Respected Climate Scientists Claim EPA Rule on Power-plant Emissions Based on Hoax

Three highly regarded climate scientists, now retired and thus beyond the reach of the “climate change consensus” that would otherwise work to discredit them, are calling a new rule from the EPA “disastrous for the country, for no scientifically justifiable reason.”

In May, the EPA finalized its rule limiting CO₂ emissions from coal-fired power plants that, if not successfully challenged in the courts, will shut down many of them. This would put the country’s energy grid in serious peril, resulting in blackouts and “rolling brownouts” across the land.

Over the weekend, William Happer, professor emeritus in physics at Princeton University, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), claimed that the EPA rule has nothing to do with science:

The unscientific method of analysis, relying on consensus, peer review, government opinion, models that do not work, cherry-picking data and omitting voluminous contradictory data, is commonly employed in these studies and by the EPA in the Proposed Rule.

None of the studies provides scientific knowledge, and thus none provides any scientific support for the Proposed Rule.

All of the models that predict catastrophic global warming fail the key test of the scientific method: they grossly overpredict the warming versus actual data.

The scientific method proves there is no risk that fossil fuels and carbon dioxide will cause catastrophic warming and extreme weather.

This is the definition of a “hoax”: an idea or concept that has been established or accepted by fraudulent means.

The two retired professors claim that the measurement of temperature is the best example of that hoax:

The most striking example of that is the temperature record. If you look at the temperature records that were published 20 years ago, they showed very clearly that in the United States by far the warmest years we had were during the mid-1930s.

If you look at the data today, that is no longer true. People in charge of that data, or what the public sees, have gradually reduced the temperatures of the ‘30s, then increased the temperature of more recent measurements.

The two ridiculed the “consensus proves the thesis” canard of the climate-change promoters: “Science has never been made by consensus. The way you decide something is true in science is you compare it with experiments or observations.” If the observed data differs from the theory, then the theory is disproved, regardless of how many want that theory to be true.

They added:

It doesn’t matter if there’s a consensus; it doesn’t matter if a Nobel Prize winner says it’s true, if it disagrees with observations, it’s wrong.

And that’s the situation with climate models. They are clearly wrong because they don’t agree with observations.

The “climate change consensus” isn’t motivated by science — it is motivated by money. Said Professor Happer:

The initial predictions of climate disasters had New York flooded by now, no ice left at the North Pole, England would be like Siberia by now.

Nothing that they predicted actually came true. You have to do something to keep the money coming in, so they changed “global warming” to “climate change.”

And how the money rolls in. The U.S. government has already committed to spending half a trillion dollars ($500 billion) over the next 10 years to “combat” climate change, funding and promoting perhaps the greatest example of human hubris in history.

Now that the scientists are retired and enjoy emeritus status, they are free to speak clearly on the topic on which they are well qualified. Said Happer:

If I’d been much younger, [the climate-change promoters] could have made sure I never got tenure, that my papers would never get published. They can keep me from publishing papers now, but it doesn’t matter because I already have [emeritus] status.

But it would matter a lot if I were younger and I had a career that I was trying to make.

Judith Curry almost didn’t make it out the door in time. A respected climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she retired in 2017 when she learned of the hoax.

In 2010 she published a paper that the climate-change lobby gladly welcomed, as it posited that hurricane intensities were exacerbated by changes in temperature. When her research “found that the percentage of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” she says, this was picked up by the media:

I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists and I was treated like a rock star; I was flown all over the place to meet with politicians.

But when her work was legitimately questioned, she admitted her study was flawed: “Like a good scientist, I investigated. Part of it was bad data. Part of it was natural climate variability.”

Her days as a rock star ended. When she noted that the canard could be traced back to the United Nations’ push for global control through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), she retired. She noted: “The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.”

The people behind the IPCC, said Curry, were motivated by “anti-capitalism [i.e., free market capitalism]. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change problem to promote their policies.”