Month: July 2018

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(4): July 2018

This year marks the 30th anniversary of James E. Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony on “global warming,” which set off the “disastrous 30 Year War on Carbon,” writes Willis Eschenbach. It is a war on access to affordable energy, which has already claimed thousands of casualties by plunging people into “fuel poverty.” Eschenbach’s electrical bills have climbed 50%; poor people in midwinter have to choose between heating and eating (https://tinyurl.com/yafzjpp3).

When I was in 7th grade at the dawn of the Atomic Age, we read about electricity “too cheap to meter.” Then came the war on nuclear energy. Then on coal. In January 2008, then-Senator Obama said of his Clean Power Plan, “[E]lectricity rates would necessarily skyrocket” (https://tinyurl.com/ydy2ngk8).

The war actually began even before 1988 in UN agencies and transnational, nonaccountable nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Foreign, anti-American interests heavily promote climate alarmism. The political left, and since around 2000 the Democrat Party, have also unconditionally supported the “climate change” agenda (https://tinyurl.com/y9qrx9tf).

In his new book Green Tyranny, Rupert Darwell argues that the ideology driving the climate scare originated in Hitler’s Germany. In 1941, Hitler said, “Coal will disappear someday,” and “The future belongs, surely, to water—to the wind and the tides.” Darwell writes: “The Nazis’ profound hostility to capitalism and their identification with nature-politics led them to advocate green policies half a century before any other political party” (https://tinyurl.com/y85o4c7n).

Once the anthropogenic global warming theory was proposed by a tiny group of scientists, “With startling speed, their theory was soon proclaimed as being supported by a scientific ‘consensus,’ backed by governments, all the main scientific journals and institutions, environmental pressure groups and the media,” writes Christopher Booker in Global Warming: a Classic Example of Groupthink. Booker applies Groupthink theory popularized 40 years ago by psychologist Irving Janis.

“The one thing those caught up in groupthink cannot tolerate is that anyone should question it…. [Thus], they cannot properly debate the matter with those who disagree with their belief” (TWTW 2/24/18, www.sepp.org).

The Nov 30, 2017, issue of Nature, devoted to “Energy Transitions,” admits no hint of doubts. It calls the transition from wood to coal the “most momentous shift in the history of energy,” which “wrought huge changes in society” in the 16th century. “It reduced the pressure on land because energy could be found below ground,” writes Roger Fouquet of the London School of Economics and Political Science. (Now the climate alarmists want to keep the energy underground.) Wind farms began in the 1980s (see p 2). The renewable energy campaign that began in Denmark in the 70s inspired the German Energiewende.

Nature remarks on how the world’s wealthiest have an “outsized carbon footprint,” an “inequity” that needs correction. The implication is that being wealthy leads to carbon emissions —rather than that access to affordable energy brings prosperity.

The economic analysis of the cost of energy, Nature says, is dominated by increases in premature human deaths allegedly caused by “air pollution” [primarily PM_2.5, see May issue and p 2]. Erica Gies writes that this accounts for more than 90% of the calculated damage costs from electricity generation from coal.

In fact, using the same logic, pollution from trucks alone kills 35% more Americans than actually die. Emissions from glider trucks, which are remanufactured from old, salvaged diesel engines, kill 4,100 per year, according to Harvard academicians  (https://tinyurl.com/ydf3h2ej). Glider trucks, however, emit about the same amount of PM_2.5 as new trucks, according to measurements at Tennessee Tech University in 2017, writes Steve Milloy. Only 38,000 glider trucks have ever been built, and there are 33.8 million diesel trucks on the road. Thus, new trucks hypothetically kill 3.65 million Americans per year. Yet there are only 2.7 million deaths from all causes (tinyurl.com/ybq36cxp).

Gross pollution does, however, cause some 5 million real, identifiable deaths each year in Africa: air pollution from burning wood and animal dung, and contaminated food and water.

These problems of poverty could be solved with affordable electricity. However, the World Bank and other Multilateral Development Banks stopped financing coal-fired power generation in 2010, and plan to stop funding oil and gas exploration by poor countries. Instead, MDBs devote $34 billion to “climate finance” —which is anti-development (https://tinyurl.com/yatexbul).

The War on Reason and Facts

“Global warming hysteria has raged for 30 years,” writes Cal Thomas. “Predictions…of global significance, should be rigorously examined to see if they have come true. In the case of Mr. Hansen, it’s apparent they have not” (Albuquerque J 7/1/18).

Instead, alarmists make dire future projections based solely on computer models, and “homogenize,” “correct,” and manipulate original data, adjusting records by as much as 3.1 °F (1.7 °C), writes Paul Driessen (https://tinyurl.com/yaes4yag). According to former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist John Bates, NOAA had knowingly released “unverified” global temperature data in order to influence policy agendas favored by the Obama administration at the 2015 Paris climate conference, reports Larry Bell (https://tinyurl.com/y9uravkk).

In 1993, the New York Times printed a classic article by Julian Simon and Aaron Wildavsky: “Facts, Not Species, Are Periled.” They stated that there was no evidence that the rate of extinction of species was going up rapidly, or at all. Still, children are being “prepared for planetary crisis”: S.F. Said cites the claim that “nearly one-quarter of mammals are globally threatened or extinct” (Nature 4/26/18). But one-fifth of all species were in danger of being gone by 2003 (NYT, op. cit.). The predictions are based on computer models; only about 800 extinctions have been documented in the past 400 years, out of 1.9 million species (https://tinyurl.com/y9828mw2).

Richard Lindzen stated that historians will wonder “how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda,… enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone…that CO₂ from human industry was a dangerous planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world” (Bell, op. cit.).

Political pollution of science, on the other hand, is something truly worthy of concern.

Energy Facts    

Upon the retirement of Vindeby, the first off-shore wind farm, we learn that it spent 75% of its 25-year life paying off the cost of its construction, and most of the rest paying for maintenance, for a return on input cost of about 1:1. Before the Industrial Revolution, England operated on an energy return investment of 2:1, as do some parts of Africa today. For a typical fossil-fuel plant, the return is 50:1 for the plant alone and 15:1 if fuel cost is included. For nuclear, the ratio is 70:1, and fuel costs are negligible compared to total cost (tinyurl.com/y6uf7x9g).

Availability in disasters: Wind and solar receive energy input at the whim of Nature. A bad storm shuts them down and can even destroy them. Gas plants need just-in-time delivery from a pipeline. Coal plants can store 90 days of fuel on site. Nuclear plants need refueling about every 2 years (WSJ 6/20/18).

 More Fake Science

Yet another indictment against PM_2.5 pollution: not only is it “associated with” birth defects (see May issue), but with premature birth. Coal and oil plant retirements in California were associated with a tiny but statistically significant decrease in the proportion of preterm births in women residing within 5 km of the plant in pregnancies beginning in the year after plant closure compared with two years before (-0.019, 95% C.I. -0.031, -0.008). That was 6.1% out of 272 live births after closure vs. 7.5% out of 316 live births before. Actual exposure was not measured. Authors speculate that pollution “may increase risk” of prematurity due to intrauterine growth restriction, preeclampsia, etc.—somehow (Am J Epidemiol 5/16/18, doi: 10.1093/aje/kwy110).

Statistician William Briggs writes: “The epidemiologist fallacy strikes again” (http://wmbriggs.com/post/24601/).

 EPA Scandals in Obama Years     

Unethical Human Experimentation: EPA deliberately exposed hundreds of unwitting subjects to diesel exhaust after telling Congress that this could be lethal (Larry Bell, Forbes 11/13/12, https://tinyurl.com/yd7nnz5q).

Obstruction? Administrator Gina McCarthy deleted 6,000 text messages days after Congress notified EPA that it might be violating laws on preserving records (tinyurl.com/yac79pqq).

Cover-up? EPA allegedly knew of the dangers of a catastrophic blowout at an abandoned Colorado mine before it triggered the release of toxic heavy metals (https://tinyurl.com/y94wkuos), but covered up evidence to shield its agents from prosecution (https://tinyurl.com/ybdvqotd).

Travel Expenses: Gina McCarthy spent $629,743 on airfare and security for international trips between 2013 and 2016. In all, Obama’s EPA administrators spent $961,856 on international travel, 7.75 times the amount spent by Scott Pruitt, without the media outcry (https://tinyurl.com/ybfc49v5).

Hiding Data: EPA concealed the results of a human experiment that directly contradicts the Obama EPA’s 2015 decision to tighten the air quality standard for ozone from 75 ppb to 70 ppb, one of the most expensive EPAs rule of all time (https://tinyurl.com/y9w5nugx).

39 more: https://tinyurl.com/yd3fkpgn

Danger, Pollution from “Clean” Energy

Destroying Water Supplies: Concrete wind turbine bases extending 30 ft below ground interfere with ground water flow, blocking or polluting supplies to homes and livestock in Scotland  (https://tinyurl.com/y7z2hs56). In Ontario, farmers are using bottled  water for livestock because of contamination with “toxic sludge” (https://tinyurl.com/yb3vmwbl).

Ticking Time Bombs: Germany’s 30,000 wind turbines, many now more than 20 years old, are failing catastrophically with increased frequency. A 100-tonne turbine plunged to earth. Razor-sharp fiberglass shards from blades of a 115-meter tall turbine flew 800 meters. They could perforate the stomach of grazing animals. Turbines are exempt from the rigorous inspections required for other industries (https://tinyurl.com/yarvyjj8).

Toxic Waste: Giant wind turbine blades cannot be recycled because they are made of composite materials that cannot be separated. Incineration is difficult, toxic, and energy intensive. By 2021 Germany may have 16,000 tonnes per year to dispose of—probably in African landfills (https://tinyurl.com/ycmqk2po).

Hansen on Renewables: “The notion that renewable energies and batteries alone will provide all needed energy is fantastical. It is also a grotesque idea, because of the staggering environmental pollution from mining and material disposal, if all energy was derived from renewables and batteries” (tinyurl.com/y9jrphqo).

Beyond Fuel

Reiterating that “exposure to air pollution is the fifth ranking human health risk factor globally,” Brian McDonald et al. examine what’s in it. As emissions from motor vehicles are reduced, volatile chemical products (VCPs) are emerging as the largest petrochemical source of urban organic emissions. VCPs include pesticides, architectural coatings, adhesives, printing ink, cleaning agents, and  personal care products. These emit secondary organic aerosols (SOAs), which are a major component of PM_2.5. Concentrations indoors, where most people spend most of their time, are about 7 times higher than outdoors. “Nonfossil” contributions to SOAs, such as wood burning, cooking, and biogenic, are not considered (Science 2/16/18).

“When smog has as much deodorant as diesel in it, you know the Earth is in trouble,” writes James Conca. Personal chemical products are 20 times as effective as gasoline and diesel at producing smog, and they “mostly come from processing petroleum anyway. Unfortunately,regulations exempt many of these chemicals from environmental concern.” Conca catalogs human depredations of Earth; for example, we allegedly “extinct [sic] about,000 species every year.” (Forbes 2/20/18, https://tinyurl.com/y9xxypvh). He makes no suggestions about how to go beyond petroleum with renewables for these useful products.

Though acknowledging that indoor air pollution is “almost 10 times worse” than ambient, Conca apparently forgot this in his laudatory comments about the study of premature births referenced above. Coal tops the list on the “Deathprint for Energy,” he writes. “If coal is a significant part of a country’s energy mix, then health care costs increase about 10%.For America, that is about $400 billion a year” (Forbes 5/30/18, tinyurl.com/y9fcoheo). Was the shutdown of eight coal or oil plants in California linked to a decrease in actual medical costs in the surrounding area? Not likely. That was not included in the study.

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(3): May 2018

On Apr 24, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt signed proposed rules requiring that the scientific information relied on by the agency be publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent validation.

“The era of secret science at EPA is coming to an end,” said Pruitt. “The ability to test, authenticate, and reproduce scientific findings is vital for the integrity of rulemaking process. Americans deserve to assess the legitimacy of the science underpinning EPA decisions that may impact their lives” (TWTW 4/28/18, https://tinyurl.com/ybymshv5).

The rule “is in line with the scientific community’s moves toward increased data sharing to address the ‘replication crisis’—a growing recognition that a significant proportion of published research may not be reproducible. [It] is consistent with data access requirements for major scientific journals like Science, Nature, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (ibid.)

In The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science, David Randall and Christopher Welser cite outright fraud, as with microplastics (see p 2) and low-dose radiation. More common is the misuse of statistics to “find” spurious correlations. There is a premium on positive results, and groupthink and absence of openness hinder efforts to check results (https://tinyurl.com/y9tcybv6).

In the Afterword, physicist William Happer lists characteristics of “pathological science”: 1. The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause. 2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability; or, many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results. 3. Claims of great accuracy. 4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience. 5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.

EPA claims about small particulates (PM_2.5) are an excellent example (CDP May 2002, Nov 2012, and July 2014, and 2017 talks by Robert Phalen, John Dale Dunn, James Enstrom, and Steve Milloy; on youtube.com, search DDPmeetings).

A “Fundamental Transformation”?

Under Obama, EPA rammed through an average 565 new rules per year, with the highest regulatory costs of any agency. It gamed cost-benefit analysis by introducing “social costs” and “social benefits.” These included speculation about how inaction would affect everything from sea levels to pediatric asthma. Before issuing the Clean Power Plan, the Obama EPA suddenly raised the global social cost of carbon emissions from $21 to $36 per ton, and in imposing new oil and gas regulations set the cost of methane at $1,100 per ton. When the Trump EPA recalculated, using only demonstrable domestic benefits, the cost estimates dropped to $5 per ton of carbon and $150 per ton of methane. This changed the claimed net benefit of the Clean Power Plan from $40 billion to a net cost of $13 billion (WSJ 6/6/18).

The new rule might also allow EPA to move away from the default use of the corrupt and scientifically flawed linear no-threshold rule (LNT) for cancer risk assessment, writes Edward Calabrese (InsideEPA 6/26/18).

Congress and Courts Seek Transparency

Another front in the war for integrity is congressional scrutiny of research funding. Four Senators—Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), and Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.)—are demanding an investigation of $4 million National Science Foundation grant to Climate Central to “educate” 500 TV weathercasters to report on “climate change.” The senators say the program “is not science—it is propagandizing.” The NSF is supposed to fund basic research, not political or social advocacy (https://tinyurl.com/y8rzzn9c).

An Arizona appellate court has finally ordered the University of Arizona to hand over public records that would expose the genesis of what some consider the most influential scientific publication of the 1990s, the Mann-Bradley-Hughes temperature reconstruction that looks like a hockey stick—1,763 days, three trips to appellate court, and two bankers’ boxes full of legal briefs after a case was filed by the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (https://tinyurl.com/y9ecyz2r).

The Establishment Strikes Back

The proposed rule came under immediate attack from Democrats, radical environmentalists, the American Lung Association, Science, Nature, and many others. One claim was breach of patient confidentiality, despite safeguards in the rule. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) pointed out the irony, given the government’s demand for ever more patient data: the government’s view on transparency depends on whether it’s their data or your data (https://tinyurl.com/y73x8reo).

“Like tobacco lobbyists and climate-change deniers, the [EPA] is co-opting scientific trappings to sow doubt,” writes science historian Naomi Oreskes (https://tinyurl.com/y7rl2vvc).

In the JAMA Forum, authors from Harvard claim that “the Trump Environmental Agenda May Lead to 80000 Extra Deaths per Decade,” most importantly from rolling back Clean Power Plan rules for PM_2.5 (JAMA 6/12/18).

The Center for American Progress, a “progressive” advocacy group founded by John Podesta, asserts that “Pruitt’s actions on energy and the environment threaten to harm women’s health and reproductive justice.” Exposure to PM_2.5 can allegedly affect fertility-related hormones and lead to low birth weight and pre-term deliveries (https://tinyurl.com/yd9fxoe8).

The Cost in Human Lives

The first example of EPA’s deliberately ignoring scientific evidence was its ban on DDT in 1972. This ban has led to about 50 million deaths from malaria worldwide; about 500 million cases are reported annually. Governmental and UN bureaucracies and immensely wealthy foundations threaten to cut off aid to poor Africans if they use DDT. Yet not one peer-reviewed, independently replicated study has linked DDT exposure to any adverse outcome in humans (tinyurl.com/acc5md3).

Incalculable are the benefits that could accrue from productive use of the $1.5 trillion that former EPA insider Alan Carlin estimates the world wastes every year because of climate alarmism based on faulty evidence (https://tinyurl.com/y7ouybpy).

Micromanaging Food

In order to reduce the environmental impact of food, policymakers would need to deal with 570 million farms in widely diverse climate and soil conditions that use vastly different methods. A recent study consolidated data on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, terrestrial acidification, eutrophication, and scarcity-weighted fresh water withdrawals related to 40 major foods, from 38,700 farms and 1,600 processors. Monitoring multiple impacts and trade-offs from changing practices would require data from producers as well as from satellites. Planners want to “communicate impacts up the supply chain.” For example, returnable stainless steel kegs create just 20 g of CO₂ eq per liter of beer, vs. 300-750 g for recycled glass bottles vs. 450-2,500 for bottles sent to landfills. Both producers and consumers need to be “incentivized” to reduce the impact of food production and distribution. “Moving from current diets to a diet that excludes animal products…has transformative potential” (Science 6/1/18).

 War on Air Pollution

The UK’s ambition to reach the WHO standard for fine particulates (PM_2.5, less than 2.5 µm diameter) of an average < 10 µg/m³ (the U.S. standard is 12 µg/m³) would require heavy regulation of a “huge, wide range of sectors and industries.” A key component is emissions of ammonia, which fuels atmospheric chemical reactions that produce problematic particulates. Farm use of fertilizers and manure from livestock and chickens produce 88% of the UK’s ammonia emissions. The government also proposes tackling domestic wood stoves and fireplaces and vehicle tires and brakes. The 104-page Clean Air Strategy also envisions phasing out diesel-fueled trains by 2040 (Science 6/1/18).

Exxon’s “Secret Science”

The cities of Oakland and San Francisco sued Exxon for damages that allegedly will result from climate change, accusing them of concealing evidence of harm from use of its products. The secret was that Exxon quoted, and by implication accepted, a summary of the Second IPCC Assessment Report (1995), which included Benjamin Santer’s mysterious distinct “human fingerprint,” the hot spot in the tropical troposphere at about 33,000 ft (TWTW 4/7/18). This was important for signing the Kyoto Protocol, and is one of the three lines of evidence the EPA relies on to regulate CO₂  emissions. The hot spot, however, cannot be found, in analyzing five different datasets dating from 1959 to 2015, once the changing El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) patterns are removed (TWTW, sepp.org 9/24/16).

The late Frederick Seitz called the process involved in inserting the term “distinct human fingerprint” the worse abuse of the peer review process he had seen in 60 years of American science.

Save the Oceans from Plastic

The theme of 2018’s Earth Day was the contamination of the oceans with plastic. Fears of a previously unrecognized environmental catastrophe—the endangerment of fish by microplastic particles in the ocean—erupted after the 2016 publication of an article by Oona Lönnstedt and Peter Eklöv at Uppsala University in Science. The U.S. had already banned plastic microbeads in personal care products. After early dismissal of their concerns, whistleblowers persisted, and the data were found to be completely fabricated (Randall and Welser, op. cit.).

Nonetheless, the war on plastics continues. “Beat Plastic Pollution” was the theme of the UN’s June 5 World Environment Day. The Plastic Pollution Coalition, claiming membership of 500 groups, calls plastic “a substance the earth cannot digest.” It is “overwhelming our planet.” The war on plastics is part of the war on hydrocarbon fuels: “Plastic pollution and climate change are parallel global emergencies” (tinyurl.com/p5cffan).

Some want all plastics eliminated—though vital for health and civilization, as they are in heart valves, smart phones, and  protective helmets, as well as food packaging. Some would allow those manufactured from biofuels. This would require turning nearly the whole planet into a biofuel farm.

Plastic is “litter, not pollution,” states Canadian ecologist and Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore. It is not toxic and passes right through the digestive tract if eaten (tinyurl.com/y8jjner5). The best way to dispose of it is by incineration, with proper emissions control. Most plastic in the ocean comes from rivers in Asia—and millions of tons of that comes from waste shipped from the EU for “recycling” (https://tinyurl.com/y8284py3).

Torturing the Data             

Potential birth defects are a horror that is especially likely to arouse public concern. Vast data-dredging studies have been carried out to try to demonstrate a connection between PM_2.5 exposure and congenital anomalies such as cleft palate or heart defects—most showing minor associations or no effect. A study by Ren et al. in the Journal of Pediatrics (2018;193:76-84) also looked at preconception exposure. The study included 548,863 live births in Ohio from 2006-2010. Exposure was estimated from monthly averages measured at 57 EPA PM_2.5 monitors, using the one closest to the maternal residence, for five periods, the month of conception and 1 and 2 months prior or after. Mean PM_2.5  level was compared for births with and without anomalies. The maximum mean difference in PM_2.5  levels for the three “most susceptible” time periods was a minuscule 0.32 µg/m³.  [The limits for detection and error of measurement are not given.] The maximum adjusted odds ratio (of the 3 of 18 that were outside the 95% confidence interval) was 1.2. The potential mechanism for a teratogenic effect of PM_2.5 of unknown composition deep in the mother’s lungs on a not-yet-conceived embryo was admittedly “speculative” and included oxidative stress and placental inflammation. See criteria for “pathological science” on p 1.

 Corrupted Evidence in Medicine

Publication Bias: Of completed drug trials, well under half are published. Most published ones favor the drug.

Rigged Outcomes: Before 2000, researchers did not have to register the primary outcome to be measured. Many were measured and the most favorable ones reported. Before 2000, 57% of trials found a positive result. After 2000, only 8% did.

Paid-off Journal Editors: About half of journal editors receive payment of some type from drug or device companies. The most egregious may be theJournal of the American College of Cardiology. In 2014, each editor received, on average, $475,072 personally and another $119,407 for “research.” With 35 editors, that’s about $15 million in bribes (https://tinyurl.com/ybculpks).