https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-science-denier-hired-at-noaa
VIA NPR:
David Legates, a University of Delaware professor of climatology who has spent much of his career questioning basic tenets of climate science, has been hired for a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Legates confirmed to NPR that he was recently hired as NOAA’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction. The position suggests that he reports directly to Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the agency that is in charge of the federal government’s sprawling weather and climate prediction work.
Neither Legates nor NOAA representatives responded to questions about Legates’ specific responsibilities or why he was hired. The White House also declined to comment.
Legates has a long history of using his position as an academic scientist to publicly cast doubt on climate science. His appointment to NOAA comes as Americans face profound threats stoked by climate change, from the vast, deadly wildfires in the West to an unusually active hurricane season in the South and East.
Global temperatures have already risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit as a result of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Warming is happening the fastest at the Earth’s poles, where sea ice is melting, permafrost is thawing and ocean temperatures are heating up, with devastating effects on animals and humans alike.
In 2007, Legates was one of the authors of a paper that questioned previous findings about the role of climate change in destroying the habitat of polar bears. That research was partially funded by grants from Koch Industries, the lobbying group the American Petroleum Institute and ExxonMobil, according to InsideClimate News.
The same year, Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner sent a letter to Legates expressing concern about his opinions on climate change, given that he was the state climatologist at the time. Minner asked him to refrain from casting doubt on climate science when he was acting in his official role. Legates stepped down in 2011.
Legates also appeared in a video pushing the discredited theory that the sun is the cause of global warming. In testimony before the U.S. Senate in 2014, Legates argued that a climate science report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change erroneously stated that humans are causing global warming.
Legates is a professor in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences at the University of Delaware. He is also affiliated with the Heartland Institute, a think tank that has poured money into convincing Americans that climate change is not happening and that the scientific evidence — including evidence published by the agency that now employs Legates — is uncertain or untrustworthy.
Advocates who reject mainstream climate science, such as those at Heartland, have had a leading role in shaping the Trump administration’s response to global warming, including the decision to exit the Paris climate accord.
Steve Milloy, a Heartland board member and part of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, says he welcomes the Legates appointment. “David Legates is a true climate scientist and will bring a great deal of much-needed science to NOAA,” Milloy writes in an email to NPR.
But climate researchers slammed the NOAA decision to appoint Legates to a key scientific position.
“He’s not just in left field, he’s not even near the ballpark,” says Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine biology at Oregon State University and head of NOAA under President Obama.
Contrarians in science are welcome, Lubchenco says, but their claims have to be scientifically defensible. That’s why official groups like the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change review the entire range of scientific research before reaching a conclusion.
Over the last 20 years, in his work and public statements, Legates has rejected the overwhelming peer-reviewed research that shows human activity is the main driver of a dangerously changing climate.
Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, says in an email to NPR that Legates has, throughout his career, “misrepresented the science of climate change, serving as an advocate for polluting interests as he dismisses and downplays the impacts of climate change.”
Mann adds: “At a time when those impacts are playing out before our very eyes in the form of unprecedented wildfires out West and super-storms back East, I cannot imagine a more misguided decision than to appoint someone like Legates to a position of leadership at an agency that is tasked with assessing the risks we face from extreme weather events.”
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Related:
‘A healthy scientific debate is being compromised’ – ‘When scientific views come under political attack, so too does independent thinking and good policy-making because all require rational thought to be effective.’
‘Post-Normal’: ‘Science emerges where ‘science by consensus’ reigns. It has been strongly argued that even in its early days, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change abandoned the scientific method in favor of this new paradigm (Saloranta 2001, Legates et al. 2013). This inherently morphs the role of the scientist from an impartial observer and seeker of the truth to one who dons the hat of an advocate. This is where the so-called ‘consensus arguments’ arise where an appeal to some very large percentage of scientists appears to give credibility to a particular viewpoint. Most of these consensuses are contrived (see Legates et al. 2014) and serve to push an agenda that diverges widely from truth-seeking. The scientific method has been abandoned by many in the climate change discussion with an appeal to the masses through an imaginary consensus of scientists. This has greatly undermined both the quest for truth in this debate and the respect the general public has for scientists who advocate for anthropogenic global warming disaster scenarios.’
Dr. Legates of the University of Delaware ‘strongly opposes the idea that manmade fossil fuels are disrupting our climate’ — Legates: ‘Climate change has become a very big bandwagon for getting funds. One thing universities like and one thing research organizations like is money’
Michael Mann claim: “But even if I weren’t, these findings are readily apparent in even a cursory reading of the National Climate Assessment. That’s the major climate report Trump’s own administration released last year, and it goes into detail about how climate change is already hurting American communities from coast to coast.”
Climate Depot response: Yes, even a cursory reading of The National Climate Assessment reveals it is a pre-determined report written by environmental activists and overseen by President Obama’s former UN Paris climate pact negotiator. Science! Climate Depot’s Morano: “The National Climate Assessement is a political report masquerading as science. The media is hyping a rehash of frightening climate change claims by Obama administration holdover activist government scientists. The new report is once again pre-determined science. The National Climate Assessment report reads like a press release from environmental pressure groups — because it is! Two key authors are longtime Union of Concerned Scientist activists, Donald Wuebbles and Katharine Hayhoe.”
A former Obama administration official with ties to a liberal advocacy group funded by Democratic megadonors George Soros and Tom Steyer helped prepare the Fourth National Climate Assessment, whose dire predictions have since been attacked as overblown. Andrew Light, who worked on the 2015 Paris accord negotiations as a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change under Secretary of State John F. Kerry, served as a review editor for the assessment, overseeing the pivotal final chapter that concluded under a worst-case scenario that global warming could wipe out as much as 10 percent of the U.S. economy by 2100…Light also spent five years as senior fellow and director of international climate policy at the Center for American Progress, which was founded and now led by longtime Democratic insider John Podesta. The center is also financed by liberal billionaires such as Mr. Soros and Mr. Steyer. …
“The National Climate Assessment report reads like a press release from environmental pressure groups — because it is,” said Marc Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”
Morano described two of the authors — Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe and Donald J. Wuebbles of the University of Illinois — as “longtime Union of Concerned Scientist activists.” “These are not ‘Trump’s own scientists’ as the media likes to claim,” Mr. Morano said.
“The key authors are in fact left-wing environmental activists with the Union of Concerned Scientists, Center for American Progress, and the Obama Administration. And they cited outlier studies funded by Steyer and [Michael] Bloomberg.”
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Climate analyst Paul Homewood: ‘Cherry picks’ a few bad weather events…extrapolates using the most scary scenarios’
Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels on the report: ‘Systematically flawed’ – Report ‘should be shelved’
Trump v. Trump?!: Dr. Ken Haapala: ‘The global warming chorus immediately seized on the new USGCRP report claiming the Trump administration is contradicting President Trump’s claims about global warming. Amusingly, some of the chorus interviewed people who worked on the USGCRP, who were political appointees under the Obama Administration.’
The new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide To Climate Change: MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen wrote of the National Academy of Sciences: “Regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If the government wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide.”
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