Real Science and the Nebulous Consensus Science

Dr. Fred Singer
Professor Emeritus

Several presentations at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Ontario, California, dealt with the issues of anthropogenic global warming promoted by the climate change industry.

Dr. S. Fred Singer, founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), and Ken Haapala, current president of SEPP, discussed the “National Environment Assessment: Peeling the Speculative Onion.” Haapala spoke of “climate fears and finance” and our government’s limitations on CO2 emissions as a “policy in search of a problem.”

Because the global warming (climate change) predictions have proven inaccurate, the fear of non-existent anthropogenic global warming should be called correctly “projections,” said Haapala. “None of the models have undergone the rigorous scientific testing required for verification and validation.”

Satellite images taken since December 1978 provided the most rigorous and comprehensive data measured in the mid-troposphere. It is where the greenhouse gas effect takes place. According to Haapala, four sets of measurements taken with weather balloons by two independent groups agree closely.  But a weather balloon does not cover the globe “comprehensively” and surface measurements are taken on land when 71 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by oceans.

Haapala said that “there is good agreement between the average of the two sets of satellite measurements and the average of the four sets of weather balloon measurements, but significant disparity between the average of the model runs and the observations. This disparity is increasing over time.” Because model runs are expensive and time consuming, many of the models proposed by climate change promoters have “only one or two runs.”

Haapala used a graph of global mid-tropospheric temperature 5-year averages of Warming Predictions v. the Real World, graph developed by McNider and Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, to illustrate the wide-gap comparison between 102 model runs and observations. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303945704579391611041331266

Dr. Fred Singer proposed re-directing public concern from Global Warming (GW) to Global Cooling (GC), including a drastic shift in current policies, “abandoning all mitigation of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide.”

An expert in remote sensing and satellites with a specialty in atmospheric and space physics, founding Director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and Vice Chair of the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, Dr. Singer is of the opinion that “a near-term cooling is among the major calamities facing the population on our planet – while concern about global warming is entirely misplaced. A Little Ice Age (DOB cooling) may arrive within decades – perhaps even sooner. The end of our warm Holocene inter-glacial is rapidly approaching.” He suggested that there is little time to lose in survival preparations and a paradigm change from global warming (GW) to global cooling (GC) is vital.

DOB (Dansgaard-Oeschger-Bond) warming-cooling cycles are solar-controlled and have periods of approximately 1000-1500 years. The most recent cooling phase of the Little Ice Age ended about 200 years ago. Singer and Avery’s 2007 book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, makes a scientific case for these cycles.

Based on deep-sea sediment cores and ice cores scientists are “reasonably sure” of global cooling while rather shaky on global warming. According to Dr. Fred Singer, Earth has experienced “17 Milankovitch-style glaciations in the past 2 million years, each typically lasting 100,000 years, interrupted by warm ‘inter-glacials,’ typically of around 10,000-year duration. The most recent glaciation ended rather suddenly about 12,000 years ago.” He expects the current warm Holocene to end soon. He believes we “have already entered into the next glaciation” which will be discovered in retrospect.

Dr. Singer believes that Little Ice Ages are not “as severe as the major glaciations,” but “present an important threat to the food supply and to current civilization.” Human survival would be possible in developed nations based on available technology but warfare will become a main threat driven by shortages of food and other essential resources.

Dr. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist who authored The Maunder Minimum and The Variable Sun-Earth Connection, discussed the topic of “How Clean is ‘Clean?’ A Common-Sense Proposal.”  Taking aim at the “half-truth + half-truth must make a whole truth” paradigm, which he called a “lie,” Dr. Soon embarked on describing the imagined environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels such as human impact issues regulated by the EPA, an organization that loves to tell people how to live.

“Silencing the people who tell the truth about science cannot stand,” Dr. Soon continued.  Ordinary people do not understand that as an honest scientist, “I do not care where the funding is coming from, I am only interested in the scientific truth,” I want to speed up finding out the truth.

Air pollution should have people dropping dead by now, if you are to believe the global warming alarmists. “Where are the bodies,” he asks? We should drop industrial activity, they say. Showing Beijing as an example of air pollution, the “data is all over the place” measured from 1998 until now.  

If Beijing is so polluted as to kill quickly, Soon said, how do you explain the polluted air levels in a smoking lounge at the airport where nobody really drops dead? Levels of particulate matter (pm 2.5 air quality standards also known as fine particle pollution) are much higher in bars and restaurants in South Korea, for example.

Dr. Soon described how he chased study after study to find out evidence that the $9 billion given to Beijing Olympics Committee to improve air quality (the pm2.5), actually worked. “We know the air quality is bad and people cry when reading the paper in Beijing. What did they do?  Shutting down the factories around to get some clean air. How much did they reduce the emission levels?” He found nothing definitive after a long chase of study after study.

Dr. Soon continued that the data shows, for example, that the air in Delhi or Santiago, Chile is more polluted than Beijing on certain days. Can you control the dust particle concentrations from dust storms in Saudi Arabia, Mongolia, or anyplace there is a desert?  There are serious exaggerations coming from the EPA in regards to sudden death from particulate matter in the air. “There is a lot of politics with no scientific evidence to support the case,” Dr. Soon explained.

“The air is getting cleaner yet more people are suffering from asthma.” Are air pollutants causing the problem, asked Dr. Soon? Is it a health crisis? Yet the EPA refuses to release their science data even during testimony in Congress. Dr. Soon added that the EPA administrator said in essence, “You are going to see only what we want you to see.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJaUO2ZFrX4

Dr. Willie Soon co-authored a paper on “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” which concluded that CO2 increases in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries “have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth’s weather and climate.” Higher CO2 levels have increased “markedly” plant growth.  http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/increasedco2effects.html

The Heartland Institute shared through its Science Director, Dr. Jay Lehr, the following environmental truths about climate change:

1.       Climate alarmism is promoted through selective MSM reporting.

2.       Temperatures around the globe have not risen since 1998.

3.       Climate has been changing for eons and it is “neither unusual nor harmful.”

4.       Antarctic ice is growing “far more than Arctic ice is melting.”

5.       “900,000 years of ice core records show continuous 1,500-year warming cycles.”

6.       When Greenland was green in the 13^th century, temperatures were seven degrees F warmer.

7.       Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is a necessary gas for plant life just like oxygen is necessary for humans to survive.

8.       CO2 concentration levels have risen historically after, not before warming periods.

9.       “Computer models used to forecast future warming cannot calculate the known past.”

10.   $5 billion is spent annually to prove that man (anthropogenic) caused global warming.

While honest scientists are debating and arguing with incontrovertible facts against the nebulous consensus science fed to the climate change industry which is worth potential trillions, an EPA cleanup crew that was supposed to pump out and decontaminate harmful sludge instead “destabilized a dam of loose rocks lodged in the Gold King Mine near Durango and released it into tiny Cement Creek.” As it flowed into the Animas River, the toxic slurry of arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum, and cadmium reached other tributaries, San Juan and Colorado rivers, and flowed 80-miles from the closed mine site. The Navajo Nation president, Russell Begaye, is planning on suing the EPA. “They are not going to get away with this,” he said. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/10/navajo-nation-aims-to-sue-epa-over-devastating-mining-spill/

This sad event begs the questions, while the EPA is helping de-develop the U.S. by over-regulating CO2, the gas necessary for plant life, are they responsibly guarding the actual pollution in our soil and water?

 

 

 

Replacing the EPA

“It’s time for the national EPA to go. The path forward is now clear and simple: A five-year transition from a federal government bureaucracy to a Committee of the Whole composed of the 50 state environmental protection agencies.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D.
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

To those who say this would fail to adequately protect the public’s health or the environment, I urge you to reflect on the poor job currently being done by EPA, and then to meet some of the men and women staffing state EPA offices and see for yourself the sophistication, commitment, and resources they have to do the job. You will not remain doubters for long.”                 -  Jay Lehr, Ph.D.

 

Dr. Jay Lehr, Science Director at the Heartland Institute, gave a speech at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness conference in Ontario, California, on the topic of “Replacing the EPA.” The author of more than 500 articles and editor of 30 books captivated the audience with his bold proposal to eliminate and replace the mammoth Environmental Protection Agency with a smaller organization composed of a committee of six individuals chosen from all 50 states. He called his plan “Addition by Subtraction.”

In his opinion, the 15,000 employees based in Washington, D.C. and in regional offices around the country “do not do useful work whatsoever.”  Dr. Lehr names himself the “most competent person on the planet” to write a proposal for the elimination of the EPA, saving the taxpayers $6.2 billion annually and improving the environmental protection” because he is the “only scientist alive that played a major role in establishing the EPA.”

Among the many pieces of legislation Dr. Lehr helped write are included the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Surface Mining and Reclamation Act, Clear Air Act, Federal  Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, and Comprehensive  Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (now Superfund).

Dr. Lehr admits in his proposal, “Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency,” that “these acts worked well in protecting the environment and the health of our citizens, with the exception of Superfund, which proved to be too overreaching and wreaked havoc with U.S. business as company operating within the law were fined countless dollars and required to pay huge sums after the fact for clean-up of waste disposal that had been within the law at the time of the activity.” (pp. 1-2)

Viewing his plan as penance, Dr. Lehr found it appropriate and fitting that the person who helped form the EPA (December 2, 1970) should contribute to its dismissal via a plan that took him two years to develop. Dr. Lehr was happy to announce that Governor Scot Walker of Wisconsin, presidential candidate, has adopted this entire EPA replacement plan.

EPA regions of the U.S.

Dr. Lehr served on a panel in 1968 which was tasked by the director of the Bureau of Water Hygiene in the U.S. Department of Health to study the potential to expand the bureau’s oversight into a full environmental protection organization.” The panel succeeded and the EPA was created. He wrote that around 1981 “liberal activist groups recognized EPA could be used to advance their political agenda.”

Referring to England, Lehr quoted Samuel Adams, who wrote on Jan. 20, 1772 in the Boston Gazette, “If the public are bound to yield to obedience to the laws to which they cannot give their approval, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them.”

Unfortunately today, it is not just the EPA, but many other agencies whose unelected officials produce endless regulations, Lehr added. We have an “over-criminalization in this country” because of endless regulations people have no idea exist, rules that Americans “probably break at least once a week.” He continued, “There are now in the federal regulatory handbook, 200 volumes of 80,000 laws, and 300,000 regulations written by various agencies with the EPA number one offender.”

James Madison warned us in the Federalist papers that … “laws should be made by men of their own choosing. If the laws are so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood,” then we have a serious problem.

Dr. Lehr believes that we are subjected today to so many laws that few people can track. “Big Business, Big Government, and Big Special Interests collude to make such laws” that give them advantage over the competition. “We have a warped economy,” Lehr said, “where the rich get richer, with the rest having less opportunity because the big three are gaming the system to gain political influence… They get privilege.”

Enabling the big three who handicap competitors and take full advantage of public subsidies, “EPA is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of liberal activist groups." Its rules account for about half of the nearly $2 trillion a year cost of complying with all national regulations in the U.S.” (Wayne W. Crews, Ten Thousand Commandments, Washington, D.C.:  Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2014)

Calling it a “rogue agency,” Dr. Lehr proposed to replace, not fix the EPA, by systematically dismantling it and replacing it with a Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies. National EPA could be phased out over five years, said Dr. Lehr. “The Committee of the Whole would determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were established by EPA without congressional approval.” (Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency, Jay Lehr, Ph.D., The Heartland Institute, p. 7)

He proposes that “the EPA research laboratories should be left in place at the national level to answer scientific questions, and even these laboratories must be substantially reorganized.” (Ibid, p. 6)

Specifically, 10 regional offices would be established, cutting back the budget from $8.2 billion to $2 billion a year, and reducing staff from over 15,000 to 300 in the national EPA headquarters in Topeka, Kansas. Of the 300 employees working, there will be six delegate-employees from each of the 50 states.

When asked how he would deal with the potential growth of the new EPA, Dr. Lehr admitted that this detail has not been worked out yet. The chairman of the Committee of the Whole would be elected by the 300 delegate-employees to a three-year term.

The drawdown would be:

-          Year One – all employees would be told of the five-year transition period to allow them time for alternate employment; all 300 new employees would transfer, start working, and decide assignments to various subcommittees

-          Year Two – Offices of Policy, Administration and Resource Management, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance will be relocated from Washington and from regional offices to Topeka

-          Year Three – Offices of Air and Radiation and Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention would transfer to Topeka

-          Year Four – Offices of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, and Offices of Water would be moved to Topeka

-          Year Five – Offices of Chief Financial Officer, General Counsel, Environmental Information, and the Office of the Administrator would also move to Topeka.

Transition members would be assigned periodically to Washington, D.C. and to regional offices to study the activities of the existing branches. If attrition is high early on, transfer of responsibility may be earlier than planned. Each state would be allocated $20 million to augment the new responsibilities.

Dr. Lehr, as one of the founders of the EPA, believes strongly that his plan can be implemented “efficiently and quickly.”