Tag: DOGE

I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find gambling going on in here

Heck, it’s like Casablanca, only with the weather. Shocking that gambling was going on in Rick’s place. I guess so are tornadoes.

https://youtu.be/vxnpY0owPkA

From CFACT

By Joe Bastardi

“There have been several comments on social media about the lack of balloon launches on Thursday, along with the usual snide political remarks claiming that the DOGE cuts are impacting the accuracy of the forecast.”

As if there is shock that could have been prevented except for the cuts.

Heck, it’s like Casablanca, only with the weather. Shocking that gambling was going on in Rick’s place. I guess so are tornadoes.

As far as blaming the administration for cuts, round up the usual suspects

Before I go on, I want to say that some of the cuts that have been made are ones I am against. I believe much of this is collateral damage from the aggressive push of the climate change agenda. The new team came in with a blunt hammer, and as a result, some very valuable research has been cut. I had no input on any of this.

Again, if NOAA had been actively promoting its weather-related research and forecasting progress so the public was aware of it — rather than constantly yelling about climate change — the backlash we’re now seeing might not have happened.

It has hit me hard personally: the Physical Science Division Reanalysis is no longer being updated. Interesting, isn’t it? The biggest advocate for using the past to counter the hysteria about the future has been kicked in the gut by these cuts — along with many other old-school, analog-based forecasters.

I can only imagine what some of the other researchers (tornadoes, hurricanes, etc) must be thinking.

But since I did a case study on this tornado event for all to see, I feel I have the gravitas to speak on this matter,

The moaning and groaning about the lack of balloon launches for the Thursday outbreak is nonsense. By extension, so is bashing that aspect of cuts.

You could see this coming, and I showed this a week ago.

Predictability too low?

Speak for yourself. Actually, since they did not take meteo 434 at PSU 50 years ago, for whoever is putting this out, it was. But not if you used pattern recognition and had the relatively simple parameters to line this up.

The outside red line is a slight risk, the second area enhanced, the inside was moderate.

This is what happened btw

Without getting too deep into the details, the parameters I teach use simple surface wet-bulb temperatures and sea-level pressures in March, April, and May as quick-and-dirty ways to predict this.

Why? Because if you have those values at the surface, you’re very likely to have the necessary support throughout the entire atmospheric column. The method relies on understanding the typical relationships between average sea-level pressure (SLP) and wet-bulb temperatures at this time of year, and what it takes to produce them.

So when you see a strong trough trying to emerge into increasingly warm, moist air, and you understand what the overall pattern is doing, you can quickly sketch out the broad outlines of what’s coming. Simple, right?

Actually, yes — and that’s exactly the problem today. If it’s simple, anyone can do it, and that threatens the authority of those who want to keep forecasting mysterious and complicated.  Some is, but not all.. I can teach this method to any high school freshman. Then he’ll start posting forecasts online and drive a lot of people crazy who don’t want some kid challenging their forecasts.

I say bring it on. Heck in wrestling, we have high school kids beating world champions. So why not in the weather?

In any case, a slight risk is where Sea Level Pressure is below 1008, and wet bulbs above 65. The lower the pressure and the higher the wet bulb, obviously, the higher the risk as the air is more buoyant.

So if you are looking at this pattern a week away ( like I showed in the blizzard case study), you set it up and hone in as you get closer

No balloon measurements in the area that got hit the hardest, right?

Well, why should that be an issue 6 hours away, it sure wasn’t if you were looking at the old school method. It was what I anticipated a week before would develop.

Look at the SLP forecast for 18z

Never mind the wet bulbs, the dew points were way up there ( meaning the wet bulbs were even higher)

So if you dissected the pattern a week out and suspected this setup was going to develop, you didn’t need balloon launches the morning of the event to tell you to watch out.

Obviously, our risk assessment a week in advance was higher than the NWS risk on the day of the event — we were already at moderate risk, while they only went to enhanced

But maybe if they used the criteria, simply having wet bulb and pressure, they would have had it. Since wet bulbs got into the 70s and pressures under 1000 mb, that is naturally a higher risk than the start of the risk area at 1008 and 65.

But you don’t need balloon launches on the day of the event to tell you what could break loose. The required parameters were already in place well before these outbreaks.

We’re in the heart of tornado season, and the overall pattern — with the MJO in Phase 1, which is historically linked to more extreme weather in the U.S. — was clearly in place. As I demonstrated for anyone who was paying attention, you could see it coming a week out, and on the day of the event, it was all there.

But this is part and parcel of what has happened in my field. Comments like “people care more about illegal immigration than cutting weather balloon launches” are perfect examples. Or the idea that launching more balloons on the day of an event — even when all the key parameters are already in place using methods developed 50 years ago — would have somehow made a real difference.

So, they circle back to politics. The notion that weather and climate are simply political tools, or that meteorologists are complaining about missing balloon data when a pattern has been screaming “look out” from a week in advance (and into next week), shows just how far we’ve sunk.

The weather and climate should never be dragged into the cesspool of politics. That happens largely because political operatives can’t keep their hands off anything they believe might advance their agenda. Look at what politics has done to our field. Think about the implications of people claiming that because a couple of balloon launches were cut, an otherwise obvious forecast was compromised. Do you think for one second that if weather and climate hadn’t been dragged into that cesspool, this event — like so many others — would have drawn any political comments at all?

Heh, they came into our house, I didn’t go into theirs.

Again, I am dead set against some of the cuts I’ve seen, and I’ve said so loudly. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t been asked to comment on them — even as the most experienced daily private-sector global forecaster. I don’t know.

But I do know this: the recently announced EPA advisory committee does not include a single global, everyday forecaster. My question is simple — how in the world are you going to make sound decisions about the environment without anyone who actually forecasts the weather, when weather is what happens in the environment every single day?

But as far as the lack of balloon launches is concerned, given the pattern and how clearly you could see this setup coming from far out, complaining about it and then linking it to political bashing is absurd. You did not need balloon launches to see this coming.

Yeah, shocking that on April 23rd, with the pattern so obvious, tornadoes occurred and weren’t predicted perfectly because of the lack of balloon launches.

I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find tornadoes going on around the US in April. If only we had launched more weather balloons.

The EPA slush fund for climate grifters

Politicians and their allies have been in a lather for months over President Trump and his administration, especially Elon Musk and his “DOGE” operation. The reason? They are exposing bureaucratic slush funds to the public, including a big one at the Environmental Protection Agency.

From CFACT

By Peter Murphy

Politicians and their allies have been in a lather for months over President Trump and his administration, especially Elon Musk and his “DOGE” operation. The reason? They are exposing bureaucratic slush funds to the public, including a big one at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The discovery in February of billions of dollars of payments to enrich favored climate groups and causes revealed a sordid taxpayer-funded scheme. The administration’s efforts to stop this gravy train threaten the climate house of cards built up for decades.

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman from New York, revealed that $20 billion of the $27 billion climate slush fund known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was paid by the Biden administration to eight organizations. The purpose was for them to distribute to numerous other organizations for climate projects such as electric vehicle loans, solar panels, and much else in search of a climate crisis.

“This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight,” Zeldin said. In so doing, Zeldin described the scheme as “self-dealing and conflicts of interest, (and) unqualified recipients.”

Designated recipients of this massive taxpayer largess promptly sued in Federal District Court. Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled in April that the EPA cannot freeze or claw back the funds under contract.

The administration immediately appealed the ruling by claiming the court has no jurisdiction and cannot overrule the executive branch’s authority to cancel a contract, which other courts have permitted involving other issues and agencies.

The following day, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals halted Chutkan’s order to disburse the funds to the climate groups in order to allow time for the case to be heard in full.

Government handouts to favored organizations, which distribute to other organizations, are like taxpayer cash flowing downstream as these ostensibly private entities act as bureaucracies to further a political agenda.

Great gig, if you can get it.

Just ask Stacey Abrams, a two-time losing gubernatorial candidate in Georgia. She is an adviser to Power Forward Communities, which had $100 in the bank until it was awarded a $2 billion grant under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. What does $2 billion buy? A limitless combination of thousands of climate advocates, overpaid executives, media buys, lawsuits, corporate solar panel and other giveaways (which dutifully donate to climate politicians), EV subsidies, you name it. 

In the non-profit, non-governmental organization world, $2 billion is an extraordinary largess and is only a sample of government efforts to perpetuate the scam.

Two programs within the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a.k.a. the “Green Bank,” are the National Clean Investment Fund and the Clean Communities Investment Accelerator, which doled out $20 billion in funding for eight recipients. One of these recipients is the Climate United Fund, a coalition of non-profit climate entities that “invest” in green projects to lower the planet’s temperature and stop hurricanes and all that.

Regarding government handouts, however, “investing” is a complete misnomer since spending taxpayer money on connected organizations and favored projects carries no risk to the “investors.” Instead, the taxpayers are on the hook.

Then-President Biden and his EPA head, Michael Regan, were determined to spend every last dollar appropriated by the Inflation Reduction Act, a massive climate change bill that disbursed taxpayer cash for a range of “green” energy projects and climate groups.

After Trump won the election, the rush to spend the money accelerated recklessly, which an EPA adviser revealed in December to Project Veritas. “Get the money out as fast as possible before they (the Trump administration) come in … It’s like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge,” the EPA official said. “It was an insurance policy against Trump winning.”

“Insurance policy” — meaning if Trump won the election, the climate movement could feed off the billions in taxpayer cash to keep payroll, “invest” in projects, run ads, litigate, and pay their hotel and other expenses at conferences and talkathons worldwide to sound the alarm about how climate change is an existential threat to mankind and the planet.

Slush funds of this magnitude doled out to climate interests are about financing their ability to wield power and influence, including against a new presidential administration that is onto the fraud of this climate industrial complex.

Zeldin and the Justice Department are determined to terminate this mass climate grifting scheme. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin declared.

We can only hope, but it remains to be seen. The cacophony of this mass industry feeding at this climate trough means it won’t give up so easily.

This article originally appeared at DC Journal

NASA chief will wind down climate alarm shop

Claiming no privileged information, this writer is enormously optimistic that incoming Trump pick to head NASA, Jared Isaacman, will terminate funding of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in concert with DOGE waste-cutting, space program redirection, and pro-drilling energy priorities.

Jared Isaacman

From CFACT

By Larry Bell

Claiming no privileged information, this writer is enormously optimistic that incoming Trump pick to head NASA, Jared Isaacman, will terminate funding of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in concert with DOGE waste-cutting, space program redirection, and pro-drilling energy priorities.

The Wall Street Journal purports to have a clearer inside picture “based upon interviews with nearly three dozen people close to Elon Musk, the Trump administration, NASA, lawmakers and SpaceX,” one which comports with my prediction that a shifted critical path emphasis to ambitious human Mars programs will redirect vital funding away from readily expendable climate research and related green energy agendas.

According to the Journal, President Trump announced the appointment soon after Musk reached out to Isaacman, the payments entrepreneur who has flown to orbit with SpaceX and invested in the company asking if he would take the job.

All three, Trump, Musk and Isaacman, share independently wealthy billionaire backgrounds and uncommonly far-forward-looking societal goals.

During his joint Congress inauguration speech, Trump said that he would launch Americans to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

Musk said in a mid-March Fox News interview, “We are going to be able to take astronauts to Mars and ultimately build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars. That is the long-term goal of the company: make life multi-planetary.”

Isaacman, the founder of Shift4, a payment-processing company that partly funded the SpaceX “Polaris Dawn” suborbital mission and flew aboard as a crew member told the Wall Street Journal in 2021 “You have to go past where we’re comfortable.”

After Trump announced his nomination to have him lead NASA on an X post, he said, “I can confidently say this second space age has only just begun.”

Dialing back to NASA GISS, it’s difficult to imagine that any of the three dedicated space exploration action figures will wish to continue to divert any more of the agency’s annual $25 billion budget to support climate alarmism by an ugly poster child for DOGE waste spending reform.

Some will recall that GISS, a small climate modeling shop located in a Manhattan office building, was originally used to give unwarranted credibility to a claimed human-caused global warming crisis from the beginning.

Former GISS Director James Hansen first gained worldwide attention in 1988 following his star witness testimony before then-Senator Al Gore’s Committee on Science, Technology and Space when he stated with 99% certainty that temperatures had, in fact, increased and that there had been some greenhouse warming, although he then made no direct connection between the two.

This observation was consistent with concerns about a particularly warm summer that year in some U.S. regions.

Over time, Hansen’s pronouncements became ever more dramatic.

In a Dec. 6, 2005, presentation to the American Geophysical Union he stated that the Earth’s climate was already reaching a tipping point that will result in the loss of Arctic ice as we know it, with sea levels rising as much as 80 feet during this century, thus flooding coastal areas. He warned that this could be halted only if greenhouse gas emissions were reduced within the next 25 years.

Hansen was subsequently arrested three times in climate protests while holding that NASA position, yet he was never fired.

In 2011, Seven Apollo astronauts, along with two former NASA Johnson Space Center directors and several former senior management-level technical experts, lodged formal complaints to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. regarding the dismal and embarrassing state of the agency’s climate science programs.

An April 10 letter admonished the agency for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change, while neglecting basic empirical evidence that called the theory into question.

The group also charged that NASA in general, and GISS in particular, had failed to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change, and was relying too heavily upon complex climate models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions.

It specifically asked that GISS, headed by Hansen, be required to “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites.”

As Gavin Schmidt who succeeded Hansen as GISS director told the renowned journal Science in 2021, “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this admission” that the models can’t be trusted as a policy instrument because “You end up with numbers for even the near‐term that are insanely scary — and wrong.”

So there, you have it.

If GISS candidly admits that it can’t be trusted to predict the future of climate, much less any possible basis for believing humans can change any outcomes by switching from fossil energy to windmills and electric vehicles, why should NASA allow such irrelevant nonpredictions to influence future human expeditions to Mars and beyond?

Isn’t it time to make America’s once visionary and inspirational space program great again too?

This article originally appeared at NewsMax

“Save NOAA Stop DOGE” Climate Protest

Want to know why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration needs a massive downsizing? Because it is a political organization masquerading as a weather forecast center. And the climate lobby is upset at the clean-up.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

Want to know why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration needs a massive downsizing? Because it is a political organization masquerading as a weather forecast center. And the climate lobby is upset at the clean-up.

Monday between 10:00 am and noon eastern, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network / Action Fund is hosting a “Hands off NOAA!” rally at NOAA’s headquarters in Silver Springs, MD. Here is CCAN’s announcement:

The Trump Administration and Elon Musk continue to recklessly demonize dedicated federal workers who provide critical services every day. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who provide critical services from the National Weather Service to seafood safety is not immune from DOGE’s intimidation tactics to fulfill the promise of Project 2025 to eliminate NOAA.

But we are NOT going to sit back and watch.

On Monday, March 3rd at 10am Congressional leaders and advocates will gather at NOAA HQ in Silver Spring, MD (right at the Silver Spring Metro stop) to tell Trump and Musk to keep their hands off of NOAA.

The call-to-action continued:

Firing hundreds of NOAA workers would have severe impacts on day-to-day life for Americans. We depend on NOAA workers every day to warn us of weather events, protect our commercial fisheries, support first responders when disasters happen, and much more. We have already seen the damage Trump and Musk have done to other critical agencies. We have seen how families and communities have paid a heavy price for so-called “efficiency.” NOAA must be defended!

On the contrary, NOAA workers with their nice severance package can find employment in the private sector, even if it means a career change. Foundations can take over functions considered vital to human wellbeing to reemploy the displaced. But climate lobbying is over on the taxpayer’s dime.

————

Sarah Guy, executive director of Ocean Defense Initiative, stated on social media.

💙💙

 is with NOAA employees who lost their jobs today as DOGE sows’ chaos across federal agencies. But as Chesapeake Climate Action Network says here, “we are NOT going to sit back and watch.”

I commented:

The private sector can pick up the NOAA ex’s who add value to weather forecasting services, and foundations can underwrite research. Others should alter career paths into teaching or who-knows-what.

Political jobs are risky, and the US is broke! www.usdebtclock.org

and:

That a climate group is leading the protest is exactly why NOAA is being downsized!

In another post regarding NOAA, I noted that this agency’s weather forecast for Texas in the winter of 2020/21 was so wrong that it contributed to the Great Texas Blackout from Storm Uri.

Other voices of despair were heard with the announcement. Jane Lubchenco, Deputy Director for Climate and Environment in Biden’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, stated:

The mass firings today at NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration are a national disaster and a colossal waste of money.  Destroying NOAA’s ability to provide life-saving information, keep our ocean healthy, and strengthen the economy makes no sense—no sense at all. NOAA is a lean agency, with highly skilled, impressively dedicated people –I know because I have worked with them for years. We need them; all of them.

A lean agency? Need every last employee? That’s one bureaucrat protecting another, part of the Climate Deep State in this instance.

Check out this function of NOAA that screams for budget cut for ecological improvement.

Unsettled Science: The Alarmists Want More Money (nope, time’s up)

The mid-course correction of U.S. policy to reign-in the out-of-control Climate Science Complex is front-page news at home and abroad. Such reform is long overdue. The bloated 25,000 registrations for the last American Geophysical Society meeting indicate how big a government-subsidized sub-industry has become. Maybe next year’s climate confab will be half as much, or less.

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“The multi-decade distraction of ‘the climate crisis’ is now being cut down to size. The Climategate emails revealed the professional rot 15 years ago, and more and more money spent on climate alarm has been wasted since. It is time to stop throwing good money after bad to, alas, quieten the issue.”

The mid-course correction of U.S. policy to reign-in the out-of-control Climate Science Complex is front-page news at home and abroad. Such reform is long overdue. The bloated 25,000 registrations for the last American Geophysical Society meeting indicate how big a government-subsidized sub-industry has become. Maybe next year’s climate confab will be half as much, or less.

More Tax Dollars, Please

Is more taxpayer money needed to understand global climate change since, alas, less is known than thought? Such a plea came from climatologists Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather in the New York Times, We Study Climate Change. We Can’t Explain What We’re Seeing” (November 13, 2024). They admitted that recent events were not predicted by greenhouse physics or climate models. Global warming, global weirding.

“[T]he unusual jump in global temperatures starting in mid-2023 appears to be higher than our models predicted,” the article began.

While there have been many partial hypotheses — new low-sulfur fuel standards for marine shipping, a volcanic eruption in 2022, lower Chinese aerosol emissions and El Niño perhaps behaving differently than in the recent past — we remain far from a consensus explanation even more than a year after we first noticed the anomalies. And that makes us uneasy.

Some humility perhaps? Nope, just a call for more money by the two.

… we do not have systems in place to explore the significance of shorter-term phenomena in the climate in anything approaching real time. But we need them badly. It’s now time for government science agencies to provide more timely updates in response to the rapid changes in the climate.

The article continues with all the problems of incomplete and delayed data that funding bumps for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as the European climate service provider Copernicus, need “sustained funding instead of one-off research grants.”

Schmidt and Hausfather end on a predictable alarmist note: “Some of the unease that people feel about climate change comes from a sense that things are out of our control — that the climate is changing faster than we can adapt.” Tipping points of doom are suggested. But SuperScience stands ready.

The good news is that climate science could easily become more agile in understanding the rapid changes we are seeing in the real world, incorporating them into our projections of the future and, hopefully, reducing that uncertainty.

Enter AAAS Pleading

Consider the above op-ed a lobbying piece for the government-dependent American Association of the Advancement of Science. AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh recently testified before a U.S. House Committee. While avoiding the term “climate change,” he warned about “existential threats to our health; food supply and water security; environmental resilience; energy production, utilization, and storage; and our overall wellbeing.”

SuperScience to the rescue? Not given the recent budget cuts of DOGE. “The announcement of an abrupt spending freeze on science and technology funding broke trust and hurt the S&T enterprise, he argued.

Many scientists, particularly those early in their careers, live paycheck-to-paycheck. I was most saddened to hear from these scientists who began questioning whether they should even continue their scientific pursuits or switch careers.

Is that good news? A market signal to spare taxpayers and go into the private sector for more productivity and social benefits? he for-profit sector. Parikh’s claim that we are going to “lose some of the next generation of science and technology talent and hurt America’s competitiveness” is fallacious. Maybe he should shut down AAAS’s lobby machine and go into the private sector himself.

Alarmism: Out of Time, Out of Money

The multi-decade distraction of “the climate crisis” is now being cut down to size. The Climategate emails revealed the professional rot 15 years ago, and more and more money spent on climate alarm has been wasted since. It is time to stop throwing good money after bad to, alas, quieten the issue.

American Association for the Advancement of Science “Trump Tracker”

Why were hundreds of millions of TAXPYERS’ dollars being spent on “education research”?

From Watts Up With That?

Guest “Heck yeah, I voted for this! And it’s better than I expected!” by David Middleton

ScienceInsider Science and Policy

Trump Tracker

Latest on firings: ““It’s bad, but I’m not gonna lay down and roll over.”
13 Feb 2025 By Science News Staff

Are you a federal scientist who took the recent buyout or have been fired? Contact us. Other story tips welcome.
Latest story: “If you are going to fire us, let us know.”–National Science Foundation union

17 Feb 2025, 2:50 PM ET

NSF union asks for information on pending dismissals

In anticipation of mass firings this week, the union representing more than 1000 employees at the National Science Foundation (NSF) today asked the agency to explain how it is implementing the Trump’s administration order to shrink the federal workforce by dismissing those designated as probationary employees.

“Put us out of our agony,” says one NSF employee who received the 17 February letter sent by Local 3403 of the American Federation of Government Employees to NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “If you are going to fire us, let us know.”

The letter, shared with Science, asks Panchanathan for the criteria the agency used to draw up a pool of those eligible to be fired under a 20 January memo from the White House Office of Personnel Management.

[…]

AAAS of A

There’s a single criterion for firing “probationary employees” …

“If you’re not the right person for the job, the employer can fire you at any point during the probationary period.” USAJOBS.gov

If you’re a probationary employee, you can be fired “at any point during the probationary period.” That’s how probationary employment works. If your job has been eliminated, you are no longer “the right person for the job.”

Now, let’s get back to the “Trump Tracker”…

14 Feb 2025, 6:30 PM ET

At Interior Department, layoffs shock new scientists hoping for a secure career of service

As the Trump administration unleashed a wave of firing today across U.S. research agencies, targeting mainly probationary workers, ScienceInsider spoke with two scientists at agencies in the U.S. Department of the Interior who are losing their jobs. A postdoc who started a position at the U.S. Geological Survey last year got a call from their center director today, telling them that they would be laid off by the end of the day. “He broke the news and wanted to do it himself,” they say. The ecologist says it was a shock, but not completely unexpected. They also consider themselves relatively lucky, because their spouse is employed and they didn’t have to relocate for their postdoc. “I’m aware of some others who moved cross-country and started positions only to have just gotten the news. … It’s really hard.”  

AAAS of A

One would think that the folks at the American Association for the Advancement of Science of America would be able to grasp the phrase “probationary workers.” And why the hell is the U.S. Geological Survey employing PhD ECOLOGISTS? Let’s ask Google AI:

Looks like another job for the DOGE boys.

Why were hundreds of millions of TAXPYERS’ dollars being spent on “education research”?

14 Feb 2025, 2:30 PM ET

Halted contracts threaten education research

Researchers warn that the sudden cancellation this week of hundreds of millions of dollars of government contracts to collect information on the state of U.S. education will blind the government to important trends from preschool to college and beyond.

AAAS of A

Hundreds of “hundreds of millions of dollars of government contracts to collect information on the state of U.S. education”? Seriously? We know all we need to know about the “the state of U.S. education.” It’s barely average in science and math.

Science literacy: 15-yr old students.
Math literacy: 15-yr old students.

5200

Estimated number of probationary workers at NIH, CDC, FDA and other Health and Human Services agencies who were scheduled to receive termination notices from the Trump administration.

AAAS of A

Repeat after me: “probationary workers.”

13 Feb 2025, 9:30 AM ET

Scientists want to kick Musk out of Royal Society

Billionaire Elon Musk has been a lightning rod for criticism in the United States for anti-DEI posts on his social media platform X and his DOGE work for President Donald Trump, which may end up gutting U.S. science agencies and has disrupted foreign aid for global clinical research. But his actions also aren’t playing well across the pond. 

[…]

AAAS of A

Right…

The folks who want to protect every DEI PhD’s access to taxpayers’ money want to kick Elon Musk out of the Royal Society… Irony can be so ironic!

Why is the American Association for the Advancement of Science of America so obsessed with down-sizing the Federal government?

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a science advocacy organization based in the United States and the largest general science association in the world. It is publisher of the journal Science.

AAAS has been accused of promoting a broadly left-leaning policy agenda and associating with front groups for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Many of its leaders have also been criticized for supporting environmentalist policies and promoting global population control measures.

In the modern era, the AAAS has become more involved in promoting left-wing “science-activism,” ideological activism performed in the guise of promoting science. Its involvement in the “March for Science,” which was organized in opposition to the election and policies of President Donald Trump.1

[…]

Funding

The AAAS had expenditures of $101.3 million in 2015, revenues exceeding $103 million, and assets of $156.6 million.36

[…]

The federal government is the largest identifiable source of funding for AAAS. Between 2008 and 2017, federal funding to AAAS averaged over $3.3 million annually. Data from the website USA Spending (managed by the Office of Management and Budget) shows AAAS received $27.9 million in 451 contracts between 2004 and March 2018. Of this sum, the largest contracts were given to AAAS by the Department of Health and Human Services (largely from a subsidiary agency, the National Institutes of Health) and the Department of Homeland Security. AAAS received another $41.5 million in 25 grants between 2011 and December 2017, of which an overwhelming majority ($35.5 million) came from the National Science Foundation. 38

Influence Watch

Farmers, is the NFU Really Worth £36 Millions of Your Money Each Year?

I’m rather annoyed with the National Farmers Union (NFU). A week or so ago, I emailed two people in the NFU media department with details of a story which I first featured in a Daily Sceptic article. I have also emailed the story to three or four NFU regional offices.

From The Daily Sceptic

By David Craig

I’m rather annoyed with the National Farmers Union (NFU). A week or so ago, I emailed two people in the NFU media department with details of a story which I first featured in a Daily Sceptic article. I have also emailed the story to three or four NFU regional offices.

In the article, I showed how the inheritance tax on farmers wasn’t really intended to raise much money to cover the supposed £22 billion black hole in the public finances which Starmer and Reeves apparently discovered about five minutes after Labour had been elected, forcing Labour to raise the taxes which five minutes earlier Labour had promised not to raise.

In the article, I explained how investment company Aberdeen (also known as the capital-letter-free, vowel-free ‘abrdn’) had launched its FLAG (Forestry, Land and Agriculture) strategy to spend hundreds of millions of pounds buying up forests and farmland. But Aberdeen had been frustrated in its attempts to buy agricultural land due to much of the land being owned by family farmers. So Aberdeen paid for a report on Britain’s tax system by Left-wing think tank Demos. Surprise surprise, one of the key recommendations of the Aberdeen-sponsored Demos report was to impose inheritance tax on farmers. Given that many farmers are ‘asset rich but cash poor’, this would have forced many farms to sell off land to pay the inheritance tax, thus allowing what Aberdeen called “purely financial owners” like Aberdeen to buy up the land. To help push through this policy, Aberdeen managed to get its head honcho onto a taskforce of business leaders invited in October 2023 to advise Rachel Reeves on what she should be doing when Labour inevitably won the July 2024 General Election.

I had imagined that the media geniuses at the NFU could pick up the story, get a few great quotes from outraged farmers – in particular Jeremy Clarkson – and launch a blitzkrieg on Reeves leading to widespread public fury and to her having to cancel the tax and possibly even resign.

I don’t consider myself anyone special. But, as I have had more than 10 current affairs books published covering such topics as politics, economics, charities, the psychology of selling, universities and non-existent anthropogenic climate change, the least I expected from the NFU media heroes was an acknowledgement of my email to them and of the story. But there has been nothing, zilch, no answer apart from two automated email responses informing me that the person I had contacted was on annual leave. The NFU gets an (astonishing to me) £36 million a year, or thereabouts, mostly from farmers. About £26 million of this goes on NFU staff costs. So I started to wonder whose interests the NFU actually serves – those of farmers, who pay almost £36 million a year to the NFU, or those of NFU employees whose lifestyles are supported by the apparent generosity of Britain’s farmers.

There are many wonderful theories about organisational behaviour. One very simplistic one I have developed is that in any non-commercial organisation – healthcare, charities, government departments, regulators, local councils etc – there are two main types of person:

  • the servers – those who see their role as providing whatever services that organisation is set up to provide
  • the self-servers – those who see the organisation as a way to advance their own careers, increasing their own importance, power and financial well-being

Given that the first group, the servers, will spend much of their time and effort delivering the service which the organisation should be delivering, this often means that the second group, the self-servers, the group using the organisation to advance its own interests, inevitably accrues power and influence. And the more power and influence the self-servers manage to appropriate, the less likely it is that the organisation will actually do what it was originally set up to do.

Here’s a nice picture of the NFU HQ:

It looks like quite a relaxing place to work. Though there aren’t many cars outside. Perhaps many of the 817 hard-working NFU employees are hard-working from home?

Working from home can be, I realise, quite challenging. By the time you’ve got the kids to school, walked the dogs, read a few emails, browsed some of your favourite websites, had lunch, walked the dogs again, answered a few emails, browsed a few more of your favourite websites, picked up the kids from school and taken them to their various after-school activities – well, there’s not much time left to do the job you’re paid to do. Of course, I have no idea if many or even any NFU staff do actually work from home. But I do know that any serious, professional organisation which understood its original purpose would have acknowledged my email, read the article on the Daily Sceptic website and sent me some form of reply. So my question for Britain’s farmers is: do you really think you’re getting good value for the almost £36 million you fork out to the NFU each year? Or is it time to do a Trump-Musk – admit the NFU is not fit for purpose and that it’s just a self-serving bureaucracy like so many other organisations in Britain today – civil service departments, police, charities, border control, NHS, regulators and so on – scrap the NFU, fire all its employees and start again building a new organisation costing you considerably less money and staffed by people who are genuinely interested in service rather than self-service? Then perhaps we could extend the Trump-Musk treatment to so many other useless, costly, ineffective British bureaucracies?

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.

Sun and planets gravitational considerations on the magnetic poles

“The latest readings of the Magnetic North Pole show that the movement of the Pole has suddenly decelerated. Here is the relevant quote from a brief article describing the phenomenon Earth’s Magnetic North Pole Officially Has A New Position | IFLScience

North pole part of a world globe

From CFACT

By Joe Bastardi

I wish to draw your attention to this from Dr Arthur Viterito:

“The latest readings of the Magnetic North Pole show that the movement of the Pole has suddenly decelerated. Here is the relevant quote from a brief article describing the phenomenon Earth’s Magnetic North Pole Officially Has A New Position | IFLScience

“The current behaviour of magnetic north is something that we have never observed before. Magnetic north has been moving slowly around Canada since the 1500s but, in the past 20 years, it accelerated towards Siberia, increasing in speed every year until about five years ago, when it suddenly decelerated from 50 to 35 km per year, which is the biggest deceleration in speed we’ve ever seen,” 

 Dr William Brown, global geomagnetic field modeler at British Geological Survey said.

An independent researcher named B. Williams published an article titled The Correlation of North Magnetic Dip Pole Motion and Seismic Activity where he finds:

“… from 1975 until 1996 the North Magnetic Pole was moving at an average of around 12 Km/yr with a low of 11.8 Km/yr and a high of 17 Km/yr….Then inexplicably, in 1996 the rate of travel doubled from its 1995 value to 44.1 Km/yr. In addition its average has been 3 times the 1975-1995 average. This rate of motion coincides with the change in geological activity with a correlation of 93.45%. This indicates an extremely close 

correlation and a strong probability of causal interaction…” 

As a follow-up to Williams’ work, I published a short article in 2017 titled Shifting Plates, Shifting Poles, Shifting Paradigms that demonstrated high correlations between polar movement, global temperatures, mid-ocean seismic activity, and CO2 from 1979 through 2016. I then go on to show that there is also a high correlation between global temperatures, CO2, and magnetic pole movements going as far back as 1850.

This sudden deceleration could be a harbinger of slowing mid-ocean seismic activity, and a subsequent decrease geothermal flux from the ocean floor. Although it’s too early to make critical predictions, heightened scrutiny is clearly called for going forward.”

So, what is all this about?  Well 1) it is keeping you, our readers at CFACT up to date on the evolution of this possible leg of the warming equation.   2). It is yet another piece of evidence that it is not man-made emissions causing the variations you are seeing, instead it’s another aspect. 3) The test case of the hypothesis I have proposed stated that if we see the geothermal input, slowing down it should mean the input of WV and CO2 into the atmosphere does follow.  Remember the ocean lags the input as it is such a massive reservoir of energy that it is slow to change.  So, it may take a few years.

But what is important here is the linkage between what the sun and planets are doing (solar is huge in everything, but again it is a longer time period) to the change of the magnetic north pole and its response. The idea that this kind of forcing from the solar system may be responsible for natural stresses that can cause both the antics of the magnetic pole and geothermal to occur.  So, we have a possible test case.

While I understand the skepticism toward all this, I am not saying all roads lead to this, the years from now we may find out that many did.  But I am saying NO roads lead to man-made catastrophic input, at least to the level of attribution that is assigned to it by people I truly believe are using it for other purposes designed for control of people, not enhancement of humankind.

But with so many challenges to the man-made warming idea, at the very least, the Trump administration would do our nation well getting out of any scheme that spends money for what is likely much ado about nothing.   DOGE should be very interested in all this.