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

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Climate Change: Where is the Science?

Is it twice as likely that the Earth is cooling than that it is warming? That humans and fossil fuels have nothing, or everything to do with it, or somewhere in between? Or is it over 99% certain that anthropogenic carbon burning-induced warming is sweeping us to the apocalypse, with all other possibilities combined being less than one percent probable?

The only way to find out is through the most rigorous and critical application of the scientific method, from laboratory practice to public discourse. Anything less than that increases the risk that the 'solution' could be more catastrophic to humans than the results of climate change itself.

Let us examine what the climate change alarm community has done and how they have done it, and see if it qualifies as the rigorous and unimpeachable science that its proponents claim it is. We'll walk it back from results to first principles.

First, results. Nothing defines science so well in the popular mind than the predictive power of scientific theory. "If the conditions, materials and/or forces A, B, C, and D come together in such-and-such a way, then the outcome WILL BE 6.7294874X. If variables P, Q, and R are substituted for A, C, and D, then the outcome will be 2.1 milligrams of tetrahydrocannabinol in combustion." Awesome.

Via: American Thinker

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Scientific Fraud and Politics

Look who is lecturing Republicans about scientific truth.

ENLARGE

PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

 A press release from the Union of Concerned Scientists recently hit our desk titled “Science Leaders Decry Congressional Attacks on Science and Science-Based Policy.” It flagged an op-ed in the journal Science that laments “a growing and troubling assault on the use of credible scientific knowledge.” Hmmm. Is this about science, or politics?

Since the scientists brought it up, which is the greater threat to their enterprise: the Republicans who run Congress, or the most spectacular scientific fraud in a generation, which was published and then retracted by the journal Science?

Last year UCLA political science grad student and maybe soon-to-be Princeton professorMichael LaCour released stunning findings from a field trial on gay marriage called “When Contact Changes Minds.” He found that a 20-minute conservation with a house-to-house canvasser could convert huge numbers of opponents into supporters, at least if the canvassers explained they were gay and told personal stories.

The study quickly became a media sensation, the most talked-about poli-sci paper in years, and it led gay-rights activists including some working on the Ireland referendum to retool their voter outreach.

The problem is that Mr. LaCour stands accused of faking everything from start to finish. Ph.D. candidates at Berkeley David Broockman andJosh Kalla tried but failed to replicate Mr. LaCour’s results. They then noticed unusual statistical irregularities in Mr. LaCour’s survey panel. He now says he pulled a Hillary Clinton and deleted his raw data. But the canvassing firm he claimed to have employed has never heard of the project—and there is no proof anyone was ever contacted, much less changed their minds.

Mr. LaCour denies wrongdoing and in a response paper assailed the motives of Messrs. Broockman and Kalla, whose violations of academic decorum include their decision to go public and “bypass the peer-review process.” That would be the same process that failed to catch Mr. LaCour’s non-findings at Science magazine.

Via: Wall Street Journal

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