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Randolph Duke

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Texas A&M University Abruptly Shuttered a Climate Lab, Citing Security Risk

By Francie Diep

APRIL 8, 2022

A climate-science lab at Texas A&M University has been shut down after its ties to a Chinese university were deemed a security risk.

The International Laboratory for High-Resolution Earth System Prediction, or iHESP, was formed in 2017 between Texas A&M, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado, and the Qingdao Pilot National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology, in China. The three institutions had agreed to share funding, experts, and computing power to develop fine-grained computer models predicting how climate change would affect the Earth. 

The first phase of the partnership was set to last through 2023. But in December 2021, the project was unexpectedly terminated, effective immediately.

The closure was attributed in part to financial troubles with the Chinese partner. The Qingdao laboratory hadn’t delivered on a promised $2 million payment to fund iHESP, said Kelly S. Brown, a spokesperson for Texas A&M. Even had the lab not defaulted on the money, however, it would have faced another barrier: The Texas A&M University system had marked the iHESP contract for termination.

The lab was on a list of foreign agreements that the system wanted the College Station campus to terminate because of national-security fears. The Texas A&M system did not respond to The Chronicle‘s questions about how the system determined iHESP was a security risk, and did not address questions about other contracts on its list for termination.

The Texas A&M University system had evaluated Chinese and Russian agreements of all kinds, including “animal-use, study abroad, gifts agreements, book publishing agreements, nondisclosure agreements,” Brown said. It made individual decisions about which such partnerships posed risks that scientists might steal technological know-how, to the military or economic benefit of another country, she said.

A spokesperson for the National Center for Atmospheric Research said the decision to end iHESP originated from Texas A&M. The center halted its work on the project on January 31, and “seven to eight” center staff members lost part of their funding as a result. Those staff members were moved to other projects, the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Emails and calls to the Qingdao national lab, sent Friday night, local time, weren’t immediately returned.

Collaborating With the FBI

The lab closure came just in time to respond to some political pressure. In February 2022, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, posted publicly that he had sent letters to 22 U.S. universities, urging them to end academic and research partnerships that could benefit the Chinese military. In his letter to John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, Rubio called on the College Station campus to terminate its partnership with Ocean University of China, which is based in the city of Qingdao and works with the Chinese navy.

Rubio’s letter never names iHESP, but Ocean University is listed as a member institution of the Qingdao Pilot National Laboratory, iHESP’s Chinese partner. And a faculty page for Lixin Wu, director of the Qingdao lab, says he is also vice president of Ocean University.

Sharp and M. Katherine Banks, the College Station campus’s president, wrote back to Rubio, in a public letter dated the next day: “With respect to your questions regarding Texas A&M University affiliations with Ocean University, those affiliations no longer exist or are being terminated as part of our rigorous, ongoing review and collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). No further university-sanctioned research will occur.”

Brown said that over the last year, Texas A&M University has terminated three dozen foreign agreements in the course of regular, rolling reviews. Before that, the university also ended one professor’s position over fears of Chinese government influence: Zhengdong Cheng was arrested and charged with hiding ties to a Chinese university in 2020. His case is still pending.

In late February, the Department of Justice announced an end to its controversial China Initiative, a Trump-era effort to keep China from stealing U.S. intellectual property via academic cooperation, which resulted in few successful prosecutions. Critics of the initiative said it had created an atmosphere of intolerance against researchers of Chinese descent.

‘There’s No Winner Here’ 

But even if an era of suspicion of Chinese academic collaborations is ending, the repercussions continue. The sudden termination of iHESP created hardships for some lab members, sources familiar with the lab told The Chronicle. Lab staff are reportedly funded through the end of May, and then must find other jobs. (Brown could not confirm the fate of iHESP employees.) For staff members still trying to establish their careers in science, losing the lab prematurely throws up obstacles to finishing their research and publishing papers, key to career advancement.

It’s also a loss for science. iHESP had provided data cited in a major international climate report, among other publications. 

The world’s climate models are getting better all the time, but predicting how rising global temperatures will affect local weather is still difficult because it requires so much computing power, researchers at iHESP wrote in a paper published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems in November 2020. “Through international collaboration, we are able to address this challenge,” they wrote.

“There is no winner here,” said Xuebin Zhang, a climate researcher with the Canadian government who is not involved in iHESP. He said he could not assess iHESP’s security risk, but noted that international cooperation is essential not only to mitigating the effects of climate change, but even to just studying it. The computing power required is such that “no single country can actually do it well,” he said. “We need to pull all the resources we have from the entire world.”

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Randolph Duke

Randolph Duke 4034

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22 minutes ago, Pancho said:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…

 

It would be a shame if someone took screenshots of the political forum at texags and sent that to their Black recruits and current athletics.  

Just if anyone is bored…

 

You mean "enlightened" posts like this classic?

 

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Randolph Duke

Randolph Duke 4034

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1 hour ago, Pancho said:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…

 

It would be a shame if someone took screenshots of the political forum at texags and sent that to their Black recruits and current athletics.  

Just if anyone is bored…

 

One main tenet of aggy culture is complete idolatry of Sul Ross. There is no question Sul Ross dedicated his life to establishing, defending, and promoting the supremacy of the white man. He was unquestionably a committed and dedicated white supremacist.

aggys know this. aggy culture was unquestionably established on a foundation of defending and promoting white supremacy. That even today they will acknowledge no wrongdoing in any of the despicable white supremacist acts of Sul Ross speaks volumes.

If black athletes don't care about the idolatry of white supremacists by aggys and are ok with having a shrine to white supremacy at the center of the A&M campus, what makes anyone think those athletes will care about being presented with yet more evidence of the sickness that defines aggy culture?

If a kid thinks playing Uncle Tom to the Rudder Association, John Sharp, Rick "Niggerhead" Perry, and their ilk is his ticket to a better life, there is nothing anyone can do to try to change their mind with meaningful facts. If they can tolerate being treated as second-class citizens, they at least have an opportunity to get a decent quality trade school education at A&M. But no student, regardless of race, creed, or other status should have to tolerate the bullshit, ignorance, and garbage that is aggy culture in order to better their lot in life. 

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Enchubben

Enchubben 5600

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I actually thought Max Johnson was the best of the bunch watching that. Not that he was terribly great or anything, but I thought he looked quite a bit better than King. 

My guess is Johnson ends up winning the position at some point if not outright before the season starts, but Weigman gets playing time.  Evan Stewart looks good, though he'll largely be wasted in that offense with those qbs.  He will always have the tiktok house to fall back on though.

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Vertigo

Vertigo 20497

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Posted (edited)
1 minute ago, Enchubben said:

With only a half dozen or so completions to go around to WR's each game, would not be surprised to see another one transfer out as well. 

Jimbo is force feeding Stewart early to try and prove to recruits that there are tons of swing passes to go around. 

Edited by Vertigo
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US183

US183 163

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Posted (edited)
6 hours ago, Longboard Horn said:

Funny thing is most likely Max Johnson is going to be the starter

And he will make sure aggy loses to LSU again, only this time he’ll beat aggy in an aggy uniform,

. 

Edited by US183
LSU
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