RUTHFULLY YOURS

The hysterical reaction of the left to Scott Pruitt’s plan to create two competing teams of scientists to study from opposite positions the left’s pet myth, man-made global warming, shows just how anti-science the left has become. The left is a single, stupid collective mind that is utterly incapable of truly independent and free thought. The left is very much like the Inner Party in Orwell’s classic, 1984, where party members believe things that are obviously not true and in which dissent is – quite literally – unthinkable.

All totalitarianism purports to rest upon “science,” and all totalitarian science slavishly follows what the state and the party of statism desire. Institutions are inevitably infiltrated by leftists and used to rubber-stamp whatever the state wants. Ben Stein in his documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed showed how any academicians who question Darwin’s increasingly silly theory of evolution by natural selection are hounded, denied tenure, and even fired for questioning authority and deviating from orthodoxy.

The drones turned out by academia who willingly put on blinders and indifferently accept as scientific dogma whatever the left wishes are not scientists, whatever credentials institutions may give them. They are simply cadres or hacks who reject scientific inquiry and embrace political correctness by blessing it as “science.”

Global warming is a perfect example of how this works. Leftists parrot the line of “settled science,” oblivious to the fact that “settled science” is murdered science. Science is a process, not a result, and science demands that conventional opinion be rigorously questioned. The true scientists are those who do just that, but institutions vomit these true scientists out and recoil in horror that anyone dare question the party line.

The history of science has often been the history of a Newton or Maxwell or Kelvin or Einstein or Heisenberg proposing new explanations for phenomena that turned “settled science” on its head. The consensus opinion of scientists has been wrong so often that it is a wonder that anyone who professes to be a “scientist” would ever present this sort of “majority rules” science as anything but comedy.

It is a sad commentary on life today that the will of the majority permeates almost everything we do as social creatures, including, now, the pseudo-science of institutionalized “science.” As sad as that is – because it means the death of real science – it is frightening that so many political leaders have so suspended any critical thinking or independent reflection that they follow the herd mentality even in this area.

Mr. Milloy served on the Trump EPA transition team and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.”

The Trump administration in May began the process of replacing the small army of outside science advisers at the Environmental Protection Agency. In June, 38 additional EPA advisers were notified that their appointments would not be renewed in August. To Mr. Trump’s critics, this is another manifestation of his administration’s “war on science.” Histrionics aside, the administration’s actions are long overdue.

The most prominent of the EPA’s myriad boards of outside advisers are the Science Advisory Board and the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, or CASAC. Mostly made up of university professors, these boards also frequently draw members from consulting firms and activist groups. Only rarely do members have backgrounds in industry. All EPA boards are governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires that they be balanced and unbiased. While the EPA is required by law to convene the SAB and CASAC, the agency is not bound by law to heed their advice.

The EPA’s Obama -era “war on coal” rules and its standards for ground-level ozone—possibly the most expensive EPA rule ever issued—depend on the same scientifically unsupported notion that the fine particles of soot emitted by smokestacks and tailpipes are lethal. The EPA claims that such particles kill hundreds of thousands of Americans annually.

The EPA first considered regulating fine particles in the mid-1990s. But when the agency ran its claims past CASAC in 1996, the board concluded that the scientific evidence did not support the agency’s regulatory conclusion. Ignoring the panel’s advice, the EPA’s leadership chose to regulate fine particles anyway, and resolved to figure out a way to avoid future troublesome opposition from CASAC.

In 1996 two-thirds of the CASAC panel had no financial connection to the EPA. By the mid-2000s, the agency had entirely flipped the composition of the advisory board so two-thirds of its members were agency grantees. Lo and behold, CASAC suddenly agreed with the EPA’s leadership that fine particulates in outdoor air kill. During the Obama years, the EPA packed the CASAC panel. Twenty-four of its 26 members are now agency grantees, with some listed as principal investigators on EPA research grants worth more than $220 million.

Although the scientific case against particulate matter hasn’t improved since the 1990s, the EPA has tightened its grip on CASAC. In effect, EPA-funded researchers are empowered to review and approve their own work in order to rubber-stamp the EPA’s regulatory agenda. This is all done under the guise of “independence.”

Another “independent” CASAC committee conducted the most recent review of the Obama EPA’s ground-level ozone standards. Of that panel’s 20 members, 70% were EPA grantees who’d hauled in more than $192 million from the agency over the years. These EPA panels make decisions by consensus, which has lately been easy enough to achieve considering they are usually chaired by an EPA grantee.

Would-be reformers have so far had no luck changing the culture at these EPA advisory committees. In 2016 the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, where I am a senior fellow, sued the agency. We alleged that the CASAC fine-particulate subcommittee was biased—a clear violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. We found a plaintiff who had been refused CASAC membership because of his beliefs about fine particles. Unfortunately, that individual was not willing to take a hostile public stand against the EPA for fear of professional retribution. We ultimately withdrew the suit.

The EPA’s opaque selection process for membership on its advisory boards has opened the agency to charges of bias. In 2016 Michael Honeycutt, chief toxicologist of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, was recommended in 60 of the 83 nominations to the EPA for CASAC membership. The EPA instead selected Donna Kenski of the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium. Ms. Kenski received only one of the 83 recommendations. While no one objected to Mr. Honeycutt’s nomination, Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.) lodged an objection to Ms. Kenski’s nomination, claiming she had exhibited partisanship during an earlier term on the committee.

Congress has also tried to reform the EPA’s science advisory process. During the three most recent Congresses, the House has passed bills to provide explicit conflict-of-interest rules for EPA science advisers, including bans on receiving EPA grants for three years before and after service on an advisory panel. The bills went nowhere in the Senate, where the threat of a Democrat-led filibuster loomed. Had they passed, President Obama surely would have vetoed them.

President Trump and his EPA administrator have ample statutory authority to rectify the problem. As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Scott Pruitt spent years familiarizing himself with the EPA’s unlawful ways. He is in the process of reaffirming the independence of the agency’s science advisory committees. This won’t mean that committee members can’t have a point of view. But a committee as a whole must be balanced and unbiased. Mr. Pruitt’s goal is the one intended by Congress—peer review, not pal review.

At least one environmentalist is capitalizing on President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord: Al Gore.

The former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner is back in the public eye whether you like it or not. Since Trump’s announcement last month that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate pact, Gore has been on a media blitz to reprise his role as the prophet of planetary doom. The timing couldn’t be better for him. Next week, Gore’s new film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, will debut. It’s the follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, his 2006 documentary that won two Oscars and became the rallying cry for climate-change activists around the world.

Gore has mostly avoided politics and kept a relatively low public profile the past several years, heading up the Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit he founded on the heels of the movie’s success. (He also divorced his wife, Tipper, and sold his Current TV channel to Al Jazeera in 2013 for a reported $100 million.) But Trump’s presidency is now breathing new life into this aging climate crusader, and he is poised to play the Climate Good Cop to Trump’s Bad Climate Cop.

On June 4, Gore appeared on Fox News Sunday for the first time since he ran for president in 2000. He told Chris Wallace that Trump’s move to exit the Paris pact “undermines our nation’s standing in the world and isolates us and threatens to harm humanity’s ability to solve this crisis in time.” While Gore blasted Trump’s action as “reckless and indefensible” and compared the Paris agreement to the post–World War II Marshall Plan, he also acknowledged that the accord would not have solved climate change but was rather a “powerful signal to the world.”

For a fleeting moment while watching the interview, one could reminisce about the era when Democrats didn’t sound off-the-rails hysterical, as Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders often do. Gore still has his signature monotone, robotic cadence that can temporarily lull one into believing anything he says. But then he quickly pivots to the same apocalyptic rhetoric that made him a climate cult hero after his failed presidential bid. He said humans are putting “110 million tons of heat-trapping global-warming pollution up into the sky every day as if it’s an open sewer.” He urged viewers to listen not only to scientists but also to Mother Nature: “You don’t have to rely on the virtually unanimous opinion of the scientific community anymore. Mother Nature is telling us. Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.” He rambled on about wildfires, droughts and downpours, and claimed he saw “fish from the ocean swimming in the streets” in Miami.

A new paper analyzing government temperature data says the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data published by NASA and NOAA are “not a valid representation of reality.” In fact, the three respected scientists who published the paper hint strongly that the data may have been fudged.

Here are the the money grafs from the paper:

In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, it was nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

As a result, this research sought to validate the current estimates of GAST using the best available relevant data. This included the best documented and understood data sets from the U.S. and elsewhere as well as global data from satellites that provide far more extensive global coverage and are not contaminated by bad siting and urbanization impacts. Satellite data integrity also benefits from having cross checks with Balloon data.

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.

Finally, since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings. (Full Abstract Report)

Using the government’s own data. the researchers showed that government agencies were able to “prove” that the Earth is warming simply by leaving out vital information.