Steve Milloy
Contributor
The National Academy of Sciences just released its so-called review of the Trump EPA’s proposal to rescind the endangerment finding for greenhouse gases. It is every bit the rigged and predetermined outcome predicted.
Not only does the report conclude that the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding was correct, it claims that the evidence now for greenhouse gas emissions causing harm is greater than it was in 2009. But what was the process by which the NAS committee reached this conclusion?
The Trump EPA formally proposed to rescind the endangerment finding on Aug. 1. The NAS announced that it would launch its own review six days later on Aug. 7. This was a surprise since the NAS generally only offers scientific advice to the federal government upon request of the federal government. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what NAS president Marcia McNutt had to say about that in April 2020 when people urged the NAS to tackle the COVID crisis: “Y’all have it backwards. The charter states that the government calls on the Academies to conduct studies, not the other way around.”
In its Aug. 7 announcement, the NAS set a deadline of Aug. 27 for the public to submit information to the committee and, perplexingly, a Sept. 11 deadline for comments on the composition of the proposed committee. (RELATED: Insiders Say National Academy Of Sciences’ Climate Report Clapping Back At Trump EPA Has More Holes Than Swiss Cheese)
Yet in a stunningly disingenuous move, the NAS committee began meeting secretly weeks before the public comment deadline to flag any problems with the committee’s composition. Its first meeting occurred on Aug. 20. There were more meetings on Aug. 25-26, a third set of meetings that began on Sept.1-5 and a fourth set on Sept. 8-9. Again, all these secret meetings occurred before the Sept. 11 deadline. The committee met for a final time on Sept. 12.
So while the climate science watchdog group, the CO2 Coalition, flagged that all 15 of the committee’s members subscribed to climate alarmism – and submitted their objections before the Sept.11 deadline – the committee was already secretly off and running.
Although the CO2 Coalition’s membership includes several NAS members, their comments and other public objections to the committee composition were apparently ignored. A mere six days after the comment deadline, the final report by the originally proposed committee was issued.
And what a report it is.
The committee met secretly for a total of 10 days from Aug. 20 to Sept. 12. Per committee chairman Shirley Tilghman, the committee reviewed all the science published since the 2009 endangerment finding was made. This claim is astoundingly false.
There have been tens of thousands of climate studies published since 2009. But the 137-page report cites only 573 of them. On the one hand, the 573 studies represent just a sliver of the climate science literature. On the other hand, 573 studies is an immense number of studies for a committee of 15 – none of whom are atmospheric scientists – to review in only 10 working days.
The overall nature and quality of the report can be assessed from the first few sentences in the report’s preface: “As the committee undertook this project, it was hard not to think about recent climate-related disasters: the heavy rainfall of Hurricane Helene that destroyed homes and roads in the mountains of North Carolina, the fast-moving wildfires that displaced thousands in Los Angeles and affected air quality for miles around, and the rapid flooding of the Guadalupe River in central Texas that led to at least 135 fatalities.”
But none of those weather events are attributable to emissions or to “global warming.” The heavy rains that hit and flooded Asheville, N.C. in 2024, had happened twice before in 1916 and 1940. The exact conditions that led to the recent Los Angeles wildfires were fretted about by local media in 1875. The tragic Guadalupe River flooding that struck on July 4 had occurred before in 1869 and 1987.
There is not enough room in this column for a comprehensive critique of the NAS report, but here is just one other egregious example. Citing an EPA graph, the report asserts that heat waves have increased since the 1960s. But the report studiously avoids another more complete EPA graph showing that heatwaves have dramatically decreased since the 1930s.
From process to substance, the NAS report is a travesty. Its purpose is to thwart the Trump energy agenda. While this particular report only applies to the fossil fuel part of the Trump energy agenda, you can bet that the NAS will be equally disingenuous when it comes to the Trump nuclear power agenda. It has a history of this.
Two-thirds of the NAS funding comes from the federal government. President Trump should terminate that funding and make the NAS decide between sound science and junk science.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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What this process needs is an arbiter who gets to formally declare on the merits of the competing claims. Perhaps a Senate Committee where someone gets to ask “Why did you leave the 1930s off you chart?” and similar debunking questions.
Allowing false narratives to dominate the media unchallenged must be disallowed. Challenging them expertly should be the default. Then we can get back to unsettled science.
Senate Committee?
Surely you jest?
More committees that won’t do anything but talk.
A large part of the point is to ensure publicity. Pick a different forum if you think it would achieve that better. But viral clips of witnesses being skewered seem to work quite well.
“O tempora, o mores!”
Downloaded the NASEM report this morning. To see if such reports know what they’re talking about, it’s my SOP to first scan for certain key word counts, e.g.
science 342
state 322
model 90
equilib(rium) 7
thermodyn(amics) 1
steady 0
dissip(ation) 0
Similar analyses for the recent reports of the five and eighty-five lead to similar distribution functions.
radiat() – e.g., ‘radiative’ or ‘radiation’ – 14 pages, too numerous to count
collis() – e.g., ‘collision’ – 0
convective – 2
convection – 0
I’m guessing:
Saturation 0
Close, but good guess – the word occurs once, but only in reference to humidity.
Rigged
Where would climate science be without the baked in “Riggedness”?
It’s called the “fix” where I’m from, as in the fix is in.
I wonder which recent report the MSM will concentrate on; this one or Lindzen – Happer of 7th. June, for example?
Gases dissipate heat they don’t add to it.
CO2 and H2O are coolants in the atmosphere.
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
At and slightly above the surface of the earth, H2O and CO2 absorb out-going long wavelength IR light (LIR) which causes warming of the air. Shown in Fig. 7 is the infrared absorption spectrum of a sample of Philadelphia inner city air from 400 to 4000 wavenumbers (wns). A wavenumber is the number of IR light waves per centimeter. The scale is linear in energy and spans an order of magnitude in energy. Not shown are additional peaks for H2O from 400 wn to 200 wn.
The active region for the greenhouse effect is from 400 to ca. 750 wns. The CO2 peak absorbs at 667 wn (15 microns). Note how narrow the CO2 peak is. It is absorbing little LIR. In 1999, the concentration of CO2 in dry air was ca. 300 ppmv at the MLO. One cubic meter of the air contained a mere 0.59 g of CO2 and ca. 21.4 g of H2O. H2O is the major greenhouse by far and CO2 makes a small contribution to the greenhouse effect. Please keep in mind that ca. 71% of the earth’s surface is covered by H2O.
Fig. 7 was taken from the essay: “Climate Change Reexamined by
Joel M. Kauffmann. The essay is 26 pages and can be downloaded for free.
PS: If you click on the Fig. 7, it will expand and be come clear. Click on “X” in the circle to return to comment text.
Thank you Harold. I stand by what I posted. As the mass of CO2 is added to the atmosphere it requires more energy to increase its temperature. As for H2O it’s Cp is so large it cools.
You are just flat wrong. At the MLO, the concentration of CO2 in dry is currently 425 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has a mass of 1.29 kg and contains a mere 0.835 g of CO2 at STP. This small amount of CO2 can have no effect on the Cp of dry air.
From my comment above, air at 28° C and 76% RH contains 21.4 g of H2O. This uncomfortable humid air holds the heat especially at night. You should do a search “corn sweat”. In the the hot steamy tropics at 90° F and 100% RH, one cubic of this air would contain 41 g of H2O.
H2O at this level would certainly effect the Cp of air.
I’ll do a Bing search on the effect of H2O on the Cp air. I’ll post the results here.
I am not saying CO2 changes the Cp of air much it is its mass requires more energy.
Again thanks for your reply.
Interesting, but irrelevant. While it is true that temperature changes of atmospheric water vapor represent much more energy than similar changes to CO2, the total energy involved is trivial compared to the daily energy transport of the water cycle. One day’s precipitation weighs as much as the entire CO2 content of the atmosphere (10^12 Metric Tons) and represents ~1.000 times as much energy of evaporation, convection to altitude, condensation in clouds, and precipitation, as a one K change in total CO2. Climate “scientists” who concentrate on non-condensing GHG, worrying about fractions of a K change over decades, while being unable to model cloud formation, are studying the toenails of the elephant.
Mr. Milloy is correct. Take away their money – taxpayer funds – and the nonsense and non-science stops.
The taxpayers are forced to fund organizations that are at heart, leftist organizations with ideological agendas dedicated to tearing down capitalism and freedom. Our government is no longer a limited government but a coercive one with entirely too much power.
Defund the Politicians!
The National Academy of Stuff We Make Up strikes again.
NAS president Marcia McNutt must have seen a blinding light and had a conversion to TDS. [Apologies to the writers of the biblical event of Saint Paul.]
Decades ago.
Ask Rud about Marcia McNutt.
She is definitely not a fair arbiter when it comes to the Climate Crisis meme.
You are not doing science, Marcia. What you are doing is political activism.
It is just amazing to me how all our hallowed institutions have been corrupted by this CO2 phobia.
The Climate Alarmist have been looking for CO2 effects in the Earth’s atmosphere for 50 years and have found no definitive evidence to support their hyperbolic claims about CO2, so now they start making things up and pretending that speculation and assumptions are the equivalent of evidence. This is not science, it is a bastardization of science, and just about all our institutions are complicit in this distortion of reality.
Even so, the People are not convinced CO2 is a danger. And there is NO evidence showing it is a danger. None whatsoever, despite what the NAS says.
“It is just amazing to me how all our hallowed institutions have been corrupted by this CO2 phobia.”
We let that happen. True skeptics in these organizations decided to leave instead of fight, or at least work, against it.
It is pseudoscience.
Science is addressing a hypothesis with intent to disprove it.
Pseudoscience is addressing a pre-ordained conclusion with intent to prove it.
It started with the Russian revolution and never ended. Organization like NAS, EPA, etc. have been stacked with fellow travelers. Just like our District Federal Judges. Deep state is the common term. The Marxists were busy building their foundation while we were sleeping snug in our complacency.
Don’t think its Marxism. Woke isn’t particularly Marxist, and the climate mania is best understood as a subset of the Great Awokening of the turn of the century and early 21C. There is a strong correlation, for no apparent logical reason, between belief in the Climate Crisis, belief in Trans ideology, belief in open borders, belief in historical guilt for racism. But they all have the same underlying forces and characteristics.
An illuminating (though imperfect) analysis of the cultural phenomenon is found in ‘The True Believer’, by Eric Hoffer. His early life remains a mystery but anyone reading him attentively will suspect some personal involvement or at least contact with authoritarian mass movements. The book reads like the result of experience followed by deep reflection on it. As you read it, you will come on many insights which will strike you as illuminating the whole Wokening mind set.
The book was first published in 1951, so his experience and analysis is primarily of National Socialism and Communism. All the same it is amazing how much of it could have been written yesterday, and about the climate, gender and race manias which have swept many Western countries.
Or at least the English speaking ones!
It’s all too coordinated to be separate entities clamoring for the same goals. Think about it. Progressives? Just another term for Marxists. The disparate groups claiming to be united are really only united because they’ve been given a common enemy to rail against. They’ll fight amongst themselves if they ever get into power. And ‘Marxist’ isn’t a dirty word. It’s just the antithesis of Capitalist.
I would suggest that its necessary to be rather more specific. I don’t think Progressives were or are Marxists. Marxism is a very specific theory of history, economics and politics. I also don’t think its the antithesis of Capitalism. I don’t even think Capitalism is a coherent concept, and in addition its derivative from Marxist theory, its not something that is in opposition to it.
The concept of Capitalism is heavily theory laden, it originates with Marx and it carries a lot of baggage with it from Marx and the theory of classes. Its not a very useful concept. Its more useful in economics to talk about the different ways in which different societies have handled markets. And when talking about societies and politics, the different ways in which societies have handled economic interest groups.
Marx was fundamentally mistaken. He took the nonsensical notion of the dialectic from Hegel, and then applied this to his nonsensical reification of temporary trends in social evolution. The great triumph of Marxism is that the language and structure of discussion about society and economics has taken over the Marxist concepts. Such as, for instance, the concept of capitalism. But also the concept of class and much more, the whole idea of there being laws of history and that future evolutions of society are predictable by using the supposed dialectic. This pollutes the discussion with all kinds of fallacious and evidence-free assumptions.
The great insight of Hoffer’s book is to have realized that authoritarian mass movements aren’t a matter of doctrine or ideas, and, as he says by way of example, fanatics of the right or the left find it very easy to switch – because the underlying motivation and mechanisms of fanaticism are the same and don’t come from the doctrine that people are fanatical about. The doctrine is easily jettisoned, the important thing was to be fanatical about something.
Frank says below that the woke concepts are all weapons of the left. I don’t think this is correct, and it doesn’t help us understand what’s going on. They are not weapons, they are alternative vehicles for personal fanaticism, and why people feel the need for such things? Well, read Hoffer, who is very convincing on the importance of frustration, boredom and loss of personal rootedness and self value.
Why do they pick one rather than another? Well, they don’t. The woke beliefs correlate very well, far better than can be explained by chance, and this is because they meet the same pychological needs, and adopt the same basic stance to the society in which the fanatics find themselves. Apparently without knowing why!
Most of the woke ideas and policy demands are perfectly crazy from a rational point of view. But as Hoffer says, this is not a bug, its a feature. The crazier they are, the more likely they are to command fanatical assent and the more their contradiction is liable to provoke fury. As we see in the climate and energy culture wars.
You’re obviously well versed in this stuff. For my part, I decided early on not to sweat the distinctions among the various flavors of the Left, because, as Hayek noted, once a nation starts schlepping down the ‘Road to Serfdom’, it’s pretty much a one way street until the totalitarians surface.
‘But they all have the same underlying forces and characteristics.’
They (climate, gender and race manias) and, of course, economic ‘class’ are all weapons of the ‘Left’, which I characterize (loosely) as any movement based on the coercive implementation of collective decisions. This, of course, differs from the ‘Right’, which I characterize as any movement that allows for, and relies upon, the voluntary implementation of individual decisions.
.
Marxism plays a part. The leaders of Black Lives Matter proclaimed that they were “trained Marxists”. They can’t be the only ones.
They were neither trained nor Marxists.
As was first said about the Holy Roman Empire – that it was neither holy, Roman nor an empire.
Or as Macaulay remarked of the British navy in the time of Charles II: staffed by officers and seamen, only the seamen were not officers and the officers not seamen.
Or as the European Common Market was characterized: it was neither European, Common nor a Market….
And as for the Climate Crisis…?
It may not be Marxism, but there is a one to one correspondence between those who push woke and those who push Marxism.
These people aren’t smart enough to be Marxists.
They are called ‘useful idiots’ by Marxists.
It doesn’t take much brains to be a Marxist. Just a desire to have government seize other people’s stuff and give it to you.
‘Just a desire to have government seize other people’s stuff and give it to you.’
Which, more often than not, doesn’t work out very well for the useful idiots that initially desired a Marxist takeover of the economy.
In the NASEM report, there is no reference to the upward trend in global mean solar flux anomaly shown in the IPCC AR6 WG1 report, figure 7.3a. The trend is downward for reflected solar itself, so by convention it is a positive trend in flux anomaly values in W/m^2. See the caption for figure 7.3.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-7/#figure-7-3
So what? Blaming recent “warming” on rising pCO2 while FAILING TO MENTION this particular aspect of the recent observations which relate to the claimed Earth Energy Imbalance is a big problem in this report. I don’t think there is any valid excuse for this omission.
Please correct me if I have missed something in the NASEM report about this.
One way or the other, Trump will kill the endangerment finding. Then let the other side try getting it back. It won’t be easy because the alarmists will never have anyone as strong as Trump in the White House. When it happens, we should have a big party! I certainly will be ranting about it here in Wokeachusetts. 🙂
Elections have consequences. If the House and Senate go even slightly blue in the 2026 election, Climate Change will be back in force in 2027, with the US groveling to rejoin the Paris Agreement. (The NYT will forget that it ever declared it dead.)
I suppose- but now there are many people who are strongly in support of Trump- individuals and enterprises. I think in the past, they didn’t realize how damaging the climate thing would be. This time they’ll stand and fight against going back to the “climate emergency”.
By “climate thing” I meant of course climate alarmism, not climate change. 🙂
We can only hope.
Now stated as the “climate crisis.”
I wonder what the mix of different sciences are represented in the NAS. Probably a good share of social scientists.
And PoliSci majors.
They are neither social towards those who ask hard questions about empirical climate observations nor are they scientists by a long shot.
How stupid are these people? Haven’t they experienced winter? With out fossil fuels they would quicky freeze to death.
These are people who believe that electricity comes from wall sockets and milk comes from the grocery store.
They are completely convinced that with a few more wind turbines and solar panels, all their energy needs can be met. After all, their college poli sci Prof assured them it was true.
re: “But the report studiously avoids another more complete EPA graph showing that heatwaves have dramatically decreased since the 1930s.”
The graph is at https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-heat-waves – click on Figure 3.
Very nice Steve. The administration needs to take a good long look at all of the organizations it helps fund. I have no doubt that many of them don’t deserve a dime from us tax payers. And the rest should be made to justify every dime they receive.
I think this amplified concern about climate, CO2 and the like, is that it gives, literally, ‘good for nothing’ people well paid jobs. You can get a job advising governments, councils etc with no skill or knowledge what so ever. Why would you not. You obviously have no morals, taking public money to speak untruths. Even scientist producing papers that are obviously false are in on the ‘good for nothing’ bandwagon. they support each other. Get a job on a committee and you can be made for life.
It’s human nature to take advantage if you are ‘good for nothing’.
A report that begins with emotional tripe reveals its purpose as Mr. Milloy offers. It is purely to appeal to the non-scientist.
Donald Trump tells the UN General Assembly it’s time to end the “failed experiment of open borders” as he accuses the UN of facilitating an “invasion” of Western countries Trump singles out Europe, saying the continent is in “serious trouble” over migration – while also criticising its failure to “cut off” Russian energy products as “embarrassing” In his wide-ranging speech, he describes climate change as the “greatest con job ever” as he claims UN predictions “were wrong” – a statement met with gasps from across the assembly floor.