RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer rely on “secret” scientific data to justify regulations, Administrator Scott Pruitt announced last week. EPA regulators and agency-funded researchers have become accustomed to producing unaccountable, dodgy science to advance a political agenda.

The saga began in the early 1990s, when the EPA sought to regulate fine particulate matter known as PM2.5—dust and soot smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter. PM2.5 was not known to cause death, but by 1994 EPA-supported scientists had developed two lines of research purporting to show that it did. When the studies were run past the EPA’s Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, it balked. It believed the studies relied on dubious statistical analysis and asked for the underlying data. The EPA ignored the request.

As the EPA prepared to issue its proposal for PM2.5 regulation in 1996, Congress stepped in. Rep. Thomas Bliley, chairman of the House Commerce Committee, sent a sharply written letter to Administrator Carol Browner asking for the data underlying studies. Ms. Browner delegated the response to a subordinate, who told Mr. Bliley the EPA saw “no useful purpose” in obtaining the data. Congress responded by inserting a provision in a 1998 bill requiring that data used to support federal regulation must be made available to the public via the Freedom of Information Act. But it was hastily written, and a federal appellate court held the law unenforceable in 2003.

The controversy went dormant until 2011, when a newly Republican Congress took exception to the Obama EPA’s anticoal rules, which relied on the same PM2.5 studies. Again the EPA was defiant. Administrator Gina McCarthy refused requests for the data sets and defied a congressional subpoena. CONTINUE AT SITE

The east coast of the United States just endured a rare spring snowstorm. How could this happen when NASA is constantly announcing that we have record high temperatures?

Advocates of the global warming theory have been predicting rising temperatures since around 1983. Available data indicated no such trend, so these advocates found reasons to adjust past temperatures downward. People who remembered the 1930s as being the hottest decade of their lifetimes were ignored. If people witness spring snowstorms, should they be ignored, too?

Recent scientific work predicts that the sun’s output will diminish in our lifetimes. Valentina Zharkova et al, here and here, estimate that we will have an ice age from about 2020 to 2053.

The theory about ice ages is simple. Do you remember when your science teacher would rap two tuning forks against a table? They would make two tones plus a periodic lull, which your teacher called a beat. Zharkova believes that the sun has two resonances and they sometimes cause a beat. The last beat that we observed, the Maunder Minimum, was from 1645 to 1715. It accompanied a climatic episode known as the “Little Ice Age” (LIA).

Much to the regret of the warmist establishment, its grant-lapping minions and the rent-seeking camp followers who have made our electricity amongst the world’s dearest, witches and heretics are no longer tossed on a pyre. These days, it is reputations and careers that are incinerated.

The Little Ice age was quite severe in Europe from 1550- 1700. After the prosperity and plenty of the medieval warm period, the LIA led to impoverishment, crop failure, starvation and a resurgence in witch burnings. Every misfortune was an excuse to accuse someone of being a witch working under the direction of Satan. Many of these accusations were the result of some calamity caused by an extreme weather event.

For example, in 1626 a hailstorm struck Germany and dropped a metre of hail. Two days later an Arctic front descended on Europe. Rivers froze, grapes on the vine ‘exploded’ and rye and barley crops were destroyed. Then came a severe frost the likes of which had not been seen for 500 years. Because all of this was so unusual it was determined to be ‘unnatural’ and there arose a cry that sorcerers and witches must be responsible and must be punished. Around 5000 were burnt in Germany alone.

It is estimated that across Europe there were at least 50,000 executions during this period, all carried out with the blessing of the educated and privileged. It was dangerous to be a sceptic because those who dissented from the hysteria were inevitably themselves accused of sorcery subject to the same punishments. Thus was any debate stifled.

weyerjean bodinLegal philosopher Jean Bodin (left) in 1580 insisted that witchcraft was the most terrible problem facing humankind. Bodin championed the international attack against sceptics, such as physician Johann Weyer (right), who tried to bring some scientific rationality to the discussion by pointing out that “confessions” obtained through torture were both worthless and immoral. In response, Bodin accused Weyer of witchcraft. Sceptics had to be wrenched out of society, he thundered, with any country tolerating them certain to be struck by plagues, famines and wars.

Sound familiar? If the modern parallels escape you, let us compare the dark past with what has happened over the last 30 years. And if James Cook University’s disgraceful shunning of Professor Peter Ridd comes to mind, so much the better.

Every perceived extreme weather event is attributed the evil CO2 causing global warming which causes the climate to go totally berserk and, of course, it’s those evil white capitalistic CO2 spewing industries which are the devil’s servants.
Global warming-caused climate change is the most terrible problem facing mankind.
Sceptical of the two points above? Well you must be one of those “climate denier”. Burning at the stake is no longer permitted, but being marginalized, ostracized and harassed is perfectly okay.
The scientific method of observation — hypothesis, develop testable predictions, gather data to test predictions, refine, alter or reject hypothesis — is not applicable to global warming “fact”. The “science is settled”, don’t you know, so no debate will be tolerated. Just send more grants, please, so warmists can continue to “prove” something they insist is already beyond dispute. As Macquarie University assures prospective students, the thriving field of climate-change validation opens up “career prospects and further research opportunities”.

President Trump’s pick to be the new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is not a fan of the Paris climate agreement, the treaty that claims it will slow global warning by reducing the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Politicians from most of the world’s nations signed the deal, and President Obama said “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”

That’s dubious.

Trump wisely said he will pull America out of the deal. He called it a “massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.”

Unfortunately, Trump often reverses himself.

The climate change lobby has been trying to change Trump’s mind. Al Gore called his stance “reckless and indefensible.” Most of the media agree. So do most of my neighbors in New York.

That’s why it’s good that Pompeo opposes the Paris deal. Such treaties are State Department responsibilities. Pompeo is more likely to hold Trump to his word than his soon-to-be predecessor Rex Tillerson, who liked the agreement.

The Paris accord is a bad deal because even if greenhouse gases really are a huge threat, this treaty wouldn’t do much about them.

I’ll bet Al Gore and most of the media don’t even know what’s in the accord. I didn’t until I researched it for this week’s YouTube video.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Oren Cass is the rare person who actually read the Paris accord.

“Everything is pointing to belief in global warming as being a reliable indicator that a person is a mindless fool, a witless idiot. If they can’t get global warming right and persist in believing in something for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, then how can they trusted to make the right decision in any instance? ”

This time it is bushfires, the next it will be floods, or drought, or gender-fluid frogs or somesuch. No matter what Gaia comes up with, some or other spigot of snappy sound bytes will point at climate change with one hand while reaching for fresh grants with the other. Well, they need fret no more.

According to an article in The Australian, the Greens have blamed bushfires and cyclones on the government’s inaction on climate change. Well the good news for the Greens is that they are wrong and therefore they can worry about something else instead. Australia’s climate hasn’t changed one whit, so a deranged climate can’t be the cause for bushfires and cyclones. Exhibit A is Australia’s lower tropospheric temperature anomaly as measured by satellites with the data available from Dr Roy Spencers’ group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville:

Only forty-some years ago, “climate science” suddenly turned from advancing a theory of global cooling to one of global warming. A 123-page paper by Christopher Booker, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), explains this sudden change in terms of a “groupthink” belief system formulated and perpetuated by a few strong personalities. Through key positions, and with sympathetic lobbyist groups, the theory overwhelmed politics during its formative years in the 1970s from its center in various United Nations agencies until its unraveling began in the late 1990s.

The first of those personalities was Swedish meteorologist Professor Bert Bolin (1925-2007), who believed that increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide from industrialization would inevitably lead to global warming. Bolin presented his views in 1979 at a first-ever meeting of the “World Climate Conference,” sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The WMO is a 191-member-country agency of the United Nations (U.N.), headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Bolin had developed his theory in the 1950s during thirty-five years of declining temperatures. Through the 1970s, many scientists, activists, and policymakers had voiced alarm at global cooling. A common view was that the cooling effect of more dust in the atmosphere, from volcanoes and industrial smokestacks, more than offset the warming effects of carbon dioxide and might require dire policies, such as those proposed by Dr. Arnold Reitze, to include banning the internal combustion engine, regulating industrial research and development, and limiting population.