Trump cuts apparently shutting down NASA’s climate office in New York
Schmidt’s data tampering, as documented in 2016.
As part of the Trump administration’s aggressive effort to trim the federal budget as well as shift the research focus at the federal government’s many science agencies, on April 24, 2025 it revealed that it has canceled the building lease for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York that has existed since 1961 and in 2016 and 2017 was found to be tampering with past climate data with no explanation, lowering past temperature numbers while raising more recent ones in order to make the data fit the as-yet unproven theory that human activity is causing global warming.
Those “adjustments” have never been justified in any way. Nor has Gavin Schmidt, the man who heads GISS, ever done anything to correct them. Moreover, when his office was accused of this tampering in 2016 he not only refused to fix or justify the changes, he responded by claiming “planetary warming does not care about the election.” In the years since it has been his office that annually declares each year “the hottest on record,” using these tampered numbers to do so and demonstrating that he has been acting not as a real researcher but as a political operative of the global warming crowd.
Though the office lease is being canceled, GISS has not been shut down, as of now.
While NASA is terminating the lease on the GISS offices, it is not closing the institute itself. Lystrup said in the email that it will help employees move “to remote work agreements in the short-term as the agency seeks a new, permanent space for the team.”
I suspect this statement is merely designed by Trump officials to dampen the screams of opposition against its actions. It is very likely GISS is going away, and most of its employees will have to find new jobs.
The hope is that new scientists can be hired to review these tampered numbers and get them fixed so that climate research in the future can proceed with reliable data.
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Schmidt’s data tampering, as documented in 2016.
As part of the Trump administration’s aggressive effort to trim the federal budget as well as shift the research focus at the federal government’s many science agencies, on April 24, 2025 it revealed that it has canceled the building lease for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York that has existed since 1961 and in 2016 and 2017 was found to be tampering with past climate data with no explanation, lowering past temperature numbers while raising more recent ones in order to make the data fit the as-yet unproven theory that human activity is causing global warming.
Those “adjustments” have never been justified in any way. Nor has Gavin Schmidt, the man who heads GISS, ever done anything to correct them. Moreover, when his office was accused of this tampering in 2016 he not only refused to fix or justify the changes, he responded by claiming “planetary warming does not care about the election.” In the years since it has been his office that annually declares each year “the hottest on record,” using these tampered numbers to do so and demonstrating that he has been acting not as a real researcher but as a political operative of the global warming crowd.
Though the office lease is being canceled, GISS has not been shut down, as of now.
While NASA is terminating the lease on the GISS offices, it is not closing the institute itself. Lystrup said in the email that it will help employees move “to remote work agreements in the short-term as the agency seeks a new, permanent space for the team.”
I suspect this statement is merely designed by Trump officials to dampen the screams of opposition against its actions. It is very likely GISS is going away, and most of its employees will have to find new jobs.
The hope is that new scientists can be hired to review these tampered numbers and get them fixed so that climate research in the future can proceed with reliable data.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
oh no
anyways…
While ( as has surly been obvious from my comments over the years), I am an absolute advocate of accurate scientific data, and absolutely condemn any “jiggering” with data to fit any any particular theory, there are still reasons to be worried about climate change, whatever the reason.
Satellite views clearly show a reduction in arctic ice, which ( my conspiracy theory) might have something to do with Trump’s interest in Greenland… Previously hidden resources are becoming accessable.
Extreme weather events are certainly becoming more common… Catastrophic hurricanes, tornadoes, storms dropping stupid quantities of rain in one go… All seem to be ramping up in frequency.
And admittedly it’s only a very small data point, but when I first moved here to Sweden (25 ish years ago ), in winter -20c was the norm, and the sea around Stockholm froze over.. it was fun to go out and go ice fishing… I haven’t been able to go ice fishing in over a decade, indeed there has been no ice on both the sea and the lake I live by for a decade.
I don’t think we know enough about the climate to point a finger at the reasons for these pretty rapid changes, and falsifying data isn’t helping any… But I also think we shouldn’t get complacent because of some bad data. Keep researching, collect and analyse genuine data, and draw conclusions based on facts.
I’m certainly not a “chicken little” , but I do think the stakes in this matter are big enough to warrent serious study… I hope for all our children’s sake this is a nothing burger, but we owe it to them to just make sure.
Lee S,
There was a reason that the rallying cry was quite deliberately changed from “Global Warming”[tm] to “Climate Change”[tm] some years ago. Climate changes all the time. The idea that the entire Earth’s climate can be rendered static, like a tiny landscape inside of a cast-Lucite paperweight, has always been ludicrous. But “Climate Change” allows regional pearl-clutching without requiring an actual global “crisis.”
There has been a long, secular warming trend since the end of the last Ice Age, but it has not been uniform or even continuous. In recent decades, the Arctic has been warming – though Al Gore’s hysterics of three decades back about the north polar ice cap vanishing by 2013 have been rendered seriously embarrassing by the passage of time.
Still, there is renewed serious talk of exploiting a formerly impractical Northwest Passage for Asia-Western Hemisphere trade. Both the Russians and Chinese seem interested in pressing new claims in the Arctic and commencing more than token military operations there.
Greenland has long been important to U.S. defense, but recent geopolitical – and climate – developments have impelled Pres. Trump to look seriously at modifying the Greenlandic status quo so as to give the US the ability to move more quickly to further secure Greenland and all of North America from military threats from very high latitude. This is also behind Trump’s recent summit with the President of Finland, a major aspect of which was talks about getting the Wartsila yards to build us some long-sorely-needed new icebreakers.
As to the “globality” of climate change, that seems more a matter of propaganda than of facts in many cases. It has been often and noisily alleged that “extreme” weather events are on the rise but there seems little or no statistical evidence for this. And recent years have certainly not been a succession of “hottest ever” here in the US. The 1930s remain, by far, the hottest and dryest decade in US history and most records set then for such things still stand. That was well before petroleum-fueled transport had had much opportunity to influence even local CO2 levels in the much-smaller-than-now industrialized areas of the globe, never mind those worldwide.
Climate science corruption, regrettably, is not an isolated aberration. In many fields of science, the percentage of peer-reviewed and journal-published papers later requiring withdrawal has long since ascended into double digits.
Much of this is traceable to the fact that much modern science research – starting during WW2 – is government funded. We are now in at least the third generation of scientists who have grown up in this milieu and their average moral fiber, if you will, has seen steep average declines. Combine that with the fact that many of the government functionaries doling out the largess are not, themselves, scientists, but political creatures with political agendas and the increasing displacement of worthy work by politically congenial fakery is an inevitable consequence.
One hopes DOGE curry combs the corruption and rot out of government-funded science in the same way it is currently doing in every other federal government bureaucracy. The shrill cries about “destroying science” are of a piece with similar baseless screeching about “destroying democracy” from other parts of the federal government. As always, the worst crooks and grifters are those who wail the loudest and lie the most.
Dick Eagleson wrote: “Climate science corruption, regrettably, is not an isolated aberration. In many fields of science, the percentage of peer-reviewed and journal-published papers later requiring withdrawal has long since ascended into double digits.”
There are other problems with the modern method of doing science. One is “hypothesis testing.” It is an attempt to determine whether the data collected proves the hypothesis. One of the mistakes made by scientists is what is known as a “p-value.” If the data is relatively random compared to the hypothesis, then the p-value is high, meaning greater than 0.05 (out of a range of 0 to 1). The problem is that most of today’s scientists assume that if the p-value is low (< 0.05), then the hypothesis has been proved and a cause/effect relationship has been established. In reality, a low p-value is meaningless, but a high value shows that the experiment has failed to prove the hypothesis. To add to the confusion (false certainty), collecting more data tends to reduce the p-value, so a large experiment may be seen as proving the hypothesis. This really means that it is relatively easy for scientists to work with their data until their p-value comes out low, "proving" that their science is top notch.
A driver for much of this effort to prove that their science is good and valid is the "publish or perish" imperative. One would think that publishing "this didn't work" would be just as important as "this worked," but publishing successful hypotheses is seen as more important than showing that a direction is a dead end.
So, the science that we have deemed to be good and true, even through peer review, can be bogus. The validity of much of it is just plain old unknown.
I worry about what we will get when AI starts creating solutions using the science papers that have false conclusions due to our broken science.
Gavin will likely hide behind this:
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-satellites-underestimate-power-emissions-reveals.html
Greenland should green
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-ice-boost-north-east-greenland.html
John Christy at UAH needs to run that outfit.
LeeS “Extreme weather events are certainly becoming more common… Catastrophic hurricanes, tornadoes, storms dropping stupid quantities of rain in one go… All seem to be ramping up in frequency.”
None of this is true. Reporting is better so things that occur anywhere on the planet come to your knowledge which didn’t used to be so.
There is also more infrastructure being built in stupid places. In Brisbane houses get regularly flooded. When buying Brisbane real estate, check the flood maps first. Most people don’t and buy in areas called “flood plains” then whine when they flood and complain about their flood insurance premiums.
Dick Eagleson “Much of this is traceable to the fact that much modern science research – starting during WW2 – is government funded. We are now in at least the third generation of scientists who have grown up in this milieu and their average moral fiber, if you will, has seen steep average declines.”
They can always get jobs selling used cars.