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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

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Academic Global Warming Advocates and the Power of Incoherent Jargon By Norman Rogers

By on May 13th, 2017

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. — George Orwell

Nature Climate Change is a monthly magazine that is devoted to supporting the idea that we face a man-caused climate disaster that will surface at some future date. The magazine presents itself as if it is a scientific journal. But scientific journals, real scientific journals, don’t fill their pages with advocacy for a single point of view.

The April 2017 issue of Nature Climate Change carries a commentary: The food-energy-water nexus and urban complexity. The title is an indication of things to come. “food-energy-water” is abbreviated as “FEW.” Obviously, people need food, energy and water. But, why are these grouped together? People need lots of other things, for example: police, transportation, housing, and education. Is water a more urgent problem than, say, education? Some people think so. When I lived in Chicago there were true believers wandering on Michigan Avenue, proselytizing for the supposed future global warming-caused water crisis. This a few blocks from one of the great fresh-water inland seas of the world. These true believers were, no doubt, less interested in the education crisis represented by the failing public schools of Chicago.

According to the article:

“The world’s FEW systems are significantly stressed and already experiencing shortfalls due to their interactions with global anthropogenic processes such as urbanization and climate change”

Okay — urbanization, the migration of poor rural people to cities, is an anthropogenic process. In fact, everything that people and societies do is an anthropogenic (man-caused) process. Urbanization in the U.S. was largely finished by the 50s and instead we had migration out of the cities to the suburbs. But, is “climate change” a man-caused process? Not unless you believe that carbon dioxide is the great controller of the Earth’s climate.

The authors explain some of their thinking with this quote:

“National and human security approaches illuminate contrasting aspects of FEW security and their epistemological and ontological differences lead to differing proposed response options, and can hinder communication and incorporation of insights and lessons across disciplines. These differences need to be carefully elicited to avoid the risk of theoretical and practical incompatibility of inconsistency.”

I have tried to translate this into plain English, but it defies a translation that makes sense.

When the authors occasionally descend into the real world, they appear to embrace conspiracy and be badly misinformed:

“While the energy security of consumers would benefit more from distributed [solar] installations, utilities and their investors have supported regulations, business plans, and technology designs that favor industrialized, large-scale plants managed by a few.”

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$697,177 for a ‘Climate-Change Musical’: You Call That Science? Research is often a wise investment of tax dollars—but agencies also fund ridiculous boondoggles. By Henry I. Miller

By on May 13th, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/697-177-for-a-climate-change-musical-you-call-that-science-1494625499?mod=nwsrl_review_outlook_u_s_

Dr. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was founding director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Biotechnology.

Research is the lifeblood of technological innovation, which drives economic growth and keeps America competitive. Government-funded scientific research runs the gamut from studies of basic physical and biological processes to the development of applications to meet immediate needs. Unfortunately, the definition of what constitutes “science” has gradually expanded to include sociology, economics and woo-woo “alternative medicine.” Much of the spending on these disciplines by the nation’s two major funders of nonmilitary research, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, is systematically shortchanging taxpayers.

The NSF, whose mission is to ensure U.S. leadership in areas of science and technology that are essential to economic growth and national security, frequently funds politically correct but low-value research projects. A few doozies include the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey, Viking textiles in Iceland, the “social impacts” of tourism in the northern tip of Norway, and whether hunger causes couples to fight (using the number of pins stuck in voodoo dolls as a measure of aggressive feelings). Research funding in the geosciences, including climate change, is certainly legitimate, but not when it goes to ludicrous boondoggles such as a climate-change musical that cost $697,177 to produce.

The primary culprit is the NSF’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, known as SBE. Underlying its ability to dispense grants is the wrongheaded notion that social-science projects such as a study of animal depictions in National Geographic and a climate change musical are as important as research to identify early markers for Alzheimer’s disease or pancreatic cancer.

In January President Obama signed the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which accomplished little with respect to setting funding priorities other than endorsing the only two criteria NSF had previously used to evaluate grant applications—the “intellectual merit” of the proposal and its “broader impacts” on society. The bill’s lead proponent, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, had wanted to include a “national interest” criterion defined by several factors including improving economic competitiveness, health, national security, the STEM workforce and scientific literacy.

In the end the national interest standard was retained, but only to provide examples of how grant applicants can satisfy NSF’s “broader impacts” requirement. In other words, SBE will continue funding marginal research by social scientists—what a former NSF official characterized as “the inmates running the asylum.”

As for the NIH, most of its budget—currently about $32 billion, with another $2 billion in the just-approved omnibus spending bill—goes to fund grant proposals from researchers all over the country. The proposals are not judged by their merits across all disciplines, but are divided by categories of research—cancer, aging, eye, etc. But one institute that is the brainchild of politicians—the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (formerly the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine)—on average does far-less-significant work than the others, but receives a significant amount of grant funding.

NCCIH’s stated mission is “to define, through rigorous scientific investigation, the usefulness and safety of complementary and integrative health interventions and their roles in improving health and health care.” But “complementary and integrative” often means implausible and poorly designed, because peer review at this institute permits the funding of such projects.

One study supported by the center found that cranberry juice cocktail was no better than a placebo at preventing recurring urinary-tract infections. Other supported studies include “Long-Term Chamomile Therapy of Generalized Anxiety Disorder,” “The Use of Narrative in Public Health Research and Practice” and “Restorative Yoga for Therapy of the Metabolic Syndrome.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Big Wind Gets Spanked in Michigan Citizens in 20 localities rejected wind-power expansion. By Robert Bryce

By on May 12th, 2017

Big Wind’s lobbyists and promoters love to claim that their projects are being welcomed by rural communities everywhere. The reality is rather different. Last Tuesday, voters in 20 rural towns in Michigan went to the polls and rejected or restricted the expansion of wind energy.

Furthermore, those same Michigan voters soundly rejected two projects being promoted by the world’s largest producer of wind energy, NextEra Energy — which, as I discussed on this site last week, has been suing rural governments in multiple states (two of them in Michigan) while at the same time collecting billions of dollars in federal tax subsidies.

Big Wind’s worst drubbing occurred in Sand Beach Township, in Huron County, where voters approved modifications to a township ordinance that will effectively ban wind development. The vote tally: 413–80. In addition, Lincoln Township voters approved an initiative that will allow it to form its own planning commission, a move that will make it far more difficult for wind projects to be developed in the township. Sand Beach and Lincoln were among 18 townships in Huron County that gunned down Big Wind’s expansion plans. (Huron County is about 130 miles due north of Detroit.) Voters in the other 16 townships went to the polls as a group and rejected two projects, including a 60-turbine project proposed by NextEra and a 70-turbine project being pushed by DTE Energy. Both proposals lost by a margin of 63 to 37 percent.

I recently talked to Kevon Martis. He is the founding director of the Interstate Informed Citizens Coalition, a group based in Blissfield, Mich., that works with rural governments in the Midwest that are resisting the encroachment of Big Wind. He was exultant. “Huron County has more than 400 turbines,” Martis said. “If wind energy is so great, why didn’t the county voters choose to have more of them?” Martis went on, saying that NextEra and DTE probably spent more than $500,000 on their efforts to get voters to approve their projects while the anti-wind forces “might have spent $3,000 or $4,000.”

Big Wind also lost on ballot questions in Marlette Township in Sanilac County and in Almer Township in Tuscola County. In Marlette, voters approved, by a margin of 53 to 47 percent, a zoning amendment that will toughen an ordinance governing wind-energy projects.

To be sure, these results haven’t been reported by mainstream media. But then, the fact that rural communities from Maine to California are rejecting Big Wind doesn’t fit the popular media’s narrative that wind energy is “green.” The Michigan results expose the fictions being peddled by Big Wind’s multitude of lobbyists. Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, who has refused to answer my e-mailed questions regarding the backlash against the wind industry, recently claimed that wind energy “boosts rural American economies in unmatched ways” and that “83 percent of Americans support more wind.” In March, Kiernan’s AWEA colleague Susan Sloan claimed that “the idea that rural America doesn’t want wind power, that’s just not what we’ve experienced.”

The fact that rural communities from Maine to California are rejecting Big Wind doesn’t fit the popular media’s narrative that wind energy is ‘green.’

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A Global Warming Surprise By S. Fred Singer

By on May 11th, 2017

Exploring some of the intricacies of GW [Global Warming] science can lead to surprising results that have major consequences. In a recent invited talk at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC-12 [Twelfth International Conference on Climate Change], I investigated three important topics:

1. Inconsistencies in the surface temperature record.

2. Their explanation as artifacts arising from the misuse of data.

3. Thereby explaining the failure of IPCC to find credible evidence for anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

A misleading graph

In the iconic picture of the global surface temperature of the 20th century [fig 1, top] one can discern two warming intervals — in the initial decades (1910-42) and in the final decades, 1977 to 2000.

Fig 1 20th century temps; top—global; bottom– US

Although these two trends look similar, they are really quite different: the initial warming is genuine, but the later warming is not. I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘fake,’ but it just does not exist; I try to demonstrate this difference as an artifact of the data-gathering process, by comparing with several independent data sets covering similar time intervals.

The later warming is contradicted by every available dataset, as follows:

**the surface record for the ‘lower 48’ [US] shows a much lower trend; [see fig 1, bottom]; presumably there is better control over the placement of weather-stations and their thermometers;

**the trend of global sea surface temp [SST] is much less; with 1995 temp values nearly equal to those of 1942 [according to Gouretski and Kennedy, as published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2012];

** likewise, the trend of night-time marine air-temperatures [NMAT], measured with thermometers on ship decks, according to data from J Kennedy, Hadley Centre, UK

** atmospheric temperature trends are uniformly much lower and close to zero (during 1979-1997), whether measured with balloon-borne radiosondes or with microwave sounding units [MSU] aboard weather satellites [see fig 8 in ref 2]

** compatible data on solar activity that show nothing unusual happening. Interestingly, the solar data had been assembled for a quite different purpose – namely, to disprove the connection between cosmic rays and climate change [see here fig 14 of ref 2], assuming that the late-century warming was real. In the absence of such warming, as I argue here, this attempted critique of the cosmic-ray–climate connection collapses.

** proxy data also show near-zero trends, whether from tree rings or ice cores, as noted about 20 years ago [see fig 16 in ref 1 and figs 2 and 3 of ref 2; plus those that may have been withheld by Michael Mann]. [If you look carefully at Mann’s original 1998 paper in Nature or subsequent copies, you will note that his proxy temps cease suddenly in 1979 and are replaced by temps from thermometers from CRU-EAU, the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University. This substitution not only supplies the ‘blade’ of Mann’s hockey-stick but enables the claim of IPCC-AR3 [2001] that the 20th century was the warmest in the past 1000 years, surpassing even the high temps of the Medieval Warm Period. In Climategate e-mails this substitution was referred to as “Mike’s Nature trick. I can’t help wondering if Mann’ s original post-1979 proxy data showed no warming at all; perhaps that has some bearing on why Mann has withheld these data; it could have killed the blade and spoiled the IPCC claim.]

On the other hand, the early warming [1910-40] is supported by many proxy data – including temps derived from tree rings, ice cores, etc; unfortunately, we could not find any temperature data of the upper troposphere. However, I bet they would have shown an amplified warming trend – a hot spot.

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Cry me a polluted non-Trumped EPA river By Ethel C. Fenig

By on May 10th, 2017

“Elections have consequences,” a once triumphant President Barack Hussein Obama (D) crowed. “I won,” he also graciously replied when questioned about his decisions. However, that was then but this is now and the Democrats don’t like the consequences that their candidate lost. As did many of their favorites in Congress and state legislatures. So, continuing their ongoing attempts to restore themselves by any means necessary to what they see is their rightful inheritance of governing the U.S.A. as they see fit, the Democrats are attempting a coup of sorts, also known as the euphemistic “resistance.”
One of the latest examples is President Trump’s (R) revamp of the Environmental Protection (sic!) Agency (EPA) to meld theoretical university scientists with scientists actually working in the highly regulated industries because “the administrator believes we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community.” And so, in another “you’re fired” action, Trump legally dismissed several members of EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors a few days ago. One of those suddenly unemployed followed his loser leader Hillary by tweeting his displeasure.

Robert Richardson‏ @ecotrope

Today, I was Trumped. I have had the pleasure of serving on the EPA Board of Scientific Counselors, and my appointment was terminated today.

Whining about the imminent collapse of the planet caused by greedy businesses followed.

“You’ve got one planet. What are you prepared to do with it? Create jobs? That seems awfully short-sighted and narrow-minded.”

Meanwhile, in January …

The Environmental Protection Agency said Friday it will not repay claims totaling more than $1.2 billion for economic damages from a mine waste spill the agency accidentally triggered in Colorado, saying the law prohibits it.

The EPA said the claims could be refiled in federal court, or Congress could authorize payments.

But attorneys for the EPA and the Justice Department concluded the EPA is barred from paying the claims because of sovereign immunity, which prohibits most lawsuits against the government. (snip)

A total of 73 claims were filed, some by farmers who lost crops or had to haul water because rivers polluted by the spill were temporarily unusable for irrigation and livestock. Rafting companies and their employees sought lost income and wages because they couldn’t take visitors on river trips. Some homeowners sought damages because they said their wells were affected.

The August 2015 spill at the Gold King Mine in southwestern Colorado released 3 million gallons of wastewater tainted with iron, aluminum, manganese, lead, copper and other metals. Rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah were polluted, with stretches of waterway turning an eerie orange-yellow.
Some of the affected rivers pass through Indian reservations.

So, who will protect these farmers and homeowners, including the “Indian” reservations from the scientific EPA? Hopefully the replacement industry scientists bringing a more practical–and fresh–outlook to the sometimes fine, theoretical work of the EPA.

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Obama’s Contradictory Climate Talk His Milan remarks offered nothing but vague hypotheticals at odds with one another. By Julie Kelly

By on May 10th, 2017

Speaking in Milan on Tuesday at the Global Food Innovation Summit, Barack Obama — who was introduced as “the man that gave us hope, dreams and made us become better people” — told the crowd he forgot his tie. In a display of his post-presidency cool, he opted instead for a dress shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest. He appeared relaxed, sun-kissed, and, as always, supremely confident. You would too, if you were about to rake in a reported $3 million to give a speech and then have a chat with your former chef.

While the four-day event this week aims to “bring food and technology together,” Obama was there to talk about climate change. As the Trump administration seriously considers withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, the former president is ratcheting up the pressure for the U.S. to stay tethered to his signature international agreement.

In his opening remarks, Obama claimed that “for all the challenges we face, this is the one that will define the contours of this century more dramatically perhaps than any other.” He blamed climate change for everything from weather conditions in America (“where states are seeing floods on sunny days, where wildfire seasons are longer and more dangerous”) to the EU’s influx of migrants, which he claimed was caused not only by the conflict in Syria, but also by “food shortages that will get far worse as climate change continues.” (He later said the strain that climate refugees have put on the EU’s political system is “just the beginning.”)

That wouldn’t be the only humanitarian tragedy that Obama would attribute to man-made climate change during his appearance. He also blamed the phenomenon for making food production more difficult. “We’ve already seen shrinking yields and spiking food prices that in some cases are leading to political instability.” But for most of the world outside, say, Venezuela or North Korea, this is simply not the case. Yields continue to rise in every major crop. High food prices, scarcity, and hunger are almost always the result of failed government and economic systems, not the methane emissions of cows.

And yet Obama seemed unsure of his own message. For at the same time, he added, producing food is also a major cause of climate change: “Food production is the second-leading driver of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions . . . and if we don’t change course, the World Bank predicts that by 2050, agriculture and land use change may account for as much as 70 percent of global GHG emissions.” In short, we aren’t making enough food because of climate change . . . but making all this food is causing climate change.

Obama also seemed to contradict himself on the effectiveness of the Paris climate accord. Although he repeatedly defended it, he acknowledged that “even if every country somehow puts the brakes on the emissions that exist today, climate change would still have an impact on our world for years to come.” Then again, he said, “if we act boldly and swiftly . . . in favor of the air that our young people will breathe,” then “it won’t be too late.” Act boldly now so our kids can live their dreams . . . in a world that still has climate change.

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A Sorely Needed Change in Climate avatar by Ruthie Blum

By on May 6th, 2017

Last weekend, during a visit to Washington, DC, I was nearly knocked down by a mob of demonstrators. Had they known I was attempting to cross through the marching throng in order to make it to an appointment in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel, I likely would have been lynched.https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/05/05/a-sorely-needed-change-in-climate/

As bad luck would have it, guards at the barricade separating the crowds on Pennsylvania Avenue from the hotel would not let me through for understandable security reasons. So, after phoning the person I was supposed to meet for drinks in the majestically refurbished Old Post Office building to suggest a different venue, I was forced to slither my way back again without getting trampled on by poster-wielding protesters sweating profusely in the afternoon sun.

This was no easy feat, particularly since each segment of the tens of thousands of people expressing their ire over “climate change” — the social cause whose name was changed from “global warming” when freezing temperatures made the term as laughable as the phenomenon itself — booed loudly as they passed by the hotel.

“No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA,” many chanted, pushing babies in strollers, carrying toddlers on shoulders or simply walking alongside friends, proud of themselves for being seen and heard by like-minded left-wingers bent on rescuing the planet from destruction at the hands of human beings with differing views. This did not prevent dozens of them from entering nearby air-conditioned restaurants to escape the heat and enjoy some pricey food generated by the very corporations “guilty” of inflicting tsunamis and other unforgiving acts of nature on the world. Oops. I forgot for a moment that the word “nature” is forbidden in the United States these days, as it connotes a belief in the innateness of things like gender.

Yet, while talking about “nature” is a no-no among enlightened Americans, “science” is all the rage. This was also evident at the rally, many of whose participants waved placards denouncing those who do not support spending billions on climate-change research and rectification as “anti-science.” This is despite the tens of thousands of physicists and physical chemists who have debunked claims by the climate-change fanatics.

In any case, what the storm on Pennsylvania had to do with President Donald Trump, the Klu Klux Klan or fascism was not made clear. Such is the method to the madness of intersectionality, according to which all extreme liberal positions are interconnected and live under one large umbrella of malcontent. The fact that these stances often run counter to one another does not seem to bother their adherents.

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The left attacks the New York Times By Peter Skurkiss

By on May 3rd, 2017

The liberal left is in an uproar. And no, the howls are not coming from the childlike snowflakes on campus, who shut down speakers, or the even from the anarchists. This time, it is coming from the intellectual arm of the left, like the New Republic magazine, Vox, and the readership base of the New York Times.

What has incurred this wrath? Nothing the president has done. It’s that the New York Times has hired Bret Stephens, until recently a deputy editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, to add his voice to the Gray Lady’s op-ed page.

Stephens can be best described as a run-of-the-mill establishment conservative from the neocon camp. During this past year or so at the WSJ, he stood out for his hysterical ravings over Donald Trump’s campaign and then his presidency. Of course, being a vociferous anti-Trumper is not what has the liberal base upset at the Times hiring Stephens. It was his first column (and some of the non-Trump-related things he said in the past) that has the liberals on the warpath.

What precipitated this kerfuffle was Stephens’s debut column of April 28 at the Times. There, he had the temerity to question the 100-percent certainty of the proponents of man-made global warming.

And please note: Stephens is not what the left would call a climate denier. In interviews, he says he actually believes in man-made global warming (or maybe it’s man-made climate change now). In his NYT column, Stephens merely questioned the certainty liberals demand that society place in their global warming hypothesis.

That was bad enough, but what got the liberals down on their knees chewing the rug was how Stephens led off his column. It went like this:

“When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use in wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful. it’s great luck, and let him thank God.

But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he is 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worse kind of rascal.”

– An old Jew of Galicia

Essentially, Stephens was saying the radical Greens are fanatics and thugs (all true) – in the pages of the liberal mothership, no less.

To the liberal mind, Stephens committed a high sacrilege, for next to abortion, man-made global warming is most sacred dogma of the left. To have even a hint of doubt on the certainty of this proposition raised in the op-ed pages of the New York Times is akin…well, akin to the supreme ayatollah burning a Koran in the center of Mecca at high noon.

Take Sarah Jones of the New Republic as one example. She unloads, writing that Stephens is the least of the problems at the Times, as the newspaper “is awash in out-of -touch, medicare columnists who are badly out of sync with the era in which we live.”

Over at Vox, Jeff Stein voices the same complaint against Stephens as did Ms. Jones. And to show what a narrow bubble these liberals are in, he writes:

The Times’s editorial page is a bit like the Supreme Court: Its opinions set the framework for the national debate, and its members tend to stay there for decades. so Stephens’s beliefs are about to have a big impact on the national discourse.

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Climate Editors Have a Meltdown How did science reporting get so detached from the underlying science? By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on May 3rd, 2017

I’ll admit it: I would have found it fascinating to be party to the discussions earlier this year that led to oscillating headlines on the New York Times home page referring to the new EPA chief Scott Pruitt alternately as a “denier” or “skeptic.” At least it would have been fascinating for 20 minutes.

Ditto the hysterical discussions undoubtedly now arising from an anodyne piece of climate heterodoxy by the paper’s newest columnist, a former Journal colleague who shall remain nameless, in which he advises, somewhat obscurely, less “certainty” about “data.”

Whether or not this represents progress in how the U.S. media cover the climate debate, a trip down memory lane seems called for. In the 1980s, when climate alarms were first being widely sounded, reporters understood the speculative basis of computer models. We all said to ourselves: Well, in 30 years we’ll certainly have the data to know for sure which model forecasts are valid.

Thirty years later, the data haven’t answered the question. The 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, voice of climate orthodoxy, is cited for its claim, with 95% confidence, that humans are responsible for at least half the warming between 1951 and 2010.

Look closely. This is an estimate of the reliability of an estimate. It lacks the most important conjunction in science: “because”—as in “We believe X because of Y.”

Not that the IPCC fails to offer a “because” in footnotes. It turns out this estimate is largely an estimate of how much man-made warming should have taken place if the models used to forecast future warming are broadly correct.

The IPCC has a bad reputation among conservatives for some of its press-release activities, but the reports themselves are basically numbing testimonies to how seriously scientists take their work. “If our models are reliable, then X is true” is a perfectly valid scientific statement. Only leaving out the prefix, as the media routinely does, makes it deceptive.

We don’t know what the IPCC’s next assessment report, due in 2021, will say on this vital point, known as climate sensitivity. But in 2013 it widened the range of uncertainty, and in the direction of less warming. Its current estimate is now identical to that of the 1979 Charney Report. On the key question, then, there has been no progress in 38 years.

For journalists, the climate beat has been singularly unrewarding. It has consisted of waiting for an answer that doesn’t come. By now, thanks to retirements and the mortality tables, the beat’s originators are mostly gone. The job has passed into hands of reporters who don’t even bother to feign interest in science—who think the magic word “consensus” is all the support they need for any climate claim they care to make. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Bret Stephens Is Surprised When The Mob He Fed Turned On Him Julie Kelly

By on May 3rd, 2017

On the eve of the Climate March, the New York Times ran Stephens’s first column for them, and it sent the climate mob on a virtual stampede with torches ablaze.

The day before activists took to the streets to blame humankind for causing climate change, a federal court granted President Trump’s request to essentially freeze the Clean Power Plan, President Obama’s signature climate policy. Trump signed an executive order in March that instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to review the plan (already tied up in the courts), which sought to reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent of 2005 levels by 2050. It’s expected that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will gut if not entirely rescind it.

That same day, the EPA announced its website is “undergoing changes that reflect the agency’s new direction under President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt” and specifically mentions “content related to climate.” This is kinda like when your boss tells you the company is going in a new direction right before she fires you. Happy marching!

But the real knife in the back came in the form of a column posted by Bret Stephens, a new columnist for The New York Times. On the eve of the Climate March, the Times ran Stephens’s first column since it poached him from the Wall Street Journal, and it sent the climate mob on a virtual stampede to the Times’ headquarters with torches ablaze. The Times hired Stephens, a neoconservative, for his virulent anti-Trump stance. As Byron York noted after the announcement, “seeking diversity, NYT editorial page wants anti-Trump opinion from left, right, and center.”

But the move backfired. Stephens has been labeled a climate denier for his past comments on the issue, such as calling global warming a “mass neurosis” and a “sick-souled religion.” Since the Times announced their hire, people have been demanding Stephens’s ouster; a petition on Change.org to fire him earned more than 28,000 signatures and many more threatened to cancel their subscriptions.
Rain on the Climate Parade Produces Hissing Steam

His April 28 column is a partial retort, if not a slight olive branch, to the climate congregation outraged that a heretic is now singing from their climate hymnal. (The Times just opened an entire bureau dedicated to climate change, brooding that “as the earth’s temperature continues to break records, climate and environmental reporting is taking on new urgency.”)

Stephens makes the wholly logical point that “claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong.” He writes how the extremism and arrogance of climate leaders have fueled doubt if not total indifference about manmade climate change among the general public: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he wrote. Irony alert here; keep reading.

If Stephens was trying to advise — if not appease — the climate mob, it didn’t work. The climate Twitterverse imploded Friday afternoon. California billionaire Tom Steyer, whose deep pockets fund climate activism around the world, tweeted that Stephens’s column “is straight out of Exxon playbook” and that it was “no different than a columnist arguing that tobacco use might not cause cancer. Dangerous.”

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