This is both my personal learning project and my contribution in the struggle to confront the ongoing Republican/ libertarian assault on rational science and constructive learning, as manifested in their malicious strategic Attacks on Science ~ A collection of articles, scientific resources, plus my own essays and indepth critique of various presentations from unidirectional-skeptics ~ Hopefully a resource for the busy, yet discerning, student who's concerned about the health of our Earth
My upcoming column at the Four Corners Free Press is a response to a Letter to the Editor that complained about my "one-sided" approach to telling the climate science story. The writer, whom I’ll refer to as Mr. GOP, then steps into a steaming pile when his suggested alternative expert turned out to be my old pal Jim Steele.
As it happens I’ll bet I’m as familiar with Jim Steele’s LandscapesandCycles fantasy as anyone. Having spent easily a couple hundred hours studying his words and working on nearly fifty posts unraveling and exposing Jim’s many malicious deceptions regarding honest competent wildlife biologists the world over.
My FourCornersFreePress column wasn’t the place for a line by line response, but I did want to write one up to help me gather my thoughts before composing my column. I’m sharing it here, because this version gives me another opportunity to share all sorts of valuable supporting evidence. I’ll be posting the FCFP column itself in a week or so.
Damned straight, the fundamentals are as settled as the promise of tomorrow morning's sunrise! I wonder what the scare-quotes are for?
The fundamentals of our global heat and moisture distribution engine and society’s influence are well understood! The explainable known physical certainties far outweigh the remaining uncertainties!
Tragically the well understood certainties are constantly being deliberately ignored or lied about by contrarian types, thus our Mr. GOP winds up profoundly ignorant of down to Earth physical processes. Here’s a sampling of that climate science.
‘Climate models are unproven’ ?
Actually, GCM’s (Global Circulation Models) have many confirmed successes under their belts.
I've been finishing up my line by line dissection of Mr. GOP's March Letter to the Four Corners Free Press Editor. Since he was complaining about how I presented climate science I figured I should include the column he was taking issue with. It appeared in the January 2018 Four Corners Free Press.
We need a real dialogue about climate.
by Peter Miesler, January 2018, Four Corners Free Press.
Early in December U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told lawmakers he intended to organize a “Red team v Blue team” exercise to debate climate change.
Pruitt is being willfully blind to the fact that the scientific aspects of global warming have already been thoroughly debated by experts. It’s expected that Pruitt will orchestrate a lawyerly winner-take-all debate. One that’s based on rhetorical trickery and a ruthless disregard for facts.
It’s a shame, since we Americans needs a constructive educational dialogue. A debate where honestly representing your opponent’s arguments and data is as important as honestly representing your own data. One where objective learning is the goal, and where truth matters.
Speaking of honestly representing the science, on November 9th Dr. Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and a lead author for IPCC’s Scientific Assessment in 1995, 2001, 2007, a giant in the field of climate assessment, gave a talk at the Fort Lewis College Climate Symposium explaining what scientists have learned about our planet. It sounded to me like a potential Blue team opening statement.
I've finally found a label I can wholeheartedly embrace and explain and defend. I am an Earth Centrist !
The reason I'm posting this is because it's some thoughts I've been working on for decades and I'm finally getting close and I want to share even if it's far from finished. Curious to see if anyone wants to bounce it around.
I am a fiercely independent guy and feeling more like H. Haller all the time so I don't make great internet intros, but feedback and networking is a requirement of life. It's fine and poetic to be the sound of one hand clapping, but I'm concerned with finding out if any of this resonates with any one of the few who'll read it. Some of you folks know many people within the climate science communication and politics interface, one of them is looking for me. Please help us connect.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated in comments or email.
Thank you. citizenschallenge at gmail com
_______________________________________________________ ( revisited and revised 7/31/2018 )
I've finally found a label I can wholeheartedly embrace and explain and defend.
I am an Earth Centrist !
Meaning that Earth and her physical processes and the pageant of her evolution are my touchstones. Understanding evolution and the biosphere I'm part of and how we got here is the foundation of all my reality.
Religions, God, political beliefs, they are all products of the human mindscape, generations of imaginings built upon previous generations of imaginings, all the way down.
Something real and to be reckoned with, yet in the end, it's only our mindscapes at work. While the real creation keeps on unfolding outside of our heads regardless and we're left to hang on for dear life.
In a way that mindscape is a product of Earth's evolution, yet it's certainly distinct and slightly separate from Earth's physical biological processes, something unique, ineffable, yet with the power to manifest personal gods and Earth shattering physical events.
I suggest most people are unaware of the Map v Territory Problem, thus society commits the same ME FIRST self-destructive errors that it has repeated for thousands of years, never learning a god-damned thing.
Just as mega-corporations that have grown big enough to destroy governments, so too our mega-species has become big enough to destroy our life sustaining biosphere.
That evolving creature that has existed since Earth bounced back from the last big comet strike about 65 million years ago.
The one that had achieved a splendid plateau 8-10 thousand years ago, but that now humanity has reset to something the likes of which Earth has not experienced in hundreds of millions of years. It’ll take a few decades and centuries to fully blossom, but it is as down to Earth physically certain as tomorrow's sunrise. Such a tragedy, yet that is where we find ourselves in 2018.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Then there's the God v Science question.
Knowledge of God is the ultimate in personal intimate relationship, your experience can not be transferred to, or replicated for, others.
Religions are human constructs for enabling people to reconcile themselves with the seasons and hardships of their lives and to enable human societies to function in a civil organized manner.
A God, if there be one, is All Things to All People, well beyond all human* understanding as the Holy Books warn us (*read petty, fearful, greedy, self-serving humans)individuals. If you are fortunate enough to be touched by God, that is your gift alone, something for you in your unique life. It is not a recipe for your neighbors or the world.
Science on the other hand is humanity’s recipe for learning about the physical world and its processes as honestly as possible.
Science is:
Learning is the goal.
Fidelity to physical facts is the gold standard.
Free Speech doesn’t mean it’s okay to lie and slander with malicious intent. Informed constructive skepticism is the rule.
This month my Four Corners Free Press submission considers a Letter to the Editor in March which accused me of presenting a one-sided opinion about our manmade global warming reality.Worse, Jim Steele got held up as some authority who’s opinion must be considered on a par with serious scientists, which he certainly is not.
Ironically, I know all about Jim Steele’s LandscapesandCycles scam and welcome the challenge to resurrect this bit of unfinished business. That’s why I’m posting this index of my extensive research into Jim Steele’s dubious thesis as supporting evidence for the couple of related posts that will follow in the next couple weeks.
You see, in a nutshell, Jim Steele proposes that landscapes and natural cycles are more powerful drivers of global warming than our insulating atmosphere and humans profligate fossil fuels burning. .
His intellectual underpinning is a self-certain, but never explained, rejection of CO2 science. He maintains it's a hoax with political underpinnings. Something his Republican-libertarian audiences want to hear so he’s never asked to justify his super-natural assertion.
Steele has parlayed his general environmental studies background to travel around the world learning about various wildlife studies with an eye towards finding errors to exploit, that is, to use as "proof" that global warming is a hoax. A most bizarre train of logic indeed.
I've tried debating with him numerous times, but Jim isn't interested in a serious constructive debate where learning is the goal; where opponents' words / evidence are honestly represented; and where objective physical truth and facts carry the day.
I've been too busy to do much with my project to dissect JohnSmith's crazy-making, but our exchange at YouTube continues and I believe this particular response is worth sharing with like-minded 'Children of the Intellectual Enlightenment' and rational fact-based thinkers and humanists.
{ More than ever we need to step up and engage with the childish tenets of faith-blinded delusionals, not to mention we need some serious networking between each other. Alone we are impotent, together we have potential.}
You see I've hurt JohnSmith's feelings again, guess I'm too busy pointing out the fallacies he's perpetrating, rather than dancing with him. Since I seem to have a reputation as a rough kinda guy, although I prefer "up front'n honest", it's worth discussing in more detail. For instance in my defense, instead of responding to my thoughts and queries, the guy reaches for the Whack-A-Mole gambit, which I'm not happy about, though I (and others) am willing to use the opportunities for sharing valid information on any angle of AGW that contrarians care to toss at us. After sleeping on it, I've decided to share my improved and expanded response. For the original and more of our exchange, check out:
Given the Trump Administration Fire Hose of atrocities, this is already old news, still it belongs in this collection dedicated to provoking some deeper thought about what we are doing to ourselves and how we Children of the Intellectual Enlightenment will confront the attack on Democracy, our way of governing and rational thinking that is currently underway.
Teacher Kristin Mink, who confronted Trump EPA Chief Scott Pruitt in a restaurant over his mounting scandals and asked him to resign, joins The Beat. Ari asks Mink to defends her actions,
At 6:00 Kristin Mink responds:
Let me say this first is that I thinkthat this whole debate about civility isa waste of time. I wish that that theleft would stop talking about it becausecivility is not the issue here!
You havepeople who are speaking up there's noviolence involved you know this isliterally people voicing what it is theycare about, to the people whose salariesthey pay.
Right, so if they want to thenturn that conversation away from theissues and to, oh it's not the right time, it's not the right place, you're notdoing your job. If you're doing your jobproperly as a civil servant you want tohear from the people who are paying yourtaxes. You want to hear from the peoplewho you're supposed to be supporting andtaking care of.
( note - Keep in mind Pruitt’s many secret meetings with powerful industry leaders, all the while evading and stonewalling the public; and our press (USA’s Fourth Estate); and science, as much as possible. Then there’s Pruitt’s Kremlin level passion for secrecy. Why did he need all that secrecy? We know, so that he could vandalize the E.P.A. out of sight.
Our environment is more than an externality!
This ME FIRST cult proudly despises environmental protections because it cuts into profits. Collectively they are so myopic as to believe our society lives by profits alone - never appreciating that it’s a healthy environment that provides our life support systems along with all we hold near and dear.
E.P.A. was created to protect the common health - but now it’s been given over to a gang for whom profits are more important that people or honesty or ethics. )
Kristin Mink continues: So the issue here is notcivility and the whole idea obviouslythis shouldn't even need to be said butthe whole idea of talking about civilityis ridiculous considering who we have asour president who has done so manythings that are outside the box ofcivility and kindness and goodness.
It's ridiculous to even spend time onthis, you know and I know that. Representative Maxine Waters you knowmade some comments about this and thatsome people on the Left have not beensupportive of her. I think that’sridiculous.
We should not be spendingtime nitpicking people who want tocriticize others for simply speaking outabout what they believe in and I think that it's my it's my right (and duty) as a citizen, it’s my responsibility as a mother and the same thing goes for everybodyelse in America. …
Good news Pruitt is gone, but keep in mind, the people that put him into that position love the job he did.You can bet Andrew Wheeler will be even worse, because he’s a smooth operator.After all their goal is vandalize the E.P.A.’s regulatory abilities as much as possible.And to do so with absolutist disregard for governmental rules and standards, or the public outcry and condemnation of their cavalier disregard for fundamental physical realities (read objective scientific knowledge) and their ME FIRST damned the consequences mentality.
I keep wondering why we don’t learn to enunciate our fundamental standards well enough so that we can start directly taking on their faith-blinded dogmatic fantasies - which have been given such a free pass for way the hell too long.
Why is it okay to do government business regarding important health and environmental regulations in secrecy?
Why are Corporate Profits more important than We The People and our wellbeing?
Why refuse to acknowledge human health and even social health depends on a healthy environment with it’s folds within folds of interconnected biological and geophysical systems and processes that provide our very life support system? How have we become so blinded to that?
Last summer one of (Pruitt’s) senior schedulers, Madeline G. Morris, was fired by Mr. Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff, Kevin Chmielewski, who said he let her go because she was questioning the practice of retroactively deleting meetings from the calendar. Mr. Chmielewski has emerged as a harsh critic of Mr. Pruitt after a bitter falling out that led to his departure from the agency as well.
Ms. Morris, who started work as Mr. Pruitt’s scheduler in June 2017, confirmed Wednesday that she was fired after she raised objections about the deletions, which she believed were illegal, although she said that Mr. Chmielewski did not tell her his reasons for firing her. …
… Ms. Morris was called last July by two agency lawyers, who told her that the changes she was making to Mr. Pruitt’s schedule might be illegal, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The following month, Ms. Morris noticed that a number of changes had been made to the record of a trip Mr. Pruitt had taken to Italy. Ms. Morris questioned the legality of the changes to Mr. Chmielewski and Mr. Jackson, and a few days later was fired, he said.
A retroactive deletion of meetings and attendees from a cabinet official’s public records could violate the Federal Records Act, which requires agencies to maintain and preserve public documents, as well as a law prohibiting intentional distortion of federal records. …
__________________________________________________________ Whistleblower: EPA's Pruitt kept secret calendar to hide meetings
By Scott Bronstein, Curt Devine and Drew Griffin, July 2, 2018, CNN
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides have kept "secret" calendars and schedules to overtly hide controversial meetings or calls with industry representatives and others, according to a former EPA official who is expected to soon testify before Congress. A review of EPA documents by CNN found discrepancies between Pruitt's official calendar and other records.
EPA staffers met routinely in Pruitt's office to "scrub," alter or remove from Pruitt's official calendar numerous records because they might "look bad," according to Kevin Chmielewski, Pruitt's former deputy chief of staff for operations, who attended the meetings.
A CNN review which compared Pruitt's public calendar with internal EPA schedules and emails shows more than two dozen meetings, events or calls were omitted from his public calendar.
Chmielewski said that some interactions were intentionally removed from Pruitt's calendar after they occurred …
… Chmielewski says he was forced to leave the EPA in February after raising questions about Pruitt's spending and management …
CNN has reached out to EPA repeatedly for comment on the allegations.
Chmielewski's description of hiding controversial events from the public appears to be supported by discrepancies between Pruitt's public calendar …
… BLT Prime restaurant inside Trump International Hotel hosted by coal producer Alliance Resource Partners and its CEO, Joseph Craft. Craft, who donated $1 million to President Donald Trump's inauguration …
…his internal schedule shows that the meeting also included Anthony Chiarello, the then-CEO of shipping company TOTE. …
… Pruitt took a controversial trip to Italy that cost taxpayers $120,000. While there he dined with Cardinal Pell, a top Vatican official known for denying climate change who was then under investigation for claims of prior sexual offenses. …
In Rebuke to Pruitt, EPA Science Board Votes to Review Climate Policy Changes
The board, with more than a dozen Pruitt-appointed members, questioned his efforts to roll back the Clean Power Plan and weaken auto standards and other regulations.
The Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board, in a rebuke to the Trump administration's retreat on environmental protection, voted overwhelmingly Thursday in favor of a full board review of the agency's most important actions to dismantle climate policy.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who appointed about 15 members of the 44-member board, now must decide whether to accept its recommendation that the outside scientific experts be allowed to formally vet his decisions. …
… And the board voted unanimously for a review of Pruitt's proposal to restrict the types of scientific evidence the agency can use in writing EPA rules, his so-called "secret science" policy.
In a series of votes, the board endorsed all of the recommendations of a work group of 10 of its members, who reported that they had received little information from the agency on the science driving Pruitt's policy changes. …
Pruitt’s Own Scientist Appointees Challenge EPA Science Restrictions
The proposal would block vital health research in pollution regulations. Members of EPA's scientific review board, including Pruitt appointees, want it scrutinized.
Ten members of an SAB work group, in a signed memorandum, called for the full board to scrutinize Pruitt's proposal at a meeting on May 31, saying his approach was designed without necessary input from the scientific community. Leading national science organizations have mounted a campaign to reject Pruitt's approach.
Pruitt's proposal would no longer allow the EPA to use scientific studies where the underlying data is not public. The move could rule out health studies that promised participants confidentiality—some of which have served as the underpinning of regulations, especially clean air standards. The policy takes up a cause long-championed by the fossil fuel industry and its allies in Congress.
Internal EPA records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Sierra Club have revealed that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt met in secret with Union Pacific executives in Omaha during his October 2017 trip to Nebraska, to discuss the company’s deregulatory wishlist.
The email exchange between U.P. and EPA officials lists the attendees of the meeting with Pruitt — including Union Pacific chairman, president and CEO Lance Fritz — and the items that would be discussed:
“Attendees
Lance Fritz- Chairman, President, and CEO- Union Pacific
Cameron Scott- Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer- Union Pacific
Scott Moore- Senior Vice President Corporate Relations- Union Pacific
Mike Rock- Vice President External Relations- Union Pacific
Items of Discussion:
Clean Power Plan
Waters of the U.S.
Railroad Tie Combustion Rule (burning them vs. landfill)
Overall permit reform”
The Railroad Tie Combustion Rule is of particular interest to U.P., because it regulates how railroad companies can dispose of the millions of creosote-treated railroad ties they discard annually in a way that does not violate the Clean Air Act or other environmental protections with the emission of toxic air pollutants generated from the wood preservatives in the ties. …
The morass of ethical questions around Scott Pruitt’s conduct as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is now stunningly thick.
But the Government Accountability Office has just answered one key question amid the allegations: The EPA broke the law when it built Pruitt’s secret phone booth last year.
In an opinion published Monday, the GAO reported that the agency violated Section 710 of the 2017 Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act. The rule states that agencies can’t spend more than $5,000 to improve the office of a presidential appointee, whether that’s new furniture, paintings, or hardware. At least, not without approval from Congress.
Pruitt’s soundproof privacy booth, which was first reported by the Washington Post in September, cost $43,238.68. And it’s illegal for another reason too, says GAO: It violates the Antideficiency Act, which states that agencies aren’t allowed to rack up bills beyond what Congress has appropriated for them.
The GAO reported that the breakdown for the bill included …
Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt is a man who is concerned about his safety. And that concern has come at a steep cost for taxpayers, adding up to some $3 million when pay is included with travel expenses, according to an EPA official who talked to the Associated Press about how Pruitt has been expanding his own personal security detail since coming into office. There is now a 20-member full-time detail on Pruitt, which is three times larger than his predecessor’s part-time security detail.
It seems the increased spending on Pruitt’s security came shortly after he arrived in Washington and promoted a former Secret Service agent to head up his security detail. Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta, who operates a private security company, quickly began expanding the EPA chief’s security detail so he would be well guarded 24 hours a day, even on family holidays. “Multiple” agents, for example, accompanied Pruitt to a family vacation in Disneyland.
The Environmental Protection Agency has experienced a huge surge in open records lawsuits since President Donald Trump took office, an analysis of data reviewed by POLITICO shows — a trend that comes amid mounting criticism of EPA's secrecy about Administrator Scott Pruitt’s travels, meetings and policy decisions. …
All told, plaintiffs have filed 55 public records lawsuits against EPA since Trump's inauguration, according to POLITICO's review of a database of cases compiled by The FOIA Project, an initiative run by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Forty-six of those lawsuits came in 2017, making it the busiest calendar year by far for open-records cases brought against EPA, according to data stretching back to 1992. …
…Breaking with established protocol, the Israeli Government Press Office did not send out his schedule or any information regarding his stay, which was never officially announced.
All attempts to get a schedule, discover his arrival time or the members of his entourage — all information usually made available — failed. Nor were officials forthcoming about why the visit was so hush-hush. …
To all questions, Israel's Foreign Ministry replied: "Ask the [U.S.] Embassy.”
On the record, the embassy declined so much as to acknowledge Pruitt's plans. …
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt came to New Hampshire Tuesday for private meetings with Gov. Chris Sununu and representatives of the forest products industry, as well as a stop at a federal Superfund site in Nashua.
Following Pruitt’s visit, the EPA issued a statement focusing on his meeting at Central Paper Products, Inc., in Manchester. … The meeting between Sununu and Pruitt was not announced in advance, setting off criticism from the state Democratic Party.
Sununu spokesman Benjamin Vihstadt confirmed that the governor had met with Pruitt at the State House after the meeting ended. …
WASHINGTON — When career employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are summoned to a meeting with the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, at agency headquarters, they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is, according to interviews with employees of the federal agency.
Doors to the floor are now frequently locked, and employees have to have an escort to gain entrance.
Some employees say they are also told to leave behind their cellphones when they meet with Mr. Pruitt, and are sometimes told not to take notes.
Mr. Pruitt, according to the employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs, often makes important phone calls from other offices rather than use the phone in his office, and he is accompanied, even at E.P.A. headquarters, by armed guards, the first head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.
A former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the E.P.A., and whose LinkedIn profile still describes him as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” Mr. Pruitt has made it clear that he sees his mission to be dismantling the agency’s policies — and even portions of the institution itself. …
Teacher Kristin Mink, who confronted Trump EPA Chief Scott Pruitt in a restaurant over his mounting scandals and asked him to resign, joins The Beat. Mink defends her actions:
_____________________________________
At 6:00 Kristin Mink says:
"Let me say this first is that I thinkthat this whole debate about civility isa waste of time. I wish that that theleft would stop talking about it becausecivility is not the issue here!
You havepeople who are speaking up there's noviolence involved you know this isliterally people voicing what it is theycare about, to the people whose salariesthey pay.
Right, so if they want to thenturn that conversation away from theissues and to, oh it's not the right time, it's not the right place, you're notdoing your job. If you're doing your jobproperly as a civil servant you want tohear from the people who are paying yourtaxes. You want to hear from the peoplewho you're supposed to be supporting andtaking care of."
( cc = Keep in mind Pruitt’s many secret meetings with powerful industry leaders, all the while evading and stonewalling the public and press (USA’s Fourth Estate) as much as possible. Then there’s Pruitt’s Kremlin level passion for secrecy. Why did he need all that secrecy? We know, so that he could vandalize the E.P.A. out of sight.
Our environment is more than an externality!
This ME FIRST cult proudly despises environmental protections because it cuts into profits. Collectively they are so myopic as to believe our society lives by profits alone - never appreciating that it’s a healthy environment that provides our life support systems along with all we hold near and dear.
E.P.A. was created to protect the common health - but now it’s been given over to a gang for whom profits are more important that people or honesty or ethics. )
Kristin Mink continues: "So the issue here is notcivility and the whole idea obviouslythis shouldn't even need to be said butthe whole idea of talking about civilityis ridiculous considering who we have asour president who has done so manythings that are outside the box ofcivility and kindness and goodness.
It's ridiculous to even spend time onthis, you know and I know that.Representative Maxine Waters you knowmade some comments about this and thatsome people on the Left have not beensupportive of her. I think that’sridiculous.
We should not be spendingtime nitpicking people who want tocriticize others for simply speaking outabout what they believe in and I think that it's my it's my right (and duty) as a citizen, it’s my responsibility as a mother and the same thing goes for everybodyelse in America. …"
