As previously noted at WUWT, over at the COLA/IGES website, they had this response to the disappeared letter to the Obama administration calling for RICO act investigations of climate skeptics:

WUWT reader Dean P. writes in comments on the WUWT story from earlier today:

The updated website says that they’ve been planning to shut down IGES for over two years now. That makes no sense since in October 2013 they were awarded NSF Grant #1338427, which started in May 2014 and is expected to continue into 2017. Does that mean they were planning to shutter the doors while they were still applying for grants? Did they tell the NSF that they planned on shutting down? As others have said – something smells fishy…

Fishy? I’ll say, that award was updated in June 2015, to the tune of over 4 million dollars (yellow highlights mine):

It seems this is an active grant, good for another two years. It is important to note the name James Kinter in that NSF page, who is part of the Shukla nepotism empire:

IGES Personnel:

President Shukla, Jagadish

Business Manager Shukla, Anastasia

Assistant Business Manager Shukla, Sonia

Director, COLA Kinter, James

Assistant to the President Shukla, Sonia

Source: http://www.iges.org/aboutiges.html

…and so far, that four million dollar plus NSF grant has produced only one paper. From the NSF grant page:

ABSTRACT

This award provides continued funding for the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA). COLA is a climate science research center established to explore, establish and quantify the variability and predictability of Earth’s climate variations on seasonal to decadal time scales, and to harvest this predictability for societally beneficial predictions. The Center is jointly funded by NSF, NOAA and NASA.

Work supported through this award includes activities devoted to 1) basic research on predictability on intraseasonal, seasonal, interannual, and decadal timescales; 2) evaluation of the predictability, skill, and fidelity of US national climate models; and 3) contributions to the development of next generation seamless prediction systems. Research performed under item 1 includes testing of land data assimilation schemes in multiple models, performing hindcasts of El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events investigate inter-event diversity of ENSO, performing dynamical prediction experiments for the Indian monsoon, and determining the dependence of drought probability on surface boundary conditions including land cover change. Work under item 2 focuses on the use of optimal spatial structures derived from information theoretic analysis, which represent the most predictable modes, or modes for which predictability differs the most between two models. This activity is intended to support climate prediction efforts at US national centers and contribute to COLA’s research-to-operations effort. Work under item 3 involves collaborators at the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and includes the development of optimal methods of initializing high-resolution coupled models including version 2 of the Coupled Forecast System (CFSv2), a model used operationally at NCEP.

The work has broader impacts due to its focus on research leading to improved climate prediction, given the substantial societal consequences of climate variability and change. In addition, COLA benefits the US climate research enterprise through community integration, education, seminars, workshops, and software and information services. COLA also serves an important function in transferring the results of basic climate science research on predictability and prediction into operational use.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

Badger, A. M., and P. A. Dirmeyer. “Climate response to Amazon forest replacement by heterogeneous crop cover.,” Hydrol. Earth Sys. Sci., v.12, 2015, p. 879.

Source: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1338427

Now, you might say that COLA isn’t the same as the IGES organization, and that might be true on paper, but the fact is that the http://iges.org website, soon to be “decommissioned” according to them, shows clearly that COLA and IGES are part of the same group, all under George mason University: (yellow highlight mine)

Note the COLA page is a sub-page of the IGES website:

http://www.iges.org/cola.html

With 4 million dollars and counting, good to 2017 according to NSF’s own grant page, the claim of the IGES/COLA website being “decommissioned” just doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t wash. And, with a web page that still looks like it was designed in 1995, one wonders why Shukla’s clan didn’t put some of that money towards making a decent web page. After all, they only were able to make ONE paper with that 4 million dollars, according to NSF.

It gets better. Have a look at their staff page:

Source: http://www.iges.org/people/people.html

Lest Shukla and associates try to claim that IGES and COLA are somehow separate, their own COLA staff web page puts the issue to rest.

COLA appears to be a subset of the Shukla family run IGES. So if the IGES website was going to be “decommissioned”, and so by shutting down IGES, it would seem that would affect COLA too. I can’t find any plans or announcements on their website that says COLA is going to supplant/survive IGES.

A Google search yields no other “new” web pages for COLA. It only yields the IGES web page and COLA subset and the COLA webpage at George Mason University, which is an exact copy of the IGES/COLA front page:

Then there’s this symposium advert page at GMU:

Source: http://cola.gmu.edu/symposium/

Gosh, a COLA symposium and Shukla’s photo is prominently featured on it? It seems that IGES and COLA are indistinguishable when it comes to Shukla involvement. I wonder if Shukla predicted at that symposium on chaos, the current chaos he’s in the middle of as a result of the now disappeared RICO20 letter?

Let’s go back to the claim they uploaded in place of the disappeared RICO20 letter yesterday.

If COLA is a subset of IGES, and it appears to be so, with the same people running the outfit, their claim of “all research projects were completed in July 2015” seems more than a bit unbelievable. It also seems unbelievable to me that they’d “decommission” the only website (IGES.org) that represents COLA while it is receiving active NSF grants.

There’s quite a gravy train going on there it seems, and as Steve McIntyre pointed out in Shukla’s Gold, it seems there’s quite a bit of double dipping going on, despite GMU policy to the contrary:

Before discussing Shukla’s structure, I’ll first quickly comment on institutional policies, as both the federal agencies (NSF, NOAA, NASA) and the university (George Mason) purport to have policies that prevent double-dipping.

Perhaps the Shukla gravy train is about to be derailed once the true accounting is done. Read McIntyre’s excellent piece Shukla’s Gold, the monetary tentacles run deep and wide on this one, and I’m betting there are a lot of people at GMU, NASA, NOAA, and NSF fretting over damage control right about now.

Note: within about 10 minutes of publication, this article was edited for a spelling correction and a text formatting correction.

UPDATE:

If you search Shukla’s name on the NSF grants database it turns up 2039 results…

http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/simpleSearchResult?queryText=Jagadish+Shukla

How many millions has this Shukla family organization taken from the American Taxpayer? How much of that money did they spend to create the RICO charge against climate skeptics?

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