monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Three House panels have opened an investigation into whether Rudy Giuliani is trying to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into helping President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

In a previously undisclosed secret mission in 2017, the United States successfully extracted from Russia one of its highest-level covert sources inside the Russian government, multiple Trump administration officials with direct knowledge told CNN.

A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.
The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel.

It’s in part because of events like such as one that I’m certain history will judge Trump to be the worst president America has had in 230 years. Not just corrupt, not just ignorant, not just impulsive, not just divisive, not just bigoted, not just juvenile and petty and vindictive, but someone so untrustworthy that he couldn’t even be relied on to not spill intelligence secrets to our adversaries.

"As you know, there have been an exodus of scientists across many of the federal agencies. This exodus has been driven largely because the results of their work has been suppressed. Indeed, recently a well-regarded physicist/chemist Dr. Rod Schoonover left the U.S. Department of State due to the suppression of even a security-cleared version of his assessment on the impact of climate change on national security. I add parenthetically that, in my opinion, the Department of State can ill afford the loss of any good scientists.

"My question is: Do you support the suppression of scientific reports from within the U.S. Department of State? If not, how did this happen? And if so, why?"

"Well, it won't shock you that I disagree with most of what you just said. Of course, no one supports the absence of science. I would argue that this State Department -- indeed, this administration -- has relied on science far more than the previous administration, and I would argue more than any administration in history. [...]

"We turn to scientists and facts-based approaches to every single difficult challenge we face every day."

I don't know.

Quote:

now discredited "hockey stick" of the Univ. Pa & Gore era

Only in your discredited mind. The "hockey stick graph" has been confirmed time and time again.

Or did you refer to some sharpie-edited version from your champion of lies?

WASHINGTON — The Secretary of Commerce threatened to fire top employees at NOAA on Friday after the agency’s Birmingham office contradicted President Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

That threat led to an unusual, unsigned statement later that Friday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disavowing the office’s own position that Alabama was not at risk. The reversal caused widespread anger within the agency and drew criticism from the scientific community that NOAA, a division of the Commerce Department, had been bent to political purposes.

Officials at the White House and the Commerce Department declined to comment.
[...]
Mr. Ross, the Commerce Secretary, intervened two days later, early last Friday, according to the three people familiar with his actions. Mr. Ross phoned Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator of NOAA, from Greece where the secretary was traveling for meetings and instructed Dr. Jacobs to fix the agency’s perceived contradiction of the president.

Dr. Jacobs objected to the demand and was told that the political staff at NOAA would be fired if the situation was not fixed, according to the three individuals, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the episode. Unlike career government employees, political staff are appointed by the administration. They usually include a handful of top officials, such as Dr. Jacobs, and their aides.

However, a senior administration official who asked not to be identified when discussing internal deliberations said that the Birmingham office had been wrong and that NOAA had simply done the responsible thing and corrected the record.

That official suggested the Twitter post by the Birmingham forecasters had been motivated by a desire to embarrass the president more than concern for the safety of people in Alabama. The official provided no evidence to support that conclusion.

On Monday, Craig N. McLean, NOAA’s acting chief scientist, sent an email to staff members notifying the agency that he was looking into “potential violations” in the agency’s decision to ultimately back Mr. Trump’s statements rather than those of its own scientists. He called the agency’s action “a danger to public health and safety.”

Dr. Jacobs is scheduled to speak Tuesday at a weather industry conference in Huntsville, Ala.

On Monday, the National Weather Service director, Louis W. Uccellini, got a standing ovation from conference attendees when he praised the work of the Birmingham office and said staff members there had acted “with one thing in mind, public safety” when they contradicted Mr. Trump’s claim that Alabama was at risk.

Since the hockey stick paper in 1998, there have been a number of proxy studies analysing a variety of different sources including corals, stalagmites, tree rings, boreholes and ice cores. They all confirm the original hockey stick conclusion: the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1000 years and that warming was most dramatic after 1920.

Confessions Of A Climate Activist: Don’t Blame Yourself, Go After The Criminals Who Sold Out Humanity For Profit

June 12th, 2019 by Steve Hanley

[…]

An investigation by Inside Climate News in 2015 revealed that ExxonMobil new exactly what the result of burning fossil fuels would be way back in 1982. Its scientists even created a graph showing what the result of pumping billions of toms of carbon dioxide would be over time. A version of that chart, with red lines added to show where we are today, was tweeted recently by Bloomberg correspondent Tom Randall.

The original hockey stick chart created in 1998 by climate scientists Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes brought hoots of derision from the industry and led to a well funded campaign — paid for in large part by ExxonMobil — to discredit the scientists who created it.

[…]

I would like to see some reference to your sources for these supposed confirmations.

So far the observed warming has fallen well below the initial forecasts based on the assumed accelerated warming.

What kind of background check?
What kind of troubled individual?