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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Washington’s Carbon Overreach Another rebuke to climate change rule by executive diktat.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee calls climate change an “existential threat,” and he has channeled President Obama in using executive powers to impose his policy response. But like Mr. Obama he suffered a major blow this month when a Washington court ruled that he exceeded his authority under state law.

Washington lawmakers have declined to pass Mr. Inslee’s signature cap-and-trade legislation, and in 2016 voters rejected a carbon-tax ballot measure. So “now we have to do it administratively,” the Sierra Club’s Doug Howell said last year.

Mr. Inslee suddenly discovered authority to act unilaterally under the Washington Clean Air Act and a 2008 law that required greenhouse gas reductions. The Department of Ecology’s subsequent Clean Air Rule required the state’s largest emitters to reduce carbon emissions by 1.7% annually, or else buy carbon credits or invest in carbon-offsets.

This sweeping regulation affected manufacturers, waste facilities and government buildings, and it imposed a de facto tax on “indirect emitters” like oil and natural gas suppliers. Regardless of their actual emissions, the Inslee Administration wanted to penalize businesses for peddling energy products it doesn’t like. And it estimated that indirect emitters were responsible for around three-fourths of the carbon emissions covered under the regulation—though they can’t control what others emit.

California’s Political Fires The state’s wildfires are overwhelming its anticarbon pieties.

Wildfires continue to ravage California, and the bravery of firefighters trying to prevent damage to homes and property has been inspiring. But this being 2017 in America, the state’s progressive politicians are blaming the fires on humanity’s sins of carbon emission. To the contrary, the conflagrations should be a wake-up call to regulators and politicians who have emphasized acts of climate piety over fire prevention.

This year’s wildfires have consumed about 1.2 million acres in the Golden State—more than the state of Rhode Island—and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. Some four dozen people were killed amid the blazes through Northern California in October. Large sections of coastal Ventura and Santa Barbara counties have been charred this month while a Los Angeles brushfire threatened the Getty Center and the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The fires are burning in California. They’ll be burning in France, burning all around the world,” fire-and-brimstone Governor Jerry Brown proclaimed recently in Paris. The world is “on the road to hell.”

Yet this fire season appears to be a black swan. One of the wettest winters on record followed a five-year drought and a bark-beetle forest infestation. The result has been a buildup of deadwood and dry brush. The U.S. Forest Service this month said it had found 129 million dead trees in California. Santa Ana and Diablo winds have been particularly persistent, strong and erratic this year, making the fires spread faster and harder to contain.

Loath to let a natural disaster go to political waste, the California Air Resources Board used the fires to promote a new climate-change “scoping plan” aimed at doubling the rate at which it cuts carbon emissions. The irony is that the emissions from wildfires could negate all of the state’s anticarbon policies.

Christmas Is Here, Everyone! EPA Officials Are ‘Leaving in Droves’Christmas Is Here, Everyone! EPA Officials Are ‘Leaving in Droves’ James Delingpole

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.

How Many Times Did You Beat Your Wife? by Linda Goudsmit

The essential element in the question, “How many times did you beat your wife?” is its presupposition that the husband beat his wife.

Perhaps the best way to understand the ongoing debate surrounding Net Neutrality is to consider Noam Chomsky’s incisive observations on presuppositions in his book The Common Good (1998).

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” p43

Millennials have been indoctrinated with the presuppositions of the Leftist narrative for two decades. Climate change is a classic example. The climate change argument presupposes the validity of its foundational premise of global warming. When it became abundantly clear that the earth’s temperature always fluctuates and was in fact cooling the global warming enthusiasts disingenuously changed the name of their campaign from “global warming” to “climate change” without ever accepting the scientific facts of the earth’s cooling. Why? Because global warming/climate change was never about the weather – it was always about the redistribution of wealth from rich industrialized countries to poorer non-industrialized countries in the form of taxes, fees, fines, and non-compliance penalties.

Even testimony by Patrick Moore former co-founder of Greenpeace before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, was not enough to convince millennials that global warming was a hoax because they had accepted the presupposition of the argument and were ideologically convinced they were saving the planet.

Oppositional views on climate change have actually been litigated. The court case against Mark Steyn attempted to silence Steyn’s oppositional views on climate change. Steyn argued that if courts can silence free and open debate on scientific inquiry then freedom of speech is functionally dead. The pressure to conform in climate science is very real and the viciousness and hostility toward people who disagree is overwhelming. Anyone in the science community who challenges the “settled” science of climate change is considered unhinged or a dissident to be silenced – not a respected scientist or a climatologist to be heard. Climate science is functionally political science because redistribution of wealth is a political matter unrelated to weather.

Does Trump Threaten Science? Part 3 By Peter W. Wood

On December 7, the American Association of University Professors issued a thirteen-page statement, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” that attacked President Trump in particular and conservatives in general as “anti-science.” In Part I of this three-part essay, I gave the historical background to the popular leftist attack on conservatives for their “anti-science.” In Part II, I showed that both left and right sometimes act on non-scientific grounds to forestall valid research and scientifically sound applications. “Anti-science” sounds bad, but the term is just a polemical way of phrasing the recognition that science can’t always be left to itself to decide what to do. Other principles of a moral and intellectual nature must sometimes supervene, to prevent, for example, heedless forms of human experimentation. Bringing these principles to bear inevitably involves political action, and in that sense the politicization of science isn’t always bad. It depends on the principles—and the politics.

In Part III, we will look at exactly what principles and politics the AAUP has in mind in its attack on Trump.

China

Nearly half of the AAUP’s report, “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” deals with the supposed threat to science posed by the U.S. Government’s efforts to protect national secrets from leaking to hostile foreign governments. At the center of this is U.S. concern about China, and Chinese researchers in America inappropriately sharing research with colleagues in China. One of the co-authors, Temple University physics professor Xiaoxing Xi, was arrested May 21, 2015 on charges that he had disclosed a device called a “pocket heater” to Chinese colleagues. The pocket heater is a patented technology for making “thin films of the superconductor magnesium diboride.” The charges were eventually dropped and Xi is now suing for “malicious prosecution.”

The report cites other researchers likewise charged with stealing secrets or otherwise passing inappropriate information to China, including Wen Ho Lee, Guoqing Cao, Shuyu Li, Xianfen Chen, Yudonng Zhu, and Allen Ho. The charges in most of the cases were dropped or ended in minimal findings. Anyone who has followed the cases closely, however, knows that charges get dropped in spy cases for lots of reasons. After the Justice Department dropped the case against Wen Ho Lee, FBI Director Louis Freeh told the Senate Judiciary and Select Intelligence Committees that “each and every one of the 59 counts in the indictment” could be proven, but a trial “posed serious obstacles to proving the facts without revealing nuclear secrets in open courts.”

The legal presumption of innocence, in other words, has to be taken with a grain of salt, at least in some of these cases. Prosecuting spies is extremely difficult. I’m not quite so ready as the AAUP to consider the U.S. counter-intelligence as comprised of bumbling xenophobic fools, haplessly undermining the legitimate international exchange of ideas.

New National Securty Strategy Focuses On Real Threats To American People “Climate change” finally removed from list of national security threats.

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.

Does Trump Threaten Science? Part 1 By Peter W. Wood

The American Association of University Professors has issued a short thunderclap of a report accusing President Trump of undermining the natural sciences. By itself, this would be pretty bad, but according to the AAUP, Trump’s hatred for science extends by means of foreign policy to damaging intellectual inquiry, economic prosperity, and human health worldwide, and maybe also planetary survival. This sort of breathless denunciation may be the sort of thing one expects from soapbox speakers at Climate Change rallies, but the AAUP usually aims a little higher.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/16/does-trump-threaten-science/

This is first of three essays in [read Part II here]which I will examine the background, meaning, and import of what the AAUP has done in “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom.” In this part I present the historical context, namely the left’s attempt to brand conservatives in general as “anti-science.”

The AAUP’s route to this destination is the claim that science is at risk.

On this general point I and my organization, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), actually agree with the AAUP. We disagree, however, on a few details. Is the patient at risk of drowning or incineration? Should we assist the drowning man with a life preserver or a 200 pound anvil? Is the conflagration to be met with a fire extinguisher or a good soaking in kerosene?

I exaggerate perhaps a little. Science doesn’t really face mortal danger. No one is trying to kill it, and even if the Armies of Darkness were laying siege to all the shrines of science from Aristotle to Newton, and Francis Bacon to Stephen Hawking, science as an enterprise would continue. Darwin and Einstein wouldn’t vanish, and people would still attempt to plumb the mysteries of DNA, exo-planets, and superconductors. The thirst for knowledge cannot be drowned or burnt to cinders. Moreover, the NAS and the AAUP do agree substantially on a key point: one threat to the integrity of scientific inquiry is the politicization of science.

Does Trump Threaten Science? Part 2 By Peter W. Wood

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.

Revisiting the EPA Endangerment Finding Obama’s EPA used semantic tricks to avoid rigorous scientific evaluation. Is Trump’s EPA more honest? By Ross McKitrick

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.

Medical Journal Perpetrates the Noble Lie that American Air Quality Kills By John Dale Dunn and Steve Milloy

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.