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REF
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Meet the scientists Trump could tap to undermine climate regulations
:{By Scott Waldman, Zack Colman | 03/19/2025 :
Some downplay the threat of global warming. Others question the efficacy of climate policy. All could be of interest to the new administration.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has made it his mission to destroy what he calls the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.
But President Donald Trump’s EPA chief can’t do it alone. To smash the holy grail, Zeldin needs help from a rare kind of scientist — the kind who believes climate change isn’t that bad or might even be good for humanity.
Those scientists aren’t easy to find. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the burning of fossil fuels is heating up Earth, and the planet’s rapid change is putting people at risk for a wide range of calamities — from more extreme storms to rising sea levels to more intense heat waves.
Those threats underpin what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — Zeldin’s holy grail. The 2009 declaration by EPA made clear that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are the root cause of climate change, and that EPA has the authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act because they can harm human health.
The endangerment finding has empowered EPA to establish landmark climate regulations, including limits on the emissions produced by cars or power plants. Rolling back these regulations — and the endangerment finding itself — would require an attack on the climate science that serves as their foundation.
Enter the climate naysayers.
The Trump administration is looking to recruit scientists who could cast doubt on climate science or climate policy, or who view global warming as either a small inconvenience or a boon to humankind.
Once selected, these scientists could add their perspective to a bedrock climate report that comes out every few years, known as the National Climate Assessment. Their contributions to the report, in turn, could be cited as evidence in future efforts to undermine the endangerment finding — all of which would make it easier to quash climate regulations.
The scientists even could help author a second endangerment finding. A Trump-era endangerment finding might, for example, selectively highlight areas of doubt in climate science or tout the perceived benefits of global warming.
To do that, a Trump-approved body of climate findings would center around future scenarios based on lower carbon scenarios than the world is currently experiencing.
It also could emphasize less severe climate trajectories than those envisioned in the original finding, said Roger Pielke Jr., a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
“Being able to tease out signals of human-caused climate change in extreme weather — which everybody cares about — are going to be much more challenging with a lower emissions trajectory than a higher one,” said Pielke Jr., who is not involved in any of the efforts and has questioned how scientists can link human-driven warming to specific extreme weather events.
There is a relatively small pool of researchers who could — or would be willing to — engage in such an effort because it would misrepresent decades of climate science by the world’s top science agencies.
“It’s a very small group of people. It’s the same people who have been there for the last 20 years,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “It’s this endlessly recycled group of people who have been making the same arguments that are unable to convince anybody in the scientific community.”
The White House has not announced its plan yet nor the researchers who might be involved, and it did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement, an EPA spokesperson said that as “part of this reconsideration process, EPA will leverage the expertise of the White House Budget Office, including the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other relevant agencies.”
Here are some of the scientists who have spent years downplaying climate risks or criticizing climate regulations, and could be tapped by the Trump administration to help Zeldin destroy the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.
David Legates
David Legates (second from right) appears at a 2016 event in Washington. | Kris Connor/AFP via Getty Images MORANO
Legates likely would be a key leader. He has worked with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought on a series of proposals to tear down NOAA and to recruit industry and think tank researchers that oppose climate rules to write a government science report.
The two men authored a key chapter outlining their plans in the Project 2025 conservative policy playbook.
Legates, who was the former state climatologist for Delaware until he was asked to step down, served as a top NOAA official in Trump’s first term. He was also detailed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but was later removed from that position after attempting to publish a series of research memos that distorted climate science.
For years, Legates has turned a partisan lens to research, claiming that climate change will benefit humanity while climate policy will hurt people. He is affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance, a group of conservative Christian scholars “dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about Biblical earth stewardship.”
Legates declined to comment for this story.
Steve Kooni
Koonin, a New York University physicist and former top scientist at BP, has long pushed to conduct a “red team, blue team” review of climate science, which would pit two groups of scientists against each other to debate a scientific report, such as the National Climate Assessment.
One group would defend the report while the other would highlight its alleged scientific weaknesses. Koonin worked on putting together the effort during the first Trump administration, but the project was eventually scuttled by the White House because some officials were concerned about Trump’s reelection chances.
Koonin said he would prefer to take on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to highlight areas of doubt.
“Anything that I can do to help make the science more transparent, you know, that’s been my goal, and remains my goal, for a long time,” he said.
Richard Lindzen
The retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist told POLITICO that he would “of course” help the Trump administration challenge the endangerment finding. Lindzen was dismayed that the red team, blue team exercise to publicly debate established climate science never took off during Trump’s first term.
A longtime critic of accepted climate science, Lindzen applauded Zeldin for calling “bullshit” on a “fake issue” of the severity of rising temperatures. But he acknowledged there may be little upside given how much the scientific community has supported the conclusion that human activity is driving climate change, even if he disagrees with it.
Lindzen argued the courts may offer the most direct route, where he said EPA should argue there “was never any evidence in the first place” to suggest greenhouse gases meet a legally defined standard of dangerous.
“I have no idea what they’re going to do,” he said. “But I think it’s pretty obvious when Trump is running on the issue of ‘Drill, baby drill,’ that he is not going to pay any attention to what is claimed to be the science.”
Ryan Maue
Maue has not had any communication with the Trump administration about serving in any science advisory or agency role, he wrote in a text message. But the libertarian meteorologist would be a natural fit: He served at NOAA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy in Trump’s first term.
Maue agrees that humans are warming the planet, but he has pushed back against stringent government policies to rein in greenhouse gases.
He has often used his large social media following on X to dispute the connections between climate change and specific extreme weather events. He has repeatedly cautioned that the world is not following the worst-case scenario climate trajectory, calling it “highly implausible” — a view that could align with Trump administration thinking to emphasize less dire forecasts.
Judith Curry
Curry said she would help the Trump administration reconsider the endangerment finding if she could work from home, but noted there’s been no outreach from Trump’s team.
The Georgia Tech professor emerita argued the original endangerment finding was “politically driven,” and that its reliance on worst-case climate scenarios compelled more drastic policy than necessary. Despite U.S. greenhouse gas reductions falling 17 percent below 2005 levels, the nation is still off-track of the U.S. share of reductions needed to stabilize global temperatures.
An additional 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100 — which is aligned with current trajectories — “isn’t a big deal because it’s what we’ve seen over the last 100 years, and we’re doing just fine,” said Curry, who is now president of consulting firm Climate Forecast Applications Network.
Scientists have said such increases have brought and would bring massive biodiversity loss, more intense extreme weather events, deadlier heat waves and economic harm through natural disaster damage, lost labor productivity, food insecurity and deteriorating health.
While Curry said there are “plenty of reasons not to like fossil fuels” and that clean energy investment is needed, she claimed “policy isn’t going to help here.” An endangerment finding that reflected less severe consequences for failing to deal with climate change “takes away the urgency for doing all of this” through government policy, she said.
John Christy
Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former lead IPCC author. He has questioned whether humans are driving the observed warming trends in recent decades — something the world’s top science agencies have long confirmed.
He opposed the endangerment finding in 2009 and has questioned the climate models on which it was based in congressional testimony. He is also a longtime proponent of applying a red team, blue team exercise to climate science.
Christy said he believed he could identify weaknesses in the first endangerment finding and that he could use research from the last 15 years to further his argument if the Trump administration pursued a second endangerment finding.
“I would like to see a very clear demonstration that climate models are not capable of telling us about the future of climate to the level of the CO2 forcing that is occurring in the atmosphere,” he said.
In fact, climate scientists have tested the models on which they rely and have found a notable amount of accuracy, particularly the latest versions, which are far more sophisticated than the models of the past.
Will Happer
Happer was part of Trump’s National Security Council in the first term, who mostly worked on classified military projects. He is a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, though not a climate scientist.
Happer is one of the few scientists who have given Trump a briefing on climate research, though his views are not supported by the world’s leading science agencies. Happer has long cast doubt on the role humans play in driving global warming and has been a vociferous opponent of climate policy.
In Trump’s first term, Happer worked on the effort to conduct an adversarial review of climate science with Koonin. After that effort was torpedoed by White House officials, Trump told Happer that he wanted to bring him back for a red team, blue team effort in his second term. Trump even discussed a potential nationally televised science “debate,” Happer told POLITICO.
“If I see an opportunity to help, I will,” Happer said. “I think it’s long overdue.”
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https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/fighting-climate-chaos/climate-deniers/koch-industries/dr-willie-soon-a-career-fueled-by-big-oil-and-coal/
willie Soon plotted to take down the IPCC AR4 before it was even written.
In 2003, as the IPCC was gearing up for the upcoming Fourth Assessment (AR4) due in 2007, Willie Soon began plotting with colleagues about how to undermine the work. As part of the FOIA documents received by Greenpeace, there was a link to Dr. Soon’s documents. That link led to a directory of Dr. Soon’s files at Harvard. Dr. Soon has also referenced these online files in previous articles published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In a letter in these files (dated after 10 October) Dr. Soon wrote:
“Clearly they [the AR4 chapters] may be too much for any one of us to tackle them all … But, as A-team, we may for once give it our best shot to try to anticipate and counter some of the chapters, especially WG1—judging from our true expertise in the basic climate sciences …
Even if we can tackle ONE single chapter down the road but forcefully and effectively … we will really accomplish A LOT!
In all cases, I hope we can start discussing among ourselves to see what we can do to weaken the fourth assessment report or to re-direct attention back to science …”
Who was this “A Team”? The letter was addressed to “Bob, Randy, Walter, Sallie and Dave”.
From other correspondence, it seems possible that “Bob” is Australian scepticBob Carter, as Dr. Soon worked with Carter. “Sallie” is clearly Dr. Sallie Baliunas,“Dave” is likely David Legates.
There is no prominent “A-team” type scientist or climate sceptic called Randy – except ExxonMobil’s lobbyist Randy Randol, who was heavily involved with the Exxon-funded deniers. Randol wrote the famous memo to the Bush administration recommending that the then head of the IPCC, Bob Watson, be replaced. (Watson was indeed replaced – by the current chair Rajendra Pachauri. But Pachauri has continued the rigorous scientific work carried out by Watson and has since become the target of deniers.)
Randol was involved in a number of other Exxon plans to undermine climate science, including a plan cooked up in 1998 with other Exxon-funded think tanks to attack the Kyoto Protocol (see his name, bottom of page 4).
Equally, there is no “Walter” in the climate denial field [cunningham?]– exceptWalt Buchholtz, ExxonMobil’s Government Relations & Issues Advisor, the man responsible for doling out Exxon’s funding grants to deniers and front groups. Buchholtz was listed as a “Government relations advisor” to the Heartland Institute in 2005 (as listed in the Heartland Institute’s 2005 990 IRS form).
Regardless of who these “A Team” members truly were, Willie Soon clearly coordinated a plan to undermine the science chapter of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment – before he even knew what science it contained. This is a clear example of the climate denier strategy of undermining climate science, and stands in sharp contrast with accepted scientific methodology.
https://www.desmog.com/2015/11/19/evangelical-christian-zeal-behind-marc-morano-s-climate-denial-documentary-climate-hustle/
The Evangelical Christian Climate Deniers Behind Marc Morano’s Climate Hustle Documentary
By Graham Readfearn on Nov 19, 2015
One unambiguous video title states that “Climate Policies kill. People will die”, while others scream how moves to cut greenhouse gas emissions “devalues human life” and “kills thousands” in Britain.
All this extremist language comes from the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a US-based Christian evangelical group that rejects climate science and is preparing to release a new documentary in the coming weeks.
Cornwall has been posting preview clips under the banner “Greener on the other Side: Climate Alarmism – Fact, Not Fear”on its YouTube page.
The views in the clips are extreme but represent a grab bag of climate science denialist talking points, ignoring the mountains of evidence gathered from multiple sources over many decades of the impacts of loading the atmosphere and the oceans with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.
The clips cut across energy policy and climate science and claim, amongst other things, there is no evidence to support cuts to the use of fossil fuels which are beneficial to the planet.
In one segment, the alliance’s supposed climate experts promote creationism. “There has to be a designer – a creator behind this,” says David Legates.
The Cornwall Alliance is preparing to release the full DVD at the end of November under the title “Where the Grass is Greener”, only days before another climate science denial documentary, Climate Hustle, gets its premiere in Paris.
The two films also share a number of experts, including statistician William Briggs, climate denial activist Tom Harris, Australian “sceptic” Bob Carter, British peer Lord Christopher Monckton and blogger Anthony Watts.
But the similarities between Greener on the Other Side and Climate Hustle do not stop there, because both films share the same director in Chris Rogers and were produced by his company – CDR Communications.
Rogers’ CDR Communications was also behind another Cornwall Alliance extremist video effort in 2010 — Resisting the Green Dragon — that claimed environmentalism was a “false religion” and that it was a cover story for a “global government” power grab.
Rogers is also the chairman of The James Partnership, the umbrella arm that includes the Cornwall Alliance as one of its projects and pays the salary of Calvin Beisner, Cornwall’s founder and spokesperson.
While Cornwall Alliance will be unlikely to gain traction for its DVD outside of evangelical Christian circles, Marc Morano has much greater ambitions for Climate Hustle.
Climate science denialist Morano is the bombastic communications director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
As DeSmog reported, after a “red carpet premier” of the film that Morano modestly claims will “rock the climate debate”, CFACT wants a US cinema release for the documentary, followed by DVD sales andthen distribution in schools and colleges.
In the most recent trailer for Climate Hustle, CDR Communications staffer Anna Milograno is credited as the editor, with Rogers as the producer and director.
In two earlier trailers, CDR Communications staffers Ian Jelliffe and Jay Kim were also credited, alongside “director of photography Joseph Rossell”.
Rossell is a research analyst at the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) who has been writing stories attacking climate science on his IRD blog Juicy Ecumenism and also on the NewsBusters website. NewsBusters is a project of the Media Research Center (MRC), which describes itself as “America’s leading media watchdog in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias.”
Morano has previously credited MRC as helping to produce Climate Hustle by providing access to archive news footage. Morano once worked as a journalist at Cybercast News Service, another MRC project.
Both MRC and CFACT have previously accepted grants from oil company ExxonMobil, which is currently under investigation by the New York attorney general for allegedly lying about the risks of climate change to the public and investors.
In the latest Cornwall Alliance film, Paul Driessen, CFACT‘s senior policy advisor, says: “I’m often accused of taking fossil fuel money – I’m still waiting for the check from ExxonMobil”.
Understanding the links between Morano, Climate Hustle and evangelical religion reveals an irony. Morano and other climate science deniers will frequently attempt to disparage climate science by comparing it to a kind of religion, implying that they are blinded by faith.
Yet the very people Morano employed to produce his new documentary are fundamentalist Christians with a warped view on science. The one being blinded by faith, it seems, is Morano himself.
mashey 2012
p 150
Z.2006.05-10a H. Sterling Burnett
Are Polar Bears Dying?738
“A new study by Dr. David Legates,Delaware’s State Climatologist and director
of the University of Delaware’s Center for Climatic Research, throws cold water
on the claim that global warming threatens to cause the extinction of polar bears.
Meme-37
Scare Unwarranted
As part of his study titled Climate Science: Climate Change and its Impacts,
expected at press time to be released in April of this year, Legates reviewed
assertions by environmental alarmists …”
Legates is now the former State Climatologist and former director.739
A critique by serious scientist says:740
“The report is filled with personal assertions that reflect a very selective and
biased look at the available scientific results, skeptically treating and dismissing
scientific results that are broadly accepted while uncritically accepting very
weakly supported claims of a natural origin of virtually all variations and
changes that have been observed. It is seemingly aimed at refuting “climate
alarmists” (who are mainly not identified, but seem to include the media and
representatives of environmental groups) and in doing so sets up a lot of
strawmen that gives him an excuse to put in a couple of contradictory references.
In most cases, however, the claims he shoots at are neither valid nor at all central
to the key scientific findings regarding human-induced global warming.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/10/climate-change-no-its-not-97-percent-consensus-ian-tuttle/
no lnx many
POLITICS & POLICY
The 97 Percent Solution
By IAN TUTTLE
October 8, 2015
Unable to address Texas senator Ted Cruz’s questions about “the Pause” — the apparent global-warming standstill, now almost 19 years long — at Tuesday’s meeting of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Sierra Club president Aaron Mair, after an uncomfortable pause of his own, appealed to authority: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists concur and agree that there is global warming and anthropogenic impact,” he stated multiple times.
The relevant exchange begins at 1:39 (though the whole segment is worth watching):
The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. Last May, the White House tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.”
“Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists” say no such thing.
There are multiple relevant questions: (1) Has the earth generally warmed since 1800? (An overwhelming majority of scientists assent to this.) (2) Has that warming been caused primarily by human activity? And, if (1) and (2), is anthropogenic global warming a problem so significant that we ought to take action?
In 2004, University of California-San Diego professor Naomi Oreskes reported that, of 928 scientific abstracts from papers published by refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, “75% . . . either explicitly or implicitly accept[ed] the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.” Also remarkably, the papers chosen excluded several written by prominent scientists skeptical of that consensus. Furthermore, the claims made in abstracts — short summaries of academic papers — often differ from those made in the papers themselves. And Oreskes’s analysis did not take up whether scientists who subscribe to anthropogenic global warming think the phenomenon merits changes in public policy.
RELATED: On Climate, Science and Politics Are Diverging
The “97 percent” statistic first appeared prominently in a 2009 study by University of Illinois master’s student Kendall Zimmerman and her adviser, Peter Doran. Based on a two-question online survey, Zimmerman and Doran concluded that “the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific bases of long-term climate processes” — even though only 5 percent of respondents, or about 160 scientists, were climate scientists. In fact, the “97 percent” statistic was drawn from an even smaller subset: the 79 respondents who were both self-reported climate scientists and had “published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change.” These 77 scientists agreed that global temperatures had generally risen since 1800, and that human activity is a “significant contributing factor.”
A year later, William R. Love Anderegg, a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to determine that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field surveyed here support the tenets of ACC [anthropogenic climate change] outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The sample size did not much improve on Zimmerman and Doran’s: Anderegg surveyed about 200 scientists.
#share#Surely the most suspicious “97 percent” study was conducted in 2013 by Australian scientist John Cook— author of the 2011 book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand and creator of the blog Skeptical Science (subtitle: “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.”). In an analysis of 12,000 abstracts, he found “a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.” “Among papers taking a position” is a significant qualifier:
Only 34 percent of the papers Cook examined expressed any opinion about anthropogenic climate change at all. Since 33 percent appeared to endorse anthropogenic climate change, he divided 33 by 34 and — voilà — 97 percent!
When David Legates, a University of Delaware professor whoformerly headed the university’s Center for Climatic Research,recreated Cook’s study, he found that “only 41 papers — 0.3 percentof all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent,” endorsed what Cook claimed.Several scientists whose papers were included in Cook’s initial sample also protested that they had been misinterpreted. “Significant questions about anthropogenic influences on climate remain,” Legates concluded.
RELATED: Scientists Don’t Actually Know What’s Causing ‘Extreme Weather’]
Studies showing a wider range of opinion often go unremarked. A 2008 survey by two German scientists, Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch, found that a significant number of scientists were skeptical of the ability of existing global climate models to accurately predict global temperatures, precipitation, sea-level changes, or extreme weather events even over a decade; they were far more skeptical as the time horizon increased. Most did express concerns about global warming and a desire for “immediate action to mitigate climate change” — but not 97 percent.
#related#
A 2012 poll of American Meteorological Society members also reported a diversity of opinion. Of the 1,862 members who responded (a quarter of the organization), 59 percent stated that human activity was the primary cause of global warming, and 11 percent attributed the phenomenon to human activity and natural causes in about equal measure, while just under a quarter (23 percent) said enough is not yet known to make any determination. Seventy-six percent said that warming over the next century would be “very” or “somewhat” harmful, but of those, only 22 percent thought that “all” or a “large” amount of the harm could be prevented “through mitigation and adaptation measures.”
And according to a study of 1,868 scientists working in climate-related fields, conducted just this year by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, three in ten respondents said that less than half of global warming since 1951 could be attributed to human activity, or that they did not know.
Given the politics of modern academia and the scientific community, it’s not unlikely that most scientists involved in climate-related studies believe in anthropogenic global warming, and likely believe, too, that it presents a problem. However, there is no consensus approaching 97 percent. A vigorous, vocal minority exists. The science is far from settled.
IAN TUTTLE is the former Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at the National Review Institute. @iptuttle
who the fuck chose these guys? how many of them got on sab?
Pruitt's prospects
Here are some of the skeptical nominees under consideration:
Joseph D'Aleo, a certified consultant meteorologist and co-founder of the Weather Channel: He has run climate skeptic websites and has appeared as a speaker at Heartland conferences. D'Aleo said his priority on the board would be attacking the endangerment finding, the legally binding document that holds that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases harm human health and must be regulated by the executive branch. He said he wants to challenge the finding because it could otherwise be used later to build back Obama-era environmental regulations.
Edwin Berry. edberry.com
"We're going to push for reconsideration, start from scratch and put together the best science," he said. "If CO2 is not a serious pollutant, let's focus the attention of the EPA on other issues."
Edwin Berry, a meteorologist and atmospheric scientist: He has funded his own climate research and says human carbon dioxide emissions do not cause climate change. He has compared those who believe in human-caused climate change to "Aztecs who believed they could make rain by cutting out beating hearts and rolling decapitated heads down temple steps." On his Twitter account, he has called Islam "a death cult" and has encouraged motorists to drive into protesters.
Berry, in an email to E&E News today, described his tweet as a joke and said he does not advocate violence.
"Clearly, my tween says to slowly drive to not hurt anyone," Berry said in the email, misspelling "tweet."
brn
Kevin Dayaratna. Heritage Foundation
Berry, who confirmed that he and a number of other skeptics were nominated by Heartland, said he wants to use his position on the board to show that humans barely contribute to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, which he claimed are mostly driven by natural factors.
"Let's get over this whole thing about climate change being an important thing, because in fact we humans have a negligible impact on climate," he said. "And if we had the Paris Agreement and everything else, it wouldn't do any good anyway."
Alan Carlin, a retired EPA employee who is affiliated with Heartland: He fought the agency's crafting of the endangerment finding. Carlin, an economist, was at the center of a political firestorm under Obama after he produced a widely criticized 93-page report comprising cherry-picked scientific data and blog entries concluding that regulating carbon dioxide was "the worst mistake that EPA has ever made."
Kevin Dayaratna, a statistician at the conservative Heritage Foundation: His report was cited by Trump as a reason to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. It claimed that the agreement could shrink U.S. gross domestic product by $2.5 trillion within two decades (though Trump stated the impact as coming within a decade). The report was criticized by some as being misleading, because that amount is less than 1 percent of the aggregate GDP over that period and the report did not account for the cost of taking no climate change action. Dayaratna was invited to attend Trump's withdrawal announcement in June in the White House Rose Garden.
Craig Idso, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute: He has researched the benefits of atmospheric carbon dioxide. His work has centered on highlighting how increased carbon dioxide will benefit plants.
Paul Driessen, a senior policy adviser at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a libertarian environmental think tank: His organization handed out leaflets at a climate protest this year in Washington, D.C., that said, "CO2 is not the 'control knob' of the climate." He also co-founded Climate Exit, or "Clexit," which criticized the science behind the Paris climate agreement and holds that spiking levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide benefit the Earth. "The world must abandon this suicidal Global Warming crusade," the group stated in its founding statement. "Man does not and cannot control the climate."
Gordon Fulks, a physicist and adviser to the Cascade Policy Institute, an Oregon-based libertarian think tank: He has denied that net sea ice melt is occurring and that the Earth is warming. He has said those who express concern about climate change are like a "societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus."
Anthony Lupo, another founding member of Clexit: He has received support from the Heartland Institute and helped in the unsuccessful fight against the endangerment finding in court.
Leighton Steward, a former energy company executive and a founder of groups that promote the rise of carbon dioxide as a benefit: He has also encouraged the United States to drop out of the Paris climate accord and says that natural warming is raising the temperature of the Earth.
David Legates,a professor of climatology at the University of Delaware: He has denied that human-caused climate change could have catastrophic consequences and has co-authored climate research claiming polar bears are not harmed by human-caused climate change that was quietly funded, at least in part, by Koch Industries Inc.
Critics want to boot EPA 'cronies'
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25102020/noaa-climate-denial-david-legates/
no lnx pix
politics & Policy
War on NOAA? A Climate Denier’s Arrival Raises Fears the Agency’s Climate Mission Is Under Attack
David Legates has spent his career disputing climate science. Now he’s a top manager in the federal agency most involved in assessing global warming’s threat.
By Marianne Lavelle
October 25, 2020
In the shadow of the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has continued to press on with its work measuring the breadth and pace of the climate crisis.
So far in 2020, NOAA recorded the nation’s hottest summer on record, the second-lowest Arctic sea ice minimum and the greatest number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. coast since 1916. NOAA led a team that showed global warming is detectable at the bottom of the ocean. It funded work revealing the climate risks of coastal forest destruction. It helped develop a breakthrough method of measuring fossil fuel emissions in ambient air.
But climate scientists are bracing for the potential disruption of NOAA’s climate work with the appointment of two prominent climate science deniers and a former campaign official for President Donald Trump to top agency positions this fall.
One of the new hires, David Legates, a University of Delaware geography and climatology professor who works closely with anti-climate action advocacy groups like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has been especially critical of the agency that he will now help run. Dismissive of NOAA’s data-gathering and models, Legates maintains there is no scientific consensus on the environmental hazard of carbon dioxide emissions. He is in a newly created top deputy position, where he will not face Senate confirmation, but will report directly to NOAA’s administrator.
“People are very alarmed and saddened about it, and it’s spooking people on the inside,” said Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which regularly surveys federal scientists on their perception of political interference. “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.”
David Legates. Courtesy of the University of Delaware
David Legates
The hiring of Legates and others, only weeks before the election, comes just as NOAA is set to collaborate with more than a dozen other federal agencies on the next Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, due out in 2023. Work on the project kicked off in earnest on Oct. 15 when a call for authors was published in the Federal Register. The state-of-the-science synthesis of climate impacts and trends across the United States is meant to serve as a roadmap for policymakers.
Veterans of the process fear the new hires may presage a Trump administration effort to inject doubt about the scientific consensus into the climate assessment.
Foes of climate action hope that’s the signal being sent.
“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. “And I hope they will have a big impact on the way the next National Climate Assessment is put together.”
Any such efforts would be a radical departure from past National Climate Assessments. The last report presented the most dire picture yet of the climate risks facing the U.S. population and economy, and gained perhaps even greater attention because of the Trump administration’s effort to downplay its findings by releasing the final volume the day after Thanksgiving in 2018.
NOAA’s Uneasy Path Under Trump
As the nation’s lead agency for weather, water and climate prediction, NOAA has clashed repeatedly with the Trump White House—even on matters far less controversial than global warming.
The most notorious incident became known as “Sharpiegate,” when Trump warned last year that Hurricane Dorian was headed for Alabama and then blew up when NOAA’s National Weather Service contradicted his mistaken forecast. (Trump had a hurricane map displayed in the Oval Office that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie pen.)
President Donald Trump references a map while talking to reporters about Hurricane Dorian in the Oval Office at the White House Sept. 4, 2019 in Washington, D.C. The map was a forecast from Aug. 29 and appears to have been altered by a black marker to ext
President Donald Trump references a map while talking to reporters about Hurricane Dorian in the Oval Office at the White House Sept. 4, 2019 in Washington, D.C. The map was a forecast from Aug. 29 and appears to have been altered by a black marker to extend the hurricane’s range to include Alabama. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The cloud of “Sharpiegate” is at least part of the reason that NOAA has been without a permanent administrator throughout the Trump administration.
It is NOAA’s longest stretch without a Senate-confirmed leader since its creation in 1970. And, as the agency marks its 50th anniversary, its budget is, for the fourth consecutive year, facing a White House proposal for deep cuts. Congress has thus far rejected the proposed cutbacks, but like all federal agencies, NOAA is operating under a stopgap budget that expires Dec. 11, leaving the funding decision in the hands of the lame duck Congress.
Despite the uncertainty that has hung over the agency’s leadership and budget, there is widespread praise in the scientific community for the work that NOAA’s nearly 7,000 scientists and engineers have continued to do.
In September, NOAA’s storm-monitoring was much in the news, as the agency tracked 10 named tropical formations, a record for the month. At the same time, it was monitoring the spread of wildfires in the West, which has set records for the number of acres burned and the size of the fires. In response, media coverage of climate change soared.
On Sept. 14, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden highlighted the issue in a campaign speech. Trump, on a brief stop in California’s fire epicenter, doubled down on his climate denial. “It will start getting cooler,” he said. “Just watch. I don’t think science knows actually.”
On that same day, Legates, who has spent years raising doubt about what science knows on climate, was named to the newly created position of deputy assistant secretary for environmental observation and prediction at NOAA.
‘It’s Like Trying to Keep the Sun From Shining’
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 (unofficially) 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 in a legal brief submitted in support of oil companies that were being sued over climate change. (Legates did not respond to requests for an interview for this story.)
In submitting the brief, Legates and other climate science skeptics were represented by a lawyer for Heartland, the conservative think tank that has led a years-long campaign to discredit climate science. The Heartland group went beyond the position of the oil companies in the suit, which focused their challenge on whether climate change was the appropriate basis for a lawsuit. Legates and his colleagues disputed the essential science of global warming, arguing that there was no scientific consensus on the cause of climate change or its dangers. (The case remains in litigation.)
It is an argument Legates has made often to Congress, state legislators, judges, including the Supreme Court, and most expansively, in lectures and panel discussions organized by Heartland and other groups that dispute climate science.
“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.”
Ocean acidification has been a central area of study for NOAA. Credit: NOAA
Ocean acidification has been a central area of study for NOAA. Credit: NOAA
Legates has a mix of views on climate change that are 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 he also argues that warming of the planet will help civilization to thrive. He disputes that carbon dioxide is driving climate change but also points to lab studies showing that species like crabs and lobsters grow faster in carbon-saturated water, asserting that could outweigh any damage of ocean acidification, which has been a central area of study for the agency. As for NOAA’s tracking of sea level rise, Legates admits that both sea level and CO2 are rising, but disputes that there is a correlation between the two.
“It’s all based on political views, it’s not based on science,” said Donald Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois who served as chief climate science expert in President Barack Obama’s White House. Wuebbles, who relies on the data gathered by NOAA in his work, is concerned about leadership of the agency, given the opinions that have been expressed by the new appointees. “Nothing they say really deals with any of the science, other than just to make strange statements that the data doesn’t back,” Wuebbles said.
A Career Devoted to Climate Skepticism
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.”
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, and his early publications on this issue are among his most cited works.
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. The issue, according to the paper, was that the records had not accounted for problems with rain-collecting gauges, which could be affected by factors like wind-blown snow, evaporation or heat. The findings had obvious implications for understanding climate change, and whether current precipitation patterns marked a change from the past, or were an artifact of problematic measuring practices.
[cf The Anti-Scientists series]
But Legates was not alone in noticing this issue. His studies are part of a vast body of thousands of peer-reviewed studies from around the world on such biases and how to correct them. NOAA has done extensive work on this topic, and is transparent about the data correction it has made in its own precipitation records. And the National Climate Assessment and the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have taken into account such uncertainties in providing a number of possible scenarios for global warming impacts.
But for Legates, the work was a first step in a career devoted to skepticism over the scientific consensus on climate change. After teaching at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Louisiana, he returned to the University of Delaware in 1999 and was promoted to full professor in 2010. The office of the Delaware State Climatologist resides within the university, and in 2005, after the professor who had been serving in that post was promoted to an administrative position, Legates took over the job.
Legates did more than carry out the traditional job of the state climatologist, maintaining current and historical weather data for the state and being the go-to person for local media interviews on storms hitting Delaware. He collaborated with other climate skeptics on research and activism against climate action. Legates has said he has not received any funding for his climate change research since 2002. But over the last 18 years, he has worked closely with other authors and conservative groups who are funded by industry, as well as conservative and libertarian-oriented foundations.
[Brent Bozell, founder and president of the Media Research Center, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, David Legates and David Rothbard, Executive Producer of the film speak during the “Climate Hustle” panel discussion at the Rayburn House Office Building on April 14, 2016 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Kris Connor/Getty Images
In 2006, Legates joined with other contrarian climatologists in a legal brief filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute opposing the state of Massachusetts in its petition seeking federal Environmental Protection Agency regulation of greenhouse gases from motor vehicles.In that case, the Supreme Court issued its landmark 5-4 ruling that greenhouse gas emissions were a pollutant that could be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. That case led to what is known as the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, the underpinning of the climate actions taken under the Obama administration. Legates and his colleagues argued that the EPA had insufficient evidence of the harm of greenhouse gases.
“The net effect of greenhouse emissions on human health and welfare is unknown and has not been comprehensively determined, even as the technological and scientific advances associated with those emissions have dramatically increased life expectancy,” Legates and his colleagues said in their brief. “It is simply impossible to conclude that the net effect of greenhouse gases endangers human health and welfare.”
By joining in the brief, Legates was taking a position opposed to that of the state of Delaware, which had supported Massachusetts’ petition for greenhouse gas regulation. That led to a dust-up with Delaware’s then-governor, Ruth Ann Minner, a Democrat, who in February 2007, wrote a letter to Legates, directing him to stop using his title as state climatologist in making public statements on climate change.
“Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration,” she said.
The restriction on Legates’ use of his title didn’t stop his work as a contrarian. That same year, he was a co-author of a paper concluding that it was “highly premature” to suggest that global warming threatened the survival of polar bears of the western Hudson Bay. The paper instead focused on other stress factors the authors said affected the polar bears, such as interaction with humans and natural ocean oscillations. Legates’s co-author on the paper, Willie Soon, disclosed that his work on the research was partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil Corporation and the foundation of libertarian petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch.
Soon, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, became a frequent collaborator with Legates. They published a paper together in 2015 that challenged influential research showing that 97.1 percent of the peer-reviewed climate science papers published from 1991 to 2011 endorsed the consensus position that humans are the cause of global warming. Legates and Soon argued that only scientific papers that specifically quantified the level of human contribution to climate change—a criterion that would include only 41 papers, or 0.3 percent of the total—should be considered to endorse the consensus position.
“By that logic, there is zero percent consensus on heliocentrism—that the Earth is revolving around the sun—because not a single recent astronomy paper states, ‘the Earth is revolving around the sun,'” said John Cook, lead author of the 97 percent consensus paper, now at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. In other words, the human contribution to climate change is so widely accepted that it is implicit in most published research.
‘This So-Called War’
Beginning around 2009, the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the public institutions and universities of a number of contrarian scientists, including Soon and Legates, in an attempt to uncover the extent of fossil-fuel industry funding of their work. In 2015, Greenpeace unearthed and distributed documents showing that Soon had received $1.2 million in industry funding over the last decade, exposing him to criticism for using a title that invoked the prestige of Harvard and the Smithsonian for fossil fuel industry-backed research. The revelations led to new funding disclosure requirements at the Smithsonian.
The Greenpeace request faced obstacles at the University of Delaware, which is state-assisted but privately governed, and where only documents related to the spending of public funds are subject to state FOIA law. The school’s general counsel asked Legates to turn over documents so it could be determined whether they needed to be produced in response to the FOIA request.
Legates refused, arguing that doing so would violate his academic freedom. The Competitive Enterprise Institute then intervened on Legates’ behalf, firing off its own FOIA petition to the University of Delaware, aimed at obtaining documents of other faculty members who supported the consensus science on climate change. Legates then argued that the school’s general counsel was not making the same document demands with those faculty members as he did for Legates, in effect discriminating against him because of his out-of-the-mainstream views.
According to a footnote in a 2016 account that Legates later wrote about the incident, he also hired an unusually high-powered attorney to represent him in his dispute with the university: Noel Francisco of Jones Day, a law firm that represents a wide array of corporate clients, including Koch Industries and other fossil fuel interests. (Francisco is not known for representing university professors in FOIA cases; for three years, beginning in 2017, he was President Trump’s solicitor general, the administration’s top lawyer in arguments before the Supreme Court. He also was on Trump’s short list of potential Supreme Court picks.)
None of Legates’ documents were ever released to Greenpeace, but the episode was a bitter one, in his telling. After he hired his own lawyer, Legates said, he was terminated as Delaware State Climatologist and as co-director of an environmental monitoring network he had spent a decade helping to develop. In testimony before Congress in 2014, Legates said that his conflict with the administrators at the university revealed bias against contrarians.
“There is nothing in my records of which I am embarrassed,” he said in written testimony to a subcommittee of the Senate Environment Public Works Committee. “I tell you this story not because I seek sympathy, but because of many other cases for which the victims cannot speak out.”
At the time, there was talk in the Democratic-controlled Senate about a war on climate science that had stalled federal action to cut carbon emissions. But Legates, invited to speak by the Republicans, said that contrarian scientists who dispute climate science were taking the most flak from their institutions and were being denied federal research dollars.
“This so-called war on science is nothing but a diversion,” Legates said in his testimony. “The real war is being waged within the halls of academia and within our Federal granting agencies.”
Legates will now be a high-level manager of one of those agencies, thanks to the Trump administration.
‘We’ve Got to Make Sure It’s Done Right’
Legates’ hiring was one of a slew of top personnel moves made by the Trump administration at NOAA.
A day after he was hired, on Sept. 15, Erik Noble, who had served as a data analyst for the Trump campaign in 2016, was brought in as NOAA’s chief of staff. 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.
On Sept. 21, the White House tapped meteorologist Ryan Maue to serve as the new chief scientist at NOAA. Maue has frequently posted criticisms on Twitter, some of them now deleted, aimed at scientists and politicians who draw connections between extreme weather or wildfires and climate change. Maue is also a former scholar with the libertarian Cato Institute. NOAA’s public affairs office did not respond to requests for details on the hirings.
Some close observers, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on personnel matters, said that the moves may signal that Trump, if he wins a second term, plans a wholesale sweep of NOAA leadership, replacing the current acting administrator, Neil Jacobs, NOAA’s former chief scientist Craig McLean and others who crossed the White House during the Sharpiegate controversy.
By placing Legates in a deputy position, the administration has made him legally eligible under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to be moved to NOAA’s top slot as “acting” administrator. One advantage of “acting” appointments is they are a way to avoid a contentious Senate confirmation process. Trump has said he prefers “acting” appointments, because it gives him more flexibility, but his administration has been slapped down by the courts for circumventing the vacancies law.
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.
But if Trump loses the election, added Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, “I expect David would disappear pretty rapidly in a Biden administration.”
That isn’t necessarily the case. Political appointees sometimes go on to seek appointments to career government positions, an end-of-administration ritual known in Washington as “burrowing in.” Although there is anxiety in NOAA about Trump appointees finding a way to stay on in a Biden administration, there’s no indication that is Legates’ intention. Indeed, an email that his University of Delaware department chair sent to students said, “David hopes to be back at UD in the spring.”
Even if Legates and the other new hires have a short stay at NOAA, they still could have influence over the National Climate Assessment.
Nominations of scientists from both inside and outside the federal government will be accepted through Nov. 15. Hundreds of authors typically participate, and at least one climate contrarian—William Happer, a Princeton University emeritus professor of physics and former Trump White House official—has expressed interest in participating as an author. Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP who briefly held a position in the Obama administration and is now a physics professor at New York University, told E&E News that he has pitched to the Trump White House the idea of incorporating an adversarial review by skeptics of climate science into the National Climate Assessment.
That would make for a quite different report from the National Climate Assessment that came out on Black Friday in 2018. Philip Duffy, a physicist and former White House policy adviser who helped coordinate the National Climate Assessment in the Obama administration, said he believed that the last report was an important affirmation of the science at a critical time, likening it to the statements about the coronavirus by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“It was a strong statement which contradicted the party line, shall we say,” said Duffy, president and executive director of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Mass. He added that the assessment’s greatest value was the detail it provided on the specific impacts of warming on different regions of the country, from heavy precipitation in the South to heat and drought in the West. “It’s intended to form the basis of decision-making and planning. That’s what’s unique about it, and essential.”
But skeptics of climate science and opponents of U.S. action to curb fossil fuel emissions were sharply critical of that report, and the Trump administration for not exerting more control over it. Ebell, who disputes the validity of both the models and the data that have informed the climate assessment, said he believes that if Legates has an opportunity to help shape the next assessment, it could provide a much different perspective than the reports of the past.
“If David Legates and his colleagues are able to be involved in the preparation of the National Climate Assessment right up to the date of publication, they’re not going to feature the least likely scenario in order to scare the public,” Ebell said. “They’re going to feature the most realistic scenario, and that will be a huge improvement.”
What that most realistic scenario is, however, is another matter: The consensus of mainstream scientists is that it depends on how much the world’s nations do to cut carbon emissions.
The 2018 National Climate Assessment focused both on a high-end global warming scenario, assuming little effort by nations to curb greenhouse gases, and a low-end scenario, consistent with nations implementing significant mitigation measures. At least one recent study concluded that the high-end scenario is the most realistic.
Wuebbles, who has been a coordinating lead author on past National Climate Assessments, said the next volume will come at a critical time.
“We need to make sure we understand well what climate change means, and what kind of options do we have, both in terms of trying to reduce the future climate change, but also in terms of ‘how do we adapt to be resilient,’” he said. “This is an important document for the government. We’ve got to make sure it’s done right.”
Wuebbles said he could not speculate on the impact the new leadership at NOAA could have on the report. “I think we’re all concerned,” he said. “We don’t know for sure.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10112020/trump-administration-national-climate-assessment-michael-kuperberg-david-legates
why would the Trump administration remove the leader of the program that produces the National Climate Assessment just as the president's time in the White House appears to be ending?
The dismissal of scientist Michael Kuperberg from his post as executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program makes little sense as a bid to exert control over the government's most comprehensive scientific report on climate risks in the United States. Any changes that promote the denial of climate science are not likely to stick in an incoming Biden administration, which fully supports the science of global warming.
But the Trump administration's lame duck move may cast a cloud over the report that lasts into the future, said Philip Duffy, a physicist and former White House policy adviser who helped coordinate the National Climate Assessment in the Obama administration.
"It suggests further politicization of science and that's not a good thing," said Duffy, executive director of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. "It erodes the credibility of these agencies, so that even if the politically motivated folks are replaced, it still could have, I think, a long-term effect on the perceived credibility of the report."
he added, "This is the official United States government view of climate change and its effect. It's extremely important that it reflect the best scientific understanding and not be a political document."
On the evening before Democrat Joe Biden was declared winner of the presidential race, Kuperberg, who headed up the climate assessment for the past five years, was notified by email that he was being removed from his post as executive director for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, associates said.
Although his replacement has not yet been announced, sources close to the administration expect it will be David Legates, a vocal skeptic of climate science who was appointed to a top deputy position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by the Trump administration in September. NOAA is one of 13 agencies that participate in the climate assessment, a review and report on climate science that Congress has mandated the government produce every four years.
"It seems to me they're trying to push this climate denial approach as far as they can, while they can," said Donald Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois who has participated in the National Climate Assessment process in the past. "But it can all be undone and redone after the new administration takes office."
The news of Kuperberg's dismissal comes on the heels of a Trump administration appointment that won praise in the climate science community: Betsy Weatherhead, a senior scientist for the consulting firm Jupiter Intelligence, was named as director of the National Climate Assessment, and would have reported to Kuperberg. She has decades of experience as a climate scientist, including as a co-author of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports on the Arctic. Her appointment was made by White House chief science adviser, Kelvin Droegemaier, who also is a widely respectedscientist.
The flurry of personnel moves, which seem to send conflicting signals, shows, if nothing else, that the final weeks of the Trump administration are likely to be as chaotic as the past four years.
The National Climate Assessment, which involves scientists both outside and inside the federal government, is meant to serve as a foundation for future decision-making, not only by Congress but by the states and localities that are experiencing the worst effects of a changing climate. The process of the fifth National Climate Assessment has just begun, with a deadline set for Saturday for the public to provide input to the administration about which scientists should serve as authors of the report and which scientific studies and technical data should be considered in the assessment.
"Since it was first mandated, the National Climate Assessment has been a well-respected gauge of the impacts climate change is having on our planet," said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who chairs the House Science Committee. "The removal of Dr. Kuperberg appears to be a clear attempt by the defeated Trump Administration in its waning days in office to politicize the assessment during a critical early stage of its development."
Kuperberg, an environmental toxicologist and ecologist who specializes in the study of the carbon cycle and Arctic processes, was detailed to NOAA's Global Change Research Program from the Department of Energy's Office of Science, where he had managed environmental research programs for a decade. He is expected to return to the Energy Department.
Wuebbles, who served as climate adviser in the Obama White House at the same time Kuperberg was managing the National Climate Assessment, said he and Kuperberg are friends, who speak frequently by phone. In an unrelated conversation they had on Saturday, Wuebbles said, Kuperberg broke the news that he would no longer head up the global research program. "We were talking about other things going on in our lives, and he said, 'There's one thing I need to tell you,'" Wuebbles recalled.
Kuperberg could not be reached for comment.
Opponents of action to curb fossil fuel emissions have been pressing the Trump administration to exert more control over the National Climate Assessment.
Even though the administration has relentlessly rolled back climate policy and exited the Paris climate accord, government scientists have continued to produce work that bolsters knowledge on the human contribution to climate change. The fourth National Climate Assessment presented the most dire picture yetof the climate risks facing the United States, its population and its economy. The report gained perhaps even greater attention because of the Trump administration's effort to downplay its findings by releasing the final volume the day after Thanksgiving in 2018.
"One of Kuperberg's greatest achievements was to get the fourth National Climate Assessment released intact under a Trump administration," said Duffy. "I frankly don't know how he managed to do that, and it really was a service to all of us."
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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/trump-white-house-recruited-climate-science-critics-work-noaa
Trump White House recruited climate science critics to work at NOAA
By Scott Waldman, E&E NewsSep. 28, 2020
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At least three prominent researchers who question the severity of climate change rebuffed the opportunity to take a senior position at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The White House has been quietly working in recent weeks to reshape the leadership of NOAA with a goal of criticizing climate science, according to people who were contacted about the job.
The revelation that administration officials approached multiple researchers with long records of casting doubt on human-caused climate change points to a political campaign to undermine mainstream science at one of the world’s leading climate agencies, experts and observers said.
After the initial candidates declined the position, the White House turned to David Legates, a geography professor at the University of Delaware who rejects the basic principles of climate science. Legates, now the deputy assistant secretly for observation and prediction at NOAA, has claimed that rising carbon dioxide levels would make the earth more hospitable to humans.
John Christy,an atmospheric science professor at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, told E&E News that a White House official promised him he would be given a free hand to change the way NOAA approaches climate research.
“The pitch was I would have new influence on the future direction of the agency,” Christy said, adding that if he had accepted the job, “I would redirect money from the climate modeling project into the weather modeling project.”
Christy, who downplays the severity of rising temperatures, said he was unable to take the job due to his academic commitments. His colleague Roy Spencer, a meteorologist affiliated with the Heartland Institute, also was mentioned as a possibility, but he did not pursue the opportunity.
Christy reached out toJudith Curry, the former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, to see if she would be interested in the NOAA position, Curry told E&E News. She, too, rebuffed the offer.
“I’m totally uninterested in anything having to do with D.C. and government,”Curry said.
In addition to Legates, the White House installed Ryan Maue, a former employee of the Cato Institute, as NOAA’s chief scientist, and Erik Noble, who worked as a data analyst for President Donald Trump’s campaign, as the agency’s acting chief of staff.
The changes symbolize a coordinated effort to reshape NOAA’s senior leadership in the dusk of Trump’s first term. Until now, the agency has remained relatively unscathed by the president’s embrace of conspiracy theories about climate change.
But the moves being taken now by administration officials could outlast Trump’s presidency even if he loses the November election to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, according to Andrew Rosenberg, who served as a deputy director at NOAA in former President Bill Clinton’s administration.
Rosenberg, who now runs the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the political appointments could be a strategic way to get climate denialists “burrowed” in at NOAA. If the political appointees are offered career positions, they will be much harder to dismiss after Trump is gone because of protections for federal workers, Rosenberg said.
“They’re packing these positions, and I’m worried they’re going to get burrowed into career positions in NOAA. First of all, getting appointed in the first place is sending a very strong signal that we are not interested in the overall scientific evidence of climate change; we’re going to go with the view of the fringe. That’s very distressing, not only to climate change, but everything NOAA does.”
Two of the new hires—Legates and Maue—have a record of downplaying climate science and have published claims in direct contradiction to NOAA peer-reviewed research.
Outside advisers to the White House have said Legates is expected to attempt to influence the next National Climate Assessment, the congressionally mandated body of research that informs policymakers around the country about how climate change is affecting their regions.
The climate “lie”
Some NOAA employees are nervous about what the moves herald if Trump wins a second term. Climate scientists seem particularly nervous that their work will be affected. In recent months, political appointees at the Commerce Department, which includes NOAA, have been monitoring climate research more closely, according to NOAA employees.
“If your morale is not already sapped, you aren’t paying attention,” said one NOAA staffer who requested anonymity to avoid repercussions.
A NOAA spokesman did not respond to a request seeking comment, and the White House declined to comment on the record.
NOAA has not been entirely immune to politicization. A year ago, the agency was engulfed by a scandal when acting Administrator Neil Jacobs and senior staff criticized agency forecasters at the National Weather Service. The controversy began when Trump incorrectly tweeted that Alabama was threatened by Hurricane Dorian in September 2019.
After receiving panicked phone calls, the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service put out a statement that correctly said the storm would not hit Alabama. Jacobs nevertheless criticized the forecasters.
The episode became known as “Sharpiegate” after Trump refused to acknowledge his mistake and later pointed to a map in the Oval Office that appeared to have been altered with a Sharpie marker to show the path of the hurricane hitting Alabama.
A recently concluded investigation by the department’s inspector general determined that senior NOAA officials were pressured by the White House to issue the statement that unduly criticized the Birmingham forecasters. The agency’s acting chief scientist, Craig McLean, called for an investigation into the statement and supported the agency’s weather forecast. McLean is now set to be replaced by Maue.
On Thursday, 85 Democrats in the House of Representatives sent a letter to Jacobs and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross protesting the appointment of Legates, saying he would “clearly be in a position to seriously damage the agency’s scientific integrity.”
“While Legates promotes the fossil fuel industry’s agenda and derides taxpayer dollars spent on mitigating the ‘undetectable effects of climate change,’ the staggering cost of failing to address climate change is terrifying to the rest of us working to save a livable future for our children and grandchildren,” they wrote.
Legates will have a senior role at an agency whose scientists he deeply disagrees with. In many cases, they’ve proved Legates’ unfounded claims wrong in peer-reviewed studies. By contrast, Legates has relished his role as a fringe researcher, collaborating with a number of groups that have received funding from the fossil fuel industry, Trump donors and foundations that oppose government regulations.
A documentary that was released last week and features Legates provides a window into the scientific priorities he might bring to NOAA.
The film, “Climate Hustle 2,” is connected to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which has received energy industry funding. It cycles through a familiar miasma of debunked and cherry-picked scientific claims that paint the relatively small number of researchers who doubt the extent of human-caused climate change as Galileo-like figures, while climate scientists publishing peer-reviewed research are portrayed as compromised elites.
The movie is introduced by “Mini AOC,” a girl dressed to resemble Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
“Like, I hope you learned a lot about climate change in this movie; I know I did. Like, I used to not believe in climate change either. Like, I thought it meant Mother Nature was transgendering into Father Nature,” she says in the online presentation, which charged viewers $15 to watch.
Legates features prominently in the film, which compares those who want more aggressive climate policy to the authoritarian government of George Orwell’s “1984” and claims thatthose who question climate science face persecution and jail under organized crime statutes.
The movie claims that people who are worried about climate change want to place limits on the number of children born in America, that steaks will be made illegal and that environmentalism is a “church” that targets heretics.
It portrays climate contrarians as being up against a multibillion-dollar industry of renewable energy companies and environmental groups while ignoring its own connections to the energy industry.
The film also features Legates’ co-author on a number of published studies, astrophysicist Willie Soon, who claims the sun is fueling global warming. Soon says he cried after The New York Times exposed that his research was secretly funded by energy companies and suggests that climate activists should be jailed. Maue’s research on hurricanes is also cited in the film.
Cutting down on carbon emissions would mean that developed nations “would head toward the undeveloped world, and we would bring everybody down to the lowest common denominator,” Legates says in the film. He says teaching young people about human-caused global warming is indoctrinating them into believing a “lie.”
“The idea behind carbon dioxide rationing is that what it essentially says is that to survive as a planet, what we really need to do is not use any energy, and what that’s going to take us back is to a condition where people have the basic necessities of life, food, clothing, shelter and security,” Legates says in the movie
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News
OMG inside the wire
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/trump-climate-change-denial-noaa
w/ Election Day just a single-digit number of days away, the Trump administration is moving on what could be their final chance to undermine government action against climate change. President Donald Trump recently delivered a series of blows to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the New York Times reported, starting with ousting the agency’s acting chief scientist last month.
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NOAA’s chief of staff Erik Noble, a former White House policy adviser and one of several employees recently installed by the Trump administration, removed agency scientist Craig McLean after McLean sent an email to some of the new appointees requesting their acknowledgement of the agency’s rules on scientific integrity, which “prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings.” Noble responded with an ask: “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” McLean answered that as acting chief scientist, he was responsible for ensuring the scientific integrity policy was upheld. The next day, Noble wrote back to tell McLean that “you no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA” and that his replacement had already been appointed.
McLean’s replacement is Ryan Maue, a research meteorologist who, per the Times, “has criticized climate scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.” Maue is not the only climate-change critic among the new political hires: David Legates, a University of Delaware professor who, like Trump, has long questioned the existence of human-caused global warming, joined as deputy assistant secretary last month, a role that reportedly did not exist before his appointment. “The positions that these individuals are in gives them the perfect opportunity to suppress, distort and cherry-pick information to make it whatever the party line is,” Jane Lubchenco, a former Obama-era NOAA administrator, said of the recent appointments. The eleventh-hour replacement is in line with Trump’s desired purge of the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon, post-election plans reported by Axios last week.
The Times notes that the NOAA “has, so far, remained remarkably independent in its ability to conduct research about and publicly discuss changes to the Earth’s climate” under an administration known for rolling back environmental protections and questioning climate science.But the freedom that the agency has enjoyed is now threatened under the administration’s recent changes, which are reportedly aimed at undercutting the National Climate Assessment, an account the government is legally required to issue every four years that sets the standard for American knowledge about climate change and underpins federal regulations to combat it.If Trump is re-elected, further changes at the NOAA reportedly include replacing longtime authors of the report with writers who argue against accepted facts about climate science, as well as “shifting NOAA funding to researchers who reject the established scientific consensus on climate change and eliminating the use of certain scientific models that project dire consequences for the planet if countries do little to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.”
Along with McLean’s removal, the installment of staff who have argued against accepted facts about global warming, and the threatened credibility of the climate assessment, the Trump administration is also placing restrictions on internal and external messages at the agency. The policy change requires all communications—from social media posts to press releases to agency-wide emails—to be approved by political staff at the Commerce Department at least three days before they are released, a move meant to ensure communications “serve the needs of your employees and mission while aligning with the over-arching guidance from the White House and Department,” a memo issued by the department said. The new limits underscore the environmental implications of next week’s vote—and offer a grim preview of what a second Trump term would look like for climate research.
==
aaas sci mag
climate change denialist given top role at major U.S. science agency
By Scott Waldman, E&E NewsSep. 14, 2020
:{:{
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Originally published by E&E News
A controversial researcher who rejects climate science was hired by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for a senior position, in a move suggesting the Trump administration is asserting growing influence over the study of rising temperatures.
David Legates, a geography professor at the University of Delaware, has a long history of questioning fundamental climate science and has suggested that an outcome of burning fossil fuels would be a more habitable planet for humans.
He was hired as deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for observation and prediction, according to a report by NPR.
The move marks an escalation within the Trump administration to undermine the agency's ability to warn the public of climate risks, observers said.
Legates has spent his career denying consensus climate science while elevating the work of fringe researchers and industry-funded scientists. He has claimed that addressing climate change would do more harm than good, and he has said pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would benefit humanity.
When testifying before the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee last year, Legates blamed natural variations for the unprecedented level of warming that scientists say is caused by the release of carbon dioxide from human activity.
"Climate has always changed, and weather is always variable, due to complex, powerful natural forces," Legates said. "No efforts to stabilize the climate can possibly be successful."
Legates has also said that teaching children about climate change was an effort "to satisfy the climate change fearmongering agenda that pervades our society today."
The hiring of Legates comes as wildfires are burning uncontrollably in the West after a period of intensely hot temperatures that many scientists link to climate change. It also comes amid a highly active hurricane season that NOAA research suggests could be a sign of strengthening storms.
Legates' appointment points to the direction the Trump administration will take on climate science if the president is re-elected in November, said Myron Ebell, the former head of President Trump's EPA transition team and the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
It shows that Trump wants to do more than roll back climate policy by actively trying to reshape climate science. Legates is a critic of climate modeling used to predict future conditions. Ebell said Legates could play a significant role in shaping the next National Climate Assessment.
NOAA and NASA are among the world's premier science agencies, and the data collected by their satellites and other equipment has informed climate research around the world."It's a very good sign that after sitting on their hands for three-and-a-half years, the administration is finally going to inject some science into official climate science," Ebell said. "This is the kind of thing we have been pushing for since before Trump was elected, to get real science into the assessment, instead of junk science, which NASA and NOAA have been doing for years."
NASA peer-reviewed research has shown that climate models have largely been accurate in predicting future conditions. The National Climate Assessment, an influential report required by Congress that's released every four years, has identified the unique ways climate change is affecting regions across the country. It has been used in local emergency preparedness, in infrastructure planning, and for development in communities across the country.
The National Climate Assessment is a comprehensive summary of the peer-reviewed science on how climate is changing and is the work of hundreds of scientists and authors around the world, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and one of the report's lead authors. She said attempts to skew the report away from consensus science could harm people.
"Any attempt to censor, skew or limit the information it presents will hamstring the ability of federal and state agencies to make decisions based on sound science and harm every citizen of this country who relies on their government to provide an accurate assessment of the increasingly dangerous risks they face from a changing climate," she said.
Legates was appointed the Delaware state climatologist in 2005 but was later asked to step down by officials with the University of Delaware and was told in 2007 by then-Governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) to stop using the title.
Even as Trump rejects climate change by calling it a hoax and directing his administration to roll back emissions regulations, the climate work at NOAA and NASA has generally been untouched.
Legates is expected to report directly to acting NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs, who was recently criticized in an inspector general report for allowing the agency's science to be politicized. Jacobs was cited by the independent watchdog for his role in "Sharpiegate," when Trump displayed a map with a hand-drawn path during Hurricane Dorian in 2019.
Jacobs was pressured by the White House to criticize the work of his own weather forecasters after they corrected Trump's false claims that Dorian was going to hit Alabama, the report said.
Neither Legates nor an NOAA spokesperson responded to requests for comment.
Legates has taken a dim view of the role the government plays in creating climate policy. He is a frequent guest at events sponsored by the Heartland Institute, which works to muddy public understanding of climate science.
In September 2019, Legates claimed that regulating carbon dioxide was actually a government control program designed to restrict the lives of ordinary Americans.
"Most governments want to keep control, and most governments get bigger and bigger over time," he said. "Carbon dioxide becomes that molecule by which we can take control of your lives, of your efforts, and everything that goes on."
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. Copyright 2020. E&E provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
cnn Washington Post: NOAA taps climate change skeptic to help lead agency
By Devan Cole, CNN
Updated 8:02 PM ET, MonSeptember 14, 2020
Climate science denier appointed to top position at NOAA
Climate science denier appointed to top position at NOAA 03:29
Washington (CNN)A longtime climate change skeptic has been appointed by the Trump administration to help run the federal agency charged with producing "much of the climate research funded" by the government, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
David Legates, who was a professor at the University of Delaware before being tapped by the administration, will serve as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's deputy assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, according to the Post, which said the climate change skeptic will reportdirectly to acting NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs.
CNN has reached out to Legates on the reported appointment.
The executive director/CEO of the nonprofit American Geophysical Union, whose website claims 60,000 members, urged in a blog post Monday evening that the appointment be rescinded.
"With climate change producing raging wildfires in the western United States and devastating hurricanes in the Atlantic, our nation -- and the world -- cannot afford to have our federal government undermining the important work of climate scientists," Randy Fiser wrote. "Legates' appointment not only threatens our ability to combat the climate crisis and protect our planet for future generations, it undermines scientific integrity at NOAA."
The Post said Legates formerly served as Delaware's climatologist but was "forced out" because of his "controversial views" on the issue.
The newspaper said that Legates "had come under pressure from then-Gov. Ruth Ann Minner (D), because of his fossil fuel industry-funded research casting doubt on the science showing that burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels is the main factor behind heating the planet and would lead to dangerous effects such as sea level rise and extreme weather events."
Legates spoke about some of his views during a hearing before the House Natural Resources Committee in 2019, claiming that carbon dioxide isn't the only thing contributing to changes in the planet's temperature.
"Carbon dioxide is not this magic knob that decides the temperature of the planet. In particular, there's an awful lot of other things that happen with it, too. The plant does not warm like a greenhouse, that's simply pure radiation balance," Legates testified during the hearing.
In response to questions from Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California, Legates said that although the planet is experiencing some of the highest recorded temperatures in the last 150 years, it "has little to do with carbon dioxide," but instead has to do with the "demise of the little ice age and warming conditions due to an increasing sun."
Climate scientists largely agree that carbon dioxide is warming the planet, and that human activity, like the burning of fossil fuels for energy, has increased the gas to dangerous levels. Other gasses, like methane, are also responsible for some of the human-causes warming we see today.
NOAA "oversees weather forecasting, climate research and fisheries," according to the Post, and "has until now continued its climate research and communications activities unfettered by political influence," unlike other parts of the administration, like the Environmental Protection Agency, that have "dismissed and sidelined climate scientists or altered their work before publication."
This story has been updated with reaction from the American Geophysical Union.
CNN's Drew Kann contributed to this report.
==
hunter kos
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/fill-the-swamp-team-trump-taps-an-infamous-oil-funded-climate-denier-for-noaa-role
although the election is almost upon us, Team Trump continues to fill the swamp to whatever new high-water mark they can possibly manage, putting the Absolute Least Competent People in charge of every government agency. It continues with the appointment of David Legates to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), where he will act as “deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction.”
Have you heard of David Legates? You might have. He’s a notorious climate change denier. And now he’s evidently being given a key role in “observation and prediction.” Or in other words, a perfect perch from which todo to government climate science what Trump’s team is furiously doing to the nation’s pandemic science: deny that the bad things are happening while claiming that scientific evidence to the contrary is a dangerous plot against Dear Leader and Dear Leader’s rich, dumb friends.
There is literally nothing “conservative” rule cannot turn into a national disaster. And there doesn’t seem to be a single thing Trump’s Republican allies are content to not turn into a national disaster.
NPR speculates that Legates’ new position “suggests he reports directly” to acting NOAA head Neil Jacobs, putting him in a powerful position to sabotage whatever reports the agency’s climate scientists produce. NPR also reports that neither NOAA or Legates was willing to so much as comment on why he was hired or what he will be doing, which is always a near-certain sign that crookedness is afoot. If a government agency is going out of its way to hide what a new hire will be doing, and it’s not the CIA doing the hiring, you can bet it’s because nobody involved thinks the details will make them look good.
as for Legates’ qualifications, they are negative in nature. He is explicitly anti-qualified. Legates has been a climate crank for years, casting doubt on scientific findings with his own research funded by the oil industry and Koch Industries or, less ambitiously, simply by sniping from the sidelines. He is a Heartland Institute associate whose latest writing for the group was a scoffing Paul Driessen-cowritten attack on expert predictions that 100,000 Americans could die in the current pandemic—one that unironically parroted the “cure is worse than the disease” condemnation of shutdown orders,which smoothly segued into the claim that if pandemic experts were giving such outrageous predictions, then What If all of climate science was also similarly false and inflated.
Yeah. Whoops. Funny how that worked out.
Look, fuckers. If you got the pandemic numbers wrong by a factor of All Of Them a mere few months back, you don’t get to feign science-knowing on anything else. Sit your fraudulent asses down, Team Heartland. [Author’s note: It shall now be considered every American’s patriotic duty to use swear words when referencing any of the conservative charlatans whose “cure is worse than the disease” bullshit killed 200,000 Americans and counting. If you’re not calling them crooked fake-ass hoax-spewing shit-for-brains oilfuckers, I’m just saying you might not love America as much as you say you do.]
So that is presumably what we can expect from Legates in his new Trump-enabling role: ostentatiously written but bullshit-heavy feints against government scientists while ignoring his own incompetent death-producing wrongness from oh, say, Last Damn April. It is the climate denier schtick. It is the Heartland schtick on absolutely everything, all the time, and never varies in the slightest.
He and his Heartlandians thought predictions of 100,000 deaths were just crazy talk, in a nationwide pandemic, but don’t you worry: They’re even more paycheck-collectingly sure the climate change that we are currently seeing is a similar hoax, and doing similar unnecessary damage to the Great American Business Model of We Have Money, So You All Can Fuck Off. (Hilariously, Legates’ Heartland biography mentions that he was presented with the “Courage in Defense of Science Award,”without mentioning that the award is, and this is not a joke, issued by the Heartland Institute itself. The group is self-parodying.)
Anyhoo, if you’re looking for a more lengthy description of just how brazenly pigheaded Team Trump’s new “observation and prediction” swamp-creature is, when it comes to pooh-poohing the rest of science while claiming he alone has the Correct Answers, you can go elsewhere for the details. Even as some of the most notorious climate deniers have been forced to alter their stances, given the evidence, to recognize climate change as happening and as a product of human-caused atmospheric changes, Legates has through the years continued to claim that no evidence of human-based change exists at all.
This is less scientific courageousness than apparent ideological commitment. Indeed, his claims tip precariously on the conspiracy-mongering side of things, with pronouncements that carbon dioxide has become “that molecule by which [governments] can take control of our lives, of your efforts, and everything that goes on.” (How …Gohmertian?)
And in his Heartland role, he has certainly been willing to praise the “bold” Donald Trump—a place every one of these dishonest fake-conservative talking point-dispensing charlatans naturally ends up, after selling their soul to all comers for a decade or two.
An aside: It’s uncanny how every die-hard conservative hack has fallen into line behind Trump with no apparent effort, in their eagerness to wage war on the government no matter what methods are used or who the commanding general is. It’s uncanny how every conservative “science” guy slips into the same exact talking points as all the others, to the point where their speeches and claims are indistinguishable, from person to person and year to year. While, of course, claiming that they are the true free-thinkers of the world.
Whatever. Whether the Heartland crew in particular were initially drawn in by Trump’s devotion to tax fraud, racism, and rape or merely willing to overlook those flaws to embrace Trump’s “bold” stance of having whatever policy some random check-cashing hack appearing on the Sean Hannity show tells him to have isn’t known, so we are free to guess. Given the massive quantities of Actual Damn Crime among every category of Trump supporter from “government appointee” to “boat owner,” [guo?] though, we’re probably still underestimating just how closely Trump’s heart and motives resonate with conservatism’s most devoted adherents.
What we do know is that the conservatives surrounding Trump are now making an all-out effort to destroy as much of the nation’s government and expertise as they can manage, before they are each pried back out of the buildings again. The damage will last, at this point, literally forever.
==
omg
please join the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in welcoming David Legates as its new as deputy assistant secretary of Commerce for observation and prediction. According to Science, Legates is a geography professor at the University of Delaware, with "a long history of questioning fundamental climate science and has suggested that an outcome of burning fossil fuels would be a more habitable planet for humans."
Legates has spent his career denying consensus climate science while elevating the work of fringe researchers and industry-funded scientists. He has claimed that addressing climate change would do more harm than good, and he has said pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would benefit humanity.
When testifying before the House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee last year, Legates blamed natural variations for the unprecedented level of warming that scientists say is caused by the release of carbon dioxide from human activity.
"Climate has always changed, and weather is always variable, due to complex, powerful natural forces," Legates said. "No efforts to stabilize the climate can possibly be successful."
Legates has also said that teaching children about climate change was an effort "to satisfy the climate change fearmongering agenda that pervades our society today."
==
==
oreskes:
In 2003, Soon and Baliunas published an article, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, in a small journal called Climate Research. Presenting a review of existing literature rather than new research, the two concluded “the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.” They had, in effect, challenged both Mann and the IPCC, and in so doing presented global warming skeptics with a cause to rally around.
Another version of the paper was quickly published with three additional authors: David Legates of the University of Delaware, and longtime skeptics Craig and Sherwood Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Tempe, Arizona. All have ExxonMobil connections: the Idsos received $40,000 from ExxonMobil for their center in the year the study was published, while Legates is an adjunct scholar at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (which got $205,000 between 2000 and 2003).
Calling the paper “a powerful new work of science” that would “shiver the timbers of the adrift Chicken Little crowd,” Senator Inhofe devoted half of a Senate hearing to it, bringing in both Soon and Legates to testify against Mann. The day before, Hans Von Storch, the editor-in-chief of Climate Research—where the Soon and Baliunas paper originally appeared—resigned to protest deficiencies in the review process that led to its publication; two editors soon joined him. Von Storch later told the Chronicle of Higher Education that climate science skeptics “had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common.” Meanwhile, Mann and 12 other leading climate scientists wrote a blistering critique of Soon and Baliunas’ paper in the American Geophysical Union publication Eos, noting, among other flaws, that they’d used historic precipitation records to reconstruct past temperatures—an approach Mann told Congress was “fundamentally unsound.”
==
cornwall sci creds bs?
The signers of the Open Letter recognize that some radical environmentalists and religious activists oppose Mr. Pruitt because he does not embrace their exaggerated fears of human-induced global warming—fears that go well beyond the empirical evidence crucial to genuine science—or their antipathy to the development of the abundant, reliable, affordable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping whole societies out of poverty and the disease and premature death that invariably accompany it.
Signers therefore urge President-Elect Trump to stand firmly behind his nominee, as they commit themselves to supporting him in the confirmation process that lies ahead. Signers include:
Neil L. Frank, Ph.D. (Meteorology), former Director, National Hurricane Center (1974–1987), Chief Meteorologist, KHOU-TV Houston (1987–2008);
David Legates, Ph.D. (Climatology), Professor of Climatology and Geography, University of Delaware;
Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. (Applied Mathematics), Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Emeritus, MIT;
Willie Soon, Ph.D. (Aerospace Engineering), independent scientist, Cambridge, MA;
Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D. (Meteorology), Principal Research Scientist, Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama, Huntsville, AL, and Lead Scientist, NASA Aqua AMSR-3 Satellite Remote Sensing Program;
James A. Wanliss, Ph.D. (Physics), Professor of Physics, Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC;
Anthony Watts, American Meteorological Society-certified television and radio meteorologist (retired), owner of WattsUpwithThat.com, Chico, CA
“Senate Democrats, at the beck and call of environmental activists, are determined to prevent Mr. Pruitt’s confirmation, painting him as a ‘science denier’ or a ‘climate-change denier’, said Cornwall Alliance Founder and National Spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. “He is neither. He’s a solid, common-sense attorney general who will bring much-needed reform to the EPA.”
==
http://www.desmogblog.com/david-legates-asked-step-down-delaware-state-climatologist
2008 suit: aei, nam, US CoC, Nat'l mining assoc, Am Iron and Steel Inst. 196 joined paslin 2007 ltr to kemptheorne, ref'd soon paper a week before it was published 197 april 9 kempthorne did not want to list, tho his asst Hall (B2 appt) said no doubt about problem 197 foolme2x
legates and soon had worked together before ; not new data, just cherrypick
2003 soon paper ~ Mann by GCMI; sci figuted out how to use tree ring density crrelated to temp; mann extended: blue reconstructed, w/ red for actual and grey to show margin of error 199 foolme
sw
David Legates is a Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware and the Director for the University's Center for Climate Climactic Research. He is also a common contributor to publications released by the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think-tank that strongly opposes climate change regulation. Legates was a speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change (2009) in New York City.
Contents
1 Critics
2 Articles and resources
2.1 Related SourceWatch articles
2.2 References
2.3 External resources
2.3.1 Articles and Presentations by Legates
2.4 External articles
Critics
The Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace have "cited Legates' ties to several groups that have supported or emphasized skeptical stands on climate change while they also received regular contributions from ExxonMobil," including "the National Center for Policy Analysis, which has received about $421,000 from ExxonMobil, and the George C. Marshall Institute, which received $630,000." The Competitive Enterprise Institute, "which also once listed Legates as an adjunct scholar, received more than $2 million from ExxonMobil at a time when the company was publicly fighting climate change policies." All three institutions have published works by Legates. [1]
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
Global warming skeptics
SourceWatch:Project:Creating Articles on Sponsors and Speakers at The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change
GP
https://www.desmogblog.com/david-legates
Professor, University of Delaware
Associate Professor in Climatology, George Marshall Institute
Dr. Legates is a climate change "contrarian" and prolific writer.
"In addition to teaching at Louisiana State University, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia, Dr. Legates has served as chief research scientist in a variety of commercial venues, including the Southern Regional Climate Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the Center for Computational Geosciences in Norman, Oklahoma." (From George Marshall website)
KEY DEEDS
Co-authored a paper with Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, which claimed that temperatures in the 20th Century were not higher than average. Legates later testifed, along with Soon, before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Source: "Earth Last," The American Prospect, 5/7/04
28 July, 2003
Co-author of Indpendent Institute report "New Perspectives in Climate Change: What the EPA Isn't Telling Us" criticizing the EPA's 2001 Climate Action Report.
Source: Independent Institute report 2003
2 May, 2007
Appeared on Glenn Beck's May 2, 2007 special "Exposed: The Climate of Fear"
Source: CNN, Glenn Beck special "Exposed: The Climate of Fear," May 2, 2007
17 May, 2007
His non-peer reviewed analysis of the science of polar bears being threatened by global warming was published on the NCPA website. This analysis has been strongly discredited by much larger and peer reviewed bodies of work.
Source: "Polar Bears on Thin Ice, Not Really!" Brief Analysis
KEY EVENTS
NCPA Earth Day Briefing on Global Warming: 'What Do We Really Know vs. What We Are Told'
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=123-04202004
The relationship of David R. Legates to the event: Speaker
Call to Truth, Prudence and the Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming
http://www.heritage.org/press/events/ev072506b.cfm
The relationship of David R. Legates to the event: Speaker
ORGANIZATIONS
National Center for Policy Analysis
Source: NCPA website 4/04
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Source: CEI website, 3/04
Independent Institute
Source: Independent Institute website 4/04
George C. Marshall Institute
Source: George Marshall Institute website 5/06
Tech Central Science Foundation or Tech Central Station
Source: Tech Central Station Bio - Legates
Interfaith Stewardship Alliance
Source: Heritage Foundation Press Release (2006)
Heartland Institute
Source: Heartland Institute - HeartlandGlobalWarming.org
SOURCES
CEI website, 3/04
http://www.cei.org
NCPA website 4/04
http://www.ncpa.org/
"Earth Last," The American Prospect, 5/7/04
article by Chris Mooney
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=7603
Independent Institute website 4/04
http://www.independent.org/
Tech Central Station Bio - Legates
http://www.techcentralstation.com/biolegatesdavid.html
George Marshall Institute website 5/06
http://www.marshall.org
Heritage Foundation Press Release (2006)
http://www.heritage.org/press/events/ev072506b.cfm
Independent Institute report 2003
http://www.independent.org/publications/policy_reports/detail.asp?type=full&id=5
Heartland Institute - HeartlandGlobalWarming.org
http://www.globalwarmingheartland.org/
CNN, Glenn Beck special "Exposed: The Climate of Fear," May 2, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/beck.climateoffear/
"Polar Bears on Thin Ice, Not Really!" Brief Analysis
National Center for Policy Analysis, No. 551
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba551/
Scientists skeptical of climate-change theories say they are increasingly coming under attack — treatment that may make other analysts less likely to present contrarian views about global warming.
“In general, if you do not agree with the consensus that we are headed toward disaster, you are treated like a pariah,” said William O’Keefe, chief executive officer of the Marshall Institute, which assesses scientific issues that shape public policy.
“It’s ironic that a field based on challenging unproven theories attacks skeptics in a very unhealthy way.”
Two climatologists in Democrat-leaning states, David Legates in Delaware and George Taylor in Oregon, have come under fire for expressing skepticism about the origins of climate change. Oregon Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski is publicly seeking to strip Mr. Taylor, widely known as the state’s climatologist, of his position because of his stance.
“There has been a broad, concerted effort to intimidate and silence them,” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global-warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “It’s the typical politics of the hard left at work. I think these are real threats.”
CEI, which previously listed Mr. Legates as an “adjunct scholar,” has published multiple reports questioning the science behind global-warming theories and has been criticized for accepting donations from companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp.
Mr. O’Keefe said his organization doesn’t deny the existence of global warming but questions the methods used by individuals and groups advocating for new government restrictions to combat the phenomenon.
“We have never said that global warming isn’t real,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “No self-respecting think tank would accept money to support preconceived notions. We make sure what we are saying is both scientifically and analytically defensible.”
In an interview with local NBC affiliate KGW-TV, Mr. Kulongoski, a Democrat, said he hopes to take away Mr. Taylor’s job title because his views do not mesh with the political opinions of most lawmakers in Oregon, including the governor.
“He is Oregon State University’s climatologist. He is not the state of Oregon’s climatologist,” Mr. Kulongoski said. “I just think there has to be somebody that says, ‘This is the state position on this.’ ”
Mr. Taylor was appointed to the position in 1991, when Oregon’s legislature created a state climate office at the college. Mr. Kulongoski wants to change the position to a governor-appointed one. State Sen. Brad Avakian, a Democrat, is sponsoring a bill supporting such a move.
WA TIMES
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/feb/11/20070211-112902-4433r/print/
https://www.desmogblog.com/david-legates
desmog 5/17
no img/vid
David Legates
Credentials
B.S. in Mathematics and Geography. [1]
M.S. degree in Geography-Climatology [1]
Ph.D. in Climatology, University of Delaware. [1]
Background
David R. Legates is a Joint Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware. [2] In 2005, Legates was designated as Delaware's State Climatologist. [3]
Legates was later asked to step down as State Climatologist by the Dean of the University. Although no one at the university was willing to explain the reason for replacing Legates as the State Climatologist, Greenpeace speculates that the reason may have been Legates's close ties with Willie Soon. [23]
In 2007, then-governor Ruth Ann Minner asked Legates to stop using his formal title in public statements on climate change policy. Minner wrote:
“Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration. In light of my position and due to the confusion surrounding your role with the state, I am directing you to offer any future statements on this or other public policy matters only on behalf of yourself or the University of Delaware, and not as state climatologist.” [23]
Legates and Soon have authored numerous papers together, including a controversial 2007 “polar bear study” that was partially funded by Koch Industries. Legates was the co-author on four of the 11 papers that Soon received fossil fuel funding for – and failed to disclose in the paper. [24], [25]
Legates maintains affiliations with numerous conservative think tanks that oppose climate change regulation or are skeptical of man-made global warming, including the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) where he has been an “Adjunct Scholar” and “Environmental Expert.” [11], [12]
Stance on Climate Change
Legates is a signatory of the Oregon Petition, which states that “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
2016
“Climate, however, is not static. It is highly variable, on timescales from years to millennia – for reasons that include, but certainly are not limited to, human activity.” [29]
2000
“Overall, it appears that anthropogenic climate change estimates are still uncertain (given the discrepancies between most models) and scenarios derived from still incomplete GCMs should not be used to assess future climate change or make national assessments.” [4]
Key Quotes
December 8, 2016
“Models have too much sensitivity to climate change, particular with relation to the greenhouse effect, because there’s just too much water in the atmosphere.” [57]
July, 2016
“Students are increasingly being fed climate change advocacy as a surrogate for becoming climate science literate. This makes them easy targets for the climate alarmism that pervades America today.” [29]
“I fear that our climate science curriculum has been co-opted, to satisfy the climate change fear-mongering agenda that pervades our society today. Instead of teaching the science behind Earth’s climate, advocates have taken the initiative to convert it to a social agenda of environmental activism.” [29]
2015
Legates concludes at the Heartland Institute's Tenth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC10) that it is “difficult to continue to argue that the climate, of the US at least, is becoming more extreme.” [21]
2001
Regarding the IPCC: “I am not a reviewer, because reviewing the IPCC allows them to put your name on the list, and then you become one of the 'major scientists,' twenty-five hundred or so, that are supposedly 'all in agreement.' I do know that there was a lot of concern, but not much of that made it into the final document.” [5]
“The IPCC really is a sham because while it gives the impression of being a consensus of scientists, it is simply a political document prepared by advocacy scientists with a large ax to grind.”[5]
Key Deeds
February 23, 2017
David Legates was a signatory of a petition (PDF) organized by Richard Lindzen of the Cato Institute urging President Donald Trump to pull the United States out of the United Nations international convention on climate change (UNFCCC). [61]
“In just a few weeks, more than 300 eminent scientists and other qualified individuals from around the world have signed the petition below,” Lindzen wrote in the letter. [61]
DeSmog investigated the list, and found that only a small handful of the signatories could be considered “even remotely ‘qualified’ or ‘eminent’ — but not in the field of climate science.” The list included individuals “interested in climate,” and one signatory who only identified as an “emailer who wished to sign the petition” while some signers provided no affiliation or address whatsoever. [62]
January 5, 2017
David Legates was a signatory to a Cornwall Alliance open letter supporting Scott Pruitt for EPA Administrator under the Trump administration. [58]
“Mr. Pruitt has also demonstrated understanding of and open-mindedness toward scientific insights crucial to the formulation and implementation of environmental regulation. He is prepared to hear all sides in debates over the risks and benefits of various activities that come under the purview of the EPA,” reads the letter.
On January 12, 2017, Senate Democrats raised conflict of interest concerns regarding Scott Prutt's fossil fuel ties. Pruitt had spent years working to combat the Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan. [59]
In an open letter to the Office of Government Ethics, members of the Senate's environmental panel commented:
“During his tenure as Attorney General of Oklahoma, Mr. Pruitt has blurred the distinction between official and political actions, often at the behest of corporations he will regulate if confirmed to lead EPA,” the letter said. “Public reporting based on documents produced by Freedom of Information Act requests illustrate how Mr. Pruitt and members of his staff have worked closely with fossil fuel lobbyists to craft his office's official positions.”
Pruitt was further grilled on his fossil fuel ties at his confirmation hearing on January 18. [60]
Some notable signatories of the Cornwall Alliance letter, as of January 5, 2017, included:
Tim Ball
Charles G. Battig
E. Calvin Beisner
H. Sterling Burnett
Kenneth Chilton
Donn Dears
John Droz
James E. Enstrom
Joseph Farah
Steve Goreham
Jay Grimstead
William Happer
Richard Land
David Legates
Richard S. Lindzen
Anthony R. Lupo
Rod D. Martin
Anthony J. Sadar
Willie Soon
Roy W. Spencer
David J. Theroux
James A. Wanliss
Anthony Watts
Peter W. Wood
Thomas H. Wysmuller
Benjamin Zycher
December 8, 2016
David Legates was a speaker at the “At the Crossroads III Energy and Climate Summit,” an event co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation and the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). The event was billed as “the premier energy-and-climate policy event in America,” and attracted a range of prominent climate change deniers as well as a range of names connected to Donald Trump and his transition team. [55]
Legates was intended to be on a panel debate, however according to him no one showed up to debate the other side. Legates joked: “I'd like to say that when they saw it was me, they went slinking bank into the swamp from which they came. But the truth is, had any one of these people or had any one of you been in the same situation, they would have not have come here either.” Video and choice quotes below.
Pat alluded, water.” [31:18[vid]
“When you look at water vapor and water in the atmosphere […] it’s everywhere, in all three forms. […] You can see, even atmospheric concentration, which is where carbon dioxide is king, it’s apparently only queen because water vapor has even the bigger impact on atmospheric concentration than carbon dioxide does.“ [32:56]
“I could have been a modeler. Maybe in another world, I am. I don’t know.” [36:35]
Legates argues that models are just too complex: “There’s 40 different kinds of vegetation around the plant. Now, this shows you just how complex these models are. But what I want to point out is how ridiculous this gets […] we’ve got an unbelievable number of variables to try to keep track of, and then we hit it with a little teeny mallet to see what happens and we bet the farm and all the policy of the future on what that model does with that little, teeny nudge, given the fact it's got all of these fundamental problems associated with them.” [37:28]
“Models have too much sensitivity to climate change, particular with relation to the greenhouse effect, because there’s just too much water in the atmosphere.” [38:45]
Doug Domenech, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation's “Fueling Freedom” project, wrote about the proceedings at The Hill. Domenech outlined the common climate change denial message shared among the speakers: “Is climate change real? Yes, it has happened in the past and will happen in the future. Is man making an impact on the climate? Perhaps but in very small ways. But the overarching consensus remains the climate change we are experiencing is by no means catastrophic.” [56]
Speakers included:
Brooke Rollins
Becky Norton Dunlop
Mike Lee
Lamar Smith
Pete Olson
Gary Palmer
James Inhofe
Kathleen Hartnett White
Stephen Moore
Bud Brigham
David Kreutzer
Patrick J. Michaels
Mark P. Mills
Horace Cooper
Patrick Forkin
Allen Gilmer
Dan Byers
Nicolas Loris
Richard Lindzen
Willie Soon
Andrew M. Grossman
William Happer
Craig Idso
Roy Spencer
Patrick J. Michaels
Brooke Rollins
Becky Norton Dunlop
David Legates
James Taylor
July 8 - 10, 2016
David Legates was a speaker at 34th Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, co-sponsored by Access to Energy, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and Physicians for Civil Defense. [19]
Legates's talk was titled “Freedom of Information Act and Academic Freedom in Climate Science.” [19]
DDP listed the following speakers at their event: [19]
Jane Orient
Willie Soon
David Legates
Mohan Doss
Arthur Levy
Geoffrey L. Shapiro
Steven Hatfill
S. Fred Singer
Ken Haapala
Tony Heller (AKA Steven Goddard)
Patrick Frank
Joe Leimkuhler
Donald W. Miller
Howard Hayden
Yuri Maltsev
Stephen Jones
Matthew Robinson
Arthur Robinson
March 31, 2016
Following the U.S. premier of CFACT's “Climate Hustle,” David Legates appeared on a panel alongside Sarah Palin, Lamar Smith, and Brent Bozell, Marc Morano's Climate Depot reports. [35]
Climate Hustle was produced by the Committee for Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and CDR Communications. As noted at Desmog's project, ClimateHustler.org, CFACT has received funding from ExxonMobil, Chevron, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars from foundations associated with Richard Mellon Scaife. CFACT has also received at least $7.8 million in “dark money” through DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund. [32], [33]
CDR Communications was behind the 2010 video by the Cornwall Alliance titled Resisting the Green Dragon, which claimed environmentalism was a “false religion” and a “global government” power grab. Chris Rogers of CDR Communictions is also chairman of The James Partnership, the umbrella arm that includes the Cornwall Alliance as one of its projects and pays the salary of Calvin Beisner, Cornwall’s founder and spokesperson. [34]
Individuals listed as “Key Scientists” in Climate Hustle include the following: [32]
Robert Giegengack
Judith Curry
Richard Tol
Caleb Rossiter
Ivar Giaever
Roy Spencer
Daniel B. Botkin
Patrick Moore
Don J. Easterbrook
Robert M. Carter
John Theon
Dennis Rancourt
William M. Briggs
Roger Pielke Sr.
Walter Cunningham
Patrick J. Michaels
Lord Christopher Monckton
Anthony Watts
Leighton Steward
Philip Stott
Will Happer
June 11-12, 2015
David Legates was a speaker on Panel 1: “Climate Science,” at the Heartland Institute’s Tenth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC10) in Washington, D.C., with Willie Soon and Patrick Michaels. [20]
View David Legates’ Panel 1 presentation at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC10, below: [21]
[vid]
Legates was also presented the “Courage in Defense of Science Award” at the conference. [28]
May 12, 2015
David Legates is a signatory to an open letter to Pope Francis on climate change. The letter invites the Pope to reconsider his views on climate change before his upcoming encyclical letter on the environment, which is widely expected to call for measures to prevent climate change in the interests of the world’s poor. [43]
The open letter was coordinated and signed by Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance. According to the letter, “Good climate policy must recognize human exceptionalism, the God-given call for human persons to 'have dominion' in the natural world (Genesis 1:28), and the need to protect the poor from harm, including actions that hinder their ascent out of poverty.” [17]
Another excerpt below:
”[…] the [climate] models are wrong. They therefore provide no rational basis to forecast dangerous human-induced global warming, and therefore no rational basis for efforts to reduce warming by restricting the use of fossil fuels or any other means.”
Judith Curry comments on her blog Climate Etc. that “Arguably the most effective 'pushback' [to the encyclical letter] comes from Cal Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance, who coordinated An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change.” [18]
April, 2015
David Legates co-authored a report, that has been cited in the media to claim that the 97% consensus is “bogus.” According to The Daily Signal, Legates, Willie Soon, William Briggs, and Christopher Monckton “found that a mere 1 percent of the 4,014 papers expressing an opinion on climate change claim that the majority of warming since 1950 is man-made.” [30], [31]
January, 2015
David Legates is a co-author, along with Willie Soon, William M. Briggs, and Christopher Monckton, of a paper in Science Bulletin titled “Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model” (PDF). [22]
The paper concludes that “it appears that the impact of anthropogenic global warming over the next century, and even as far as equilibrium many millennia hence, may be no more than one-third to one-half of IPCC’s current projections.”
June, 2014
In June 2014, Legates testified at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee about droughts and agriculture, stating: “My overall conclusion is that droughts in the United States are more frequent and more intense during colder periods. Thus, the historical record does not warrant a claim that global warming is likely to negatively impact agricultural activities.” [38]
March, 2013
In March 2013, Legates appeared on the same stage as Willie Soon at a Georgetown, Delaware debate on global warming. Legates told the audience, “There is no clear signal of sea-level rise in Delaware.” [37]
March, 2009
David Legates was a speaker at the Heartland Institute's 2009 International Conference on Climate Change. The conference is described as “a platform for scientists and policy analysts from around the world who question the theory that global warming is a crisis.” [39]
icccc vid]
The conference's sponsors have received over $40 million from oil companies and right-wing foundations such as Koch Foundations and Scaife Foundations. One of the main purposes of the conference was to cast doubt on the findings of the most recent Assessment Report by the Independent Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.
October, 2009
David Legates signed an open letter to the EPA opposing the endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. According to the letter, submitted to EPA administrator Lisa P. Jackson, “there is no known credible reason why further increasing CO2 levels will cause harm in the future.” [36]
May, 2008
Appeared in a video titled “Unstoppable Solar Cycles: The Real Story of Greenland” alongside prominent skeptic Willie Soon. The video, produced by the Idea Channel and funded by the Heartland Institute, contends that solar cycles are the sole driver behind climate change.
The Heartland Institute distributed over 11,000 brochures and DVDs to Canadian Schools, with their goal being for students to receive a “'balanced' education about an 'important and controversial issue'.” [6]
Rie Oldenburg, curator of the Narsaq Museum in Southern Greenland, says she was told that she was contributing to a video on Norse history. But she was horrified to learn that the interview was used to contribute to a DVD that denies the human contribution to climate change.
March 30, 2008
David Legates spoke at an event sponsored by the Heartland Institute. His speech was titled “Is Our Climate Changing? Are We to Blame?”: [40]
February, 2007
Legates was reportedly ordered by the Governor of Delaware to stop using the title of “State Climatologist” when making statements about global warming. Legates used the “State Climatologist” tag when he co-wrote a friend-of-the-court legal brief opposing an attempt by Delaware and other states to force the federal regulation of greenhouse gases. The brief was filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. [7]
In response to the use of the title “State Climatologist,” Delaware Governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) wrote to Legates:
“Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration. In light of my position and due to the confusion surrounding your role with the state, I am directing you to offer any future statements on this or other public policy matters only on behalf of yourself or the University of Delaware, and not as state climatologist.”
February 24, 2016
David Legates's work is featured in Shattered Consensus, a book comprised of “nine expert essays on global warming,” describes the George C. Marshall Institute. Legates was one of the four authors who discussed their chapters at a Marshall Institute event. [27] In addition to Legates, authors included Ross McKitrick, Patrick Michaels, and Oliver W. Frauenfeld. Slides from Legate's presentation can be viewed here (PDF). [26]
July, 2006
Legates was a speaker at an event celebrating the release of a paper by the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA) titled “A Call to Truth, Prudence and the Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming.” Authors of the paper include prominent climate change skeptics including Calvin Beisner, Paul K. Driessen, Ross McKitrick and Roy W. Spencer. [8]
“A Call to Truth” refutes, on a point-by-point basis, an open letter by another Evangelical organization titled “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action” which supports the existence of man-made climate change. [41], [42]
The ISA paper contends that “All of these assumptions [by 'An Evangelical Call to Action'] … are false, probably false, or exaggerated.”
According to their website, the ISA is “a coalition of religious leaders, clergy, theologians, scientists, academics, and other policy experts committed to bringing a proper and balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development.” The group was renamed in 2007 as the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.
2003
Legates was a “review editor” at the journal “Climate Research” when the controversial Soon/Baliunas paper attacking Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick was published. He went on to co-author an update to the paper, publishing in discredited journal Energy and Environment with Soon, Baliunas, and both Craig and Sherwood Idso.
According to Legates' testimony to the Senate Environment and Public Works committee in July 2003: [54]
“I will say with respect to Climate Research, Otto Kinne, who is director of Inter-Research, the parent organization of Climate Research, asked Chris de Freitas who was the editor who served on the Soon and Baliunus papers, and I can relay this because I am a review editor of Climate Research so I am familiar with what has been taking place.”
2003
David Legates appeared to be one of the recipients of an email Willie Soon sent to a group of friends in 2003, planning to criticize the IPCC’s AR4 report before it was written. [44]
Affiliations
George C. Marshall Institute — “Expert.” [9]
Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) — Listed as “personnel” since 2012. [10]
National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) — “Adjunct Scholar” and “Environmental Expert.” [11], [12]
Independent Institute — “Research Fellow.” [13]
Heartland Institute — “Expert.” [14]
Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP) —Past “Allied Expert.” [15]
Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)— “Adjunct Scholar*” and contributor.
*ExxonSecrets and other sources have listed Legates as an “Adjunct Scholar” with the CEI, but this information has been since removed from the CEI website. Legates is listed among CEI's “alumni, and CEI currently maintains a blank contributor page for a “David Legates.” [16], [45]
Funding
The George C. Marshall Institute (now the CO2 Coalition) has received over $865,000 in funding from oil-giant ExxonMobil. [46], [47]
The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) has received over $615,900 from oil giant ExxonMobil. [48]
The NCPA also has a history with tobacco company Philip Morris. For example, in a 1998 Philip Morris document titled “third-party public policy activity,” the NCPA is listed as an anti-government regulations group that “will write op-eds.” [49]
The Independent Institute has received $85,000 in grants from ExxonMobil as well as grants from Philip Morris. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, a charitable branch of the oil-services giant Koch Industries, also contributed $160,000 between 1995 and 2001. [50], [51], [52]
The Heartland Institute has received over $676,500 from oil-giant ExxonMobil since 1998. [53]
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has received $2,005,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. They have also received signification funds from the American Petroleum Institute as well as from the oil-service giant Koch Industry's family foundations. [45]
The CEI receives some of the highest levels of corporate funding of any conservative think-tank, and ExxonSecrets reports them to be “at the center of the global warming misinformation campaign.”[45]
Publications
“Polar bears of western Hudson Bay and climate change: Are warming spring air temperatures the ‘ultimate’ survival control factor?” Ecological Complexity 4 (2007) 73–84. M.G. Dyck, W. Soon, R.K. Baydack, D.R. Legates, S. Baliunas, T.F.Ball, L.O. Hancock.
“New Perspectives on Climate Change: What the EPA Isn't Telling Us.” The Independent Institute. July 28, 2003. S. Fred Singer, John R. Christy, Robert E. Davis, David R. Legates, Wendy M. Novicoff.
“New Perspectives on Climate Change” (PDF) indicts the IPCC, describing any research done by them as “misleading, inaccurate, unreliable, or simply wrong.” The Independent Institute's report summary describes Legates as a “internationally recognized…authority on climate change.”
Washington Roundtable on Science & Public Policy: “Global Warming and the Hydrologic Cycle: How are the Occurrence of Floods, Droughts, and Storms Likely to Change?” (PDF) April 14, 2004. George C. Marshall Institute.
Resources
“David R. Legates.” Profile at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/v0qzg
“People | David R. Legates,” University of Delaware. Archived February 25, 2012. Achive.is URL: https://archive.is/41H4R
“Prof named state climatologist,” U Daily, September 23, 2005. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/LElJF
David R. Legates. “Climate Models and the National Assessment,” The Marshall Institute, November 10, 2000. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/QyVIM
Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy Climate Forecasts, Global Warming and the National Assessment” (PDF). January 23, 2001. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
“Canadian schools sent brochures, DVDs from climate change skeptics,” Canwest News Service, May 4, 2008. Archived October 8, 2015. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/wSQje
“Delaware climatologist asked to stop using title in official capacity,” Greenwire, February 22, 2007. Republished by the Heat is Online. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/rmObp
“Call to Truth, Prudence and the Protection of the Poor: An Evangelical Response to Global Warming,” The Heritage Foundation, July 25, 2006. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Ar2di
“Dr. David R. Legates,” George C. Marshall Institute. Archived October 9, 20012. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Vjgra
“Personnel,” Science & Public Policy Institute Website. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/IbR98
“Climatologist Exposes Cracks In Global Warming Foundation,” National Center for Policy Analysis, July 12, 2004. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/JYs7a
“David R. Legates,” Profile at the National Center for Policy Analysis. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/v0qzg
“Research Fellow: David R. Legates,” The Independent Institute. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/foNfB
“Heartland Experts: David Legates,” The Heartland Institute. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/yaHr5
“NRSP People,” Natural Resources Stewardship Project. Archived February 13, 2007. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/2dBsA
“Alumni,” Competitive Enterprise Institute. Archived April 4, 2008. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/JvQjW
“An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change,” Cornwall Alliance, April 27, 2015. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/rcUsx [repeat s43]
Judith Curry. “Pope Francis, climate change, and morality,” Climate Etc. April 29, 2015. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/gIRZN
“DDP 34th Annual Meeting – July 2016,” Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. Archived July 22, 2016. Backup archive url: http://archive.is/oRn3j
“Speakers,” Heartland Institute. Archived June 30, 2015. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/lpiqu
“Panel 1: Climate Science with Willie Soon, Ph.D., David Legates, Ph.D., and Patrick Michaels, Ph.D.,” UStream video. Archived video on file at DeSmog.
“Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model” (PDF), Sci. Bull. (2015) 60(1):122–135. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
Ben Jervey. “David Legates Asked To Step Down As Delaware State Climatologist,” DeSmog, July 14, 2011.
Brendan DeMelle. “Koch Industries' Extensive Funding of Climate Denial Industry Unmasked,” DeSmog, March 29, 2010.
Lisa Song. “A Guide To Willie Soon's Climate Research Funded by Fossil Fuel Companies,” InsideClimate News, February 23, 2015. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/2fXjv
“Precipitation and the Precipitation and the 'Enhanced' Hydrologic Cycle” (PDF), Marshall Institute. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
“Shattered Consensus: Four Authors Discuss Their New Book on Climate Science,” George C. Marshall Institute, February 24, 2006. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/HcIlO
“David Legates, Courage in Defense of Science Award, ICCC10,” YouTube video uploaded by user The Heartland Institute, July 2, 2015. Archived .mp4 on file at DeSmog.
David R. Legates. “Climate science or climate advocacy?” Watts Up With That? July 22, 2016. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/aiaMQ
“Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: A Rejoinder to Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change,” Science & Education, April 2015, Volume 24, Issue 3, pp 299–318. Retrieved from SpringerLink. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/oHqcJ
Nicolas Loris. “Debunking Leonardo DiCaprio’s Climate Change Documentary,” The Daily Signal, November 10, 2016. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/6ee4B
“Background on Climate Hustle Host and Producers,” ClimateHustle.org. Archived .pdf on file at Desmog.
Homepage, climatehustler.org. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/NB9qn
Graham Readfearn. “The Evangelical Christian Climate Deniers Behind Marc Morano’s Climate Hustle Documentary,” Desmog, November 19, 2015.
Marc Morano. “'Climate Hustle' goes to DC: Skeptical film to premiere on Capitol Hill; Panel with Gov. Sarah Palin, Brent Bozell & Appearance by Warmist Bill Nye,” Climate Depot, March 31, 2016. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/n2q7P
“Many leading scientists tell the EPA to think again by The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley,” Climate Realists, February 28, 2010. Archived November 25, 2016 Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Bc0Nc
Jeff Montgomery. “Climate change skeptics say 'sick' science distorts facts,” The News Journal, March 19, 2013. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/s0cvh
Jeff Montgomery. “UD's David Legates caught in climate change controversy,” The News Journal, February 27, 2015. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/3WyLx
“David Legates, ICCC2,” International Conferences on Climate Change. Archived .mp4 on file at DeSmog.
Cornwall Alliance Newsletter (June 19, 2009). Archived July 31, 2013. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Mbx6E
“Climate Change an Evangelical Call To Action,” Christians and Climate an Evangelical Call To Action. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/8poLg
“An Open Letter to the Signers of 'Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action' and Others Concerned About Global Warming” (PDF), Cornwall Alliance, April 15, 2009. Archivd .pdf on file at DeSmog.
“An Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change,” Cornwall Alliance, April 27, 2015. Archived November 25, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/rcUsx [repeat s17]
“Willie Soon email to climate deniers IPCC 4th Assessment Attack,” Greenpeace USA. Archived October 23, 2014. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/Nx0y5
“FACTSHEET: COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, CEI,” ExxonSecrets. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/P4xss
Gayathri Vaidyanathan. “ADVOCACY:Think tank that cast doubt on climate change science morphs into smaller one,” ClimateWire, December 10, 2015. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/fTPko
“FACTSHEET: GEORGE C. MARSHALL INSTITUTE, GMI,” ExxonSecrets. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/iFBDa
“FACTSHEET: NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS, NCPA,” ExxonSecrets. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/XWRcV
“Re: Third-party Public Policy Activity,” Philip Morris Records, April, 1998.. Retrieved from Truth Tobacco Industry Documents. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
“FACTSHEET: INDEPENDENT INSTITUTE,” ExxonSecrets. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/IzTDM
“Dear Derek,” The Independent Institute, January 6, 1995. Retreived from the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents library. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
“Independent Institute,” SourceWatch. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/xe6jM
“FACTSHEET: HEARTLAND INSTITUTE, HEARTLAND,” ExxonSecrets. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/OYlvz
“CLIMATE HISTORY AND THE SCIENCE UNDERLYING FATE, TRANSPORT, AND HEALTH EFFECTS OF MERCURY EMISSIONS” (PDF), July 29, 2003. Archived .pdf on file at DeSmog.
“At the Crossroads III: Energy and Climate Policy Summit,” Heritage Foundation, December 8, 2016. Archived December 22, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/AKaKq
Doug Domenech. “Climate change: Speaking truth to power,” The Hill, December 13, 2016. Archived December 21, 2016. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/zAEH5
“Part 5 - At the Crossroads III: Energy and Climate Policy Summit,” YouTube video uploaded by user The Heritage Foundation, December 9, 2016. Archived .mp4 on file at DeSmog.
“Open Letter Supporting Scott Pruitt for EPA Administrator,” Cornwall Alliance, January 5, 2017. Archived January 19, 2017. Archive.is URL: https://archive.is/xMash
Ben Jervey. “Mapping EPA Nominee Scott Pruitt's Many Fossil Fuel Ties,” DeSmog, January 13, 2017.
Ben Jervey and Steve Horn. “EPA Nominee Scott Pruitt Gets Grilled on Fossil Fuel Ties at Confirmation Hearing,” DeSmog, January 18, 2017.
“PETITION” (PDF), February 23, 2017. Richard Lindzen. PDF Archived at DeSmog.
Graham Readfearn. “Climate Science Denier Richard Lindzen's List of 300 “Scientists” Sent to Trump Is the Usual Parade of Non-Experts,” DeSmog, February 27, 2017.
Other Resources
“David Legates,” SourceWatch Profile.
ExxonSecrets Factsheet: David R. Legates.
“David Legates,” Wikipedia entry.
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