RUTHFULLY YOURS

President-elect Trump met with global warming proponent Al Gore on Monday, giving liberal activists a glimmer of hope that his environmental policies will moderate somewhat from his campaign pledge to scrap President Obama’s climate change policies. But on Monday, Trump dashed their hopes by choosing to nominate an outspoken critic of the EPA and noted climate change skeptic to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Via Fox News:

Word of Trump’s choice for the Environmental Protection Agency came as the president-elect also named Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad as his pick for ambassador to China and asked retired Gen. John Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Trump announced late Wednesday as well that he’ll nominate Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, as administrator of the Small Business Administration.

Pruitt may be the most controversial pick of the four.

Pruitt, 48, has been a reliable booster of the fossil fuel industry and a critic of what he derides as the EPA’s “activist agenda.”

Representing his state as attorney general since 2011, Pruitt has repeatedly sued the EPA to roll back environmental regulations and other health protections. He joined with other Republican attorneys general in opposing the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to limit planet-warming carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. Pruitt has argued that curbing carbon emissions would trample the sovereignty of state governments, drive up electricity rates, threaten the reliability of the nation’s power grid and “create economic havoc.”

His installment, if confirmed, would mark a significant break with the current EPA approach toward global warming.

In an op-ed published earlier this year by National Review, Pruitt castigated the group of Democratic attorneys general who had announced in March that they would criminally investigate oil and gas companies that disputed the science behind man-made global warming.

We won’t be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.

The Democrats’ climate inquisition completely unraveled by the end of August, but the fact that they even tried to criminalize dissent was outrageous and chilling.

How often have we heard that ‘climate change’ is the greatest threat to mankind! How often have we heard that Global Warming will lead to an unprecedented rise in sea levels! — when what is the truth?

There is absolutely no truth whatsoever in these assertions, made by a coven of corrupt scientists, who have held the whole world in thrall. Not only is the globe not warming, but we find that the books have been cooked on a truly massive scale. So massive, in fact, that even intelligent members of Parliament with some scientific knowledge have been fooled. The world at large has been fooled, as witness the bizarre antics at COP22. Did you think that that was a Climate Conference? Think again! It was about nothing but money, and who could screw the most out of the supposedly rich nations.

I am indebted to Christopher Booker, who has written in the Daily Telegraph what I would never have dared to write. He has given a cast of those who have been deceiving the world on an unimaginable scale. Here I quote just a few paragraphs, but it is necessary to read the entire article:

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

…Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

The subway stop at 116th Street in Manhattan is for Columbia University. Is this subway stop a wormhole to an alternate universe, where people look like everyone else but are possessed by strange ideas and incomprehensible ways of thinking?

My journey to 116th Street was to attend a lecture titled “What Would it Mean to Understand Climate Change?” It is hard to understand the title of this lecture, and the official description of the lecture increases the confusion:

Efforts abound to “understand” climate change. But what kind of understanding is needed? Does “understanding” mean the same thing to concerned citizens as it does to scientists, humanities scholars, or policy makers? At this public event climate scientist Isaac Held, philosopher of science Philip Kitcher, and science journalist Jonathan Weiner will compare the work of understanding undertaken by different communities engaged with climate change, and address the question what remains to be understood.

The first speaker, Isaac Held, was the only scientist. Held is deeply involved with the computer climate models that are the foundation for the predictions of climate doom. Apparently, nearly everyone at Columbia University, judging from the speakers and the audience, has accepted the message from the computers as absolute truth.

Held’s talk was meandering and difficult to understand. His thesis is that there are a hierarchy of stories explaining climate change. At the most complicated level are the computer climate models. A simple story could be a prediction – say, that doubling CO2 in the atmosphere will increase global average temperature by X degrees.

Held avoids making any judgments. He never tells us how much confidence we should have in the climate models, even though one would think that as someone deeply involved with climate models, he should be in a good position to make judgments. After all, if the climate models are unreliable, why are Held and hundreds of other scientists spending their time working on climate models? Perhaps because they are being paid to work on climate models.

I asked Held what conclusion he draws from the lack of warming of the Earth during the last 18 years in the face of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. He acknowledged the problem but seemed to suggest that the warming hiatus was created by chaotic variations in the climate. He also became duplicitous when he suggested that the recent El Niño was breaking the warming hiatus. As an expert on climate, he surely knows that El Niño is temporary and not connected to long-term climate change. (El Niño is the name for a disturbance in the tropical Pacific Ocean that causes a temporary variation in global temperature.)

Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”

WikiLeaks provides a window into a world I’ve seen up close for decades: the debate over what to do about climate change, and the role of science in that argument. Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community, my long experience shows what can happen when politicians and media turn against inconvenient research—which we’ve seen under Republican and Democratic presidents.

I understand why Mr. Podesta—most recently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—wanted to drive me out of the climate-change discussion. When substantively countering an academic’s research proves difficult, other techniques are needed to banish it. That is how politics sometimes works, and professors need to understand this if we want to participate in that arena.

More troubling is the degree to which journalists and other academics joined the campaign against me. What sort of responsibility do scientists and the media have to defend the ability to share research, on any subject, that might be inconvenient to political interests—even our own?

I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career.

Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians. In 2011 writers in the journal Foreign Policy signaled that some accused me of being a “climate-change denier.” I earned the title, the authors explained, by “questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports.” That an academic who raised questions about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in an area of his expertise was tarred as a denier reveals the groupthink at work.

Yet I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.

When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops.

The IPCC never acknowledged the snafu, but subsequent reports got the science right: There is not a strong basis for connecting weather disasters with human-caused climate change. CONTINUE AT SITE

The problem with a giant con game like global warming hysteria is that the baseline dishonesty ends up corrupting other institutions. Academia is pre-eminent among the collateral corruptees, but even a Native American tribe in genuine peril is in on the game. Willis Eschenbach provides the ugly details at Watts Up With That?

He spotted news that a tribe on the seashore of Olympic Peninsula is being touted as the “first climate refugees.” He drily notes eight other separate claims of being the first climate refugees, so he dubs the Quinault Indian Nation the “ninth first climate refugees.”

But that is not the nub of the criticism. It is that the Quinaults are genuinely threatened by tsunamis and in all logic ought to evacuate their current settlement right on the shore, because a major fault is nearby and overdue.

But the money is not in tsunamis; it is in global warming. So, as NPR says:

In the U.S. Northwest, sea-level rise is forcing a Native American tribe to consider abandoning lands it has inhabited for thousands of years.

The Quinault Indian Nation, whose small village lies at the mouth of the Quinault River on the outer coast of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, now relies on a 2,000-foot-long sea wall to protect it from the encroaching Pacific Ocean. (snip)

The Quinault tribe has developed a $60 million plan to move the entire village of Taholah uphill and out of harm’s way. That will mean relocating the school, the courthouse, the police station and the homes of 700 tribal members a safer distance from the encroaching Pacific.

“It’s a heavy price tag,” Sharp acknowledged, adding that she and others with the Quinault will be turning to Congress, philanthropists and the tribe’s own financial resources to pay for the project.

NPR plays the usual sympathy game:

Let’s assume global warming is real. Correct or not, we will start today with that supposition. Assume with me that there is a problem for a moment so that we may discuss tangible solutions.

Let us start by defining our terminology, as the concept of “climate change” tends to drift to fit the data—the true hallmark of scientific rigor.

The argument at hand is that the earth is warming due to greenhouse gases which man is releasing into the atmosphere; most especially carbon dioxide. This has been culminating since around the time of the post-war industrial boom accompanying and following World War II. Since then, CO2 emissions have continued to expand at an alarming rate. Through this anthropomorphic, man-made increase in warmth the average surface temperature of the earth will continue to climb, the oceans will rise, polar bears will need to learn to surf, and all that jazz. Also, potentially, parts of coastal California will eventually fall into the ocean. This is apparently to be taken as a bad thing, but must depend on one’s perspective.

This is a real problem.

Even if it isn’t, there is the famous “play it safe” argument. If we can’t be positive either way in regards to climate warming, shouldn’t we work to reduce our greenhouse emissions just to be sure? Those that argue in this alternative and don’t take it to the logical extreme are not serious people.

The case for global warming, as straightforward as it is, should be equally easy to solve. We simply need to return to the carbon levels of 1940, the front end of our carbon production explosion, and all the anticipated pain will go away. Any other suggestion from trillion-dollar, jet-setting, pretend-you-aren’t-part-of-the-problem climate summits is a half-measure.

So, problem solved. In 2014 humans emitted 35.69 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere . To solve climate change, we don’t have to take this down to zero; just back to 1940 levels. In that year, according to the Carbon Dioxide Emission Analysis Center, human emission was 1.299 million metric tons.

While we will go with it for today, admittedly this isn’t strictly “apples to apples” in its comparison; though it is also not too far off. Climate activists would, here, bring up solar and wind power, and such, as a key difference from 1940. And I would agree if those not-ready-for-primetime solutions were going to solve the carbon “problem” at any point in the conceivable future. If it were to be practical, I could buy the “play it safe” argument that we switch away from fossil fuels.

As an aside, in this regard I somewhat agree with so-called climate advocates. I have faith that technology will continue to improve on its own accord, fossil fuel use will eventually be replaced with more efficient solutions (a process which can be done without government coercion), and this whole thing will be rendered rather academic within a hundred years. Activists will probably claim a successful victory at this point; having done nothing but hold summits that agree to cripple economies.

But the argument—THE argument—is that this needs to be solved immediately; not that we have a couple hundred years of wiggle room. We are already past the date when New York was supposed to sink and landfall hurricanes would be an annual occurrence. Unless we can switch to solar and wind power tomorrow, an immediate reduction in emissions of 96% should just about suffice in their place.

Well, except for the pesky global population.