RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

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.

To climate change fanatics, polar bears are the eye candy for the worldwide call for action on global warming. There have been news reports about the sad shape they are in, with their coats going brown, their food supplies drying up, and their ice floes melting. Conclusion: The bears are set to starve.

Welp, turns out there are too many of them now.

According to Marc Morano’s Climate Depot:

2 New Papers: 92% Of Polar Bear Subpopulations Stable, Increasing – Inuit Observe ‘Too Many Polar Bears Now’

…and…

Inuit observations of polar bear ecology: “Last year he said that there’s more bears that are more fat … they rarely see unhealthy bears… back in early 80s, and mid 90s, there were hardly any bears … there’s too many polar bears now.”

So, instead of furtive bears withering away on ice floes and starving due to loss of habitat, rising sea levels or whatever the global warmers claim, what we actually have here is a bear explosion, with bears so well fed that they’ve gotten fat.

It’s more than just anecdotal – the bear populations are exploding everywhere.

In Russia, near its Chukotka peninsula, AFP reports:

MOSCOW: A boatload of tourists in the far eastern Russian Arctic thought they were seeing clumps of ice on the shore, before the jaw-dropping realisation that some 200 polar bears were roaming on the mountain slope.

“It was a completely unique situation,” said Alexander Gruzdev, director of the Wrangel Island nature reserve where the encounter in September happened. “We were all gobsmacked, to be honest.”

Several years ago, we were warned that bears were starving due to global warming and would be irretrievably lost.

I recall the first interview I did with Alaska’s then-governor, Sarah Palin, about the polar bear situation in 2008, before she got famous. I asked her if the news reports were right that polar bears were starving. I only have a reference to the link, unfortunately, but I vividly recall her most memorable quote: “Our bears are healthy bears!”

She added that maybe that could be the situation in Canada, but it certainly wasn’t in Alaska.

As the hysteria over global warming heats up, carbon taxes have become the “cool” option. Environmentalists love them. So do politicians, who are more than happy to raise taxes while scoring political points.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/06/why-carbon-taxes-actually-increase-global-emissions/

Carbon taxes, or other analogous pricing schemes, are now prevalent in Western Europe, and are making headway in North America. For example, California recently joined forces with the Canadian Provinces of Ontario and Quebec to create an integrated cap-and-trade carbon market.

On top of this, many well-known economists support carbon taxes, thinking they’re the best way to mitigate man’s contribution to climate change. A relatively new report written by thirteen leading economists under the direction of professors Nicholas Stern and Joseph Stiglitz—who won a Nobel Prize in 2001—recommends the adoption of a global carbon tax. The tax would value carbon emissions somewhere between 50 and 100 USD per ton by 2030, and would cost upwards of $4 trillion. Theoretically, the tax would raise the cost of using carbon-intensive sources of energy, thereby nudging producers to switch from fossil fuels to “green energy” sources like wind and solar power. Likewise, it would raise the cost of electricity, thus creating an incentive to use energy more efficiently.

As an abstract principle of theory, this seems to make sense. There’s just one problem. It won’t work.

In reality, carbon taxes are just that: taxes. They’re a money-grab dressed up with good intentions. Worse still, carbon taxes will not reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, adopting carbon taxes in the West will actually raise global carbon emissions by offshoring economic activity from relatively environmentally-friendly places, like the USA and Germany, to places with lax environmental laws, like China.

Open Markets & Offshoring

Wealth is like water: it flows to the lowest possible point, and continues to do so until the level is equal. This is why consumers chase cheaper goods, why investors look for undervalued companies, and why multinationals offshore to cheaper markets. This last point—offshoring—is why Western carbon taxes will actually increase global emissions.

President Trump announced Monday that he will dramatically reduce the acreage of two national monuments. The order ends excessive federal control of Utah land, allowing residents to protect their own territory and conserve their cultural relics.

Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 to give Presidents emergency authority to prevent the looting and destruction of national treasures. The law said designated monuments should be limited to “the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects,” but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama misapplied this power to carry out a Washington land grab.

Without public comment, the federal government unilaterally seized control of more than 3.2 million acres of southeastern Utah that together constitute the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. Residents and their elected representatives had minimal influence on the draconian land-use restrictions imposed by Washington bureaucrats. In September, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke described how the Antiquities Act had been abused “to prevent public access and to prevent public use” of land, harming everyone from cattlemen to cross-country skiers.

Last spring Mr. Trump ordered a review of 27 supersized monuments. The Interior Department made recommendations only after accepting formal public comment. Mr. Trump announced Monday that he would shrink Bears Ears by about 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante by nearly 46%.

Over the past few days, thousands have marched in Salt Lake to oppose the decision. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance denounced the order as “the single most harmful attack any president has ever launched on public lands.” The group claims the Trump Administration acted “at the behest of ideological extremists and dirty energy barons,” adding that the decision is “an insult to the tribes that advocated to protect Bears Ears.”

Calm down, guys. Most of the two million newly undesignated acres are still public lands, subject to rigorous federal and state protections. The Trump Administration increased Native American representation on the advisory Bears Ears Commission.

As part of the tax reform bill passed by the Senate, Republicans included an amendment that would open a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil exploration.

ANWR comprises nearly 20 million acres of pristine wilderness. The bill authorizes drilling in less than 10% of that area.

Washington Examiner:

“This small package offers a tremendous opportunity for Alaska, for the Gulf Coast, and for all of our nation,” Murkowski said before the vote. “We have authorized responsible energy development in the 1002 area.”

Democrats have long been successful in blocking Republican efforts to allow energy exploration in a 1.5 million acre section of the 19.6 million acres of ANWR known as the “1002 area,” where billions of barrels of crude oil lie beneath the coastal plain.

But this year, Republican control of Congress and the White House spurred Senate Republicans to consider the provision with the tax reform measure under budget reconciliation rules that allow it to avoid a filibuster and pass with a simple majority vote.

Senate Democrats have blasted the process Republicans used to advance the ANWR bill, considering it an unfair way to change the character of a refuge that has been protected since 1960.

Democrats and environmentalists say drilling would harm the ecosystem of what they describe as one of the wildest places left on earth, inhabited by animals such as polar bears, caribou, and arctic foxes.

Opposition to drilling in ANWR has been irrational. Even Democrats have to admit that the tiny fraction of the reserve that will be opened to development will barely impact the ecosystem or any animal, rare or not.

Environmentalists oppose opening ANWR because, well, fossil fuels. When 90% of the wilderness set aside by Congress will be protected and preserved, the argument that oil exploration will destroy the land doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

To get the oil from the refuge to the coast would require construction of a pipeline. But we’ve built pipelines in Alaska before with little or no impact to the ecosystem.

The “best” argument made by the greens for not drilling in ANWR is the impact on one of our largest Caribou herds.

Science:

To the west of the Arctic refuge, in the heart of the North Slope oil fields, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Central Arctic caribou herd shifted calving areas away from well concentrations. And in longterm studies of the Porcupine herd (named after the Porcupine River in the Yukon and Alaska), Johnson found that even decades after oil development in the Canadian portion of its range, caribou were still avoiding areas within 6 kilometers of roads and wells.

But it is not clear how those behavioral changes might affect population size. “We get into a more nuanced conversation: ‘Does this mean there are going to be a lot fewer caribou, [or] a little fewer?’” Johnson says. “What [development] means for population dynamics is the million-dollar question.” CONTINUE AT SITE