RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anthony J. Sadar is a certified consulting meteorologist and author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail (Stairway Press, 2016).

In case you missed it, yesterday was Earth Day, the high holy day of Earth-worshipers. So it was quite appropriate for Mother Earth’s true believers, acolytes, and clueless subservients to trek en masse to the holiest city on the planet, Washington, D.C., for obeisance, especially when the present administration is threatening to cut back on government tithing to insatiable Gaia groupies, particularly in the area of global warming hysteria.

The reason for this year’s pilgrimage is more than a bit hypocritical, however.

The pretense for self-righteous indignation this time is that somehow activist snowflakes just discovered that climate science is manipulated by politics. They already know that such science is influenced by money, thus a reason for stomping through the streets of Capital City.

But political influence? Big surprise.

After all, for at least the past eight years, atmospheric science in the form of “carbon pollution” is causing caustic chaos across the climate cosmos, has been practically front and center on the previous administration’s agenda. And the previous administration, like so many before it, was all about pure objectivity in science.

Except that it wasn’t. Nor were earlier administrations.

Politics influenced past scientific practice. Consider the roots of the global warming issue. Skipping the fact that the fear of the 1970s during the era of the first Earth Day – which began on April 22, 1970 – was the coming of the next ice age, the global warming frenzy began in earnest on June 23, 1988. On that day, Senator Timothy Wirth had organized congressional hearings on climate change, staging the event on one of the hottest days of the year. Senator Wirth and his staff left the windows of the hearing room open all the sweltering night before the meeting to ensure an uncomfortable event the next day.

Furthermore, as noted in a recent commentary for The Washington Times, the year 1988 “also saw the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC’s stated role is to assess the ‘risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation[.]” Typically, scientific investigation is not directed to find a preordained conclusion. There is a tendency, rather, to heed what Upton Sinclair cautioned: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

And the championing of the climate craze by political scientist Al Gore is legendary, as is his An Inconvenient Truth film and his anticipated to be equally mythical movie opening this summer, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.

When President Donald Trump announced his proposed budget last month, he included a large cut to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Naturally, cries that his administration is waging a “war on science” ensued. But in all honestly, the EPA really could use some trimming.

Staff scandals wracked the EPA throughout President Obama’s tenure, and when the government “shut down” in 2013, only 7 percent of EPA staff were considered essential.

Here are nine reasons why cutting the EPA, as Trump has suggested, is not such a bad thing after all.
1. 15,000 non-essential workers.

When Texas Senator Ted Cruz famously ended the world by “shutting down the government” in 2013, Obama’s EPA revealed just how much fat there was to trim. As Reuters reported toward the end of September, “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will take one of the biggest hits of any federal agency if the government shuts down this week, operating with under 7 percent of its employees, according to guidance issued by the agency.”

That’s right — less than 7 percent of the EPA’s staff were deemed “essential.” The EPA “said its plan for dealing with a shutdown would classify 1,069 employees, out of 16,205, as essential. These employees would continue to work if Congress fails to secure a budget deal by midnight Monday to avoid disruption to federal funding.”

By the Obama EPA’s own logic, 15,136 of the agency’s 16,205 employees were not “essential.” That suggests a great deal of wiggle room.

Coincidentally, many employees have seemingly singled themselves out by their own behavior.
2. Watching porn, six hours a day.

In 2014, the EPA inspector general uncovered “a high ranking EPA official” who “admitted to watching between two and six hours of porn per workday.”

Worse, the employee kept his job, which pays $120,000 per year. As EPA Facts reported, “The employee is still receiving his $120,000 salary, continues to have access to EPA computers, and has recently received performance bonuses, according to testimony at yesterday’s Oversight Committee hearing on the EPA.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that kind of behavior should be acceptable for a high-ranking government official.
Is President Trump Launching a ‘War on Science’?
3. Hiring friends and family as paid interns.

Here’s another stellar example of above board work at the EPA. Renee Page, director of the EPA’s Office of Administration “hired 17 of her family members and friends as paid interns,” the Daily Caller reported in 2014. “She also paid her daughter — who also works at the EPA — from her agency’s budget account.”

Interestingly, “instead of being punished, Page received a prestigious Presidential Rank Award in 2010, for which she got $35,000 in cash.”

It’s all about who you know, am I right?

Now that tax day has passed, I must thank you, my fellow federal taxpayers. You all are the wind beneath my solar panels.

Pardon me for mixing energy metaphors, but it’s only appropriate that I express appreciation for the generous subsidy you provided for the 28-panel, four-array, 8,540-watt photovoltaic system I installed on my metal roof last year. Thanks to the investment tax credit, I slashed my 2016 federal tax bill by $7,758.

Before going further, let me be clear: I’m opposed to all energy subsidies—unless, of course, I’m the one collecting them. And thanks to the incentives for rooftop solar, I’ve snared three subsidies.

In addition to the federal subsidy, Austin Energy (our city-owned utility) paid $6,593 of the cost of my system. Thus, after subtracting local and federal subsidies, the net cost of my 8.54-kilowatt system was $18,100, or about $2.12 per watt of installed capacity. I’m also getting an ongoing subsidy that pays me far more for the electricity I produce than what other generators get in the Texas wholesale market.

My panels are producing about 12 megawatt-hours of electricity per year. In 2016, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the average wholesale price of electricity was $24.62 per megawatt-hour. But Austin Energy pays me $106 for each megawatt-hour my system produces. Therefore, I’m getting more than four times as much for my solar electricity as other generators in Texas. I get that price regardless of whether the grid needs the juice from my panels or not.

In the 12 months since I installed the system, half of my monthly electric bills are showing up with a negative balance. I figure my solar panels will pay back their cost in 14 years and that the return on my investment is about 7%. CONTINUE AT SITE

The apocryphal King Canute placed his throne on the beach to demonstrate the fact that the power of kings was subservient to that of God. This is a message yet to be learned by those who believe that man can control the temperatures of earth – that man is more powerful than nature.

“Denier” is what “climate change absolutists” call those who, like me, acknowledge the fact of climate change and that man has played a significant part, but are skeptical that the precise magnitude of man’s effect is determinable, let alone dominant. “Denier” is the term used by those who profess moral and intellectual superiority to those they condemn as being in the pay of fossil-fuel lobbyists, or as being too stupid to understand what they claim is undeniable. “Denier” is what we are called, we who believe in evolution – that adaptability is key to survival – by those who, like Canute’s entourage, believe that man can compel the tide not to rise.

No reasonable person doubts man’s impact on the environment. He has dammed rivers, so that lands might be cultivated. He has developed energy sources, so that we might be comfortable in winter and summer. He has broken laws of gravity, so that we might travel through air and through space. He has built cities where marshes and virginal forests once stood, so that we might enrich our lives, form societies, educate our youth, finance our businesses, create employment, and erect museums and symphonies to exhibit the art we have created. We know we have had an impact. We also know all living things are interdependent. When one species becomes extinct, others must adapt or die; for change is a permanent feature of life.

Nations, like species, develop unevenly. With species, the ability to adjust to change is crucial. Among nations, survival is tied to liberty. Free men, living under the rule of law and with the prospect of private profit, are more willing to take risks, thus more likely to enjoy the fruits of creativity, ingenuity, perseverance and hard work. A victim and a beneficiary of the wealth created has been the natural world. We have exploited our resources, but we have allowed people to live with clean water and air.

Environmental extremists attack those who extract resources that help all, but they rarely acknowledge the benefits that industry and wealth have brought. When oil was first discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, the woods of New England towns (like the one in New Hampshire where I grew up) were largely denuded, with trees used for heat, cooking and construction. Wood charcoal was used to make steel, before coal was first used around 1875. New York apartments ceased being heated by coal before the EPA was created. It has hard to imagine how we would live had fossil fuels not been discovered. We may rue the damage they have caused, but without them our lives would be absent comforts we take for granted; nor would we have the moneys they have generated, which have helped conserve our rivers, forests, mountains and beaches.

The Science & Environmental Policy Project is an outstanding resource for those unwilling to bury their heads in the sand and blindly accept the notion that human-caused catastrophic global warming is settled science and must be the highest priority in allocating the world’s limited economic resources.

Its April 1, 2017 issue of “The Week That Was” leads with the point that “government-funded Climate Studies have largely turned from empirical science to dogma — a belief system unsubstantiated by physical evidence.” Each week’s TWTW is chock full of commentary and links describing the latest science and other developments that challenge the climate change orthodoxy. This issue highlights the written testimony of John Christy, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Alabama’s State Climatologist and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, at the March 29th hearing titled “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method” held by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Professor Christy’s summary of his written testimony, supported by evidence in the full statement, gives rise to serious questions about those who think the subject of catastrophic global warming is no longer open to further scientific inquiry and debate.

“Science” is not a set of facts but a process or method that sets out a way for us to discover information and which attempts to determine the level of confidence we might have in that information. In the method, a “claim” or “hypothesis” is stated such that rigorous tests might be employed to test the claim to determine its credibility. If the claim fails a test, the claim is rejected or modified then tested again. When the “scientific method” is applied to the output from climate models of the IPCC AR5, specifically the bulk atmospheric temperature trends since 1979 (a key variable with a strong and obvious theoretical response to increasing GHGs in this period), I demonstrate that the consensus of the models fails the test to match the real-world observations by a significant margin…