With Tax Reform Done, Trump Should Set Record Straight On ‘Climate Change’

When President Trump calls the alarm surrounding climate change a hoax, he is fundamentally correct:  there is no valid scientific basis for climate alarm.

Climate alarmism is made possible by equal parts data manipulation and worthless climate models.

Now that Congress and the president are done with tax reform, many expect spending cuts and debt reduction to be up next.

Given the huge and still increasing economic costs being imposed on the nation for no scientifically valid reason, we suggest a renewed focus on rapidly eliminating destructive carbon dioxide emission regulations.

For the last year, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has been mulling a decision about whether (and how) to reconsider something called the Endangerment Finding (EF).

For those not familiar, in December 2009 the Obama administration issued a report (the EF) that claimed to find atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHG) pose a “danger” to human health and welfare.

Despite President Trump’s statement that climate alarm is a “hoax,” nearly everyone Pruitt talks to — holdover officials at EPA, legions of academics receiving government funding, lobbying organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers, and even many energy industry executives — tells him that reconsidering the EF is a huge mistake because the scientific evidence supporting it is overwhelming.

Pruitt has proposed a year long, perhaps televised, Red/Blue debate to clarify the scientific situation.

But before this lengthy process has even started, environmental groups and blue state AGs are already pummeling EPA in court with its own EF, winning victories that obstruct the administration’s efforts to grow America’s energy sector and to enhance its economic and national security.

So, what is the actual science behind the EF?  We confidently assert that in any Red/Blue evaluation of the science, where the Blue team supports the EF, the Blue team will lose badly.

“Warmists” claim a 97% scientific consensus regarding the hypothesized catastrophic impact of increased atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ and other GHGs.

But this illusion of consensus has only come about through misrepresentation of global temperatures and research results plus rigid enforcement of orthodoxy and refusal to debate for some two decades.

In accordance with the scientific method, the EF has been shown to be invalid at least three separate times over the past two years.

One of us (Wallace) is the lead author of three scientific research reports that each in a unique fashion, invalidated all of the lines of evidence on which EPA claimed to rely for its EF.

All three of these reports meet two criteria fundamental to the scientific method:

1. the authors’ mathematical/statistical modeling work can be easily replicated since the model results are shown, and all of the data utilized are stated in the research reports to be available from one of the authors; and
2. extensive peer review, with the distinguished, highly credentialed reviewers being publicly identified.

By contrast, the vast majority of the work on which EPA relied for the EF does not meet these two criteria, and therefore would be excluded from consideration in a scientifically proper reconsideration.

Most important, our findings have never been invalidated by the massive climate alarm community.

As an illustration of the relevance of these findings, our June 2017 Research Report sought to validate the estimates of current and historical global average surface temperature (GAST) from NOAA, NASA, and the UK’s Hadley CRU, using the best available empirical data.

These official GAST estimates are a necessary foundation for EPA’s “lines of evidence” for its EF and are also the foundation for frequent government claims of record-setting temperatures.

But this research found it impossible to conclude from the three GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever.

Instead, the conclusive findings were that the GAST data sets are simply not a valid representation of reality.

More specifically, in this research report, past changes in the previously officially reported historical data are quantified.

It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.

And, it was nearly always accomplished by each entity systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.

Given the magnitude of each of the three entities’ historical data adjustments, and their removal of the previous officially-reported cyclical temperature patterns, the officially-reported data are now totally inconsistent with very considerable current, published and credible U.S and other temperature data.

With GAST data set validity being a necessary condition for the EF, it too is invalidated by these research findings. Therefore, EPA’s 2009 claim that CO₂ is a pollutant has been decisively invalidated.

The same conclusion is reached based on separate analyses in the other two research reports.  Thus, the likelihood of this EF invalidation result being in error is nil.

For there to be a real global warming crisis, it is necessary that rising atmospheric GHG concentrations be proven to have a statistically significant impact on GAST.

Collateral claims of danger from things like extreme weather events, droughts, floods, hurricanes and rising seas are fundamentally based on proof of that impact. But that proof has not been made.

The regulations based on the EF that President Obama imposed (e.g., the Clean Power Plan) cause huge and totally unnecessary costs to the economy in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

Given the vast economic costs to America of pursuing the suppression of fossil fuels, it makes no sense to insert a further one-year plus Red/Blue debate delay in granting reconsideration of the EF.

Instead, the Red/Blue exercise should be held as a prompt, on-the-record legal reconsideration of the EF.

When this exercise is over, the American people finally will have been shown the truth about the shoddy, tendentious, and unscientific mangling of data that are necessary to sustain the cult of climate alarm.

Wallace, Ph.D., is the lead author of numerous papers and legal briefs regarding EPA’s Endangerment Finding.

Menton is a lawyer who has submitted a petition calling on EPA to reopen its Endangerment Finding.