A Beautiful Night On The Greenwich Village Waterfront

On Wednesday evening about 8 PM, I took a walk down to the Greenwich Village waterfront, and went out on the Charles Street pier.  It was a beautiful night.  The sun had just set.

Looking Northeast, you can see the excellent park along the water, with multiple new condos just behind it (as well as the very large subsidized Westbeth project).  The building with a spire lit up in white at the center is the Empire State Building.  It's about 2 miles away.  It seems much closer in person than it does in this photograph.  The cranes at the left are part of the new Hudson Yards construction project in the West 30s, about 1.5 miles away.

Looking South, you can see some of the towers of the Financial District, again about 1.5 miles away.  The big one in the middle is the new One World Trade Center.  Just to its right, only about half as tall but very brightly lit, is the headquarters of Goldman Sachs.

Looking West, you see the waterfront of Hoboken, New Jersey.  The Hudson River (actually an estuary rather than a river) is well more than a mile wide at this point.  Again, Hoboken seems much closer in person than it does in the photo.  The brightly lit clock tower is the Hoboken Terminal of NJ Transit.  Check out the crescent moon in the upper left!

Next time you are in New York, I highly recommend a walk in this area.  When you get tired, there are many good restaurants a couple of blocks inland.

In Government, Failure Is The Way To Get Yourself More Money

I have noted previously on many occasions the remarkable extent to which total failure by a bureaucracy is actually the main strategy used to squeeze more money out of the taxpayers and thereby grow the agency.  See for example my Poverty tag.  For today's subject, consider the state of public transit in New York.

It's seemingly been a bad few months for New York's MTA, operator of the subway system and also of two of the three commuter railroads.  (The third commuter railroad, NJ Transit, is run by the state of New Jersey.)  Here is a timeline of some of the problems from DNAInfo.  In most years there are no train derailments at all, but this year it's been one after the next.  Going back to the beginning of the year, on January 4, a Long Island Rail Road train blew through the end of the line and crashed into the Brooklyn terminal, injuring dozens.  On March 24 a train derailed going over the switches in Penn Station, and then another train did the same on April 3, and yet another one on July 6.  (These were Amtrak and NJ Transit trains, but the derailments screwed things up for the MTA's Long Island Rail Road as well, since it shares Penn Station.)  On the subway, there was a big derailment of an A train in Harlem on June 27, again with dozens of injuries; and then a derailment of a Q train in Brooklyn on July 21.  A derailment generally shuts down the line or station affected for at least a day, and often multiple days; so these are major events.  Outside of the derailments, subway delays have seen a big increase this year over the recent past.  And then on July 10, Amtrak began a major round of repairs at Penn Station, causing diversion to more remote terminals of many LIRR trains that normally would come into Manhattan.

Needless to say, all of this chaos has brought an outcry that the situation needs to be fixed.  And, this being progressive New York, everybody can agree on how to fix things:  They need more money!

Governor Cuomo -- the guy who appoints the MTA Board members, and thus looks to be on the wrong end of the political firestorm -- has now brought back former MTA Chairman Joe Lhota to resume the job.  (Lhota's previous tenure in 2011-12, although relatively brief, was widely regarded as a success.)  On Tuesday Lhota came up with his so-called "rescue plan."  Here is the New York Times report on the plan.  You won't be surprised to learn that the basic idea is more money, more money, and more money.

The authority’s chairman, Joseph J. Lhota, outlined a sweeping set of fixes that he vowed would turn around steadily deteriorating service. The plan included at least 30 separate measures to address the major problems plaguing the system, including antiquated signals and subway fires, and called for hiring 2,700 new workers. . . .  The improvements come with a steep bill — about $450 million in operating costs and $380 million in capital investment — and Mr. Lhota called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to help fund the plan.     

The genius of this is that, in the crisis of the moment, with derailments and delays constantly in the news, nobody stops to ask why the vast sums of money they were already getting were not sufficient to maintain the system.  Is the current budget being used effectively?  This question is just too crude to be asked in the middle of such a crisis.  Certainly, the politicians are unanimous in their view that this is not the time to start blaming the inefficiency of the unionized work force, but rather is an opportunity to hit up the taxpayers.  From E.J. McMahon in the New York Post on June 26:

Amid all the finger-pointing over who’s to blame for the subway “summer of hell,” New York’s leading politicians at least agree on this much: The transit system needs more money. 

But of course the big problem in New York is that the current budget is not being used effectively at all.  Getting a handle on just how ineffective the spending is is not easy, but I can give a few data points.  In a post back in November 2014, titled "MTA Reinvention Commission Misses The Elephant In The Room," I pointed to data collected by Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations that New York's construction costs for transit projects were in the range of five to ten times those of major international cities (like London and Paris) for comparable projects.  Levy points to union work rules and benefits (not so much base pay) as the main reason for the differential.  

Are operations and maintenance in the New York transit system subject to the same level of inefficiency?  Well, consider just the part we can see.  In the world of automobiles, many innovators are approaching the goal of perfecting the self-driving automobile, with all the myriad complexities that that entails.  If automobiles no longer need a driver, surely subway trains do not either.  Yet on every subway train we have not one but two workers operating it -- and a subway train runs on a fixed route that is completely pre-determined from one end to the other.  Is anybody even considering automating this function on the subway?  Not that I have heard of.  Similarly, thousands of subway workers make change in stations for pay plus benefits approaching $100,000 per year on average.  These people seem to be on the way to getting phased out -- in a process that is taking decades.

In today's New York Post, Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute points out that over the past decade or so the MTA has gotten its hands on several new sources of revenue (dedicated taxes); and essentially all of the money has gone into increased pension and benefits for the work force, with no or minimal improvements in service or maintenance:

So what is the MTA spending its money on?  The biggest culprit in skyrocketing costs is employee benefits.  Consider that in 1985, retirement and health benefits for New York City Transit personnel cost $1.2 billion in today's dollars.  Today, they cost nearly $3.1 billion annually. . . .  This increase in benefit costs alone consumes all the additional revenue that the MTA takes in from the payroll tax the Legislature implemented in 2009.  Should the Legislature enact a new tax, ever-increasing benefits likely will consume that, too.

And as of now, the strategy of getting more money to compensate for failure, and then diverting the money to totally non-productive purposes, continues to work.  The problem is that some day someone will wake up and realize that we can't afford this any more.  

The New Face Of The Democratic Party?

A good one-sentence summary of the current American political divide is this:  Republicans think that Democrats are wrong, but Democrats think that Republicans are evil.  I mean, if you believe that all human problems -- poverty, racism, inadequate healthcare, income inequality, whatever -- can be solved, and that the world can be perfected, by another government program and some more spending and coercion, then who could be so evil as to stand in the way?  And, if our opponents are evil, shouldn't we be angry?  Really angry?  We just need someone to articulate and channel that anger to rev up the voters, say, the way Hugo Chavez did so successfully in Venezuela.

Which brings me to the current wave sweeping over the Democratic Party:  Maxine Waters 2020!

Maybe 2020 seems like a long way off to you, but in this game you can never start too early to test the waters (no pun intended).  And for these purposes, "testing the waters" means making a few visits to New Hampshire.  So you won't be surprised to learn that Maxine was in New Durham, New Hampshire this past weekend, making a speech at a local Democratic Party event.

Do you know much about Ms. Waters?  She is the 13-term Congresswoman representing a district in mostly-poor South Central Los Angeles, during some of which time she has also headed the Congressional Black Caucus.  She is famous for uncontrolled outbursts of rage on the House floor.  Recently, she has been a leading voice stridently calling for the impeachment of President Trump.  (For what?  Really, does it matter?)  

There is no more perfect embodiment than Maxine Waters of completely unhinged rage at anyone who dares to suggest that all human problems cannot be solved right this nanosecond by more government spending.  Her other specialty is playing the race card to deflect any and all criticism from herself.  Things she does not specialize in are (1) knowing what she is talking about, and (2) making any sense whatsoever.  There are many "top ten" lists out there of various people's favorite Maxine Waters quotes.  I'll give you just a few examples (from a list put together by Human Events in 2011):

• On her seemingly bottomless anger (1989): “I have a right to my anger, and I don’t want anybody telling me I shouldn’t be, that it’s not nice to be, and that something’s wrong with me because I get angry.”
• On "outrageous" behavior by people attending a Tea Party rally (April 2010 -- just after passage of Obamacare):  "I just watched-the Republicans were out there-they were having a great time.   They were laughing, they were waving the American flag, they were egging them on, and I thought that was outrageous behavior.   I really did."  
• Interrogating oil company executives at a Congressional hearing (2008): “Guess what this liberal would be all about?   This liberal would be about socializing … uh, umm.   … Would be about, basically, taking over, and the government running all of your companies.”
• On the great success of Fannie Mae under the leadership of Franklin Raines (2004): “We do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Frank Raines.”  (Raines left Fannie Mae at the end of 2004.  He and his top coterie of execs walked away with some $90 million in bonuses during their last years.  In 2008, Fannie Mae collapsed.  ProPublica puts the taxpayer cost of the Fannie/Freddie bailout at $187 billion.)
• On the riots (in her district) following the Rodney King incident (1992): “If you call it a riot, it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason.   I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable.   So I call it a rebellion.”  
• On how public policy gets made in America (1993): “Policy, for the most part, has been made by white people in America, not by people of color.   And they have tended to take care of those things that they think are important."

You could go on with this literally as long as you want.  Then there is the question of Waters' $4.5 million house in the affluent Vermont Knolls section of LA (outside her district -- although, to be fair to her, it was in her district prior to the most recent re-districting).  How do you afford that on a Congressional salary of $174,000 per year?  Plenty of people have asked (for example, TruePundit here), but Waters won't say.

All of which brings me to the last page of the Sunday New York Times Magazine from a couple of days ago, where this prime piece of journalistic real estate was fully given over to an interview of Ms. Waters by Ana Marie Cox.  In a surefire indication that this "Waters 2020!" thing is real, this interview was one of the most ridiculous collection of softballs since Hillary Clinton passed from the scene.  For example, there was this exchange on the house controversy (question in bold):

Tucker Carlson went after you recently: He used some very loaded language about your home, which he implied you could not afford on a government salary. I own several properties. The way he talked about it is: What right does an African-American woman have to do well? He doesn’t know anything about my investments, about the house that I’ve lived in for 25, 30 years. This idea of ‘‘how could she afford that?’’ is racist, and I just dismiss it.   

No follow up on that, of course.  Hey, this is Pravda!  Here are a couple of other examples of the tough, tough questions faced by Waters from the Times:

Recently you’ve found internet fame after some of your public appearances went viral. Why do you think you’ve become so popular with young people?

How does it feel to be a meme?

Meanwhile, some conservatives are also starting to realize that there is a lot to be said for a Waters candidacy.  For example, Michelle Malkin come out just yesterday with a video, proclaiming that she is heading up a new committee, Conservatives for Maxine Waters for President.  Key quote:

“As chairman of Conservative for Maxine Waters for president, I pledge to do my best to spotlight Mad Max’s long record of coddling gang members and using her office to enrich herself and her family. . . .  There you have it in a nutshell, liberalism in living color,” Malkin said. “Corruption, cronyism and cashing in for friends and family while your constituents and taxpayers get screwed.”

By the way, Waters is soon to be 79.  She makes Bernie Sanders look young!

Official Announcement Of New Supplemental Petition To EPA

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post describing new research results once again eviscerating EPA's CO2 "Endangerment Finding," this time on the grounds that the supposed "record warming" that underlies the Finding is no more than an artifact of fraudulently altered temperature data.  If you somehow still doubt that our government has fraudulently altered temperature data in order to give credence to the global warming scam, kindly read my fifteen part series on that subject at this link.

Today, my excellent client, the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, has issued its official announcement that it has submitted a new petition to the EPA -- actually, the Second Supplement to its already existing Petition -- demanding that EPA rescind the Endangerment Finding because it has been invalidated by the new results.

The full text of our Press Release follows:

Electricity Consumers File New Study in Their Call for EPA to Reopen its Endangerment Finding

Key Points:

1. Just Released, new research findings demonstrate that adjustments by government agencies to the global average surface temperature (GAST) record render that record totally inconsistent with published credible temperature data sets and useless for any policy purpose.

2. The new results invalidate the claims based on GAST data of “record warming” in recent years, and thereby also invalidate the so-called “lines of evidence” on which EPA claimed to base its 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding.

3. If the Endangerment Finding is not vacated, whether the current administration likes it or not, it is certain that electric utility, automotive and many other industries will face ongoing EPA CO2 regulation.

4. This scientifically illiterate regulation will raise U.S. energy prices thereby reducing economic growth and jobs.

July 24, 2017

The Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council announces that on July 6, 2017 it filed with EPA a Second Supplement to the Council’s January 20, 2017 Petition asking the Agency to reconsider the scientifically invalid Endangerment Finding on which all Obama-era greenhouse gas regulations are based. The Second Supplement to Petition may be found at: https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/ef-gast-data- secondsupplementtopetitionfinal.pdf

The Council’s original Petition
(see https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/ef-epa- petitionforreconsiderationof-ef-final-1.pdf) and First Supplement to Petition (see https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ef-checc-suppl-pfr-of-ef-050817-final.pdf) demonstrated that the Endangerment Finding is nothing more than assumptions that have each been disproved by the most relevant empirical evidence from the real world. The original Petition was substantially based on a major peer-reviewed 2016 scientific paper by James Wallace, John Christy and Joseph D’Aleo (Wallace 2016) that analyzed the best available temperature data sets and “failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important tropical and global temperature time series data sets analyzed.” The full text of Wallace 2016 may be found at: https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/ef-cpp- sc-2016-data-ths-paper-ex-sum-090516v2.pdf .

The First Supplement to Petition was substantially based on a new April 2017 peer reviewed scientific paper, also from the same authors (Wallace 2017A). Wallace 2017A can be found
at: https://thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/ef-data-research- report-second-editionfinal041717-1.pdf . Wallace 2017A concluded that once impacts of natural factors such as solar, volcanic and ENSO activity are accounted for, there is no “natural factor adjusted” warming remaining to be attributed to rising atmospheric CO2 levels.

The Second Supplement to the Petition now relies on a third new major peer reviewed scientific paper from James Wallace, Joseph D’Aleo and Craig Idso, published in June 2017 (Wallace 2017B). Wallace 2017B analyzes the GAST data issued by U.S. agencies NASA and NOAA, as well as British group Hadley CRU. In this research report past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, this result was nearly always accomplished by each entity systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

The Second Supplement to Petition states:

Adjustments that impart an ever-steeper upward trend in the data by removing the natural cyclical temperature patterns present in the data deprive the GAST products from NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU of the credibility required for policymaking or climate modeling, particularly when they are relied on to drive trillions of dollars in expenditures.

The invalidation of the adjusted GAST data knocks yet another essential pillar out from under the lines of evidence that are the claimed foundation of the Endangerment Finding. As the Second Supplement to Petition states:

It is therefore inescapable that if the official GAST data from NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU are invalid, then both the “basic physical understanding” of climate and the climate models will also be invalid.

The scientific invalidity of the Endangerment Finding becomes more blindingly obvious and undeniable with each day’s accumulation of reliable empirical data. It is time for an honest and rigorous scientific re-evaluation of this Obama-era political document. The nation has been taken down a tragically foolish path of pointless regulations and wasteful mal-investments to “solve” a problem which does not actually exist. Our leaders must summon the courage to acknowledge the truth and act accordingly.

The Council brought its Petition because the Obama-era greenhouse gas regulations threaten, as President Obama himself conceded, to make the price of electricity “skyrocket.” All Americans will benefit from a new era where the cheapest sources of energy can also compete and prevail in the marketplace.

Media Contacts:

Francis Menton
Law Office of Francis Menton

85 Broad Street

New York, New York 10004

(212) 627-1796

fmenton@manhattancontrarian.com

Harry W. MacDougald
Caldwell Propst & DeLoach LLP
Two Ravinia Drive, Suite 1600
Atlanta, Georgia 30346
(404) 843-1956
hmacdougald@cpdlawyers.com 

Spread the word far and wide!

Government Employees Systematically Violating Their Oaths Of Office

Quick quiz:  Which of the following do we live in?

• Constitutional republic.  We have elections where the voters periodically choose a new President.  The new guy gets to come in and run things differently -- that's what elections are for.  Government employees have a constitutional duty to take their orders from the duly-elected President.  
• Progressive bureaucratic utopia.  The government is really run by a permanent cadre of omniscient, apolitical experts who can use the government's power as they see fit and as guided by their expertise.  If a newly elected President disagrees with their expert judgment, the bureaucrats can tell him to get lost.

If this simple test were administered today to the federal civil service, I really wonder if any significant percentage would get the answer correct.  The consensus view of the bureaucrats today is that it is perfectly appropriate for them to resist the directions of President Trump and his political appointees -- and, more incredibly, they think that in doing so they somehow occupy the moral high ground.  The truth is that they are systematically violating their oaths of office.

A notable example of this phenomenon occurred immediately after the inauguration back in January, when holdover Acting Attorney General Sally Yates took it upon herself to order the attorneys in the Justice Department not to defend the new President's Executive Order on immigration, thus directly countermanding presidential instructions.  I covered that action on February 1 in a post titled "The Bureaucrats Think That They Don't Answer To The President."  Yates did not even attempt to contend that the President's Executive Order was contrary to law, but instead justified her action on the ground that Justice's Office of Legal Counsel had not addressed whether "any policy choice embodied in [the] executive order is wise or just. . . ."  Yates was promptly (and appropriately) fired.  

Since January things have only gotten worse.

Before getting to a recent extreme example, let's first go over the basic legal principles that govern this situation.  In terms of the formalities, it would certainly seem that we have the constitutional republic.  To start with, we have the Constitution, and in Article 2, Section 1 the Constitution grants all of the executive authority of the United States to the President:  "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."  It's hard to think of something more explicit that they could have said to make it clear that everybody in the executive agencies works for the President.  The President then does have the duty to follow the law (Article 2, Section 3: "[H]e shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. . . ."), but notice that that duty is the President's duty, not somebody else's.  And then there is the oath of office taken by every federal civil servant (from 5 U.S.C. Section 3331):

I . . . do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. . . .

As I read it -- and I don't think there's any other way to read it -- for an executive branch employee that oath says first and foremost that you agree that you work for the President.  Far and away the most important part of "supporting the Constitution" for a federal executive branch employee is to recognize that you ultimately answer to the President and only to the President.  To attempt to read the oath differently to allow for the bureaucrats to have power other than that coming from the President would be to eviscerate the elections and render the Constitutional structure meaningless.

With that context, consider this op-ed in the Washington Post on Wednesday, headline "I'm a scientist.  I'm blowing the whistle on the Trump administration."  The piece is by a guy named Joel Clement, one of the top career bureaucrats at the Interior Department, and a "scientist" whose portfolio at Interior has included "climate change."  A month or so ago, as part of a departmental reorganization, Clement was reassigned to a job in accounting, collecting royalty checks from oil companies.  Clement:

I am not a member of the deep state. I am not big government.  I am a scientist, a policy expert, a civil servant and a worried citizen. Reluctantly, as of today, I am also a whistleblower on an administration that chooses silence over science.  Nearly seven years ago, I came to work for the Interior Department, where, among other things, I’ve helped endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate. But on June 15, I was one of about 50 senior department employees who received letters informing us of involuntary reassignments.

I love that part where he starts the piece by saying "I am not a member of the deep state."  What do you think the term "deep state" refers to, pal?  You are precisely a guy who has a fundamental policy disagreement with the President over the agenda of your department, and you are asserting the "right" to keep doing it your way and ignore the orders of the President as given to you through his deputy, here the Secretary of the Interior.  So Clement has decided to become a "whistleblower":

On Wednesday, I filed two forms — a complaint and a disclosure of information — with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. . . .  Removing a civil servant from his area of expertise and putting him in a job where he’s not needed and his experience is not relevant is a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars.  Much more distressing, though, is what this charade means for American livelihoods.  

Or to put it another way, I'm right and Trump and Zinke are wrong on a policy issue, and therefore  I'm going to force the President to keep me in my previous job where I can work to undermine the policies that the new administration wants to implement.  I also like the use of the term "whistleblower."  Previously I had thought the term referred to bringing to light things like criminal activity, corruption, theft of government funds, or the like.  Not any more.  Now the term seems to have a new meaning:  "I'm going to tell the world that the administration is trying to implement the policies that got it elected by moving aside obstructionist bureaucrats such as myself!"  OK Mr. Clement, what exactly is wrong with the President trying to implement the policies that got him elected?

You probably think that across the government people who understand the Constitution are pointing out to Clement that Trump and Zinke have every right to do what they are doing and his choices are to go along with it or quit.  Actually, the opposite.  From GovExec.com, July 20:

Clement said he has received a “groundswell of support” from federal employees across the government since he published the op-ed on Wednesday.

And then GovExec quotes someone named Deborah D'Agostino, a lawyer whose practice includes representing federal employees in "whistleblower" claims.  She comments on the prospective Trump administration response to Clement's claim:

“I can’t fathom the agency is going to be able to put something up other than, ‘Well, we have the right,’ ” she said. “It’s not something that makes sense to any reasonable person.”

So according to Deborah we have reached the point where "no reasonable person" could possibly think that the President has the right to exercise his constitutional authority in order to implement the policies that got him elected.  Whew!

Of dozens of articles out there about this guy, I can't seem to find a single one that makes the obvious points that a President has the right to implement the agenda that got him elected by issuing orders to his subordinates, and the employees have the obligation to follow the orders from the boss.  As just one more example of the "deep state" view of the situation, consider Inside Climate News from July 20, "Whistleblower Case Shows How Trump Tries to Silence Science":

[A] senior agency official has invoked the protections of the whistleblower law to publicly object to what he calls an illegal attempt to intimidate him.  The official, Joel Clement, had been the director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the Interior Department before he says he was arbitrarily reassigned to an obscure accounting post to punish him for speaking up about protections for native Americans in Alaska.

The voters elect a new guy with a specific agenda to change the policies of the previous administration.  The new guy comes in and proceeds to move aside -- even fire! -- the holdovers standing in the way of implementing the new policies.  Is this an "illegal attempt to intimidate" the bureaucrats?  It looks to me like they are systematically violating their oaths of office.  Civil servants violating their oath of office can and should be fired, and the sooner the better.  

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XVI

Fifteen posts into this series -- and I certainly hope that you have read all of them -- perhaps there are still a few of you out there who continue to believe that this whole global average surface temperature (GAST), "hottest year ever," "record warming" thing can't really be completely fraudulent.  I mean, these claims are put out by government bureaucrats, highly paid "experts" in their designated field of temperature measurement.  It's really complicated stuff to figure out a "global average surface temperature" from hundreds of scattered thermometers, some of which get moved, get read at different times of the day, have cities grow up around them, whatever.  Somebody's got to make the appropriate adjustments.  Surely, they are trying their best to get the most accurate answer they can with a challenging task.  Could it really be that they are systematically lying to the people of America and the world?

The designated field for my own career was civil litigation, and in that field lawyers regularly call upon ordinary members of the public (aka jurors) to draw the inference of whether fraud has occurred.  Lawyers claiming that a defendant has committed fraud normally proceed by presenting to the jury a few glaring facts about what the defendant has done.  "Here is what he said"; and "here is the truth."  The defendant then gets the chance to explain.  The jurors apply their ordinary judgment and experience to the facts presented.  

So, consider yourself a member of my jury.  The defendants (NASA and NOAA) have been accused of arbitrarily adjusting the temperatures of the past downward in order to make fraudulent claims of "hottest year ever" for the recent years.  You decide!  I'll give you a couple of data points that have come to my attention just today.

James Freeman is the guy who has taken over the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web" column since James Taranto moved on to another gig at the paper earlier this year.  Here is his column for yesterday.  (You probably can't get the whole thing without subscribing, but I'll give you his critical links.)  Freeman first quotes the New York Times, March 29, 1988, which in turn quotes James Hansen, then head of the part of NASA that does the GAST calculations:

One of the scientists, Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, said he used the 30-year period 1950-1980, when the average global temperature was 59 degrees Fahrenheit, as a base to determine temperature variations.

So 59 deg F was the "average global temperature" for the 30-year period 1950-1980.  Could that have been a typo?  Here is the Times again, June 24, 1988:

Dr. Hansen, who records temperatures from readings at monitoring stations around the world, had previously reported that four of the hottest years on record occurred in the 1980’s. Compared with a 30-year base period from 1950 to 1980, when the global temperature averaged 59 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature was one-third of a degree higher last year. 

OK, definitely not a typo.  Freeman also has multiple other quotes from the Times, citing both NASA and "a British group" (presumably Hadley CRU) for the same 59 deg F global average mean for the period 1950-80.  So let's then compare that figure to the official NOAA January 18, 2017 "record" global warming press release:  "2016 marks three consecutive years of record warmth for the globe":

2016 began with a bang. For eight consecutive months, January to August, the globe experienced record warm heat.  With this as a catalyst, the 2016 globally averaged surface temperature ended as the highest since record keeping began in 1880. . . .  

And kindly tell us, what was the global average temperature that constituted this important "record warm heat"?

The average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces in 2016 was 58.69 degrees F . . . .

OK, over to you to decide.  Was the claimed "record warm heat" real, or was it an artifact of downward adjustments of earlier temperatures?  If you think it might help (it won't), here is a link to NASA's lengthy bafflegab explanation of its adjustments.  It's way too long to copy into this post, and provides literally no useful information as to what they are doing, or why they think it's OK.

Do you still think it might be possible that they are playing straight with you?  My friend Joe D'Aleo (he's one of the co-authors of the paper that was the subject of Part XV of this series) sent me this morning a write-up he had done about the temperature adjustments at one of the most prominent sites in the country, the one at Belvedere Castle in Central Park in Manhattan.  There are lots of charts and graphs at the link for your edification.  The temperature measuring site has been at the very same location near the exact middle of the park since 1920.  That location is about 0.2 mi from the West edge of the park, and 0.3 mi from the East edge, so relatively speaking it is highly immune to local land use changes that affect many other stations.  Yes, the City has grown some in that century, but the periphery of the park was already rather built up in 1920, and in any event the closest Central Park West park boundary is almost a quarter-mile away at the closest point. 

This paper is another real eye-opener.  You should read the whole thing (it's only 7 pages long).  The Central Park site is one for which the National Weather Service (part of NOAA) makes completely original, raw data available.  D'Aleo does a comparison between that completely raw data and adjusted data for the same site from NOAA's so-called "HCN Version 1" set, for two months each year (July and January) going for the century from 1909 to 2008.  Essentially all of the temperatures for Central Park in the HCN Version 1 set are adjusted down, and dramatically so; but the adjustments are not uniform.  From approximately 1950 to 1999, the downward adjustments for both months are approximately a flat 6 deg F -- an astoundingly huge amount, especially given that the recently declared "record" temperature for 2016 beat the previous "record" by all of 0.07 deg C (which would be 0.126 deg F).  Then, when 1999 comes, the downward adjustments start to decrease rapidly each year, until by 2008 the downward adjustment is only about 2 deg F.  Result:  whereas the raw data have no material upward or downward trend of any kind over the whole century under examination, the adjusted data show a dramatic upward slope in temperatures post-2000, all of which is in the adjustments rather than the raw data.  D'Aleo:

[T]he adjustment [for July] was a significant one (a cooling exceeding 6 degrees from the mid 1950s to the mid 1990s.) Then inexplicably the adjustment diminished to less than 2 degrees.  The result is [that] a trendless curve for the past 50 years became one with an accelerated warming in the past 20 years. It is not clear what changes in the metropolitan area occurred in the last 20 years to warrant a major adjustment to the adjustment. The park has remained the same and there has not been a population decline but a spurt in the city’s population [since 1990]. 

Since NOAA and NASA will not provide a remotely satisfactory explanation of what they are doing with the adjustments, various independent researchers have tried to reverse-engineer the results to figure out what assumptions are implied.  One such effort was made by Steve McIntyre of the climateaudit.org website, and D'Aleo discusses that effort at the link.  McIntyre gathered from correspondence with NOAA that their algorithm was making an "urbanization" adjustment based on the growing population of the urbanized area surrounding the particular site.  Based on the adjusted temperatures reported at Central Park and the known population of New York City in the first half of the twentieth century, McIntyre then extrapolated to calculate the implied population of New York City for the recent years of the adjusted record.  He came up with an implied population of about 17 million for 1975-95, then suddenly plunging to barely 1 million in 2005.  Well, I guess that's not how they do it!  Any other guesses out there?

By the way, in case you have the idea that you might be able to dig into this and figure out what they are doing, I would point out that by the time you have completed any analysis they will undoubtedly have adjusted their data yet again and will declare your work inapplicable because that's "not how we do it any more."  As the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins noted in November 2015:

By the count of researcher Marcia Wyatt in a widely circulated presentation, the U.S. government’s published temperature data for the years 1880 to 2010 has been tinkered with 16 times in the past three years.

I'm just wondering if you still think there's anything honest about this.