RUTHFULLY YOURS

Several lawmakers just introduced a bill that would nearly triple the budget for the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP), the federal agency in charge of overseeing the U.S. organic market. But before we hand over more tax dollars to this feckless bureaucracy, Congress should demand hearings about NOP’s complicity in what might be the biggest consumer scam in decades: the sale of phony organic food.

Last month, the USDA’s inspector general released a shocking report detailing widespread fraud throughout the global organic-food supply chain and noting the failure of federal officials to ensure the integrity of the organic market in the U.S. The report is proof that millions of consumers have been — and are still being — duped, buying pricier “organic” products that do not meet federal organic standards. It is very likely that organic companies (and the advocacy groups they support) ignored this fraud so they could continue charging higher prices for food labeled organic. Many organic executives are Democratic donors and fundraisers, so consumers also have a right to know whether the Obama administration overlooked this systemwide consumer fraud to protect its pals in the organic industry.

Organic imports have exploded over the past decade to keep pace with consumer demand. The U.S. is a net importer of organic goods, from coffee to feed grains such as corn and soybeans. At the same time, organic brands are rolling in the dough, misleading consumers to believe their products are “local” and healthier than non-organic options. None of it is true. Furthermore, the inspector general’s report warns that “U.S. consumers of organic products have reduced assurance that foreign agricultural products maintain their organic integrity from farm to table,” which should outrage anyone who is a regular buyer of organic food.

Investigators discovered that imported organic shipments often did not have the proper certification, and that NOP officials were “unable to provide reasonable assurance that imported products labeled as organic were from certified organic foreign farms and businesses that produce and sell organic products.” This is at the core of the potential fraud: “There is no definitive test to identify whether a product is organic or not,” Jayson Lusk, head of Purdue University’s agricultural-economics department, told me. “Organic is primarily a certification of processes. To the extent consumers value these processes, trust in the certification system is key to the integrity of organic.”

Investigators also found that imported organic produce was fumigated with prohibited pesticides, an egregious violation of federal policy: “This practice results in the exposure of organic agricultural products to NOP-prohibited substances.”

One by one, the artifacts of President Barack Obama’s rule by administrative fiat are tumbling.

The latest is his signature Clean Power Plan that Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt says he will begin the arduous process of unwinding.

The first year of Donald Trump’s presidency has been characterized — despite his bumptiousness — not by executive overreach, but executive retrenchment. Trump the populist has operated within constitutional lines better than his technocratic predecessor, who used tendentious readings of the law and sweeping bureaucratic actions to impose his policies on immigration, health care, college campuses, and the environment.

The Clean Power Plan, which sought to reduce U.S. carbon emissions by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, was government by the administrative state on a scale that has never been attempted before. The EPA took a dubious reading of a portion of the Clean Air Act (Section 111, which arguably prevented the EPA from taking this action rather than empowered it to do so) and used it to mandate that the states adopt far-reaching plans to reduce carbon emissions, under threat of the loss of federal highway funds.

The legal foundation of the Clean Power Plan was so rickety that the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of blocking its implementation pending all the lawsuits against it.

The presumption of the plan was jaw-dropping. The EPA usually targets pollutants; carbon dioxide isn’t one (although the Supreme Court erroneously said that it meets the definition in the case of Massachusetts vs. EPA). The EPA has always regulated specific power plants; in this scheme, it went “outside the fence” to mandate broader actions by the states, e.g., the adoption of quotas for renewable energy. The EPA once considered its mandate to be protecting clear air and water for Americans; with the Clean Power Plan, it sought to adjust the global thermostat for the good of all of humanity.

The last gets to the absurdity of the Clean Power Plan on its own terms — it did virtually nothing to affect global warming. As Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute points out, the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan (which includes the Clean Power Plan) would reduce the global temperature by 15 one-thousandths of a degree by 2100. The point wasn’t to fight climate change per se, but to signal our climate virtue in the hopes of catalyzing action by other nations and, not incidentally, hobble the U.S. coal industry in favor of more politically palatable sources of energy, namely wind and solar.

Whatever the merits of this agenda, as a first order matter, it must be enacted lawfully and not instituted by strained legal interpretations alone. In congressional testimony arguing that the Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional, liberal law professor Laurence Tribe noted that the Supreme Court has said that Congress doesn’t “hide elephants in mouse holes.”

If Congress had authorized the EPA to remake the nation’s energy economy, we would presumably be aware of it and recall an impassioned congressional debate over this radical and costly change. In fact, the opposite is true. Congress has declined to enact laws limiting carbon emissions, including when Democrats held both houses of Congress under President Obama.

If the future of the planet is at stake and it requires a generational effort to save it, surely it is not too much to ask that a statute or two be enacted by Congress explicitly committing the country to the task. Yes, this requires winning elections and gaining democratic assent, but such are the challenges of living in a republic and a nation of laws.

In his impatience with Congress and his administrative imperiousness, President Obama dispensed with all that. What he imposed unilaterally is subject to unilateral reversal. The rollback will encounter its own regulatory and legal obstacles, but can be achieved more readily than if Obama had been able or bothered to write a swath of his legacy into law.

The United Nations is misusing statistics to try and prove a causal relationship between the reported increase in carbon dioxide concentrations and the purported increase in extreme hurricane events over the last several decades, focusing in particular on the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. “Over the past 30 years, the number of annual weather-related disasters has nearly tripled, and economic losses have quintupled,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at a press briefing on Wednesday. To “prove” his point, graphs were distributed to reporters that show carbon dioxide concentration levels and ocean temperatures rising since 1960, together with an increase in the number of meteorological natural disasters. “Scientists are learning more and more about the links between climate change and extreme weather,” the Secretary General added. He then predictably called for “countries to implement the Paris Agreement [on climate change], and with greater ambition.”

The UN is using the familiar logical fallacy of equating statistical correlations with proof of causation. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory issued a report, last revised on August 30, 2017, that demonstrates the crucial difference between mere statistical correlation and proof of causation. The report found that “records of Atlantic hurricane activity show some correlation, on multi-year time-scales, between local tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the Power Dissipation Index (PDI),” which is “an aggregate measure of Atlantic hurricane activity.” However, the report went on to conclude that it is “premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.” Computer models may indeed predict increased storm intensity and destruction by the end of this century based on some measures of historical data showing increases in sea surface temperatures. However, the extent to which this would be due to an increase in 21st century greenhouse warming caused by human activity is indeterminate at the present time.

Moreover, even the statistical correlations may be misleading. The report examined records of past Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane numbers (1878 to present), which it found to be incomplete in terms of reported storms prior to 1965. Reliance on ship-based observations during that period meant that some storms, particularly short-lived ones, were simply overlooked because they had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic. There were no satellites more than five decades ago to observe and measure hurricanes with the same degree of accuracy as can be performed today. Even with the sketchier information we do have regarding hurricanes in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, we know that five of the eight seasons with the most major hurricanes since 1851 occurred prior to 1965. The strongest hurricane on record to hit the U.S. occurred on the Florida Keys on Sept. 2, 1935. And while Hurricane Maria was a tragically devastating hurricane to be sure, Puerto Rico suffered an even worse hurricane in 1928.

The 2017 North Atlantic hurricane season has the climate change alarmists out in full force.

These activists claim that man-made global warming has made the Gulf of Mexico warmer and the air more humid, thereby making tropical cyclones — called hurricanes in the North Atlantic — more frequent and more intense. They demand we reduce our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to lessen the “increasing” hurricane threat.

Even scientists who should know better are promoting the hurricane/global warming connection. Dr. Gregory Flato — a Canadian government scientist who is vice chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group that reports on the causes of climate change — maintains:

There’s also an expectation that as the sea surface temperatures increase, that the intensity of very intense hurricanes will become larger.

Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University has made similar claims, asserting that the potential intensity of hurricanes and other large storms has risen as a result of climate change.

But basic observations and meteorological science do not support their claims.

Meteorologist Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and an expert on tropical cyclones, explains:

[M]ajor hurricanes don’t really care whether the Gulf [of Mexico] is above average or below average in temperature.

Similarly, in a research paper published in March 2017, M. Mohapatra and V. Vijay Kumar, both of the India Meteorological Department, state:

[T]here is a decreasing trend in the tropical cyclone number over the North Indian Ocean in recent years, though there is an increasing trend in the sea surface temperature.

That ocean temperature rise in the Gulf of Mexico will not increase hurricane frequency has been part of fundamental meteorology since the 1970s. America’s “hurricane guru,” the late Dr. Bill Gray — emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University (CSU) and the head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at CSU’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences — showed in peer-reviewed research that the seasonal hurricane frequency is determined by six climatological factors:

1. The rotational tendency, or vorticity, already present in the atmosphere. Low vorticity lessens the likelihood of a hurricane forming.

2. Pressure gradients determined by latitude. Low pressure gradients lessen the likelihood of a hurricane forming. Within 4 to 5 degrees of the equator, pressure gradients are too weak for hurricanes to form.

3. Wind shear, the changes in wind speed and direction that occur between layers in the atmosphere. Low wind shear allows the whole system in a growing hurricane, from sea level up to around 15,000 meters, to turn together. This helps to keep the storm intact and strengthening. High wind shear essentially cuts the top off a cyclone before it can become a hurricane.

4. Ocean thermal energy as indicated by temperatures to a depth of 60 meters. Temperatures in the Gulf and other hurricane formation regions are always above the critical value of 26.7 degrees Celsius necessary to spawn hurricanes at this time of year. Therefore, like trying to put more water into a full bucket, higher ocean temperatures have relatively little effect on the frequency or intensity of hurricanes.

5. The rate of change of temperature with altitude. High rates of change encourage hurricane formation.

6. Relative humidity in the mid-troposphere, a layer centered at about 5 km above the surface.

Of these six factors, only wind shear has been exceptional this year in the Gulf of Mexico.

It was very low wind shear, not temperature, vorticity, humidity, or anything else, that is therefore the main cause of the high activity in this year’s hurricane season. And wind shear is a natural phenomenon that varies across the globe and is determined by a host of meteorological factors, none of which are under human control.

The global warming/hurricane connection completely falls apart when one looks at the observational data.

For example, during the 1945-1977 cooling period, when ocean temperatures worldwide were undoubtedly lower than today, we witnessed stronger hurricanes than now. Hurricane Camille, the second-most intense tropical cyclone to strike the U.S. on record, slammed into Mississippi as a category 5 (the strongest) hurricane on August 18, 1969, producing a storm surge of 7.3 meters. Hurricane Flora struck in September 1963, killing over 6,000 people. This was the highest number of fatalities for a tropical cyclone in the Atlantic Basin since the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, which may have claimed as many as 12,000 lives.

The strongest tropical cyclone on record worldwide was not recent, either. It was the 2,200 km-wide “Super Typhoon” Tip which made landfall in southern Japan on October 19, 1979, immediately following the global cooling period (by contrast, Irma was about 680 km in diameter; Harvey about 400 km).

The biggest storm surges worldwide were 14.5 meters in Australia in 1899 and 13.6 meters in Bangladesh in 1876. During the warmer 21st century, no tropical cyclone was strong enough to generate a surge greater than 10 meters.

The fact that hurricanes and other tropical cyclones are not caused by — or even significantly enhanced by — man does not give us an excuse to do nothing about them, however. CONTINUE AT SITE

The recent wave of hurricanes that lashed the US had no sooner done their worst than all the paid-up and grant-fed members of Climate Catastrophe Inc., were crying ‘We told you so!’ Yes, they have told us, repeatedly. And just as often they have been wrong, as they are now and once again.

Don’t know why. There’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather. Ah! Gaia is very, very, angry.

Windmills providing expensive, intermittent and unreliable power — the idols of our age — must be built to appease Gaia. Deplorables are dispensable. Those without base-load power in developing countries, plus coal miners, the old, the infirm, the poor must all be sacrificed. Only then will Gaia smile on us again.

I told some ‘warmist’ friends about a Category 4 hurricane hitting Galveston in Texas, generating a fifteen-foot tidal surge, and killing an estimated 8000 people. The deadliest natural disaster in US history. I let it stew for a moment or two before revealing the time: September 1900. I don’t think it made an impression. The climate change ethos has etched itself so deeply into the minds of disciples that it is impervious to clashing information.

Effectively, climate change has become an idolatry masquerading as science. Destructive climate events, however commonplace historically, cause much wailing, finger-pointing and scapegoating. High priests in the guise of climate gurus, like Gore, Flannery, Mann and Suzuki, come into their own. Reason succumbs to superstition.

Take hurricanes.

The latest information, sourced from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), indicates that hurricane activity has not increased by either frequency or scale during recent decades – so far as can be determined. The data going back is patchy and unreliable; as, in fact, is all climate-related data.

I looked at the hurricane data from the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA for the Atlantic Basin for the period from 1851 to 2016. In the ten years to 2016, there were 28 “major” hurricanes recorded. In the previous ten years 39 were recorded. This is relatively high when compared with the whole period from 1851. However, 39 major hurricanes were recorded for the ten years to 1956 and 32 for the ten years to 1966, before dropping to 17 and 16 in the next two succeeding decades. So, what to say? Hurricanes come and go.

There is nothing markedly unusual happening. But, you wouldn’t think that if you suffer the unfortunate experience of tuning into widespread alarmist commentaries and news bulletins. Those who claim to believe in science are quick to dispense with it when it doesn’t suit their storyline. They point to the latest hurricanes as yet more evidence of climate change. And you can bet your life that every storm, drought and heat wave from now on will draw the same response.

They suffer no embarrassment in making such outlandish claims. They are impervious to any factual rebuttals. They have a higher calling.

I understand that the current scientific theory is that warmer water tends to engender more airborne turbulence. Maybe it does. I don’t know. I am not a climate scientist, just an ordinary Joe. But what I do know is that warmer water is not necessarily man-made. Maybe the climate is just warming as it has in early periods of time; and, in any event, maybe it is not warming as much as the high priests tell us. This brings me to a recent climatologist recantation.

A recent article in the Washington Post details five nutrition “facts” we used to be believe. It ends by saying something that you rarely read but is entirely accurate: “In fact, we don’t have a lot of answers about nutrition, which is considered a relatively new science.” But to listen to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and popular food activists, you would think the only issue is that Americans just aren’t listening.

The real problems don’t start with consumers, they start with scientific and economic shortcuts. The consequences of bad policies are dire: poor nutrition is linked to chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Unfortunately, one out of every two adults suffer from one or more preventable chronic diseases.

But the federal officials who are charged with making nutrition policies continue to make poorly informed decisions. In 2009, the USDA instituted a program that excluded white potatoes from the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), presumably to address obesity. They did this despite the fact that many Americans have shortfalls in potassium and potatoes are a great source of this nutrient. Five years later, they finally asked the Institute of Medicine whether this was a good move.

Predictably, one of the Institute’s findings was that “Intakes of … potassium … among low-income women, fall short of current nutrient intake recommendations.” The program may have slightly affected obesity in children, although it is not clear that it has anything to do with potatoes.

The FDA, meanwhile, just finalized its regulations to put calorie labeling in restaurants, theaters, and grocery stores. The rule was initially finalized in 2014 but put on hold by the current administration. Studies are mixed as to whether or not posting calories will do just a little bit or no good whatsoever. But science is not the reason this rule is going forward.

The National Restaurant Association supported the rule, originally as part of the Affordable Care Act, because there was a growing “patchwork” of local and state laws requiring it. This is a perfect example of how not to make scientifically based health policies. In letting the rule go, the Commissioner announced that the rule would institute “predictable, uniform federal standards,” precisely what industry needed. Again, the real problem was with that we did not pay attention to the first adopters, who demonstrated that the information wouldn’t help with obesity.

At least the five nutrition facts cited earlier were originally based on some science. One myth in the article was that “All fat is bad.” But it was only in 2010 when the Dietary Guidelines committee stopped recommending limits on total fats, although they still recommended reducing saturated fat. The original myth was about total fat, but recently multiple studies have found that polyunsaturated fats (and possibly monounsaturated fats) found in foods such as walnuts, salmon, and soybean oil are now considered good for you.

Even more recently, a 2014 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine was unable to conclude that even saturated fats caused heart disease. Moreover, it remains unclear whether unsaturated fats are good for you. These are still controversial findings, and, without clear scientific backing, policymakers should proceed with caution.

More specifically, public health policy must always be preceded by both sound science and cost-benefit analysis.

Sound scientific evidence must be present for a positive public health benefit to be amply demonstrated. Had there been more research to indicate what manufacturers might do to replace animal fats in the 1980s, activists might not have campaigned so hard against trans fats. As for cost-benefit analysis: “Trying” out public policies, such as nutrition labeling, without credible analysis showing that benefits exceed costs, removes public resources that can be better spent addressing public policies that do pass such a test.

These problems are exacerbated in the case of the new science of nutrition. For diet and disease relationships, dietary guidance and nutrition policy based on memory-based recall data have been shown by professor Edward Archer to be “pseudoscience and inadmissible.” These data, which underpin most of the advice from the Dietary Guidelines, ask consumers to remember what and how much they ate in the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, well over half of consumers do not report eating enough to stay alive. If the data that go into diet-disease relationships are flawed, then the correlations between dietary choices and disease may be wrong. This means that much of the current advice and policies may be wrong.

Call it another dispute about the “settled science” of climate change.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/23/more-unsettled-science-on-climate-change/

According to a report published in Nature Geosciences last week, we have more time than we thought to stop the predicted meltdown of the planet. Not only are climate models way off—“running hot” by overestimating temperature increases—but the warming we were supposed to experience this century hasn’t happened as most climate models anticipated. What’s even more alarming to the climate tribe is that this study, “Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” is authored by several prominent climate scientists,, many of whom have warned of planetary doom if we don’t cap global warming within the 1.5 C range.

First, some background: Most climate agencies report the world has warmed by about 0.9 C since the late-1800s; climate scientists insist we need dramatic decreases in carbon dioxide emissions to keep the overall temperature increase to 1.5 C (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century. This means Mother Earth has about 0.6 C left in her global warming thermometer before we break the glass. The entire raison d’etre for the Paris Climate Accord is to oblige nations immediately to cut carbon emissions so we can keep warming “well below” a 2 C rise over pre-industrial levels.

There have been varying, desperate pleas about how much time we have left to stop global warming. Some scientists lament that we are already past the point of no return. Others, including the former United Nations climate chief, warned in a paper published in June that we only have three years left to stop human-caused global warming and if “emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable.”

But this new paper suggests we have about 20 years until we will need a mass conversion to using solar panels and Teslas in order to bring total CO2 emissions to zero (a wholly punitive, unnecessary, and impossible goal.) The conclusion is based on a complicated calculation of how much of a “carbon budget” (total CO2) we have left to burn before we get into the danger zone; according to an editorial that accompanied the paper, “the amount of carbon that humans could emit before Earth warms to that 1.5 C threshold is larger than previously estimated.” Despite howls from the media, Democrats, and climate pimps like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who last week said it was already too late to recover from man-made climate change, the key goal of the Paris Climate Accord is “not yet a geophysical impossibility . . . we have more breathing space than previously thought.”

This is the inescapable conclusion of a landmark paper, published in Nature Geoscience, which finally admits that the computer models have overstated the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and that the planet is warming more slowly than predicted.

The paper – titled Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C – concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true.

In order for that to happen, temperatures would have to rise by a massive 0.5 degrees C in five years.

Since global mean temperatures rarely rise by even as much as 0.25 degrees C in a decade, that would mean the planet would have to do 20 years’ worth of extreme warming in the space of the next five years.

This, the scientists admit, is next to impossible. Which means their “carbon budget” – the amount of CO2 they say is needed to increase global warming by a certain degree – is wrong. This in turn means that the computer models they’ve been using to scare the world with tales of man-made climate doom are wrong too.

One researcher – from the alarmist side of the argument, not the skeptical one – has described the paper’s conclusion as “breathtaking” in its implications.

He’s right. The scientists who’ve written this paper aren’t climate skeptics. They’re longstanding warmists, implacable foes of climate skeptics, and they’re also actually the people responsible for producing the IPCC’s carbon budget.

In other words, this represents the most massive climbdown from the alarmist camp.

But you certainly wouldn’t guess this from the way the scientists are trying to spin their report.

According to the London Times:

Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London and one of the study’s authors, admitted that his previous prediction had been wrong.

He stated during the climate summit in Paris in December 2015: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.”

Speaking to The Times, he said: “When the facts change, I change my mind, as Keynes said.

“It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.”

and

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and another author of the paper, said: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

He said that the group of about a dozen computer models, produced by government research institutes and universities around the world, had been assembled a decade ago “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”.

He said that too many of the models used “were on the hot side”, meaning they forecast too much warming.

Note the disingenuousness here.

Grubb is claiming that the facts have changed. Which they haven’t. Climate skeptics have been saying for years that the IPCC climate models have been running “too hot.” Indeed, the Global Warming Policy Foundation produced a paper stating this three years ago. Naturally, it was ignored by alarmists who have always sought to marginalize the GWPF as a denialist institution which they claim – erroneously – is in the pay of sinister fossil fuel interests.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been doing the leftist media interview circuit recently, pressing his peculiar thesis that professional (i.e., paid) scientists are a superior class of humans whose conclusions are intrinsically beyond reproach and must therefore be accepted blindly by unscientific lunks like you.

In each of these interviews, a non-climate scientist asks a series of predetermined questions designed to elicit rehearsed responses from the non-climate scientist Tyson, the upshot of which is that (a) people who question man-made global warming are anti-scientific fools driven by irrational agendas; (b) scientific consensus is not the product of the social and political pressures of academic life working on the minds of the career-motivated, publication-obsessed majority of scholarly mediocrities, but rather consensus is the very definition of Objective Truth; and (c) anyone who questions a scientific consensus poses a threat to the survival of democracy.

For an example of (a), here is Tyson’s explanation of why some people continue to question the alleged scientific consensus on global warming:

What’s happening here is that there are people who have cultural, political, religious, economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another.

In other words, non-scientists who have the audacity to cite scientific results falling outside the consensus as grounds for questioning global warming are just people with agendas who are refusing to accept the settled science, for anti-scientific reasons. This doesn’t account for the actual scientists who produced those dissenting results or hypotheses. Are they also to be dismissed as mere “deniers,” since their views do not match the consensus?

Tyson’s answer appears to be yes, as he offers this interesting definition of “objective truth,” answering to talking point (b), above:

For an emergent scientific truth to become an objective truth – a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it – it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences. That’s what we have with climate change as induced by human conduct. This is a known correspondence. If you want to find the three percent of the papers or the one percent of the papers that conflicted with this, and build policy on that – that is simply irresponsible.

So according to Tyson, science is ultimately defined not by superior individual minds defying accepted views – i.e., standing against a consensus. No, science is rather defined by consensus itself, for consensus alone establishes objective truth, which “is true whether or not you believe in it.” (Funny – I always thought Nature or God established objective truth, but apparently, in our nihilistic progressive age, that task has devolved to the collective of university professors.)

And what is a scholarly consensus? It is “a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences.” Tyson conveniently leaves out the most important factor: “all beginning from the same underlying premises.”