RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Pentagon released a National Defense Strategy that for the first time in more than a decade does not mention manmade global warming as a security threat.

An 11-page summary of the new National Defense Strategy makes no mention of “global warming” or “climate change,” according to a keyword search by the Huffington Post. The document reflects the Trump administration’s focus on “energy dominance” over climate.

The National Defense Strategy, signed by Defense Secretary James Mattis, doesn’t have much to say about energy issues, except that the U.S. would “foster a stable and secure Middle East” and “contributes to stable global energy markets and secure trade routes.”

The Pentagon released the strategy document Friday, and officials were clear that it would make no mention of global warming. The Bush administration added global warming to the defense strategy in 2008, but the issue gained top-tier status during the Obama administration.

The Trump administration released its “America First” security strategy in December, which called for “[u]nleashing these abundant energy resources— coal, natural gas, petroleum, renewables, and nuclear” to boost the economy and aid U.S. allies.

That plan de-emphasized policies aimed at fighting manmade global warming, a complete u-turn from national security under the Obama administration.

“Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system,” reads the National Security Strategy, released in December.

“U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth, energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy security interests,” reads the plan. “Given future global energy demand, much of the developing world will require fossil fuels, as well as other forms of energy, to power their economies and lift their people out of poverty.”

Fulfilling every stereotype of the phoney-baloney politician, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio last week sued the oil industry.

His argument, that oil companies cause a public nuisance in the form of greenhouse gases, has already been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The five companies he wishes to blame for rising seas and unpleasant storms account for a tiny share of global CO2 output. Most of the world’s energy reserves are government-owned. The oil performed exactly as advertised. The public got exactly the benefit it expected. Where is the fraud?

“The City . . . does not seek to restrain Defendants from engaging in their business operations,” the lawsuit says. The city isn’t trying to stop climate change but to share in the booty. If New York and other locales that have launched or contemplated such lawsuits want to tax energy, why don’t they just tax energy?

Never mind. Not 10 members of Congress or most other elected officials could, within an order of magnitude, describe the CO2 component of the atmosphere. They couldn’t explain the misnamed greenhouse effect or what climate sensitivity is.

And for good reason: Learning anything about the subject would be a waste of their time when their positions were long ago pre-determined by which party they belong to and who their constituents are.

Those who find the Donald Trump Show some awful tragedy rather than a satirical extravaganza perhaps suffer a mistaken belief that he interrupted a political discourse that was operating on a high level.

Mr. de Blasio is an unusually lanky case in point. “It’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient,” he explained. So residents can go on enjoying their energy-rich, fossil fuel-enabled lifestyles, he didn’t add.

As a New York Times headline put it, “Battling Climate Change from the Back Seat of an S.U.V.”

The Sierra Club’s Michael Brune, with unintended irony, said, “This is what climate leadership looks like.”

Uh huh. This is exactly what climate leadership looks like nowadays. Under a whole range of likely future climate scenarios, the cost-benefit trade-off of meaningful action has become an impossible sell to voters and even in terms of payoff for distant generations.

But a meme is a terrible thing to waste. Keep the climate panic fluffed in the minds of receptive voters to promote careers like Mr. de Blasio’s, or to extract political rents for the green-energy impresarios who increasingly nestle in both parties. CONTINUE AT SITE

Skepticism is the lifeblood of scientific progress. By constantly asking whether there is a different answer, a better approach or an alternative view, scientists drive improvements and innovations that ultimately benefit everyone. It is not “antiscience” to be skeptical—it’s definitively pro-science. At a time when people of all ideological stripes are seeking definitive sources of truth, we should all embrace our inner skeptics and turn to the scientific method for a fresh approach to resolve our differences.

When I started out as an oncologist in the mid-1980s, women with the most aggressive form of breast cancer were subjected to surgical removal of not only their breasts but large amounts of their chests and rib cages. Treatment later evolved toward less-extensive surgery but greater use of chemotherapy, which too often came with debilitating side effects. I still remember what I called “the mother sign”—women being helped into my clinic by their moms because they were so weak from the therapies I gave them.

In the 1990s I left patient care for biotechnology, which held promise in improving cancer treatments. I led product development at Genentech, where we developed drugs such as Herceptin, which targeted cancerous cells and left healthy ones largely intact. By challenging the status quo, we found ways to treat at least some patients without first making them sicker. In a little over a decade, cancer treatment moved from disfiguring surgery to powerful drugs to precise gene therapies. Today, harnessing the immune system to treat cancer shows immense promise for the next advance.
Photo: iStock/Getty Images

But whereas skepticism and uncertainty have always been the heart and soul of science, confidence and certainty are the coin of the realm in much of today’s public discourse. Unquestioning confidence is deeply troubling for the scientific community because it is not the currency we trade in, and it has led people in America and around the world to question scientific enterprise itself. We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

Valuing beliefs over science manifests itself as cynicism at best, denialism at worst. Scientists talk about skepticism to assert that nothing should be accepted or rejected without considerable evidence. Denialism—the refusal to accept established facts—is different and dangerous. According to Harvard research, between 2000 and 2005 AIDS denialism in South Africa led to an estimated 330,000 deaths because the government rejected offers of free drugs and grants and dragged its heels on establishing a treatment program. And in just eight weeks last year—April 7 to June 2—Minnesota saw more cases of measles, a disease easily prevented with a vaccine, than had occurred in the entire United States in 2016.

The point of science is not to produce doctrine, but to collect and test evidence that points toward conclusions, which in turn inform approaches, treatments and policies based on rigorous research. These conclusions are provisional. Scientific investigation is undertaken to question today’s knowledge, to seek new evidence through research and experimentation.

What are you to do if you are a liberal journalist and you get the news that 2017 was actually cooler than the year before it, 2016? You can’t write a headline that reads, “Earth getting cooler,” because the enviro-nuts will storm your offices with pitchforks, and Al Gore, the grand imam of the environmentalist doomsday cult, will issue a fatwa ordering that steps be taken to stop you from exhaling carbon dioxide.

So what does a liberal writer do? The answer: Disguise the truth.

The New York Times headline was “2017 Was One of the Hottest Years on Record.” Reading it, an uninformed person would think 2017 was hotter than ever, without quite lying about the facts.

Here’s the WaPo’s misleading headline: “The planet just had its hottest 4 years in recorded history.” Again, not an out-and-out lie, but a misleading statement meant to disguise the most recent cooling.

Here’s what claims to be the data on historical climate temperatures, from the NYT article:You can see the inconvenient fact of the cooling in 2017 compared to 2016. Liberal writers explain it away by saying that even if 2017 wasn’t the warmest on record, it is still on that sharp upward trajectory.

The only problem is that the chart itself is a lie. Climate data has been manipulated to falsely show warming.

You probably think that the classical reference in the title is to a saying originating from baseball humorist Yogi Berra. But Quote Investigator traces the origin of the saying back to an unnamed wag in the Danish parliament in the 1930s. Early users of the phrase included Danish atomic physicist Nils Bohr and movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn.

As hard as they may be to get right, predictions about the future are the core of the field that goes by the name of “climate science.” Because of predictions about the future by climate scientists, everybody knows that human burning of fossil fuels will cause world temperatures to increase by multiple degrees over the coming century, leading to a series of calamities ranging from sea level rise to droughts to floods to hurricane and tornadoes. After all, the climate scientists have sophisticated computer models! If you don’t believe the predictions of the models, you must be a “science denier.” The predictions of significantly rising temperatures are so certain that you are to be required by government coercion (unless President Trump can head it off) to dramatically reduce your use of fossil fuels and restrict your lifestyle.

You and I are not going to be around in 2100 to see if any of these predictions about the future have come true. But meanwhile the climate alarm crowd obliges us with shorter term predictions to help us get some handle on how reliable they are. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing a very good job of keeping track of these predictions and seeing how they are turning out. So once again it falls to the Manhattan Contrarian to do some leg work. On this subject, I am assisted today by some very useful work from my friend Benny Peiser and the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK.

For example, there was the prediction that our national weather bureaucracy (NOAA) came out with back in October as to the severity of the upcoming winter. How do they come up with that prediction? Eric Niler at Wired wrote a post on the prediction on October 29 that revealed that the seasonal predictions rely on models using the same theories of “heat trapping” greenhouse gases as they use for the longer-term models:

NOAA climate scientists incorporate heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels when they run the models that produce their seasonal climate predictions.

So what was the prediction?

With President Trump putting economic growth above climate alarums, green activists are turning to progressive states to press their regulatory agenda. Governors from 15 states have formed the U.S. Climate Alliance, for example, to enforce the Paris Climate Agreement despite Mr. Trump’s withdrawal. Fair enough if it’s all above board, but records we’ve obtained suggest that foundations are steering policy behind the scenes without transparency or clear public accountability.
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A leading example is Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s office, which seems to have subcontracted some of its work and budget to two foundations pushing an activist climate agenda. An environmental nonprofit, the World Resources Institute, actually hired Washington’s state government as a contractor last July.

Under this remarkable arrangement, the state agreed to perform a “scope of work” for the nonprofit that includes “activities and deliverables” to advance a green agenda. The special-interest tail is officially wagging the democratic dog, given that the contract provides the job framework for Mr. Inslee’s senior policy adviser for climate and sustainability, Reed Schuler.

According to Mr. Schuler’s official job description, his duties include working to “identify policy ideas,” “draft policy proposals and briefs for communication to Policy Director and Governor’s executive team,” and “prepare letters, executive orders, and other directives for the Governor’s signature.” Beyond the executive branch, Mr. Schuler is also involved in “monitoring progress of clean energy legislation” and representing Washington “among multi-state and international efforts.”

In other words, he holds an influential policy position. And it’s funded through a grant from the World Resources Institute, which reimburses Washington for Mr. Schuler’s salary, benefits and expenses. Under its contract, Washington State sends progress reports alongside its $33,210 quarterly invoices to the nonprofit.

It has been a good month for American energy development. The tax reform signed by President Trump contained a provision allowing for oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Last week the Interior Department proposed opening up wide swaths of territory offshore.

This is good policy for a lot of reasons, but the least obvious is that it will help the environment. Despite howls from the green lobby, the truth is that it’s less hazardous to drill for oil on land and in shallow waters using conventional rigs.

BP’s Deepwater Horizon was drilling in about 5,000 feet of water when it exploded in 2010. If the accident had occurred on land or in shallow seas, the spill could have been contained in three days instead of three months.

The company took the blame for the disaster, paying $19 billion, but I blame U.S. environmental policy for chasing oil producers further and further out on the risk curve. For more than 40 years, the U.S. government has had a moratorium on drilling in shallow water, putting nearly 100 billion barrels out of reach.

This overregulation has been neither prudent nor partisan. President George H.W. Bush, a former oilman, enacted a separate and redundant moratorium in 1990; Bill Clinton extended it in 1998. And approval rates for drilling permits on federal lands plummeted during the Obama administration.

The ANWR is thought to hold at least 10 billion barrels of crude oil, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The actual number is likely greater. The nearby Trans-Alaska Pipeline is ready to go, with the capacity to move ANWR oil 800 miles to the Port of Valdez. That pipeline operates at 25% of capacity and could use the extra flow for efficiency’s sake.

Drilling in the ANWR poses less risk to the environment than fracking. It would also be cheaper. Fracking was invented in response to drilling restrictions, as a way to produce oil from shale formations on private land, where government restrictions don’t apply.

But fracking is no walk in the park. A fracked well consumes an average of 4.2 million pounds of sand and between two million and nine million gallons of water. The sludge created as a byproduct requires careful handling and underground disposal. From an environmental standpoint, drilling in the ANWR ought to be attractive by comparison. CONTINUE AT SITE