Trump Appoints Climate Realists to Top NOAA Positions

Written by Cap Allon on November 23, 2020. Posted in Current News

NOAA, the warm-mongering climate arm of the United States government, has recently experienced something of a shake-up — this fall, President Donald Trump has appointed two prominent “climate science deniers” to top agency positions.

Naturally, the mainstream media is painting this as an unmitigated disaster (what don’t they deem a catastrophe these days?), but perhaps a little dose of reality to go along with agency’s deep-rooted bias and conjecturing is exactly what’s needed — hopefully it’ll hold some members of the agency to account.

One of the new hires, David Legates, a University of Delaware geography and climatology professor, has been especially critical of NOAA that he will now help run. Dismissive of the agency’s data-gathering and models, Legates maintains that there is no scientific consensus on the environmental hazard of carbon dioxide emissions. As explained by insideclimatenews.org, Legates is in a newly created top deputy position, where he will not face Senate confirmation, but will report directly to NOAA’s administrator.

The hiring of Legates came just weeks before the election, in a move Trump likely deemed one of the key final plays of his presidency (should it be about to end). The move was greeted by a string of typically melodramatic responses we’ve grown accustomed to from climate alarmists. Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said:

“People are very alarmed and saddened about it, and it’s spooking people on the inside.We know from the scientific surveys that having a climate denier at the helm causes people in the agency to self-censor, even if they aren’t told to change anything.”

A much more reasoned voice came from the “skeptic” camp: “I hope it means that the administration, after three years of sitting on their hands, is actually going to reform the kind of junk science produced at NOAA,” said Myron Ebell, a former Trump transition official who is energy and environment program director at the conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who continued: “And I hope they will have a big impact on the way the next National Climate Assessment is put together.”

LEGATES AND HIS STANCE

Legates is a qualified climatologist, and it’s important to remember that when taking onboard the smears dealt by the other side. “Listen to the scientists,” we’re constantly implored. Well, Legates is a scientist — moreover, he’s actually one working within the appropriate field: climatology.

As recently as 2018, Legates described himself as a scientist who had been ostracized by NOAA and other federal agencies for his outlier views on climate: “I have been notified that I am on a federal ‘do-not-fund’ list simply because I have been critical of the official position on anthropogenic global warming,” Legates said.

“Climate is changing because it always has changed and always will—it is dynamic and variable,” Legates said in testimony last year to urge Pennsylvania’s Legislature not to adopt Gov. Tom Wolf’s climate action plan.

“To create a Climate Change Action Plan to ‘stabilize’ the Earth’s climate is like trying to keep the Sun from shining,” Legates said. “We cannot halt something that for all history has been variable and so all such attempts at ‘climate stabilization’ are doomed to failure.”

Legates has a perfectly logical mix of views on climate change, and is particularly dismissive of the work of NOAA. He doesn’t accept the accuracy of the data gathered by NOAA and others showing that the planet is warming, but also argues that any warming of the planet could only ever be beneficial to life–as it has proven to be so in the past.

Legates has described himself as someone fascinated with weather since his childhood in the small town of Harrington, Delaware. He told the Wilmington News-Journal that when he was a fifth-grader, he made his own weather-observation station, taking wind and rain measurements daily before and after school.

“I’ve just always been interested in weather,” Legates told the paper. “Unless you lock yourself in an interior room, you can’t get away from it.”

As reported by insideclimatenews.org, he took an unusual path to climate science, studying geography and math before pursuing his Ph.D. in climatology at the University of Delaware. For his dissertation, he delved deeply into the issue of bias in the measurement of precipitation. Legates collaborated, for example, on 1994 research that concluded that the United States gets about 9 percent more rain and snow than the official records indicate — a topic that NOAA itself has since done extensive work on, and one that is obviously key to get a grip of when it comes to climate predictions.

The work was a first step in a career devoted to skepticism over the scientific consensus on climate change. And Legates is keen to point out that he hasn’t received a penny of funding for his climate change research since 2002.

THE OTHERS

Legates’ hiring was one of a slew of top personnel moves made by the Trump administration at NOAA. Erik Noble was another, who had served as a data analyst for the Trump campaign in 2016. Noble has been brought in as NOAA’s new chief of staff, and has made an immediate impact, firing NOAA’s acting chief scientist, Craig McClean. Noble had past experience as an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Center, where he did climate and weather prediction modeling, and he had been working in the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Meteorologist Ryan Maue is yet another new appointee, serving as the new chief scientist at NOAA, replacing McClean. Maue has frequently posted criticisms on Twitter, some I’ve retweeted myself (which have since been deleted), aimed at scientists and politicians who draw connections between extreme weather or wildfires and climate change.

The personnel moves won praise from the community of conservative climate action opponents, who have mostly supported the president, but who expressed concern that he has not moved more aggressively to dismantle the remnants of climate science policy.

“Legates’ appointment to NOAA represents a big win for climate realism,” wrote H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow with the Heartland Institute, on the group’s website.

However, with the threat of a Biden presidency just a matter of week’s away, Legates’ “acting” employment could be short-lived — that is, if he doesn’t obtain a career government position during the transition: an end-of-administration ritual known in Washington as “burrowing in.”

On the plus side though, even if Legates and the other new hires have a short stay at NOAA, they still could have a big influence over the next National Climate Assessment report, due in 2023.

The previous report, released in 2018, focused primarily on a high-end global warming scenario, assuming little effort by nations to curb greenhouse gases–no doubt in an effort to scare the masses and policy makes into action.

Climate alarmist Professor Donald Wuebbles, who was a coordinating lead author on the 2018 National Climate Assessments, said he could not speculate on the impact the new leadership at NOAA could have on the next report.

“I think we’re all concerned,” he said.

“We don’t know for sure.”

I’m sick of the lies, lies made a thousand times worse by the climatic reality that is actually barreling towards us: the COLD TIMES are returning, the mid-latitudes are REFREEZING in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow.

Both NOAA and NASA appear to agree, if you read between the lines, with NOAA saying we’re entering a ‘full-blown’ Grand Solar Minimum in the late-2020s, and NASA seeing this upcoming solar cycle (25) as “the weakest of the past 200 years”, with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.

Furthermore, we can’t ignore the slew of new scientific papers stating the immense impact The Beaufort Gyre could have on the Gulf Stream, and therefore the climate overall.

Read more at electroverse.net

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