RUTHFULLY YOURS

Imagine if the head of a federal agency announced a new policy for its scientific research: from now on, the agency would no longer allow its studies to be reviewed and challenged by independent scientists, and its researchers would not share the data on which their conclusions were based. The response from scientists and journalists would be outrage. By refusing peer review from outsiders, the agency would be rejecting a fundamental scientific tradition. By not sharing data with other researchers, it would be violating a standard transparency requirement at leading scientific journals. If a Republican official did such a thing, you’d expect to hear denunciations of this latest offensive in the “Republican war on science.”

That’s the accusation being hurled at Scott Pruitt, the Republican who heads the Environmental Protection Agency. But Pruitt hasn’t done anything to discourage peer review. In fact, he’s done the opposite: he has called for the use of more independent experts to review the EPA’s research and has just announced that the agency would rely only on studies for which data are available to be shared. Yet Democratic officials and liberal journalists have denounced these moves as an “attack on science,” and Democrats have cited them (along with accusations of ethical violations) in their campaign to force Pruitt out of his job.

How could “the party of science,” as Democrats like to call themselves, be opposed to transparency and peer review? Because better scientific oversight would make it tougher for the EPA to justify its costly regulations. To environmentalists, rigorous scientific protocols are fine in theory, but not in practice if they interfere with the green political agenda. As usual, the real war on science is the one waged from the left.

The New York Times in an article reporting on President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the regulatory state, hit upon a divergence of thought on the Right.

The Times quoted Gordon Lloyd, a professor emeritus at Pepperdine University and a preeminent scholar of the American Founding and the nature of limited government. Rather than defend Trump’s efforts to chip away at the administrative state, Lloyd instead compared Trump’s actions to “Lenin dismantling the institutions.”

The comment likely raised a few eyebrows because, by and large, most on the Right would consider the deconstruction of bureaucracy a positive development; a long sought after goal, even. To reside on the American Right, generally, means you see regulation and regulators have run amuck—and certainly have extended beyond the safe confines of the Constitution.

But Lloyd’s comment points to an area where the minds of some limited government proponents diverge. While we may all agree on the principle that regulations are most effective when they are few, targeted and efficient, the disagreement comes over how we arrive at the sweet spot.

Trump has garnered plaudits with some on the Right for his aggressive tactics toward reining in the regulatory state: an executive order mandating that for every single regulation that is issued, two are repealed; appointment of judges who hold a skeptical view of the agency-friendly judicial doctrine known as “Chevron deference,”and directing his Cabinet heads to simply repeal regulations they deem to be economically harmful or outside the agency’s mission. (EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, for all the unfavorable press coverage he’s received, has been a champion in this regard.)

Environmentalism has a long history of attracting cranks, loons and zealots.

There was the Unabomber, whose Manifesto was all but indistinguishable from Al Gore’s Earth In Balance.

There was James Lee, the eco-terrorist who in 2010 was shot by police at the Discovery Channel after taking hostages, leaving behind rambling messages protesting about “overpopulation” and the need to “the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies.”

Now there is David S Buckel, a lawyer who burnt himself to death in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, apparently in the belief that this would set some kind of moral example to all those people out there bent on destroying the planet.

Here is how Buckel put it in an email to the New York Times:

“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

Buckel may, as the New York Times describes him, have been a “prominent” lawyer who did much good work in the field of gay rights. But the very last thing I hope anyone will do is to listen to his final words on the environment.

First, he is wrong historically. The history of human progress is the history of a journey from primitive conditions, long working hours and backbreaking toil into one of much greater leisure, abundance and health. This is one of the many things that fossil fuels have done for us: by supplying the energy intensity equivalent of many hundreds of horses, many thousands of men. Compare the average lifespan of people who lived in the West before the Industrial Revolution and people who live in it now. The disparity makes an absolute nonsense of that stuff about “many” dying “early deaths”: people had it way worse in the pre-industrial age.

There is mounting pressure on warmist researchers to come up with arguments, if not evidence, that will stand up in court. As climate models continue to get it wrong, often spectacularly so, the carpetbaggers’ various lawsuits are in dire jeopardy, but that doesn’t mean they won’t stop trying

With the international political, financial and reputational stakes so high, it was only a matter of time before climate change appeared in the dock, handcuffed to its partner in prognostication, the dodgy discipline of extreme weather attribution.

Attribution, n., the art of evaluating the relative contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or an event, according to one’s prejudices.

To make sense of the climate change scene today, it is best to begin with the end game: the orthodoxy’s search for an argument, however abstruse, that will stand up in court. It needs one sufficiently “robust” to ensure developed countries—still effectively on trial in the United Nations, where a protracted “loss and damages” claim awaits resolution—and fossil fuel companies are legally liable to pay multi-billion-dollar “climate reparations” to the alleged victims of “carbon pollution”, be they in the developing world or in the path of a natural disaster.

Indeed, the credibility of the “relatively young science” of extreme weather attribution, the legitimacy of its ambition to “tease out the influence of human-caused climate change from other factors”, the whole alarmist movement and fate of the UN’s Green Climate Fund, all crucially depend on delivering such a legal argument.

How did we get to this point? When the climate change meme was planted successfully in the collective mind a decade ago as the most serious existential threat facing humankind, the orthodoxy wanted it to stay there. A sense of public anxiety had to be maintained, despite the risk of apocalypse fatigue syndrome.

So it created an Attribution of Climate-related Events (ACE) initiative. The international research agenda gradually shifted to the tricky territory of extreme weather attribution.

ACE’s first workshop was held on January 26, 2009, in Boulder, Colorado, at the Pei-designed National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Lab. Attendees included Myles Allen (Oxford University), Martin Hoerling (NOAA, USA), Peter Stott (UK Met Office, Hadley Centre), Kevin Trenberth (NCAR) and David Karoly (University of Melbourne). Its objective was to:

develop a conceptual framework for attribution activities to be elevated in priority and visibility, leading to substantial increases in resources (funds, people, computers) and both a research activity and a framework for an “operational” activity, that sets forth a goal of providing a lot more concrete information in near real time about what has happened and why in weather and climate.

Imagine if the head of a federal agency announced a new policy for its scientific research: from now on, the agency would no longer allow its studies to be reviewed and challenged by independent scientists, and its researchers would not share the data on which their conclusions were based. The response from scientists and journalists would be outrage. By refusing peer review from outsiders, the agency would be rejecting a fundamental scientific tradition. By not sharing data with other researchers, it would be violating a standard transparency requirement at leading scientific journals. If a Republican official did such a thing, you’d expect to hear denunciations of this latest offensive in the “Republican war on science.”

That’s the accusation being hurled at Scott Pruitt, the Republican who heads the Environmental Protection Agency. But Pruitt hasn’t done anything to discourage peer review. In fact, he’s done the opposite: he has called for the use of more independent experts to review the EPA’s research and has just announced that the agency would rely only on studies for which data are available to be shared. Yet Democratic officials and liberal journalists have denounced these moves as an “attack on science,” and Democrats have cited them (along with accusations of ethical violations) in their campaign to force Pruitt out of his job.

How could “the party of science,” as Democrats like to call themselves, be opposed to transparency and peer review? Because better scientific oversight would make it tougher for the EPA to justify its costly regulations. To environmentalists, rigorous scientific protocols are fine in theory, but not in practice if they interfere with the green political agenda. As usual, the real war on science is the one waged from the left.

The EPA has been plagued by politicized science since its inception in 1970. One of its first tasks was to evaluate the claim, popularized in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, that the use of DDT pesticide was causing an epidemic of cancer. The agency held extensive hearings that led to the conclusion that DDT was not a carcinogen, a finding that subsequent research would confirm. Yet the EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, reportedly never even bothered to read the scientific testimony. Ignoring the thousands of pages of evidence, he declared DDT a potential carcinogen and banned most uses of it.

Stormy Daniels may come and she may go, but the navel-gazing Henny-Pennys of the Left want you to know that “climate change” is still like totally a thing:

A record-cold “ Arctic Blast” is set to hit the East Coast this weekend. And undoubtedly, some people will point to it and say that it proves global warming isn’t for real. That’s totally false: categorically, definitely, unequivocally, scientifically false. And yet it’s made over and over and over again by climate denialists and their paid-for politicians in Washington.

Insert obligatory Trump-bashing here. Then:

Here, then, is the definitive list of four reasons that cold winters do not disprove global warming.

Are you ready for No. 1?

1. Climate Is Personality, Weather Is a Mood

The most important thing to remember, when it comes to climate change, is that it is never possible to trace any single weather event—hurricane, cold snap, dry spell—to climate change. As University of Georgia geography professor John Knox puts it, climate is personality; weather is mood.

In other words, the relevant data for climate change are long-term trends, not short term phenomena (generally, climatologists look at thirty year averages). And there’s no doubt about those trends. According to NASA, the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Based on carbon samples, the NOAA says that the last three decades have, on average, been the warmest on 1,000 years.

Remember, this is from the “party of science.” Next, we back away from the old hotness, “global warming,” and wrap our arms around the new hotness, “climate disruption.” What happened to “climate change,” you ask? Well, “disruption” is so much less neutral, and so much more… accusatory:

The Earth’s climatic system is extremely complicated. And so while the core feedback loop of climate change is simple— more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps more heat, like glass traps heat in a greenhouse—its effects are anything but. Some parts of the world get hotter, others get colder. And some are thrown into chaos. CONTINUE AT SITE

“I do,” President Trump said Thursday afternoon when asked by reporters whether he still has confidence in embattled Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt. And well the president should.

Pruitt has been the most effective appointee in implementing the Trump agenda. If Pruitt is forced out of his job because of charges he behaved unethically, America will suffer.

President Trump was elected as the economy was being choked and jobs were being destroyed by record-breaking, excessive and counterproductive regulations issued by the Obama administration.

The regulatory agency leading the charge against a healthy American economy and American job creation was the EPA. Candidate Trump knew this and campaigned on it. Millions of Americans voted for Trump precisely because he came out strongly against regulatory overreach.

When elected, the new president wisely tapped then-Oklahoma Attorney General Pruitt to bring EPA back with the bounds of the law and to end the EPA’s gross overregulation.

Pruitt knew well EPA’s proclivity toward rogue behavior. He had been involved in some dozen lawsuits against the agency.

EPA Administrator Pruitt was specifically directed via presidential executive order to roll back the two most excessive overreaches of the Obama EPA – the Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the United States rule.

The Obama war on coal and coal miners, capped off by the Clean Power Plan, has destroyed 94 percent of the market value of the U.S. coal industry and killed thousands of coal miner jobs – all for no environmental or public health gain.

Fifteen attorneys general and the city of Chicago filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration Thursday charging that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has violated the federal Clean Air Act by stalling implementation and enforcement of the mandate to regulate methane emissions from oil and gas operations.

The lawsuit comes as Pruitt is under fire for renting a $50-per-night D.C. condo from the wife of an energy lobbyist and reportedly cutting a member of his security detail for refusing to use lights and sirens to cut through D.C. traffic to get to a French restaurant on time. A top Pruitt aide, Office of Policy senior counsel and associate administrator Samantha Dravis, also just resigned, with a friend telling The Hill that the agency was a “shit show.”

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is leading the methane lawsuit, said in a statement that the EPA “has a clear legal duty to control methane pollution from oil and gas operations, one its largest sources,” and “its continued refusal to do so is not only illegal, but threatens our public health and environment, and squanders savings of over $100 million annually.”

“Our coalition has made clear: when the Trump administration thumbs their nose at the law and endangers New Yorkers, we’ll see them in court,” he added. CONTINUE AT SITE

The media’s biggest target after Trump is Pruitt, the president’s most effective cabinet secretary. Ousting him would be a huge victory for Trump’s opponents.

After Donald Trump, the individual in DC with the biggest target on his back is Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. When he was attorney general of Oklahoma, he sued the EPA more than a dozen times to get the powerful regulatory agency to stay within its legal authority. His nomination was deeply concerning to radical environmentalists inside and outside the media. As a result, he and his team have been under a microscope since even before his confirmation in early 2017.

Well-funded environmental groups, many with former EPA staffers, deluge the agency with FOIA requests to catch someone in a scandal. Unlike how they covered Obama-era EPA administrators, media outlets constantly request information about everything Pruitt does, from his schedule to his travel particulars. Whipped-up partisans have made unprecedented numbers of death threats against him and his family. Powerful liberals opine against him.

Some suggest the death threats are understandable. Liberal Republican governors of New Jersey despise the man. Thomas Kean was calling on him to resign a year ago. Christine Todd Whitman gave inappropriately unserious comments about the death threats. Chris Christie did George Stephanopolous’ bidding by trying to throw Pruitt under the bus this past weekend. Maybe there is something in the water of Jersey.

The Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol, who this week tweeted his desire for Michelle Obama to run and defeat Donald Trump, said Pruitt was a parody of sycophancy for supporting a conservative deregulatory agenda. He also thrice tweeted his excitement over the possibility of leftists ousting Pruitt. Fellow NeverTrump enthusiast and Washington Post in-house conservative (really!) Jennifer Rubin also expressed giddiness about him possibly being fired.