 2015 report, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus,” which updated the ocean temperature record, was published six months before the U.N.’s Paris summit.

The accusations sparked a fierce back-and-forth Sunday between so-called climate warmists and skeptics over the validity and implications of Mr. Bates’ claim, which he defended on the Climate Etc. blog run by former Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry.

Zeke Hausfather, Berkeley Earth climate scientist, said in a Sunday “factcheck” on the CarbonBrief blog that the Karl paper’s conclusions “have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys and Argo floats and many other independent groups.”

“While NOAA’s data management procedures may well need improvement, their results have been independently validated and agree with separate global temperature records created by other groups,” Mr. Hausfather said, citing Berkeley Earth and the U.K.’s Met Office Hadley Centre.

He said the record “strongly suggests that NOAA got it right and that we have been underestimating ocean warming in recent years.”

Independent analysis in 2015 when the report came out showed this same NOAA conclusion to be a question of giving more weight to sources that showed a rise in temperature as well as fiddling with past data to show a larger rise than was evident in the temperature record. This is exactly what Bates is alleging.