Defund the NSF, the “Science” of Climate Alarmism
The NSF, the National Science Foundation, is one of the largest funders of global warming research. It is a US government agency, so subject to FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) requests, and funds NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is one of the largest global warming research institutes and whose climate model I (Dr. Duane Thresher) have worked on.
The Weinstein of Climate Science has been funded by the NSF for decades. They’ve probably given him millions over the years. I got to thinking about the NSF while I was filing FOIA requests with them about his sexual harassment.
I remembered the NSF TV commercials from the 1980’s: “our strength is in our diversity”. Even then, before I was in science, I thought it odd that the NSF should run such clearly non-science TV commercials. They may have been public service announcements but they cost the taxpayer plenty somewhere along the way.
Later it came out that the NSF was spending/wasting a lot of money on “social science”, although the extent to which the NSF had been taken over by social scientists was not reported.
Social science has the word “science” in it so it must be a science and be eligible for NSF funding, right? Wrong. If you were in a field that had trouble getting funding what would you do? Tack “science” onto the name of your field and tap into plentiful real science funding of course.
Social science includes history and political “science” (see!) and many other fields most people would not consider science and would not want their taxes wasted on. In short, it is “fake science”. Premier among these fake sciences is “sociology” (adding “ology” is the same as adding “science”).
Sociology is the field run by the left to give scientific authority to their fantasies about how society should be. Sociologists usually have no real science or math background. They misuse statistics programs to “prove” the predetermined leftist outcome of their “research”.
The positions of Director and Deputy Director of the NSF are appointed by the President and confirmed by the US Senate. Cora B. Marrett is an African American woman sociologist. She was acting Deputy Director from January 2009 to January 2011, acting Director from June 2010 to October 2010, Deputy Director from May 2011 to August 2014, and acting Director from March 2013 to March 2014 (all dates from the NSF website). Obama was President from January 2009 to January 2017.
From March 2014 to present, France A. Cordova has been Director of the NSF. Cordova is a Hispanic woman born in France and educated in California. She has a BA in English but a PhD in Physics (LOL). She might as well be a sociologist. (In my direct FOIA request to her about The Weinstein of Climate Science I indicated who he was. We’ll see what she does with that information. Probably nothing.)
Global warming, or climate change as they renamed it, has become a fake science and is also used by the left as a political weapon. As indicated, the NSF is one of the largest funders of global warming research. So the staggering amount of money wasted by the NSF, while the taxpayer assumes it is being well-spent, includes that spent on social science AND global warming. Another case of Follow The Money .
Tough budget talks are coming up and the NSF is a good place to start cutting waste. Defund the NSF! At least until it is drastically reformed. Start by firing the current Director of the NSF, France A. Cordova.
Hell, make me Director of the NSF. I’ll get the sociologists out of there and into positions to which they are more suited, like those where you say “do you want fries with that”. Actually, I apologize for that remark. Fast food workers are usually more competent, honest, and hardworking than sociologists.
I am certainly more qualified than Cordova. And I have experience with the NSF. I was on a research cruise (mostly as CTD operator) around the Mertz Glacier Tongue region of Antarctica. The ship, the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, was built for and was chartered by the NSF and they paid for the cruise itself. (The data from that data-sparse remote region is worth the money. How this data is misused later is a different matter. A few years after my cruise, a large piece of the Mertz Glacier Tongue broke off. It wasn’t because of global warming; it was because it had grown so large it stuck out so much into the ocean that currents and other icebergs broke it off.)
While I was working in Germany in climate science, I tried to get some funding from the NSF under one of their international research cooperation programs. No way. The only way to get that money is to do science in Third World countries, those powerhouses of scientific research. Obviously, the program was created and run by leftist sociologists at the NSF. They didn’t even care what field of science it was in or if any real results came out of it.
The left has a long history of taking over and ruining science by making it a political weapon. Lysenkoism was a political campaign against genetics in the former Soviet Union starting in the 1920’s. Supported by Joseph Stalin and in opposition to widely-accepted Mendelian inheritance and Darwinian evolution, Trofim Lysenko believed in the heritability of acquired characteristics (Lamarckian evolution) — for example, giraffes started with short necks but stretched them reaching for leaves and then passed this characteristic on to the next generation. This supported the socialist fantasy that the way society was was not inherent and could be changed through revolution.
Thousands of biologists were fired, imprisoned, and even executed. Scientific research in the field of genetics in Russia was destroyed and there are indications it has not recovered to this day.
Speaking of Russians in science, on my NSF research cruise above, the pilot was a Russian. For obvious reasons of experience, the Russians are unparalleled in ice piloting. One night on the ship I was alone on the bridge with him and as the only representative of the scientific crew available, I got to command where the ship went. A little dangerously, I took the ship deeper into the west bay of the Mertz Glacier Tongue than anyone else had ever gone before.
Finally, if you still don’t believe the left has taken over the NSF look at the NSF flag above. It’s in front of the all-red socialist flag. The NSF flag (red, white and blue with the red hidden) is people holding hands encircling the globe. What does that symbolize more to you, socialism or science? Can you honestly believe that was unintended?
Read more at columbia-phd.org
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