RUTHFULLY YOURS

Environmental Protection Agency officials are “leaving in droves”, reports the New York Times.

More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.

What marvellous news to ease us all into the festive Christmas spirit, eh readers?

Why, it’s like the final scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge repents of all his miserliness, his nephew Fred gets a big fat turkey, Bob Cratchit gets a pay rise and Tiny Tim declares “God bless us, every one!”

Not, of course, that this is quite the way the New York Times sees it. It wants us to believe that this is an attack on both science and the environment.

Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.

Actually, though, what it really is is #winning.

The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released on December 18th, is premised on the belief that America’s economic security is national security. In reordering the skewed priorities of the Obama administration, “climate change” is no longer listed as a national security threat. Instead, the new National Security Strategy document emphasizes the importance of “energy dominance—America’s central position in the global energy system as a leading producer, consumer, and innovator.” The document goes on to state that our nation’s “abundant energy resources—coal, natural gas, petroleum, renewables, and nuclear—stimulates the economy and builds a foundation for future growth.” Climate policies cannot be so extreme that they risk undermining America’s strengths in energy, thus endangering America’s current and future economic security.

“The United States will continue to advance an approach that balances energy security, economic development, and environmental protection,” according to the National Security Strategy document. An anti-fossil fuel agenda not only is injurious to U.S. economic security. It fails to recognize the important role that fossil fuels must play for the foreseeable future, along with alternative forms of energy, in helping the developing world “power their economies and lift their people out of poverty.”

What a refreshing change from the last administration’s obsession with climate change, which former President Barack Obama had made the centerpiece of his national security agenda. “Today, there is no greater threat to our planet than climate change,” Obama declared during one of his weekly video addresses in 2015. At the climate change conference in Paris, which led to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change from which the United States is now withdrawing thanks to President Trump, Obama claimed that climate change is “akin to the problem of terrorism.” In September 2016, Obama signed a Presidential Memorandum on Climate Change and National Security, establishing a policy that the impacts of climate change must be considered in the development of national security-related doctrine, policies, and plans.

In his single-minded preoccupation with climate change, Obama kicked the can down the road when it came to dealing with more pressing national security issues, including the looming existential crisis posed by North Korea’s rapid development of nuclear arms and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the U.S. mainland. The Obama administration also facilitated the path for Iran to become a full-fledged nuclear power within a decade or so, by agreeing to the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry made the delusional claim that the Iran deal and the Paris climate change agreement he negotiated were vital to global security, during a speech he delivered on June 5, 2017 at Ploughshares Fund’s annual Chain Reaction event. In both cases, all that his deals managed to do was to undermine U.S. national security.

On December 7—a date presumably chosen because it is Pearl Harbor Day and thus resonates with general alarm—the American Association of University Professors issued a thirteen-page statement, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” The aim of the statement is to call out President Trump in particular and conservatives in general for their “anti-science” attitudes and policies. In Part I of this three-part essay, I gave the historical background to the popular leftist attack on conservatives for their “anti-science” positions. In Part II, I take a closer look at what “anti-science” really means. https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/17/does-trump-threaten-science-part-2/

Passions and Padlocks

In principle, science padlocks political passions in a cage from which they cannot escape to disrupt experiments or analysis. But that principle is often violated, and it also turns out not even to be all that good as a principle.

Sometimes those political passions protect science from running off the rails. Our rules that prevent involuntary human experimentation, for example, are grounded in respect for human life and dignity, not in science. Science pursued entirely as a quest for knowledge has no capacity to distinguish right from wrong. Curing a disease and creating a new disease are indistinguishable as far as the ends of science go. We rely on our human passions and non-scientific human reasoning to prevent science from going off in malign directions, and we rely on politics to give organization and force to those positive passions.

But once having granted the legitimacy of some non-scientific principles to govern the aims and uses of science, where do we stop? This is the deep question lurking behind most of the political contention over science.

Fracking. There is scant evidence that hydraulic fracturing is dangerous to humans or to the environment, yet politicians in some blue states, including New York, have banned it. Their position is “anti-science” plain and simple, though few would openly use that term. The opponents of fracking act on an irrational fear—though again, few would own up to its irrationality. Instead they would spin a web of “what ifs” and “maybes.” Is this this a case where an irrational fear should be given weight in light of a larger non-scientific principle? It is hard to say what that principle would be. Some prominent members of the movement avow their hostility to the extraction of any hydrocarbons from the earth on the grounds that growing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere pose a danger to health and safety. This indeed is a principle but one that stands on conjectures, hypotheses, and models that have not been treated kindly by the accumulating facts.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt is mulling over how, or whether, to respond to demands from climate skeptics that he reexamine the science that obligates the EPA to issue costly carbon-emission regulations. While he has recently acknowledged that agency staff short-circuited the science review early in the regulatory process, he may not realize that the EPA inspector general’s office flagged this problem years ago, and the agency staff blew him off by means of a preposterous legal fiction that has long been in need of correction.

In 2009 the EPA issued the Endangerment Finding, which created a statutory obligation to regulate carbon emissions. In the lead-up to this decision the EPA had published its Technical Support Document. Numerous petitions for reconsideration were subsequently filed with the administrator citing evidence of bias and cherry-picking in this report, but all of them fell on deaf ears.

In April 2010, Senator James Inhofe (R., Okla.) asked the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General to review the adequacy of the peer-review process behind the Technical Support Document. The EPA was not happy with what he unearthed.

It turns out that the federal government has rules in place governing how the scientific basis for regulations should be reviewed. Guidelines from the Office of Management and Budget issued under the Information Quality Act impose varying requirements depending on the uses to which a scientific assessment will be put. The most rigorous process is for so-called Highly Influential Scientific Assessments (HISA). These are scientific assessments that will, among other things, lead to rules that have an annual economic impact exceeding $500 million.

The inspector general issued a lengthy report in 2011 concluding (pp. 15–22) that the EPA’s science assessment for the Endangerment Finding was highly influential, but the peer-review process fell short of the required standard. It even violated internal EPA guidelines, by failing to publicly report the review results and cutting corners in ways that potentially hindered the work of reviewers.

The EPA argued back, rather brazenly, that their report was not an assessment at all, merely a summary of previous findings by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Climate Assessment, and other reports, and these documents — not any original research by the EPA — underpinned the Endangerment Finding.

The iconic academic journal of American medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), published since 1812, has committed itself to a Noble Lie[1], that ambient (natural) air quality in America kills hundreds of thousands annually.

Jeffrey Drazen, MD, lung specialist, Editor in Chief of the NEJM since 2000, Distinguished Parker B. Francis Professor of Medicine at the Harvard School of Medicine, professor in the Department of Environmental health at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, is in his 17th year of tenure as editor of the NEJM and in that time he has approved publication of false claims about air quality lethality, resulting in the NEJM become a partisan news outlet that promotes the US EPA political agenda and onerous burdensome air regulations that chase a phantom air quality scare. Air quality in America isn’t killing anyone.

The bias and partisanship of the NEJM and Dr. Drazen and his editorial board is displayed in the publication of an article in June of 2017, authored by Di, Dominici, Schwartz, and others titled “Air Quality and Mortality in the Medicare Population” that claimed to show deaths from exposure to American air quality in a very large study of elderly Americans. They claimed thousands of elderly Americans were dying every year from bad air quality, but their study showed a very insignificant increase of 8% in deaths, in the range of what scientists call “noise” (natural variance) as opposed to good evidence, called “signal.” In spite of that unreliability, as described in the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (Chapter on Epidemiology, pages 597-606), Dr. Drazen approved publication in the NEJM and joined in writing an editorial applauding the article ”Air Pollution Still Kills.”

Earlier in 2017, two published studies on air quality effects said just the opposite of the Di study, that ambient air quality wasn’t killing anybody. The first research report by James E. Enstrom was a reanalysis of old studies relied on by the EPA in the 1990’s to justify air regulations. The second study was by Young, Smith and Lopiano, a comprehensive decade long study of all the heavily populated air basins in California that showed no death effect from small particle or ozone air quality. These two studies refuted the premise and claims of the Di NEJM study of June 2017 and all the EPA funded and sponsored studies used to justify aggressive air quality regulations.

In legitimate science activity, researchers are expected to comment on studies that conflict or contradict their assertions, but the Di, Dominici, Schwartz article did not comment on or discuss the Enstrom and Young studies, or other studies that showed no death effect. The editors of the NEJM would be expected to demand that authors display a proper scientific temperament and cite contradictory studies and attempt to explain or refute the contradictions. Instead the Di authors and the editors of NEJM ignored the conflicts in results, and asserted their position. That’s how the Noble Lie is perpetrated; establishment researchers repeat themselves and assert the matter is settled.

To climate change fanatics, polar bears are the eye candy for the worldwide call for action on global warming. There have been news reports about the sad shape they are in, with their coats going brown, their food supplies drying up, and their ice floes melting. Conclusion: The bears are set to starve.

Welp, turns out there are too many of them now.

According to Marc Morano’s Climate Depot:

2 New Papers: 92% Of Polar Bear Subpopulations Stable, Increasing – Inuit Observe ‘Too Many Polar Bears Now’

…and…

Inuit observations of polar bear ecology: “Last year he said that there’s more bears that are more fat … they rarely see unhealthy bears… back in early 80s, and mid 90s, there were hardly any bears … there’s too many polar bears now.”

So, instead of furtive bears withering away on ice floes and starving due to loss of habitat, rising sea levels or whatever the global warmers claim, what we actually have here is a bear explosion, with bears so well fed that they’ve gotten fat.

It’s more than just anecdotal – the bear populations are exploding everywhere.

In Russia, near its Chukotka peninsula, AFP reports:

MOSCOW: A boatload of tourists in the far eastern Russian Arctic thought they were seeing clumps of ice on the shore, before the jaw-dropping realisation that some 200 polar bears were roaming on the mountain slope.

“It was a completely unique situation,” said Alexander Gruzdev, director of the Wrangel Island nature reserve where the encounter in September happened. “We were all gobsmacked, to be honest.”

Several years ago, we were warned that bears were starving due to global warming and would be irretrievably lost.

I recall the first interview I did with Alaska’s then-governor, Sarah Palin, about the polar bear situation in 2008, before she got famous. I asked her if the news reports were right that polar bears were starving. I only have a reference to the link, unfortunately, but I vividly recall her most memorable quote: “Our bears are healthy bears!”

She added that maybe that could be the situation in Canada, but it certainly wasn’t in Alaska.