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Politics : The Solyndra Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: longnshort who wrote (144)4/23/2014 11:23:08 AM
From: joseffy  Respond to of 1400
 
State rips out osprey nests blocking traffic cameras...

CONSERVATION GROUP: 'Wise decision'...



To: longnshort who wrote (144)5/13/2014 12:27:01 PM
From: joseffy  Respond to of 1400
 
WARNING: EPA regs will devastate economy...



To: longnshort who wrote (144)5/20/2014 12:02:25 PM
From: joseffy  Respond to of 1400
 
Environmental Scientist Caught Agreeing To Ignore Her Own Data, Make Up New Claims


December 12, 2011 | Filed under Law, Science | Posted by Kevin
wizbangblog.com

Dr. Ann Maest is a managing scientist at Straus Consulting, and she’s the go to expert on all things groundwater. In the press release announcing her reappointment to the National Academy of Sciences, they mention that she is focused on the environmental effects of mining and petroleum extraction and production, and, more recently, on the effects of climate change on water quality.

Maest is in high demand as an expert for those looking to stop oil and mineral exploration.

She’s also heavily used by the federal government, even though new details about her past work are coming to light as a result of a lawsuit. From The New York Times:

An environmental consulting firm named as a defendant in a racketeering suit filed by Chevron Corp. over a landmark pollution lawsuit in Ecuador is continuing to work on another blockbuster case: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill investigation.

Boulder, Colo.-based Stratus Consulting, a long-term contractor with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other federal agencies, is gathering and analyzing data concerning the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Chevron is suing those behind the Ecuadorian case including: the lead attorney Steven Donziger; Stratus Consulting; and Maest. As part of their lawsuit, Chevron obtained through discovery, outtakes from a documentary film called “Crude” that show Donziger and Maest colluding to ignore their own scientific findings and make up some new unsubstantiated claims. Watch this:

Paraphrasing the video, Maest says that in their study contamination has not spread and is only found at the site of the pit. Donziger says let’s just extrapolate and say what we want. Maest readily agrees.

Donziger goes on to say that it’s Ecuador and if they have 1000 people around the court house they win, the report is just smoke, mirrors, and bullshit.

Of course when you’re endeavoring to pull off a multi-billion dollar legal heist in a banana republic you don’t stop at just inventing damages; you stack the deck on the judicial side as well. What Chevron has been able to show from the outtakes and records obtained is that Maest and her firm drafted substantial portions of the report of the independent expert, Richard Cabrera, who they allege Donziger was instrumental in getting appointed to do the court order study of the alleged environmental damage. Sounds like a criminal enterprise to extort, right? That’s what Chevron thinks, and it’s why they’re suing under RICO.

In addition to being sued, Maest’s work (if that’s what you want to call it) was thouroughly debunked by another team of scientists.

It is hardly a surprise that Donziger is an old Harvard buddy of, you guessed it, President Obama.

What’s really surprising is that here we have a National Academy of Science member caught red-handed agreeing to make up data, and our government wants to give her more business.





To: longnshort who wrote (144)6/17/2014 12:59:39 PM
From: joseffy  Respond to of 1400
 
Global Warming Witch Hunt Continues With Caleb Rossiter
.......................................................................................................................

06/16/2014

Without evidence to back up their claims, climate zealots have taken to intimidation.


They're blacklisting academics who have the nerve to question the "settled science" of climate change.

The latest victim of climate McCarthyism is Caleb Rossiter, who, until his op-ed challenging the "consensus" on climate change was published in the Wall Street Journal, was a Democratic academic who briefly forayed into politics but was content to crusade against U.S. support for dictators and against the use of anti-personnel land mines.

In that op-ed, Rossiter called himself an "Africanist." He not only questioned the science behind climate change warnings but the impact of abandoning fossil fuels on human progress on a continent that's lowest in production of carbon emissions and the neediest in terms of economic development.

For his questioning of climate orthodoxy, Rossiter, an adjunct professor at American University, was sacked via email from his position with the Institute for Policy Studies. That organization says it is committed to something called "climate justice," a notion that Rossiter questioned. He believes that position dooms the African continent to reliance on green energy sources such as wind and solar that are erratic and unreliable.

"If people ever say that fears of censorship for 'climate change' views are overblown, have them take a look at this: Just two days after I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for Africa to be allowed the 'all of the above' energy strategy we have in the U.S., the Institute for Policy Studies terminated my 23-year relationship with them ... because my analysis and theirs 'diverge,'" Rossiter told Climate Depot.

Where's the justice, Rossiter asked in his piece "Sacrificing Africa For Climate Change," in "trying to deny to Africans the reliable electricity — and thus the economic development and extended years of life — that fossil fuels can bring"?

Even if the "wildest claims" of climate zealots are true, he writes, "Africa should be exempted from global restraints as it seeks to modernize."

Rossiter doesn't accept these claims, noting "the computer models simply built in the assumption that fossil fuels are the culprit when temperatures rise, even though a similar warming took place from 1900 to 1940, before fossil fuels could have caused it."

He also questions the logic behind imposing calamitous human suffering for improvements that are at best infinitesimal for global temperatures.

"Computer models used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to determine the cause of the six-tenths of one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature from 1980 to 2000 could not statistically separate fossil-fueled and natural trends," he writes.





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