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The Daily Signal
Lawmakers Probe
Taxpayer-Funded Academic Who Wants Obama to Prosecute Climate Change
Skeptics
Kevin Mooney
October 26, 2015
Taxpayer-funded college professors and researchers who cite climate
change to advocate regulations that would raise energy costs for
consumers have some explaining to do, congressional investigators say.
A House committee wants to know more about the relationship between
taxpayer money received by the academics and their urging of President
Obama to use federal racketeering law to go after businesses and other
groups that oppose his aggressive agenda against climate change.
The panel’s investigators also are curious to hear a George Mason
University environmentalist, leader of the publicly supported
researchers, explain a growing disparity between computer models
showing global warming and fresh scientific evidence suggesting that
Earth’s temperatures have been flat for 18 years.
Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the Committee on Science, Space
and Technology, cites “serious concerns” in a stern letter to Jagadish
Shukla, a professor at George Mason University who specializes in
atmospheric, oceanic, and earth studies.
Shukla’s environmental institute, Smith writes, “appears to be almost
fully funded by taxpayer money while simultaneously participating in
partisan political activities by requesting a [federal] investigation
of companies and organizations that disagree with the Obama
administration on climate change.”
In a follow-up letter dated Oct. 19, Smith asks Shukla for financial
documents as part of the congressional investigation.
Smith is correct to be curious about an apparent conflict of interest,
free-market energy policy analysts and scientific skeptics who question
the validity of climate models told The Daily Signal in interviews.
“As evidence mounts that the dire predictions of catastrophic global
warming are not confirmed by climatological observations, the alarmist
camp has had to resort to witch hunts,” said Bonner Cohen, senior
fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Shukla is among 20 publicly subsidized academics who signed a letter to
Obama calling for a probe of “corporations and other organizations that
have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate
change.”
It turns out Shukla reaped tens of millions in climate-related grants
from U.S. taxpayers in addition to his university salary.
Shukla, 71, is the founder and former president of the Rockville,
Md.-based Institute of Global Environment and Society, a nonprofit that
received $63 million in taxpayer funds since 2001, according to
financial data compiled by the Washington Free Beacon.
The $63 million accounts for over 98 percent of his environmental
institute’s revenue in that time. By double-dipping between his
university salary and his nonprofit, critics say, Shukla appears to
have violated George Mason University’s conflict of interest
stipulations and rules that federal grant recipients who work for
universities are expected to observe.
Steve McIntyre, a statistician noted for challenging the data and
methodology used in United Nations climate reports, writes the Climate
Audit blog. McIntyre offers a detailed analysis of Shukla’s
compensation and how it squares with university and government policies.
The India-born Shukla, who joined George Mason’s faculty in 1993, made
a university salary of $314,000 by 2014, according to Climate Audit.
Shukla and his wife, Anastasia or Anne, continued to take in a
substantial income from his nonprofit environmental institute, which is
connected with the university’s College of Science in Fairfax, Va. Anne
Shukla was listed as business manager.
The couple received more than $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014 in
combined income from the university salary and the environmental
institute. A daughter, Sonia, was also employed by the institute,
listed as both assistant business manager and assistant to Shukla.
Colleague Cites ‘Some Evidence’
Beyond questions of nepotism and other potential conflicts of interest,
congressional investigators—as well as policy analysts and scientists
who differ with Shukla’s views on global warming—is the appearance that
taxpayers are financing the environmentalist’s political activism.
Some also argue that Shukla is in lockstep with the policy directives
of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.
Shukla’s name tops a list of 20 signers of the Sept. 1 letter urging
Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and John Holdren, director of
the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to investigate
corporations and other groups skeptical of climate change under the
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That law, known as
RICO, typically is used to pursue organized crime.
Also signing the so-called RICO 20’s letter were five colleagues at
George Mason University and academics from the University of Washington
in Seattle, Rutgers University in New Jersey, the University of
Maryland, Florida State University, the University of Texas at Austin,
and Columbia University. All are publicly funded universities.
The academics’ request to Obama specifically embraces Whitehouse’s call
for a RICO investigation of those who dispute theories, advanced
through the United Nations, that human activity largely is responsible
for warming during the latter half of the 20th century.
In his Oct. 1 letter to Shukla, Smith directs the climate scientist to
preserve all documents and electronic records going back to Jan. 1,
2009, which might be requested by Smith’s committee as it looks into
the allegations of the RICO 20. The committee chairman also asks for a
list of employees, interns, and other associates in that period.
The Daily Signal last week asked Shukla and the five other George Mason
academics for evidence that scientific skeptics had “knowingly
deceived” the public about the risks of global warming. It also invited
Shukla to comment on his financial relationship with the Institute of
Global Environment and Society on campus, which some say violates
university and government policies.
Shukla and most of the others did not respond.
The Daily Signal also asked a George Mason spokesman whether the
university had any concerns about Shukla’s work with the environmental
institute IGES and whether it was confident Shukla operated within its
policies. As of publication, the university has not responded.
In a phone interview, however, one George Mason professor who requested
the probe of organizations that disagree on climate change said he
intended to call for a RICO investigation only if hard evidence emerged
that such groups knowingly were involved in an act of deception.
David Straus, a professor of climate dynamics, told The Daily Signal:
My understanding is that there is some evidence in
books and editorials that the groups and organizations mentioned in the
letter may have knowingly deceived the public, and that the letter was
written in response to an editorial [by Whitehouse] that said if
evidence emerged that there was this deception, then the government had
this option.
The Daily Signal also asked Whitehouse’s press office what evidence the
Rhode Island senator had that climate skeptics and the fossil fuel
industry were “knowingly deceiving the public,” and whether the senator
had any concerns about the accuracy of the U.N.’s climate models.
In an email to The Daily Signal, Whitehouse said:
The recent Exxon
series, the implausibility of companies that big not comprehending the
overwhelming science, the enormous financial motive to mislead, and
their lobbying agenda being so at odds with the established science, as
well as the evidence contained in recent books about a pattern of
industry schemes to distort science. Civil discovery would of course be
the time-tested way to find all the evidence.
Any concerns I may
have about individual climate models are more than offset by the actual
measurements we are already seeing of ocean and atmospheric warming,
sea level rise, and acidification of the oceans. As a data set, the
models appear quite accurate, notwithstanding the variations among
different models. The ocean effects are very hard to deny as
measurement of heat absorption, the law of thermal expansion, and the
chemistry of acidification seem beyond cavil.
Soviet-Style Tactics?
William Happer, a Princeton University physicist, has another idea.
Instead of launching RICO probes against dissenting scientists and
others who raise legitimate questions about government-funded global
warming research, Happer told The Daily Signal, policymakers should
take a hard look at the “Lysenko cult” that held sway in the days of
the Soviet Union.
“There are honest climate scientists today who are trying to straighten
out the contradictions between climate models and observations, just as
there were honest biologists in the Soviet Union who had the courage to
speak out against Lysenko’s cult,” Happer said in an email.
Trofim Lysenko was a biologist who directed the Lenin All-Union Academy
of Agricultural Sciences. With the support of Soviet strongman Joseph
Stalin, he dictated scientific results in step with the government’s
political agenda.
“Lysenko’s biology was adopted as official truth by Stalin’s communist
party by about 1930,” Happer said.
The “falsification” and “bogus proofs” used to prop up Lysenko’s
schemes is well-documented in the book “Power and Science: The History
of the Destruction of Genetics in the USSR,” the Princeton physicist
said.
Happer added:
Climate science has attempted to do the same thing.
In spite of a recalcitrant Mother Nature, which has refused to warm for
18 years or more, grave government pronouncements continue to claim
that this month is the warmest on record [and] that the most recent
storm or last winter’s record snowfall in some locale was due to global
warming.
‘Ironic and Hypocritical’
Given the failure of U.N. climate models to accurately predict
temperatures for almost two decades, the RICO 20 may be more vulnerable
to their allegations than their intended targets, Cohen, the senior
fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The
Daily Signal.
“It’s ironic and hypocritical that those who blithely accuse skeptics
of ‘knowingly deceiving’ the public on manmade climate change have
themselves engaged in systematic deception for years,” Cohen said in an
email, adding:
They have deceived the public by claiming that
climate models, with their dire projections of impending disaster,
constitute science when, in fact, they are nothing but mathematical
exercises that can be easily manipulated to produce the desired
results. When the models turn out to be inaccurate, as they invariably
do, the alarmists simply produce new models projecting more warming,
rising sea levels, etc. They go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the
essence of scientific inquiry: testing their hypothesis against
measurable climatological observations. It’s a tacit admission that
they know they have no case.
David Kreutzer, a senior energy policy analyst with The Heritage
Foundation, expressed concern that some academics appear inclined to
stifle scientific debate instead of welcoming new avenues of inquiry.
In light of the “climategate” scandal that erupted in November 2009,
Kreutzer told The Daily Signal, the letter from the RICO 20 could
backfire. In that scandal, emails leaked from the Climate Research Unit
at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain showed that
researchers appeared willing to manipulate data to account for
predicted catastrophic warming that didn’t materialize.
“RICO lawsuits are no way to do science or to resolve policy
questions,” Kreutzer, Heritage’s senior research fellow in energy
economics and climate change, said. “However, if there were to be such
lawsuits, it seems like those who manipulated charts to ‘hide the
decline’ [in temperature] and conspired to prevent contrarian scholars
from publishing in academic journals would be first on the docket.”
‘Ethical Baggage’
To date, 2015 has been a big year for political attacks on those
skeptical of climate change and what might cause it.
As the Daily Signal previously reported, Whitehouse and other members
of Congress sent letters to fossil fuel companies and trade groups
asking if they funded scientists who questioned the validity of
theories that link global warming with human activity. The letters
named Willie Soon, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics.
In a peer-reviewed paper published in January in a scientific journal,
Soon and co-authors found that computer models included in the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were laced with mathematical
errors that greatly overstated the effects of carbon dioxide on the
climate. The research paper appeared in Scientific Bulletin, a
bimonthly journal co-sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and
the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
“As evidence mounts that the dire predictions of catastrophic global
warming are not confirmed by climatological observations, the alarmist
camp has had to resort to witch hunts,” said Cohen, the senior fellow
at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Cohen cited the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration, and other agencies as he added of
climate change activists:
Rather than debate Willie Soon on the science, a
fight they can’t win, they attack his source of funding. Ironically,
the alarmists’ funding dwarfs that of the skeptics, and [their] funding
comes with its own ethical baggage. It comes from highly politicized
federal agencies – EPA, NOAA, NASA, the Department of Energy, etc. –
that have a vested interest in keeping the scare going in order to
justify their own funding levels. They are in a position to steer
taxpayer dollars to researchers who are dependent on federal grants for
their livelihoods, and who can be depended on to produce the results
their paymasters want to see.
Watchdog.org reported last week that Smith’s committee wrote NASA,
NOAA, and the National Science Foundation requesting “all documents and
communications” related to Shukla and his institute.
Another element, Cohen said, is the “nexus” between politicians in
Washington, D.C., and the green energy industry.
“Purveyors of alternative energy, such as wind and solar, justify the
subsidies, mandates, and other goodies they receive by touting their
‘low-carbon’ credentials,” Cohen told The Daily Signal. “They profit
from, and participate in, the demonization of fossil fuels, just as the
alarmist establishment thrives on the demonization of those who dare to
question climate-change orthodoxy.”
‘Unwarranted Personal Attacks’
Shukla, leader of the RICO 20, has acknowledged that there is a limit
to what climate models can predict accurately.
“It has long been assumed that the upper limit of weather predictably
is one to two weeks,” Shukla said in a paper he co-wrote.
Members of the House and Senate who cited Soon in letters to fossil
fuel companies declined to respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal
about the accuracy of U.N. climate models.
“Willie Soon and his coauthors have pointed out how terribly the IPCC
climate models are performing and offered an explanation,” Heritage’s
Kreutzer said, referring to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change.
Kreutzer added:
The apologists for those models have taken to
unwarranted personal attacks against Dr. Soon instead of using facts
and logic to defend the models’ poor performance. It is as though the
little boy who cried out that the emperor had no clothes was accused of
working for a tailor. It doesn’t matter. The emperor had no clothes,
and the IPCC models have done a poor job predicting recent temperature
trends.
The Heritage Foundation has produced several studies highlighting what
the think tank characterizes as the “underestimated costs” and
“exaggerated benefits” of the Obama administration’s environmental
agenda.
Contrary to most reports in the establishment media, no scientific
consensus exists on the connection between human activity and climate
change, Kreutzer and other experts note.
In fact, updated research identifies natural influences as the primary
drivers of warming and cooling trends.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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