By Larry Bell

Lots of global warming alarmists are hyperventilating over President Donald Trump’s pick of U.S. Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla. a "climate change denier," to head NASA. Hopefully, he will give them good reason for cold sweats by ending the agency’s politically corrupt and embarrassing role in perpetuating history’s arguably most costly fraud. Harsh words? You bet!

Lest there be any confusion, I am referring here to a tiny politically-protected group of climate model theorists called the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) operating above a restaurant in a midtown Manhattan office building nowhere near a major NASA facility. Ironically, GISS has virtually nothing to do with studying space, much less honoring its legendary namesake, Dr. Robert H. Godard, who is widely recognized as the father of American rocketry.

Instead, NASA GISS is far more publicly associated with its longtime head Dr. James Hansen, who is appropriately recognized as the godfather of a global warming alarm syndicate. Hansen even retained his position following four handcuffed arrests for noncompliance with police orders during eco-activist anti-fossil energy demonstrations.

GISS is well-known for headline-grabbing media claims that “NASA warns hottest day, month or year." They have a long history of "tuning" global temperature data and abbreviating recorded timelines to make the past colder in order to have recent temperatures appear remarkably warmer. Dr. Reto Ruedy of GISS once confessed in a Climategate e-mail that GISS had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis, whereby, "NASA's assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data . . . may not have been correct."

Nevertheless, we’re supposed to accept that this information is still good enough for government work. As Reudy explained in a memo to USAToday’s weather editor, "We are basically a modeling group . . . for that purpose what we do is more than accurate enough [to assess model results]."

My highly concerned friend Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham doesn’t accept this as good enough for NASA. He wrote, "Those of us fortunate enough to have traveled in space bet our lives on the competence, dedication, and integrity of the science and technology professionals who made our missions possible . . . In the last twenty years I watched the high standards of science being violated by a few influential climate scientists, including some at NASA, while special interest opportunists have dangerously abused our public trust."

GISS’s shoddy performance shouldn’t be good enough for Jim Bridenstine either. Whereas he doesn’t question the reality that climate changes, he has very good reasons to challenge lousy pretend science . . . particularly when it is purported to represent the best research and thinking of an agency which has accomplished legendary scientific and technological progress.

Speaking on the U.S. House floor in 2013, Bridenstine said, "Mr. Speaker, global temperatures stopped rising 10 years ago. Global temperature changes, when they exist, correlate with sun output and ocean cycles. During the Medieval Warm Period from 800 to 1300 A.D. — long before cars, power plants, or the Industrial Revolution — temperatures were warmer than today. During the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1900 A.D., temperatures were cooler. Neither of these periods were caused by any human activity."

Incidentally, Bridenstine also believes in a need for good weather research. He even co-authored H.R. 353, the Lucas-Bridenstine Weather Research and Forecasting Act which was recently signed into law.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has argued that Bridenstine’s " . . .doubt that humans contribute to climate change — a research area in which NASA is intimately involved" and lack of "experience in scientific research or academia" should disqualify him from heading the agency.

Yet if having academic credentials in climate science is important, one might imagine that it would be doubly so for anyone heading NASA’s climate research activities. Gavin Schmidt, Ph.D, a mathematician who now heads NASA GISS holds no climate or Earth science degrees either.

Duane Thresher, a former GISS employee for seven years, posted a letter to the prospective new NASA administrator in his Sept. 8 Real Climatologists blog titled, "Bridenstine, Climate Scientists Are Not Noble, Stop Paying Them."

Thresher, who is highly critical of the abysmal lack of GISS science competence and integrity, wrote that when bureaucrats decided that global warming was the next big thing, there was a huge influx of money and unqualified people who spent it including opportunists, carpetbaggers . . . the corrupt and ignoble.

It is tragic to see the agency that applied solid science to put humans the Moon become publicly identified with and misrepresented by a junk science-premised climate alarm propaganda machine. While no one I know denies that natural climate changes, it’s high time for a political climate change that gets NASA back to doing reliable science we can once again trust. Duane Thresher’s advice should be heeded, "NASA GISS is a monument to bad science that truly should be torn down. Take the money and buy a rocket."

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).