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).

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(2): March 2018

After spending untold millions of taxpayer dollars, the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller has yet to turn up any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian regime to steal the Presidential election from Hillary Clinton.

If Democrats care about foreign (especially Soviet or Russian) infiltration of our government, the focus and timing is indeed odd. Overwhelming evidence of Soviet influence from the days of Franklin Roosevelt forward has already been gathered (see Diana West, American Betrayal: the Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character) and generally ignored. If members of Congress had to pass a background check on foreign influences, how many could be seated? Continue reading “Collusion”

Civil Defense Perspectives 33(1): January 2018

The basis for draconian anti-carbon regulations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the Endangerment Finding issued in 2009. This finding created a statutory obligation to regulate carbon emissions on the basis that greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO₂, endanger human health and welfare.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has recently acknowledged that agency staff short-circuited the science review early in the regulatory process. Sen. James Inhofe (R, Okla.) had asked the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, in April 2010, to assess the adequacy of the peer review of the Technical Support Document, writes Ross McKitrick (https://tinyurl.com/y7tjz2tv). The OIG found that the EPA had violated its own rules, but agency staff responded with a preposterous legal fiction that the docu- ment was not a Highly Influential Scientific Assessment that should have been reviewed as such.

A petition requesting reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding (https://tinyurl.com/y7aokaqm), filed by the Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, states that the lines of evidence on which the Finding is based have all been invalidated. The essential “greenhouse fingerprint” or “tropical hot spot” is not to be found. If the theory of how greenhouse gases will cause catastrophic warming is correct, it is “critical and necessary” to see evidence in the tropics that the upper tropo- sphere is warming faster than the lower, which is warming faster than the surface because of greenhouse gases blocking heat trans- fer into space. But we don’t see this. Models are not evidence.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) also filed a Petition (https://tinyurl.com/ya68nab3). It emphasizes that “there has been no statistically significant atmospheric warming despite a continued increase in atmospheric [CO₂] levels.” The “warmest year on record” (2016) was reportedly 0.02 °C warmer than 1998, only one-fifth as much as needed to be statistically significant. A warming of 2 °C would fall within the natural range of variability over recent geological time. Moreover, “at the current level of

~400 ppm we still live in a CO₂-starved world. Atmospheric lev- els 15 times greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects.”

The Four Fears

On Dec 10, 1948, the 3-year old-UN adopted in its Univer- sal Declaration of Human Rights what Eleanor Roosevelt called the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Now, it appears that a principal purpose of the UN is not to protect freedoms, but to promote fears. The Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report, of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR-5, 2013 & 2014) for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPPC) predicts a dire future from continued use of carbon-based fuels. The four phantom fears, based on never-validated models, are:

• Fear of Dire Temperature Increase
• Fear of Sudden Sea Level Rise
• Fear of Ocean Acidification (change in chemistry) and
• Fear of Famine

These are debunked by Ken Haapala (The Week That Was 12/9/17, https://tinyurl.com/y9k8yv2w), and also in the Cli- mate Change IQ Project of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (www.ddponline.org).

Global Health and Welfare

Since 1950, as atmospheric CO₂ has climbed, the percentage of the world’s population living in absolute poverty (a condition of severe deprivation of basic human needs) has decreased from around 72% to less than 10% in 2015 (https://tinyurl.com/ yb7q45ms). Since 1990, hunger, illiteracy, and child mortality have all declined (https://tinyurl.com/ybnbj8fg).

Poverty is the world’s greatest killer. Income rises with CO2 emissions, and life expectancy rises with income (https:// tinyurl.com/y9dumthf). Also necessary is the legal and eco- nomic system that provides incentive to work, invest, and inno- vate: free markets (https://tinyurl.com/yacmbckg). The de- struction of capitalism is the expressed goal of Christiana Fi- gueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (https://tinyurl.com/yabex9wr).

Insurance, or Suicide? 

Will Happer, Director of the Office of Science in the U.S. Dept. of Energy from 1991-1993, compares the climate change consensus to Pascal’s Wager (https://tinyurl.com/yak8o93t). As with the existence of God, the stakes are said to be so high that it is far better to act and discover it was not necessary, than not to act and discover it was. Cutting CO₂ emissions is just an “insurance policy.” However, as John Christy pointed out in testi- mony to Congress, a total elimination of U.S. emissions would have a near zero impact on global climate despite devastating economic consequences. Happer writes:

But the insurance salesmen, like the Laputan professors of Gulliver’s Travels, “instead of being discouraged, … are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and  despair.” This is a protection racket, not insurance.

The German Energiewende provides a preview of the results (http://www.nber.org/papers/w22467). Electricity cost Ger- man households $0.30/kWh in 2016, vs. $0.17 in France. Wind and solar supply 16% of German electricity and 3.5% of total energy. Wind production was 5.85 GW (installed capacity, 35.92 GW); solar 3.7 GW (installed 37.34 GW). Volatility is buffered by conventional plants, which cannot operate profitably and must pay feed-in tariffs guaranteed for 20 years to assure “fairness.” The viability of huge power companies is at risk (also see p 2).

“If [Matt] Ridley is right and the earth is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age,” writes Maurice Newman, former head of Deutsche Bank, in The Australian, “our successors will need a plentiful supply of cheap, reliable energy, impossible given to- day’s intelligentsia’s religious objection to low-cost fossil and nuclear fuels. It’s not carbon dioxide that threatens us with ex- tinction but blind ideology dressed up as science” (https:// tinyurl.com/y8ugb7xv).

Publication Schedule

Civil Defense Perspectives (formerly DDP Arizona Newsletter) was continuously published as a bimonthly from November 1984 until September 2015, although the later issues were often written months after the issue date. The editor constantly fell behind owing to other obligations, especially work on the fifth edition of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis, which should be re- leased by Wolters Kluwer around April 2018. Volume 32 con- tains three issues: #1 (November 2015), #3 (March 2016), and #6 (September 2016). No issues were published in 2017, so volume 33 will commence with this issue.

Physicians for Civil Defense continued to work during 2017. We sent nine news releases through PR Newswire, which were viewed 1,936 times by the public, 763 times by media outlets, and more than 41,000 times by webcrawlers. (Click “press releases” tab on www.physiciansforcivildefense.org.) In addition, we provide substantial support to the annual meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (www.ddponline.org.)

Numbers

• $40 billion: amount spent by U.S. government on Climate Sci- ence, including funding of IPCC, without finding hard evidence that CO₂ is causing dangerous global warming (TWTW11/25/17, sepp.org.) See Searching for the Catastrophic Signal: The Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by Bernie Lewin and https://tinyurl.com/y6v7wh64 for IPCC history.
• $100 billion: amount spent by  S.  to  “fight  climate change” (ibid.). Climate is still changing.
• $350,000,000: annual operating budget of Greenpeace,

<$200,000 for the CO₂ Coalition (a “CO2 Anti-Defamation League”) (https://tinyurl.com/ya5zxrwb).

• 800,000 German households: number unable to pay the elec- tric bill (the “second rent”) (https://tinyurl.com/y8majnlw).
• $77 million: active EPA research grants held by scientists on EPA scientific advisory boards over the past 3 years prior to di- rector Scott Pruitt’s policy to exclude them from such positions (Science 11/9/17).
• 8: number of manufacturing jobs lost in Ontario per “green job” (often temporary) created by government policy (TWTW 11/11/17).
• 220 tonnes: coal needed to produce steel for 1 MW wind elec- trical generating capacity (or 220 small cars).
• 000014%: amount by which Virginia cap-and-tax plan would reduce global CO₂ emissions by 2030 (AP 11/16/17).
• 18%: reduction in production of wheat, maize, rice, and soy-

beans that would result from return to pre-industrial temperature and CO2 levels, with serious consequences for food security (TWTW 11/18/18, www.sepp.org).

The Great Manure Crisis

In 1894, the London Times predicted that in 50 years, every street in London would be buried under 9 ft of manure. In New York City, about 100,000 working horses produced 2.5 million pounds of manure per day. About 20,000 New Yorkers died each year of diseases related to this. Fortunately, the government did not intervene by subsiding steam engines. Free markets brought the far superior internal combustion engine (WSJ 11/13/17).

New York City et al. Sue Exxon/Mobil

Along with several California jurisdictions, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio has sued Exxon/Mobil and other oil majors for climate conspiracy covering up the claims that CO₂ is causing dangerous climate change. Exxon/Mobil is pointing out to the court that these plaintiffs either ignored the “irreparable” harms in its bond offerings, which would be a severe securities violation, or claimed that risks were unpredictable. Exxon also calls the municipalities “eager consumers of energy” that emit substantial amounts of greenhouse gases. (https://tinyurl.com/y9q55vrw).

Buffering Volatility of Wind and Solar

The unreliability of wind and solar electricity places an upper limit on wind and solar generation. Without relying on neighbor- ing nations, if Germany tried to handle the volatility of wind and solar production without using stores, while replacing all nuclear and carbon-based fuels, on average 61%, and at the margin 94% of wind and solar capacity would have to be wasted, states Hans- Werner Sinn, one of Germany’s top economists (NBER, op. cit.). The best form of storage of excess power production is pumping water to a higher reservoir—pumped-storage plants or PSPs, of which Germany has 35 and few additional potential sites. To expand wind/solar to 100% would require 39,854 PSPs. The round-trip efficiency of storage is about 75%.

The “Norwegian solution”—relying on Norway’s huge hy- droelectric dams for backup—has several constraints. The trans- mission capacity would have to be increased 60-fold relative to today and 20-fold relative to what has been planned. Also, hy- droelectric plants can’t run in reverse (ibid.).

Sinn also believes that the cost of the Energiewende will end up far exceeding the earlier government estimate of 1 trillion eu- ros. Moreover, he says that Germany is also transforming its idyl- lic landscape into a large industrial park. Journalist Holger Doug- las commented: “In the ensuing discussion [after Sinn’s presenta- tion] one of the gravest consequences of the Energiewende emerged: the credibility of science. At almost every single re- search institute experts have been making every effort to dodge the fundamental laws of physics and nature in order to justify the Energiewende after the fact” (https://tinyurl.com/y8e2dspt).

Endangerment from Wind Power

• Toxic spill. Four giant batteries, installed to help the Royal Adelaide Hospital in southern Australia meet its emissions stan- dards while providing power when the wind wasn’t blowing, ex- ploded, spilling 80 liters of sulfuric
• Ice Throws. A wind turbine can throw a 400-pound chunk of ice 1,000 feet. The American Wind Energy Association calls the danger a myth, but large chunks of ice are seen on the ground and steel steps leading to the turbine have been broken. Uses of property—such as children’s swings—are restricted. Some call it “trespass zoning” (https://tinyurl.com/yaxadvcr).
• Sleeplessness: In diaries kept by families near a wind farm in south Australia, sleep disturbance was the most common symp- tom. Some awakenings were from “sensations,” not audible noise. Disturbances did not occur during 10 days when turbines were shut down. More events occurred during changes in power level (https://tinyurl.com/y6vgv6dx).