RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.
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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.