President Obama wasted no crises on the occasion of the U.N.’s climate fear-fest earlier this month. Associating murderers of 129 people there two just weeks previously with agents of man-made global warming Armageddon, he observed that by fostering “dangerous” ideologies, climate change “in some ways is akin to the problem of terrorism and ISIL.”
He even hailed the conference as “a powerful rebuke of terrorists.”
These dangerous culprits presumably include all who challenge the existence of any rational scientific basis for climate hysteria . . . along with disbelievers of pixie dust premises that planetary salvation demands replacing affordable, abundant, and reliable fossil energy with costly, puny and intermittent windmills and sunbeams.
Even if the climate hadn’t warmed over 19 years prior to the run-up to that conference, feverish rhetoric certainly did. Yale Professor Timothy Snyder’s September New York Times op-ed titled “The Next Genocide” compared those who doubted dangerous man-made climate change with a Nazi commander slaughtering a Jewish baby.
He referred to “these deniers [who] tend to present the empirical findings of scientists as a conspiracy and question the validity of science — an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s.”
Last February Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, attempted to launch a congressional witch hunt against climate alarm skeptics.
He requested that universities turn over documents about grants, congressional testimony and other activities involving seven dangerously doubting scientists who have testified at climate hearings.
My good friend Dr. Willie Soon, a distinguished and extensively published scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was targeted for receiving “more than $1 million from [evil] U.S. energy companies over the past decade.”
Not mentioned was that half of that money received over those ten years was paid to his organization for administration, while the rest covered Dr. Soon’s salary and research expenses.
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., followed suit by publicly encouraging legal prosecution of those who buck a so-called scientific global warming doom and gloom “consensus.”
Following in his presumably carbon-free footprints, Jagdish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University, along with 19 other academics, sent a Sept. 1st letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and White House Office of Science Policy Director John Holdren which called for “a RICO investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” (The “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act” (RICO) was primarily directed at Mafia figures that ordered, but didn’t actually commit crimes such as murder.)
The “RICO-20” letter was originally posted on a website of the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), a “nonprofit, tax-exempt research institute” founded by Dr. Shukla. It was later removed.
And where did IGES get its own more than $63 million — 98 percent of its total revenue since 2001? A report in The Washington Free Beacon says that a lot came from taxpayers in the form of grants.
According to IRS Form 990 and other documents, 99.6 percent of its 2014 funding ($3.8 million) was provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and NASA.
What’s more, a huge amount of that generous IGES non-profit, tax-exempt largess went into Shukla family pockets. According to tax filings, together with his “business manager” and wife Anastasia and “assistant business manager/assistant to the president” daughter Sonia they drew $5.6 million in compensation since 2001 (not including Sonia’s unreported earnings).
Although his IGES employment was “part time” this was all on top of Jagadish’s $314,000 2014 salary from George Mason University which IGES joined as part of its College of Science in 2013.
As reported by Ian Tuttle in the National Review, the only other member of the IGES staff is longtime Shukla associate James Kinter who runs George Mason’s Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA).
Kinter (who didn’t sign the RICO-20 letter) added $180,038 from IGES to his $171,320 George Mason University salary in 2014. Shukla also reportedly funneled $100,000 in U.S. IGES grants to his “Institute for Global Education, Equality of Opportunity, and Prosperity,” an “educational charity” located in his hometown in India.
Meanwhile, as satellites show no statistical warming for nearly two decades despite rising CO2 levels while overheated climate models have gone berserk, transparent agendas of glass house residents who attack alarm skeptics warrant reverse scrutiny.
Let’s remember who is paying the bills for a multi-billion fear-dependent climate industry which imposes ever-increasing tax and consumer cost hikes for uneconomical and unreliable “green energy” pipe dreams.
In case there’s any lingering doubt, it’s the rest of us.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012).
