NASA’s top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt has warned President-Elect Donald Trump that the planet just won’t stand for having a fully-fledged climate denier in the White House.

Good luck with that one, Gavin. Or “Toast” as we’ll shortly be calling you…

Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), told the Independent:

“The point is simple: the climate is changing and you can try to deny it, you can appoint people who don’t care about it into positions of power, but regardless nature has the last vote on this.”

Unfortunately, Schmidt doesn’t feel so strongly on the issue that he is prepared to offer his resignation:

Asked if he would resign if the Trump administration adopted the most extreme form of climate change denial, Dr Schmidt said this was “an interesting question”. It would not cause him to quit “in and of itself”, he said.

“Government science and things generally go on regardless of the political views of the people at the top,” Dr Schmidt said. “The issue would be if you were being asked to skew your results in any way or asked not to talk about your results. Those would be much more serious issues.”

Schmidt’s principled position on skewing results is somewhat ironic given that skewing results is what he does best.

Last year a German professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert – a retired geologist and data computation expert – accused NASA GISS of having tampered with the raw data so extensively that it had effectively “invented” global warming.

As I reported at Breitbart:

He has painstakingly examined and tabulated all NASA GISS’s temperature data series, taken from 1153 stations and going back to 1881. His conclusion: that if you look at the raw data, as opposed to NASA’s revisions, you’ll find that since 1940 the planet has been cooling, not warming.

Ewert listed some of the trickery employed by Schmidt and his egregious predecessor James “Death Trains” Hansen to exaggerate the appearance of “global warming”.

• Reducing the annual mean in the early phase.
• Reducing the high values in the first warming phase.
• Increasing individual values during the second warming phase.
• Suppression of the second cooling phase starting in 1995.
• Shortening the early decades of the datasets.
• With the long-term datasets, even the first century was shortened.

This chart, comparing the satellite temperature records with Schmidt’s adjusted version, gives you an idea of the scale of the climate fraud being committed by NASA GISS.

Among Schmidt’s many outrageous adjustments are the ones he made to Iceland’s temperature data sets.

You can see – courtesy of Paul Homewood – what he did to the one at Reykjavik:

So long and slippery are Gavin’s tentacles that, it would appear, he has somehow persuaded the Iceland Met Office to accept these adjustments, where previously it had rebutted them. You can read the full story at Real Climate Science.

This is not science. This is political activism of a kind unlikely to receive much support from the incoming presidential administration.

Firstly, as we know, Donald Trump has declared himself a sceptic of man-made climate change theory.

Secondly, President-Elect Trump holds the old-fashioned view that the job of an organisation called National Aeronautics and Space Administration really ought to involve stuff like space exploration – not, as it became under President Obama, an official promoter of climate alarmism and a vehicle for Muslim outreach.

Just to remind you what an emasculated husk Obama made of NASA, here is an actual quotation from 2010, in which NASA administrator Charles Bolden spoke about his new priorities:

“When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things. One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.”

This now looks likely to come to a very welcome end.

According to Bob Walker, who has advised Mr Trump on space policy, Nasa has been reduced to “a logistics agency concentrating on space station resupply and politically correct environmental monitoring”.

Mr Walker, a former congressman who chaired President George W. Bush’s Commission on the Future of the US Aerospace Industry, told The Telegraph: “We would start by having a stretch goal of exploring the entire solar system by the end of the century.

“You stretch your technology experts and create technologies that wouldn’t otherwise be needed. I think aspirational goals are a good thing. Fifty years ago it was the ability to go to the moon.”

I guess that’s bye bye Gavin Schmidt then. He’s beginning to sound very much like a luxury the U.S. taxpayer cannot afford.