Congress Wants Answers After NOAA Official Creates New, Higher Paying Job For Himself

Earlier this month, it came to light that a top official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration created a new contract position with the same responsibilities as his previous position, took that new job and got a $43,200 raise in the process.

Now, the Senate wants answers.

Senator John Thune, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, sent a letter to NOAA Administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan demanding to know how something like this could happen.

“The fact that senior agency officials approved this unseemly arrangement, which clearly warranted closer scrutiny, appears to be indicative of a potential agency-wide problem,” Thune wrote. “In order to maintain the integrity of the agency, NOAA’s officials must avoid conflicts of interest and adhere to and enforce federal hiring and contracting rules.”

According to a report released by the Department of Commerce Office of the Inspector General, P. Donald Jiron, the deputy chief financial officer for the National Weather Service, an agency within NOAA, helped to write the job description and set the salary for his own post-retirement consulting job, and then returned to the office the day after retiring to perform the exact same job.

On top of that, Jiron demanded a $50,000 housing allowance even though he wasn’t eligible for the housing benefit. The housing allowance was meant for senior government officials on temporary assignments at NOAA headquarters, not for outside contractors.

The OIG report found that Jiron’s consulting gig was in violation of federal acquisition regulations and Jiron may have violated federal criminal law, though prosecutors declined to pursue charges.

The inspector general also said Jiron pressured and bribed other NWS officials to hire his daughter as a contractor.

“We conclude that senior official’s actions in attempting to influence the NWS staff were improper, and some of those actions may have implicated 18 U.S.C. § 201, the criminal statute prohibiting bribery of public officials,” the report said.

Among other things, Thune asked NOAA to provide data about contractors pay compared to federal employees with similar job responsibilities, the most common jobs filled by contractors in the agency and details about the process involved in drafting a job description.

The agency has until June 26 to provide the information.

Via: The Daily Caller

Continue Reading....

The climate warming pause goes AWOL (or not)

Science mag is publishing a blockbuster paper today, on June 4.  Oh boy!  Get ready to watch yet another big fight about climate change – this time mainly among different groups of climate alarmists.  Is there a “pause”?  Did global climate really stop warming during the last dozen years, 18 years, or even 40 years – in spite of rising levels of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide?

The renowned National Climate Data Center (NCDC), a division of NOAA located in Asheville, NC, claims that the widely reported (and accepted) temperature hiatus (i.e., near-zero trend) is an illusion – just an artifact of data analysis – and that the global climate never really stopped warming.If true, what a blessing that would be for the UN-IPCC – and for climate alarmists generally, who have been under siege to explain the cause of the pause.

This paper is turning out to be a “big deal.”The publisher of Science has even issued a special press release, promoting the NCDC claim of continued slow but steady warming.

Of course, NCDC-NOAA and Science may end up with egg on their collective faces.It does look a little suspicious that NCDC arrived at this earth-shaking “discovery” after all these years, after “massaging” its own weather-station data, just before the big policy conference in December in Paris that is supposed to slow the rise of CO2 from the burning of energy fuels, coal, oil, and gas.

Now watch the sparks fly -- as there are two major constituencies that have a vested interest in the pause:

There are at least two rival data centers that may dispute the NCDC analysis:

the Hadley Centre in England and the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).In fact, Hadley’s partner, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, was the first to announce, on the BBC, the existence of a pause in global warming.

Via: American Thinker

Continue Reading....