Experienced Former NASA Employees Unsettled by the Settled Science of Climate Zealotry in NASA

How many teachers teach what they teach on climate because their bosses tell them to stick to the curricula?  How many climate curricula creators create what they create because government tells them to?  How many governments insist on what they insist upon on climate because their trusted authorities tell them to?  Authorities such as  NASA.

Here are some very experienced ex-NASA employees who are clearly pissed-off by the whole silly, unsubstantiated assertions of their former employer.  Poor teachers. You are at the delivery end of the chain of intellectual corruption that begins in places like NASA thanks to a few rogue but influential existing employees there.  But let us reserve our greatest pity and compassion for your pupils.

March 28, 2012
The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001
Dear Charlie,
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.
As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.
For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.
Thank you for considering this request.
Sincerely,
(Attached signatures)
CC: Mr. John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for Science
CC: Ass Mr. Chris Scolese, Director, Goddard Space Flight Center
Ref: Letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, dated 3-26-12, regarding a request for NASA to refrain from making unsubstantiated claims that human produced CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on climate change.
/s/ Jack Barneburg, Jack – JSC, Space Shuttle Structures, Engineering Directorate, 34 years
/s/ Larry Bell – JSC, Mgr. Crew Systems Div., Engineering Directorate, 32 years
/s/ Dr. Donald Bogard – JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 41 years
/s/ Jerry C. Bostick – JSC, Principal Investigator, Science Directorate, 23 years
/s/ Dr. Phillip K. Chapman – JSC, Scientist – astronaut, 5 years
/s/ Michael F. Collins, JSC, Chief, Flight Design and Dynamics Division, MOD, 41 years
/s/ Dr. Kenneth Cox – JSC, Chief Flight Dynamics Div., Engr. Directorate, 40 years
/s/ Walter Cunningham – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 7, 8 years
/s/ Dr. Donald M. Curry – JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Leading Edge, Thermal Protection Sys., Engr. Dir., 44 years
/s/ Leroy Day – Hdq. Deputy Director, Space Shuttle Program, 19 years
/s/ Dr. Henry P. Decell, Jr. – JSC, Chief, Theory & Analysis Office, 5 years
/s/Charles F. Deiterich – JSC, Mgr., Flight Operations Integration, MOD, 30 years
/s/ Dr. Harold Doiron – JSC, Chairman, Shuttle Pogo Prevention Panel, 16 years
/s/ Charles Duke – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 16, 10 years
/s/ Anita Gale
/s/ Grace Germany – JSC, Program Analyst, 35 years
/s/ Ed Gibson – JSC, Astronaut Skylab 4, 14 years
/s/ Richard Gordon – JSC, Astronaut, Gemini Xi, Apollo 12, 9 years
/s/ Gerald C. Griffin – JSC, Apollo Flight Director, and Director of Johnson Space Center, 22 years
/s/ Thomas M. Grubbs – JSC, Chief, Aircraft Maintenance and Engineering Branch, 31 years
/s/ Thomas J. Harmon
/s/ David W. Heath – JSC, Reentry Specialist, MOD, 30 years
/s/ Miguel A. Hernandez, Jr. – JSC, Flight crew training and operations, 3 years
/s/ James R. Roundtree – JSC Branch Chief, 26 years
/s/ Enoch Jones – JSC, Mgr. SE&I, Shuttle Program Office, 26 years
/s/ Dr. Joseph Kerwin – JSC, Astronaut, Skylab 2, Director of Space and Life Sciences, 22 years
/s/ Jack Knight – JSC, Chief, Advanced Operations and Development Division, MOD, 40 years
/s/ Dr. Christopher C. Kraft – JSC, Apollo Flight Director and Director of Johnson Space Center, 24 years
/s/ Paul C. Kramer – JSC, Ass.t for Planning Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics Div., Egr. Dir., 34 years
/s/ Alex (Skip) Larsen
/s/ Dr. Lubert Leger – JSC, Ass’t. Chief Materials Division, Engr. Directorate, 30 years
/s/ Dr. Humbolt C. Mandell – JSC, Mgr. Shuttle Program Control and Advance Programs, 40 years
/s/ Donald K. McCutchen – JSC, Project Engineer – Space Shuttle and ISS Program Offices, 33 years
/s/ Thomas L. (Tom) Moser – Hdq. Dep. Assoc. Admin. & Director, Space Station Program, 28 years
/s/ Dr. George Mueller – Hdq., Assoc. Adm., Office of Space Flight, 6 years
/s/ Tom Ohesorge
/s/ James Peacock – JSC, Apollo and Shuttle Program Office, 21 years
/s/ Richard McFarland – JSC, Mgr. Motion Simulators, 28 years
/s/ Joseph E. Rogers – JSC, Chief, Structures and Dynamics Branch, Engr. Directorate,40 years
/s/ Bernard J. Rosenbaum – JSC, Chief Engineer, Propulsion and Power Division, Engr. Dir., 48 years
/s/ Dr. Harrison (Jack) Schmitt – JSC, Astronaut Apollo 17, 10 years
/s/ Gerard C. Shows – JSC, Asst. Manager, Quality Assurance, 30 years
/s/ Kenneth Suit – JSC, Ass’t Mgr., Systems Integration, Space Shuttle, 37 years
/s/ Robert F. Thompson – JSC, Program Manager, Space Shuttle, 44 years/s/ Frank Van Renesselaer – Hdq., Mgr. Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters, 15 years
/s/ Dr. James Visentine – JSC Materials Branch, Engineering Directorate, 30 years
/s/ Manfred (Dutch) von Ehrenfried – JSC, Flight Controller; Mercury, Gemini & Apollo, MOD, 10 years
/s/ George Weisskopf – JSC, Avionics Systems Division, Engineering Dir., 40 years
/s/ Al Worden – JSC, Astronaut, Apollo 15, 9 years
/s/ Thomas (Tom) Wysmuller – JSC, Meteorologist, 5 years

Source: WUWT
Credit: Bob Ferguson, SPPI

The Environmental Terrorizing of Children

Reproduced here with permission of the author, an article recently published at Canada Free Press by Alan Caruba:

The Environmental Terrorizing of Children

'In many ways, the worst aspect of environmentalism is why Greens not only feel free to terrorize children with doomsday scenarios, but feel compelled to do so.

I have been reviewing books for some fifty years and with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 and books such as Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” have been offering scenarios intended to move people and governments to take action that, in retrospect, were based on bad “science” and absurd doomsday predictions.

If you were fooled by global warming, they are counting on you to be fooled again by “sustainability”, their reworking of Marx’s communism in the form of a grandiose scheme to control all of the Earth’s bounty. In June the United Nations will hold a Rio+20 conference that will declare that governments exist to ensure “sustainable well-being and happiness.” The Declaration of Independence offers the opportunity to pursue happiness. It does not guarantee it, nor does it suggest that it is government’s job to provide it.

A key element of the Green’s endless indoctrination schemes has been to reach children, the most vulnerable among us and for this reason our schools have been turned into Green prisons where their version of the Earth is pumped into the minds of children here and around the world.

Their primary teaching tool is fear. Fear that the oceans will rise and wipe out entire cities. Fear that the rainforests are disappearing. Fear that entire species are being destroyed by the hand of man. Fear that the use of any kind of fuel, coal, natural gas, and oil is despoiling the planet.

I have reviewed books for some fifty years at this point and I could not put a number on the books for children that hammer home these and other terrifying themes. One crossed my desk the other day, “Our House is Round: A Kid’s Book About Why Protecting Our Earth Matters” by Yolanda Kondonassis and illustrated by Joan Brush. It has been called “the perfect children’s introduction to environmental issues” by Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

The author is not a biologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, or any other kind of scientist. She is a Grammy-nominated classical harpist. A harpist!

“Our Earth has gotten messy. What should we do?” she asks her young reader. What does she mean by “messy”? Her answer is that “cars, trucks, and factories make pollution, a kind of dirty gas or liquid that goes out into the air and into our rivers, lakes, and oceans.” This book is written for children age five to nine!

Imagine now what it must be like to be that age and be told that the air is polluted and the water is as well. This verges on child abuse.

“Pollution goes up into the sky and forms a blanket of gas that holds heat within Earth’s atmosphere. That makes our whole Earth warmer and leads to unclean air for breathing, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns. Scientists call this warming of our Earth’s temperature CLIMATE CHANGE.”

It is a LIE. The Earth has been cooling for fifteen years.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a gas as vital to all life on Earth as oxygen is to the life of living creatures. Without it, not a single blade of grass or tree or the vegetation we call “crops” would not grow. Livestock and wildlife depend on that vegetation. If you are age five to nine, you likely are unaware of this.

This book and all the others that incorporate these lies are a form of psychological terror.

The same week I received “Our House is Round”, I also received “The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea” and “Earth-Friendly Buildings, Bridges, and More.” You could stack all the environmentally-themed children’s books I’ve seen and it would reach up several stories.

They are a corruption of geophysical and biological science. They have nothing to do with “saving the planet” and everything to do with distorting children’s understanding of the real world.

It does not matter that the Ms. Kondonassis thinks she is serving humanity. The great lie of communism is that it will create a collectivist utopia. In reality it has always depended on terror to maintain itself and it has failed wherever it has been tried. Environmentalism is its latest permutation.

It is the same reason that communism derides religion for its emphasis on life and morality.

It is the same reason Americans are being subjected to government imposed limitations on energy and transportation, and coerced social change, altering and secularizing our society.

I have devoted my life to freedom of the press, freedom to publish, freedom to speak out, and to urge participation in the life of the greatest nation on Earth, but some books like “Our House Is Round” are the worst kind of mental pollution.

Environmentalism, like all tyrannies, begins by indoctrinating children.'

Editor’s Note: In 1974 Alan Caruba was a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Environmental scaremongering targeting children is not new.  In 1984, Herbert London published 'Why Are They Lying to Our Children?' about the same issue.  The foreword by Herman Kahn begins as follows:

'War, famine, environmental disasters, material shortages, and a declining quality of life - that's what schoolchildren are being taught to expect in their futures.  What these grim and mostly inaccurate forecasts are doing to their lives I don't know for sure.  ut I do know this.  Our children are absorbing excessively negative misinformation.'

Well, some children born in 1984 are now teaching in classrooms themselves. I dread to think how many of them will welcome books such as those mentioned by Alan Caruba in his hard-hitting article.  It is little wonder that the mass media, for example, have been so supine in the face of environmentalist excesses - it is quite possible that many there actually believe them, and are not merely looking for sales through sensationalism.  Many politicians, locked in an almost closed mutual feedback system with the media, are in the same boat.  What chance have the teachers got to rebel against the misinformation, and what chance have the children got to survive with their minds and spirits unharmed?

Harpist Decides The Children Must be Told: and so another scary climate book for kiddies hits the streets

All sorts of people have been taken up with the great adventure of saving the planet from our CO2.  The idea of a climate crisis has been remarkably productive, providing a stimulating vehicle for politicians intent on more power, insurers intent on more premiums, journalists intent on more readers, scientists intent on more grants, consultants intent on more clients, NGOs intent on more funds and movie-makers intent on more tickets.  And then all sorts of others have found joining-in irresistible, including, presumably, the woman who wrote the book on the left, 'Our House is Round', which is to be re-released on Amazon in the UK later this year.

The book has been read, partly reviewed, and roundly condemned by Alan Caruba:
 
'The author is not a biologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, or any other kind of scientist. She is a Grammy-nominated classical harpist. A harpist!

“Our Earth has gotten messy. What should we do?” she asks her young reader. What does she mean by “messy”? Her answer is that “cars, trucks, and factories make pollution, a kind of dirty gas or liquid that goes out into the air and into our rivers, lakes, and oceans.” This book is written for children age five to nine! 

Imagine now what it must be like to be that age and be told that the air is polluted and the water is as well. This verges on child abuse.

“Pollution goes up into the sky and forms a blanket of gas that holds heat within Earth’s atmosphere. That makes our whole Earth warmer and leads to unclean air for breathing, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns. Scientists call this warming of our Earth’s temperature CLIMATE CHANGE.”

It is a LIE. The Earth has been cooling for fifteen years.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a gas as vital to all life on Earth as oxygen is to the life of living creatures. Without it, not a single blade of grass or tree or the vegetation we call “crops” would not grow. Livestock and wildlife depend on that vegetation. If you are age five to nine, you likely are unaware of this.

This book and all the others that incorporate these lies are a form of psychological terror.'
(hat-tip: Greenie Watch)

The book was published in 2010, and the site promoting it includes an interview with the author, Yolanda Kondonassis, from which I have taken this extract:

'Q: This book is more plain-spoken than most kid’s books about what causes environmental problems. Was that a conscious decsion?

YK: Very conscious. I have a huge amount of respect for the intelligence and capacity of kids. I learned long ago that it’s almost always a mistake to talk down to children. They are refreshingly lacking in agendas so their minds are open in the most productive and observant way. They are also shockingly honest. If something doesn’t make sense, they will usually ask all the right questions and shine a spotlight on the blind spots of adults in about two seconds flat. I love that. Perhaps we should have a kids’ delegation Congress.

Q: In your book, you don’t avoid or tip-toe around the issue of climate change. Tell us about your convictions.

YK: It’s a pretty simple cause and effect equation. The problems facing our earth aren’t simple, but recognizing that we do indeed have problems should be pretty clear. I am big on metaphors so to use another one, I have found that at the beginning of a child’s cold or flu, there is always the temptation for parents to say “it’s allergies,” “he’s overtired,” “she had a long day,” “he’s overheated,” etc. For working parents, a sick child requires scheduling overhaul, missed obligations, and family upheaval. No one wants to admit when these disruptions are imminent. But most moms also know that glassy look in their kids’ eyes that says we’re headed into the sick zone for a few days. Our earth definitely has that glassy-eyed look and we need to admit it so we can get on with solutions. The goal should not be to slow the damage, but to reverse the trends'

Now it is arguable that the earth is far from having that 'glassy-eyed look', but is actually in vigorous good health.  It is not the sickly, vulnerable child that so many alarmed people seemed to suppose, but rather a grizzled, remarkably robust ancient.  As for air quality and water quality,  these have been improving this past century hand-in-hand with industrial progress, and it is the continuation of that progress which holds out greatest hope for further improvements.  The glib 'environmentalism' of such as Kondonassis seems to skip over all that.  Let me finish with a quote from a book which I hope she will read one day if she has not already done so, 'The Rational Optimist' by Matt Ridley:

'The four horsemean of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable deaths in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke, and malaria, which kill respectively about seven, three, three and two people per minute.  If you want to do your fellow human beings good, spend your effort on combating those so that people can prosper, ready to meet climate challenges as they arrive.  Economists estimate that a dollar spent on mitigating climate change brings ninety cents of benefits compared with $20 benefits per dollar spent on healthcare and $16 per dollar spent on hunger.'

I suspect Ms Kondonassis may not possess this wider perspective.  She, like many other decent well-intentioned people, has probably been scared by the talk of a climate crisis.  And she, like a good many others, has decided to share that scare with children.  Here is how her book presents industrial progress to the very young:

  Negative or what?  And of course, the air and water pollution issues we face are primarily to do with inputs that no-one associates with 'climate change', such as carbon monoxide and sewage, and which have been dramatically reduced in industrialised countries.  Kondonassis' list - whole Earth warmer ... unclean air for breathing, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns - is readily Fisked: the slow warming of the past 150 years or so seems independent of CO2 and has recently slowed down despite CO2 levels rising faster than ever, air quality has been improving at least in the developed world, Antarctica - the major icecap is not melting, the slow rate of sea-level rise has become even slower in modern times, and even the IPCC has stopped using extreme weather as a poster-child.  Perhaps if and when she realises these things, she will stop promoting the facile propaganda of climate alarmism.  If that should allow her more time for playing the harp, the world will become a little better as a result.

'Trust me' science - is that something teachers could highlight in the classroom when required to propagate alarm over climate change?

North Shore

 Teachers are generally required to stick to curricula, and curricula these days are at risk of containing what is little more than propaganda or conditioning for climate alarmism.  The distribution of 'An Inconvenient Truth' to schools in the UK is an illustration of this.

But a post I was reading today suggests a way in which teachers can at least alert their pupils to intellectual and moral dangers while at the same time sticking to the letter of their climate-related curricula.  The post has a provocative title:

A lot of science is just plain wrong

 It is on a site whose goals I have a great deal of admiration for called Straight Statistics, where they describe themselves as follows: 'We are a campaign established by journalists and statisticians to improve the understanding and use of statistics by government, politicians, companies, advertisers and the mass media. By exposing bad practice and rewarding good, we aim to restore public confidence in statistics.'

Extract from the post (I put it into italics, and added the emboldening):

'Suddenly, everybody’s saying it: the scientific and medical literature is riddled with poor studies, irreproducible results, concealed data and sloppy mistakes.

Since these studies underpin a huge number of government policies, from health to the environment, that’s a serious charge.

Let’s start with Stan Young, Assistant Director of Bioinformatics at the US National Institute of Statistical Sciences. He recently gave evidence to the US Congress Committee on Science, Space and Technology about the quality of science used by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Some might think, he said, that peer review is enough to assure the quality of the work, but it isn’t. “Peer review only says that the work meets the common standards of the discipline and, on the face of it, the claims are plausible. Scientists doing peer review essentially never ask for data sets and subject the paper to the level of examination that is possible by making data electronically available.”

He called for the EPA to make the data underlying key regulations, such as those on air pollution and mortality, available. Without it, he said, those papers are “trust me” science. Authors of research reports funded by the EPA should provide, at the time of publication, three things: the study protocol, the statistical analysis code, and an electronic copy of the data used in the publication.

Further, he calls for data collection and analysis to be funded separately, since they call for different skills and if data building and analysis are together, there is a natural tendency for authors not to share the data until the last ounce of information is extracted. “It would be better to open up the analysis to multiple teams of scientists.”'

The key is to spot the 'trust me' science. We do need to take a lot on trust, especially in pre-university education where there is neither the time nor necessarily the specialist skills to demonstrate the evidence and the arguments for every assertion.  But when scientific assertions are made which others deploy to produce widespread alarm, and/or to support far-reaching policy decisions, then it would seem obvious that someone somewhere should be able to thoroughly, and independently, check the results and the reasonings.  In fact, the naive observer might suppose that governments would insist upon it under such circumstances.  That did not happen in the area of climate policy.  In direct contradiction to the Nullius in Verba spirit of the original (but not the present) Royal Society, the words of alarmists were taken at face value, not least the Summaries for Policy Makers published by the IPCC.

The flaws of the hockey-stick plot could have been exposed earlier had the methods and the data involved been made available to all.  In fact it took a remarkable amount of determined statistical sleuthing to find the truth, the story of which has been captured for posterity in Andrew Montford's superb book, The Hockey Stick Illusion.  McKittrick and McIntyre's work was inspired by the modest goal of trying to reproduce a dramatic graph which had been pushed through letter-boxes throughout Canada by a government there convinced by the alarming picture it conveyed.  It was phoney.  The government was fooled.  The two part-timers (M&M), not in the climate science field, took several years to overcome the barriers to making that clear.  In the meantime, the huge political impact of this graphic had happened.  The damage was done.

The sorry state of some corners of climate science - those occupied by those most active in steering the IPCC - has been revealed by the release of the ClimateGate materials.  They include this quote by Professor Jones of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a quote subsequently put in a Parliamentary record here by the climatologist, Warwick Hughes, who had requested some data held by Jones, and received this in reply:
"Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

Jones is clearly of the 'trust me' school of scientific method.  As are any who push the output of complex computer models as 'evidence'.  Mann of the notorious hockey stick plot, was also expecting others to trust him and his co-workers.  We do not have to assign sinister motives to such people in order to be very concerned about this.  We merely have to assign them human fallibility.

So, my tentative suggestion is this.  When you have to display some scary graph projected say tens of years into the future by some hideously complicated software, when you have to refer to unsubstantiated assertions about doomed polar bears, disappearing glaciers, spreading deserts, and so on and on, you can label it 'trust me' science.  And explain perhaps, that our trust should at best be tentative, pending further enquiries.

 

Something for the Climate Classroom Wall: a fine riposte against the scaremongering and negativity of the climate snake oil sales force

Posted on Bishop-Hill, this new work by Josh was inspired by Matt Ridley's excellent book 'The Rational Optimist'.  Imagine the difference in outlook if a book like that rather than the corrupt, misleading, error-strewn, and alarmist propaganda of 'An Inconvenient Truth' had been sent to all schools by those running the Thought-Control (Youth Section) Tendency in the last Labour government?  Inconceivable since bad news and alarmism are what such people thrive on, and are what has allowed a generation of people with the moral fibre of snake-oil salesmen to spread so much fear and deception around climate into our schools.

Well, strike back a little - stick that drawing up on your classroom wall!

Note added later on 3 April: Matt Ridley's post of 21st March gives more details of what inspired Josh's work. WUWT is also carrying the drawing, and someone called Peter S in the comments there is suggesting raising funds to distribute the drawing as a poster to schools.