Professor Tony Ingraffea Admitted to NO PROOF, Under Oath

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After Admitting He Has No Evidence about Dimock, Tony Ingraffea Hides and Runs (Fracknation  on Facebook)

Professor Tony Ingraffea has never been shy about speaking to the press about fracking. He has been in both Gasland documentaries, given hundreds of press interviews, and spoke at rallies with anti-fracking celebrities Mark Ruffalo, Sean Lennon, and Yoko Ono.

But over the past few days, his advocacy has come back to haunt him and left him literally hiding and running away when it comes to answering difficult questions.

It has been a rough few days for Professor Ingraffea, the anti-fracking movement’s favorite scientist. Finally, he was under oath and had to tell the truth. When he didn’t, he had to face his lies being exposed. He was giving evidence in the Dimock Water Trial where the Hubert and Ely families from Pennsylvania are accusing Cabot Oil and Gas of polluting their water during fracking.

Under skillful cross-examination, Professor Ingraffea was forced to admit that he’s an anti-fracking and anti-fossil fuel “advocate.” He denied being an activist, but his face fell when lawyers for Cabot asked to show the jury photographs of him speaking in front of anti-fracking signs and participating in an Artists Against Fracking press conference alongside Ruffalo, Lennon, and Ono.

Even the lawyer for the families, Leslie Lewis, blurted out in open court that she “wasn’t thrilled” that the photos existed.

But the hits to Professor Ingraffea’s credibility kept coming. He admitted that his theory contradicted the plaintiffs’ own timeline. Under Ingraffea’s theory, the “contamination” could only have started in late 2008/early 2009 because that was when the gas drilling started; however, the plaintiffs have stated repeatedly that their water allegedly deteriorated in the summer of 2008 before the drilling Ingraffea has been blaming for the past 8 years…..


Earlier Phelim McAleer Reported


…Tony Ingraffea, Retired Cornell Professor and anti-fracking advocate tells court he has “no proof” Dimock water polluted by oil and gas company.

In an important development Ingraffea – the plaintiffs key witness in the high profile trial has admitted there is no evidence to back up his theory.

Retired professor Tony Ingraffea made the admission during a trial where the Ely and Hubert families of Dimock Pennsylvania are suing Cabot oil and gas for allegedly contaminating their water. The Dimock case is important because activists say it is ground zero for fracking contamination and the area has featured in the Gasland documentaries and hundreds of other activist events and pieces of journalism.

Under cross examination by a lawyer for Cabit Oil and Gas Professor Ingraffea was asked:
“If we follow your theory, the Gesford 3 S well is the leaking well and the well gas migrates out of it over into the other well which is as you said, is speculation – you don’t have any direct proof of that – right?”

To which Professor Ingraffea replied: 

“Yes”.

Ingraffea’s admission of no proof is the latest in a series of setbacks for the plaintiffs in the case.

 

Is There “Mass Incarceration” of Blacks?

Video Description:

IS THERE Mass Incarceration?! Michael Medved reads from a scholar on the issue, Barry Latzer, who wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Myth of Mass Incarceration” (http://tinyurl.com/jkvm5pr). In the article we find some damning statistic… at least damning to the left, and some from the right.

People like Marissa Jenae Johnson, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, who recently said that saying “all lives matter” is a racial slur (http://tinyurl.com/jt9cffz), and Bernie Sander’s and Hillary Clinton are the one’s using this misinformation to get votes.

There are 4-calls that I included as well:

☎ The 1st call is a challenge of sorts to the stats ~ 13:52
➤ A Fox News break comparing Democrats and Republicans scale of freedom ~ 17:18
☎ The 2nd call is about legalizing all drugs (the straight libertarian argument) ~ 19:18
☎ The 3rd call is about prescription drugs and marijuana ~ 23:03
☎ The 4th call is just from a crazy person using a non-sequitur ~ 25:00

For more clear thinking like this from Michael Medved… I invite you to visit: http://www.michaelmedved.com/

Here is a portion of the Latzer article via the Wall Street Journal:

It has become a boogeyman in public discourse: “mass incarceration.” Both left and right, from Hillary Clinton to Rand Paul, agree that it must be ended. But a close examination of the data shows that U.S. imprisonment has been driven largely by violent crime—and thus significantly reducing incarceration may be impossible.

Less than one-half of 1% of the U.S. population is incarcerated, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), so “mass” is a bit of hyperbole. The proportion of African-Americans in prison, 1.2%, is high compared with whites (0.25%), but not in absolute terms.

There’s a lot of historical amnesia about the cause of prison expansion, a mistaken sense that it was all about drugs or race and had very little to do with serious crime. This ignores the facts. Between 1960 and 1990, the rate of violent crime in the U.S. surged by over 350%, according to FBI data, the biggest sustained buildup in the country’s history.

One major reason was that as crime rose the criminal-justice system caved. Prison commitments fell, as did time served per conviction. For every 1,000 arrests for serious crimes in 1970, 170 defendants went to prison, compared with 261 defendants five years earlier. Murderers released in 1960 had served a median 4.3 years, which wasn’t long to begin with. By 1970 that figure had dropped to 3.5 years.

Unquestionably, in the last decades of the 20th century more defendants than ever were sentenced to prison. But this was a direct result of changes in policy to cope with the escalation in violent crime. In the 1980s, after well over a decade of soaring crime, state incarceration rates jumped 107%.

When crime began to drop in the mid-1990s, so did the rise in incarceration rates. From 2000 to 2010, they increased a negligible 0.65%, and since 2005 they have been declining steadily, except for a slight uptick in 2013. The estimated 1.5 million prisoners at year-end 2014 is the smallest total prison population in the U.S. since 2005.

Those who talk of “mass incarceration” often blame the stiff drug sentences enacted during the crack-cocaine era, the late 1980s and early ’90s. But what pushed up incarceration rates, beginning in the mid-1970s, was primarily violent crime, not drug offenses.

The percentage of state prisoners in for drug violations peaked at only 22% in 1990. Further, drug convictions “explain only about 20% of prison growth since 1980,” according to a 2012 article by Fordham law professor John Pfaff, published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation….

(read it all)

Trump Appealing to Truthers & Birthers

  • “Who needs Michael Moore!? Who needs Bill Maher!? Who Needs Ted Kennedy!? …We got Trump!” ~ Larry Elder

In this first excerpt of some great commentary by Dr. Thies, we see the last minute appealing by Trump to the fringes of both parties:

In saying George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Donald Trump possibly reveals his general election strategy: appeal to truthers as well as to birthers. As discussed in a prior blogpost, about half of Democrats are truthers, and about half of Republicans are birthers. All that is missing from combining the kook segments of the electorate of both the right and the left with economic nationalism and xenophobia, is promising free stuff. Thus, the perfect opponent to the Donald in the general election would be Bernie Sanders. But, did Bush lie about weapons of mass destruction?

To say Bush lied is to say that the Bush administration knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. But, weapons of mass destruction were indicated by intelligence. Even so, as an assessment by the Defense Department said, “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.” In real time, Colin Powell famously accepted the conclusion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and attempted to persuade the UN Security Council of this. But, in his 2014 book, It worked for me, Powell says he should have been more skeptical. He says he failed to smell this out….

In this second post by Professor Thies
adds to the depths Trump will pander:

At Saturday’s debate, Donald Trump said, “You call it whatever you want. I will tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction and there were none. And they knew there were none.”….

Trump’s statement was taken as the popular accusation, “Bush lied,” as in “Bush lied, thousands died,” the slogan of Code Pink and other left-wing critics of the administration.

As an aside, I point out in depth the fact that there were WMDs in Iraq, HERE.

One Minute Version:

HotAir asks in their title a question: Did Trump damage his chances by accusing Bush of lying about Iraq?  to which they respond:

Ace says yes. I’m not convinced.

If Donald Trump is right, and George W. Bush deliberately schemed with his neo-con advisers to “lie” us into a phony war with Iraq, what does that say about the average Republican voter who supported Bush from 1999, voted for him, defended him through the recount, cried with him on 9/11, agreed with him on Iraq, defended him from ceaseless liberal attacks on him during the war, defended him from Obama’s never-expiring “Blame Bush” blame-shifting, etc.?

If Trump is right, then we’re not just wrong to have supported him. If Trump’s right, we’re goddamned rubes and fools to have defended this Actual Hitler-Level Monster for going on 17 years now…

This is a long way of saying Trump specifically and completely contradicted a belief that 75-80% of Republicans have about Bush — that he was a fundamentally decent man, perhaps overwhelmed by a very difficult period, who made an erroneous decision based on incomplete information — and instead offered a new belief, that Bush deliberately lied about Iraq’s WMD’s, a position that 75-80% of Republicans have long not only rejected but have been actively hostile towards…

I think Trump, who has been a past-master at getting people to buy-in to a very low-cost premise — “Let’s Make America Great Again” — just made a very high cost premise central to buying into him.

[….]

I think that, at this stage of the game, if you’re still open to Trump then nothing he says about Bush or Iraq is going to sway you. If you’ve sat through 20 Ted Cruz commercials a day in South Carolina attacking him as a phony conservative, a pro-choicer, and a parasite using eminent domain to prey on the working class, “Bush lied” isn’t the straw that’ll break the camel’s back. If anything, it’s all part of Trump’s Republican reboot. Trumpmania is a catharsis, repudiating the establishment and its idols (except Reagan, who’s simply too sanctified). If Bush gets caught up in that, eh. That’s all part of Year Zero. If Trump ends up paying a price for this, I think it’s more likely to come after he’s the nominee and some segment of conservatives decides that they can’t in good conscience support him in the general. “Bush lied!” will be part of a long list of disqualifying Trump positions for those righties once the time comes to make their break. For most Republicans it’ll be absorbed and put aside — but keep an eye on what happens this week as Dubya hits the trail for Jeb. The fact that he’ll be right there in front of South Carolinians, reminding them of how much they like him, makes Ace’s theory stronger than I would otherwise expect.

Satellite Data Shred Global Warming Claims (Updated)

The only way the “warmists” get the high temps they do, is when they use (and fudge) the very unreliable land temps at stations [most in fact] that are in areas that add an artificial heat to the real temperature.

  • NOAA’s adjustments to previous ocean temperatures between 1998 and 2012 made recent global temperature changes appear more than twice warmer than the original records showed (Dr. Larry Bell, NewsMax)
  • “To manufacture warming during the hiatus, NOAA adjusted the pre-hiatus data downward” (Daily Caller)

REAL SCIENCE notes that before “the year 2000, NASA showed US temperatures cooling since the 1930’s, and 1934 much warmer than 1998.” Continuing RL says:

  • Right after the year 2000, NASA and NOAA dramatically altered US climate history, making the past much colder and the present much warmer. The animation below shows how NASA cooled 1934 and warmed 1998, to make 1998 the hottest year in US history instead of 1934. This alteration turned a long term cooling trend since 1930 into a warming trend.

However, a stark contrast to now is still wrapped up in this graph:

NOAA/NASA use only land-based temps to claim 2015 hottest year ever

Using data from heavily adjusted land-based temperature readings, NOAA and NASA declared yesterday 2015 to be the ‘hottest year ever,’ even though they’ve excluded the satellite record, and worse, ocean temperatures. That’s important because “70 percent of the Earth is oceans,” and “we can’t measure those temperatures very well,” says MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen. “The ocean temps can also be “off a half a degree, a quarter of a degree. Even two-10ths of a degree of change would be tiny but two-100ths is ludicrous.”

[….]

As for 2015? The satellite record shows it as being only the third or fourth warmest since satellite tracking began in 1978. The satellite data, which is compiled and maintained by the University of Alabama/Huntsville, found “2015 to be third warmest on record, and Remote Sensing Systems satellite data ranked 2015 as the fourth warmest in the nearly four-decade-old satellite record.”…

(Examiner)

In the above graph, you have lines showing GREAT warming… waaaay above the 30’s to 40’s. HOWEVER, these have been adjusted… that is, the red “raw” data is the ground stations temps… the two lines above it, the blue one (TOBs-Adjusted) and green one (Homogenized) have been monkeyed with. A researcher lightened those lines and put the bolder “pink” and “purple” lines showing data from satellites (NASA). (Much of that blurred out data is milked from measuring units discussed in my post after a Christmas discussion about 2014 being the hottest year on record)

…Just for grins, I plotted the UAH and RSS satellite time series on top of the Hausfather graph…. I think can see why the so-called consensus has become so obsessed recently with destroying the credibility of the satellite data.

(WUWT … read it all for better context)

Now the truth is revealed… in that these persons cannot dabble with the preciseness of the satellite data. And why recent attempts have been to discredit it because it discredits their pet theory.

Climate Depot continues the “heresy”!

NASA and NOAA today proclaimed that 2015 was the ‘hottest year’ on record.

Meanwhile, satellite data shows an 18 plus year standstill in global temperatures.

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen balked at claims of the ‘hottest year’ based on ground based temperature data.

“Frankly, I feel it is proof of dishonesty to argue about things like small fluctuations in temperature or the sign of a trend.  Why lend credibility to this dishonesty?” Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, told Climate Depot shortly after the announcements.

“All that matters is that for almost 40 years, model projections have almost all exceeded observations.  Even if all the observed warming were due to greenhouse emissions, it would still point to low sensitivity,” Lindzen continued.

“But, given the ‘pause.’ we know that natural internal variability has to be of the same order as any other process,” Lindzen wrote.

Lindzen has previously mocked ‘warmest’ or ‘hottest’ year proclamations.

“When someone says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period,” Lindzen said in November 2015.

Lindzen cautioned: “The most important thing to keep in mind is – when you ask ‘is it warming, is it cooling’, etc.  — is that we are talking about something tiny (temperature changes) and that is the crucial point.”

“And the proof that the uncertainty is tenths of a degree are the adjustments that are being made. If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree,” he added.

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Mocks ‘Hottest Year’ Claim: ‘Anyone who starts crowing about those numbers shows that they’re putting spin on nothing’

[…..]

The THREE BIG LIES of 2015

Gay Patriot lists the three BIG LIES he thinks was most pushed by the media establishment and most referenced by Democrats and their lackeys. The entire article should be read, but here are the three (with some YouTube additions):

  • …In 2015, the Democratic Party and its Media Operation collaborated on an unprecdented scale to advance a number of Big Lies in order to advance a sweeping socio-political agenda. Just to name a few:

ONE: The Big Lie of ‘Rape Culture’ – In order to advance the Feminist Transformation, there was a huge push to advance a Narrative that all universities and colleges were essentially Rape Zones where privileged white males raped women at will with no consequences. This lie was advanced by Rolling Stone’s discredited Virginia Tech Gang Rape story, by the completely discredited claim that 1 in 5 college women are raped, and by lying drama queens like Emma “Mattress Girl” Sulkowicz and Lena Dunham. The left advanced this Big Lie in order to advance a comprehensive feminist indoctrination agenda beginning in kindergarten, to shut down criticisms of the radical feminist agenda, and, of course, to label political opponents of the radical feminist agenda as anti-woman. Also, the Rape Culture myth requires universities to create phony-baloney jobs for otherwise unemployable ‘Womyn’s Studies’ majors.

Here the Factual Feminist (one of my favorite authors on feminism) wieghs in:

Dennis Prager reads from Heather Mac Donald’s article in from The City Journal about the “rape culture.” As usual, the left over-exaggerates… and what parent would put their daughter in AP classes to prepare them for the worse crime wave in human history, which is: one-in-five women are rapped at college. OBVIOUSLY the definition is the issue.

As society gets further away from Judeo-Christian norms… more-and-more regret will rear its head from drunken hook-ups.

TWO: Another Big Lie that dominated the culture was the narrative of ‘Racist Cops Gunning Down Innocent Black Men with Impunity.’ This is a useful Big Lie to an administration that seeks to radically alter American society. It advances the myth that the only reason some people don’t achieve as much as other people is because of racism, and the only way to solve that problem is for a massive, all-powerful Government to redistribute wealth from those who have it to those who have been denied it because of racism. This Big Lie was promulgated through the ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot myth after the shooting of violent, drug-addled thug Michael Brown and fueled the rise of the violent hate group ‘Black Lives Matter.’ It also allows racial con artists like Shaun King, Ta-Nehisi Coates and DeRay McKesson to become rich.

In pursuit of the leftist agenda to prohibit the private ownership of firearms, the Democrat Media Complex (DMC) has promulgated a mythology worthy of the Church of Scientology. The anti-gun left falsely claimed that mass shootings were a daily occurrence in the USA. Democrat politicians at the highest level repeat the discredited myths such as that gun manufacturers are uniquely immune from liability laws or that 40% of gun sales occur without a background check. The policies intended to be advanced by this mythology have nothing to do with stopping the criminal use of firearms, and everything to do with inhibiting the lawful ownership of firearms by law-abiding citizens. The Democrat Party has rallied to the cause of suspending Due Process and using a secret Government List to deny citizens the Right to Self-Defense, along with other laws that have repeatedly been shown to have no effect on the criminal abuse of firearms.

A magic 50-minutes with Larry Elder. He weaves the reality that the Left can only weave — and that is this:

  • the bankruptcy of and the consequences of the “state” [statist ideology] that came to fruition in Ferguson in the micro via the MACRO application of failed leftist policies! (e.g., the welfare state, subsidizing fatherless-ness, and the funding of programs and pensions via unions and it’s city/state employees.

This third lie is fleshed out well in this article at WUWT, “There Is No Climate Change Disaster Except The One Governments Created.”

Acid-Rain: Not a Song from DRI But A Myth from the 80’s

The following “News” item is just an early example of running with the story before the facts are in:

Remember the big “acid rain” scare during the 1970s and 1980s attributing damage to lakes and forests to emissions from Midwestern utilities? If so, did you ever hear the results of a more than half-billion-dollar, 10-year-long national Acid Precipitation Assessment Program study that was initiated in 1980 to research the matter?

Probably not.

As it turned out, those widespread fears proved to be largely unfounded, since only one species of tree at a high elevation suffered any notable effect, and acidity in lakes was traced to natural causes. The investigating scientists reported that they had “turned up no smoking gun; that the problem is far more complicated than it been thought; that other factors combine to harm trees; and that sorting out the cause-and-effect was difficult and in some cases impossible.”

(Forbes)

ACID RAIN MYTH:

The first section below is a good overview of what the second section shows in-depth.

Myth: Acid rain has caused a large portion of U.S. lakes to become acidic.

Fact: In a recent study of 7,000 Northeastern lakes, only 3.4% were found to be acidic. Most of these lakes are just as acidic as they were before the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, most of the acidic lakes in the United States are in Florida, where there is the least acid rain.

Myth: Data taken by proponents of the acid rain theory is accurate and conclusive.

Fact: Proponents of the acid rain theory have rested their claims on a deeply flawed series of articles by G.E. Likens and his co-workers in the 1970s. A careful evaluation of Likens’ research conducted by a group of scientists at Environmental Research and Technology, Inc., reveals that his data collection and selection was deliberately biased to support the desired conclusions.

Myth: Acid rain destroys vegetation.

Fact: Acid rain actually has a positive impact on vegetation. The nitrogen and sulfur characteristic of acid rain, act as nutrients essential for plant growth. The world’s first acid rain study concluded that, “the principle effect of acid rain is the improvement of crop yields and crop protein content.”

Myth: Acid Rain is unnatural.

Fact: Rainwater is naturally acidic. Because water is such a good solvent, even in the cleanest air, rainwater dissolves some of the naturally present carbon dioxide, forming carbonic acid. According to EPA regulations, Ph levels any lower than 5.0 are environmentally harmful. Yet, an analysis of ice from the Antarctic and the Himalayas, deposited hundreds and thousands of years ago when the environment was presumably pristine, had Ph values ranging from 4.8 to 4.2.

  • Information from Environmental Overkill by Dixy Lee Ray (Regnery Gateway, 1993); Trashing the Planet by Dixy Lee Ray (Regnery Gateway, 1990).

This next section can be read in full online, and comes from Edward Krug’s book, Environment Betrayed: The Abuse of a Just Cause (Kindle Edition), from the chapter on “Acid Rain: Forests and Fish.”

ABSTRACT

Acid rain first came to public attention with claims that it was rapidly killing forests and lakes on a broad basis. To assess the accuracy of these claims, Congress initiated the largest study to date of an environmental problem: the ten-year, $500′-million National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), which involved over three thousand scientists. NAPAP determined that acid rain may present a threat to one species of tree in 0.1 percent of eastern forests. The percentage of acidic lakes was also found to be much smaller than previously believed and not measurably increasing. Nevertheless, these scientific findings had little apparent impact on legislation passed in 1990, having been judged by some to be “not policy relevant.”

INTRODUCTION

George Will’s column of January 8, 1992, indicates that mainstream journalists are beginning to get the idea that in the hands of environmental advocates, estimates of environmental damage take on lives of their own, with few ties to reality. In the column, Mr. Will mused, “Whose interests are served by a numerical exaggeration? The answer often is: the people whose funding or political importance varies directly with the perceived severity of a particular problem” (Will, 1992).

Just about everyone of public importance had some sort of stake in acid rain being an environmental Armageddon. The scientific reality of the effects of acid rain differ enormously from public perception. And this is important for the setting of environmental policy because, unlike scientific fact, political reality in a democracy is established by vote.

The enormous gulf between fact and perception was brought out in the 60 Minutes story on acid rain (December 30, 1990). Correspondent Steve Kroft asked Dr. James Mahoney (then director of NAPAP) about the media representing acid rain as making a “silent spring” in the forests and lakes of the Northeastern United States. Director Mahoney commented that the media accounts of damage were overblown by quite a bit. When pressed why such fiction, rather than science, is being reported, Dr. Mahoney refused to address this issue and answered that his job is to do the science, not the reporting.

Yet the EPA had no such reservations about commenting, and commenting strongly, on media reporting. The EPA blasted the 60 Minutes acid rain story in a lengthy and detailed response claiming that outrageous statements were made (EPA, 1991). Let us examine the peculiar responses of the EPA, our public servant of environmental policy.

As a scientist, I can see how the EPA would have been upset by some of the comments made on 60 Minutes. The EPA is the lead federal agency of NAPAP. EPA Administrator Reilly is chairman of the President’s Joint Chairs Council, which oversees NAPAP. So I would have thought that the EPA would have been upset by the remark of David Hawkins (an activist for the Natural Resources Defense Council) who in effect told 60 Minutes that NAPAP has been a waste of time and money. And further, he said that in its ten years of existence, NAPAP has only confirmed what was known ten years ago!

Peculiarly, the EPA did not indicate any offense at all with this statement. But as a NAPAP scientist, I certainly was offended. We must remember that the United States almost did not have a NAPAP. In 1980, public opinion was very strong against waiting ten years for NAPAP to complete its study. Environmental activists established the conventional wisdom that by 1990 it would be too late: Rachael Carson’s prophesy of a “silent spring” would come to pass, with acid rain forever killing forests and lakes, by 1990.

Only a recalcitrant President Reagan, allied with Midwest rust-belt legislators, stood in the way of environmentalists’ demands. But the pressure became even too much for President Reagan who, by the end of 1983, was ready to capitulate. In late January/early February 1984, I was one of a committee of scientists who were asked to advise EPA Administrator Ruckelshaus on the choice of continuing research on acid rain or passing a new Clean Air Act. What the government would do hinged on how we answered the following question: will eastern North America survive five more years (will it survive until 1989) under the fierce onslaught of acid rain? The question seems ludicrous now, but back in 1984, it was considered foolish and immoral for anyone to even ask this question. President Reagan stayed with NAPAP.

Now we know that NAPAP’s findings did not confirm what was known ten years ago in 1980, as Mr. Hawkins claimed. And Mr. Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council is in the position to know this firsthand because this is the same Mr. Hawkins who was appointed by President Carter as the EPA assistant administrator responsible for acid rain. President Carter, then Mr. Hawkins’s boss, told the American public in 1980 that acid rain was one of the two most severe atmospheric environmental problems of the century. And Mr. Hawkins’s EPA lent the appearance of scientific credibility to President Carter’s assertion by publishing that the average Northeast lake had been acidified a hundredfold over just the last forty years as the result of acid rain (EPA, 1980)—a statement that has no basis in fact. Yet, by 1990 the EPA’s own research, as part of NAPAP, showed that, even in the Adirondacks, the area whose lakes are supposed to suffer the greatest acidification by acid rain, EPA data show that the average lake is no more acidic now than it was before the industrial era (Krug and Warnick, 1991).

The EPA produced a six-page, single-spaced rebuttal to what it considered outrageous statements made on 60 Minutes (EPA, 1991). Was the EPA response to 60 Minutes concerned about Hawkins’s assertion about wasted research dollars? No. Or about research results substantiating the public perception of 1980? No.

Yet EPA Administrator Reilly wrote in a letter to Science: “In the Senate hearings on my confirmation as EPA Administrator, the first criterion that I mentioned for an effective environmental policy was ‘respect for science'” (Reilly, 1990).

I could understand if Mr. Reilly were concerned about Mr. Hawkins having a less-than-respectful attitude for science on 60 Minutes when he said that NAPAP scientists were unable to see damage because we have very crude scientific tools but that the American public can look out their windows and see the damage being done. Mr. Hawkins then went on to characterize us as backpacking around in the woods.

Yet again, the EPA, which considers itself to be a scientific agency and is the lead agency of NAPAP, an agency whose administrator publically claims to have “respect for science,” did not indicate any offense at all with this statement.

What really offended the EPA? I was asked to comment on Mr. Hawkins’s characterization of us NAPAP scientists as not being able to see anything because we were larking around in the woods with crude scientific tools. I responded, “Actually we do know a lot. We know that the acid rain problem is so small that it’s hard to sec.”

The EPA took great offense to that statement.

The EPA promptly carried out an ad hominem attack on me! This was done even though I have letters from the EPA itself calling me a recognized leader in acid rain—even though I have been used by the EPA itself to review its acid rain programs, and I have even been used to advise Administrators Ruckelshaus and Thomas of the EPA about acid rain.

The EPA also released comments from an alleged peer review of a project report I published for NAPAP two years earlier. I call it an alleged peer review because:

  1. The first time I had heard of it was when a Washington Post reporter called me up on January 11, 1991—twenty-one months after the report was published.
  2. The report was peer-reviewed by NAPAP prior to publication. The EPA’s comments did not come from the NAPAP review of the report.
  3. I have yet to see a copy of this alleged peer review even after making a freedom of information request on January 14, 1991, to EPA Administrator Reilly to see it.

We can now begin to understand why the scientists who conducted the Adirondack lakes study for the EPA—the study that showed no net acidification—refused to publish this result. Similarly, the results of the EPA’s largest acidification research project—where no correlation could be found between acid rain and surface water acidity, and soil chemistry is the principal factor controlling the acidity of surface waters (EPA, 1989)—was not published by EPA scientists in the scientific literature. So, after waiting for up to two years for these data to be published, I finally published them in a letter to Science last fall (Krug and Warnick, 1991).

We see that, as public servants and as holders of the public trust, the EPA is unconcerned about public misinformation that exaggerates acid rain as an environmental problem. The EPA is unconcerned about science bashing in the media. Indeed, the EPA even partakes in it.

In conclusion, George Will’s column of January 8 hit the nail on the head: in the hands of environmental advocates, estimates of environmental damage take on lives of their own, with few ties to reality. As Mr. Will concludes, those who exaggerate are those whose funding or political importance varies directly with the perceived severity of a particular problem.

The reason why the public is so well misinformed on acid rain is that the environmental advocates are not just Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. Just about everybody gains from the acid rain myth—everybody, that is, except you and me. The EPA likes it because, in terms of regulation, the 1990 Clean Air Act is ten times bigger than any previous environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act of 1970. The government likes it because it gains more popularity, power, and control as government is seen doing something good for little cost; most environmental costs are off budget, being paid directly by the consumer. The media likes it because environmentalism is a just cause depicted in terms of good-versus-evil, David-versus-Goliath battles. Environmentalists hand the media popular and spectacular disaster stories pitting the blue-jeaned defenders of Mother Earth from the three-piece-suit Darth Vaders of big business, in this case, utilities spewing forth acid rain. The utilities like it because they get to pass on higher utility rates, along with increased profits, from the Public Utility Commissions onto you and me because we, the well-misinformed public, are demanding to be protected from the scourge of acid rain.

What a sweet setup!

Small wonder why scientists refuse to publish data showing acid rain has little or no measurable effect. When another acid rain scientist was asked by a magazine reporter why Ed Krug would take it upon himself to publish politically incorrect science, my colleague replied, “He was a bit immature in the area of political science” (Anderson, 1992).

On that note, let us quickly examine what political science has done to the science of acid rain.

POLITICAL SCIENCE: HISTORY

It is a little-known fact that the European and American acid deposition monitoring networks originated in the national agricultural experiment stations; these have been sampling and analyzing atmospheric deposition of N [nitrogen] and S [sulfur] for more than a century, not as contaminants but as beneficial nutrients (Krug, 1991). Among agronomists, such “pollution” was often called the poor man’s fertilizer. In Sweden, the world’s first national acid rain study determined that the principal effect of acid rain was improvement of crop yield and crop protein content (e.g., Johansson, 1959).

However, the insertion of the term “acid rain” into the modern literature and psyche by Likens and associates in 1972 “caught the attention of the scientific community as well as the public at large” (Abdullah, 1989). The deposition. How could anything called “acid rain” be anything but bad? So the results of the Swedish program became lost in history, and any scientist who brought up the point that acid rain might have a good side was ridiculed into oblivion.

Later on, NAPAP would report on the fertilizing effect of acid rain on forests, but would emphasize the negative potential of it. Fertilization of high altitude forest by acid rain, 0.1 percent of our eastern forests, may be increasing cold damage by making forests grow too long into the winter. The potential beneficial effects of fertilization on the remaining 99.9 percent of eastern forests remain safely buried in voluminous technical reports—reports little read by interested specialists, let alone by policy makers and the public.

Around the time that Likens and associates used two little words to permanently change the way that we think about deposition of N and S, the Norwegian national acid rain program came into existence.

The Norwegian national acid rain program of the 1970s, not the Swedish program of the 1940s and ’50s, established the research perspective of the subsequent American, Canadian, and European national acid rain programs. Regrettably, the proposal (Nr. 172/1974) to the Norwegian parliament for financing the program stated that “the aim of the project is to provide material for negotiations in order to limit the emission of SO2 in Europe” (Rosenqvist, 1990). Thus, scientific objectivity was lost from the inception; politicians proclaimed that acid rain is a problem and would pay those scientists who would support the political position.

Thus, political correctness came to acid rain twenty years ago.

A similar situation was manufactured in the United States. As the Norwegian program was ending in 1980, President Carter called acid rain one of the two atmospheric environmental crises of the century and started NAPAP at $10 million per year for ten years.

Thus, the inception of NAPAP was hardly scientifically objective either. And, at $10 million per year, NAPAP was merely window dressing to provide the appearance of scientific credibility for the claims of environmental disaster.

Remember, NAPAP was supposed to be investigating the sources of acid rain, its atmospheric chemistry and transport, as well as its myriad claimed effects, such as visibility, effects on crops, effects on forests, effects on lakes, effects on buildings, effects on human health. Then you take all of these effect and research areas and divide them among all of the participating agencies: the US Park Service, the US Geological Survey, the US Forest Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the US Department of Agriculture re, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the national laboratories, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and (last but not least) the Environmental Protection Agency, and you see that $10 million per year will hardly pay the salaries of the administrative paper pushers, let alone support any meaningful research.

NAPAP was originally set up to put a rubber stamp on the false claims of disaster. It was not set up to do science.

This changed after 1984, when the Reagan administration asked for scientific rather than political opinion. We scientists reported to the administration that, contrary to popular belief, the world was nor going to end soon because of acid rain. Please let us do the science.

President Reagan’s response was not to push for a new version of the Clean Air Act. Not only did he continue NAPAP, but he increased NAPAP’s budget tenfold to around $100 million per year so that it could finally get around to doing meaningful scientific research on acid rain.

With the new budget and the emphasis now being on science, NAPAP also got a scientist to be its new director, Lawrence Kulp, a former director of the Lamont Geochemical Laboratory at Columbia University.

This made environmentalists furious. NAPAP became distinct from all other national acid rain programs: it was evolving into a scientific entity rather than remaining a creature of environmental politics. Since NAPAP was no longer likely to rubber stamp the claims of disaster, environmental activists would discredit NAPAP with the help of its powerful allies in the media and government, which most importantly included the EPA. And the EPA was NAPAP’s lead federal agency.

Thus NAPAP was not able to produce perfectly objective science. However, we must commend NAPAP for performing far better than we have any right to expect; NAPAP was overwhelmingly besieged from both within and without.

You can measure the success of NAPAP by environmentalists criticism of it and their vehement objections to the establishment of a “NAPAP” for global warming….

“Not Fully Forthcoming” In Politispeak Means “LIED”

Via Libertarian Republican:

Halperin is enormously respected in the Inside-the-Beltway media community. For him to make this admission is huge. The exact quote: 

No, and I owe all of my Republican sources an apology. They kept telling me he was hugely involved, and the White House played it down. They were right, the Republicans were right.

RPT’s Short Video Dealing With Rachel Dolezal ~ #TransRacialLivesMatter

Video Description:

I have a short commentary about Rachel Dolezal with included video of her getting caught in a lie.

Gay Patriot comments on the issue well when they say:

…As I read it, I could not help but wonder whether there is race fluidity in addition to gender fluidity? If a person can be whatever gender they want to be despite the biological reality of their genetic and physical make-up, then why can’t they be whatever race they feel they are? Why should those same rules not apply to race?

It used to be thought that a man claiming to be a woman had no more grip on reality than a man claiming to be Napoleon or a bunny rabbit. But the culture has evolved, and society has decided that for a man to be woman requires nothing more than hormone treatments, surgery, and make-up. (Which, as an aside, seems rather insulting to real biological women.) If race is an identity, than why should people have any less right to determine what their race in addition to their gender?…

Read More: http://www.gaypatriot.net/2015/06/12/is-race-as-fluid-as-gender/

Likewise I post on the matter a bit here with news from around the web:

See on Twitter as well:

Taung Child: Another Evidence [Proof] of Evolution Falls

(Subscribe to Creation Magazine)

Here is a quick description from the Smithsonian Institute’s site about Taung:

When this 3-year-old child’s skull was found in 1924, it was among the first early human fossils to be found in Africa — and the first early human fossil discovery to draw major attention to this region as a place of origin of the human family tree. Still, it took over 20 years after that before scientists accepted the importance of Africa as a major source of human evolution.

The Taung Child’s fossilized anatomy represented the first time researchers saw evidence of early human upright, two-legged  (bipedal) walking. The evidence was the position of the Taung Child’s foramen magnum, or the hole through which the spinal cord connects with the brain. This spinal cord hole is positioned toward the front of the Taung Child’s skull, a characteristic associated with bipedal locomotion. This bipedal adaptation allows the head to balance atop of the neck; while contrastingly, a four-legged ape has its foramen magnum positioned toward the rear of the head to keep its eyes facing forward (and not down) when it moves.

And here is more from Science Daily, the cites where Creation magazine references:

Summary: By subjecting the skull of the famous Taung Child to the latest CT scan technology, researchers are now casting doubt on theories that Australopithecus africanus shows the same cranial adaptations found in modern human infants and toddlers.

The Taung Child, South Africa’s premier hominin discovered 90 years ago by Wits University Professor Raymond Dart, continues to shed light on human origins. By subjecting the skull of the first australopith discovered to the latest technologies in the Wits University Microfocus X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) facility, researchers are now casting doubt on theories that Australopithecus africanus shows the same cranial adaptations found in modern human infants and toddlers — in effect disproving current support for the idea that this early hominin shows infant brain development in the prefrontal region similar to that of modern humans.

The results have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on Aug. 25, in an article titled “New high resolution CT data of the Taung partial cranium and endocast and their bearing on metopism and hominin brain evolution.”

The Taung Child has historical and scientific importance in the fossil record as the first and best example of early hominin brain evolution, and theories have been put forward that it exhibits key cranial adaptations found in modern human infants and toddlers.

To test the ancientness of this evolutionary adaptation, Dr Kristian J. Carlson, Senior Researcher from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, and colleagues, Professor Ralph L. Holloway from Columbia University and Douglas C. Broadfield from Florida Atlantic University, performed an in silico dissection of the Taung fossil using high-resolution computed tomography.

“A recent study has described the roughly 3 million-year-old fossil, thought to have belonged to a 3 to 4-year-old, as having a persistent metopic suture and open anterior fontanelle, two features that facilitate post-natal brain growth in human infants when their disappearance is delayed,” said Carlson.

Comparisons with the existing hominin fossil record and chimpanzee variation do not support this evolutionary scenario.

Citing deficiencies in how the Taung fossil material has been recently assessed, the researchers suggest physical evidence does not incontrovertibly link features of the Taung skull, or its endocast, to early prefrontal lobe expansion, a brain region implicated in many human behaviors.

read it all

“The Ends Justify the Means” ~ Sarah Silverman (UPDATED)

Video Description:

As only he can, the “Sage from South Central,” Larry Elder, explains with “proof texts” why the Left’s modus operandi is lying. Larry starts with Sarah Silverman, goes right to Hillary Clinton, then on to James Carville and others.

Good opening minutes of Elder’s Show!

Harry Reid: “I Lied About Romney, But He Didn’t Win, Did He?” (American Spectator)
The Truth About What’s In Clinton’s Deleted Emails (Allen West)
The Bush 41 Grocery Scanner Myth (Brendan Nyhan)
▼ Durbin Should Reflect On His Past Votes Against African-American Nominees And Apologize For Playing Race Card Against Republicans (Greta van Susteren)

For more clear thinking like this from Larry Elder… I invite you to visit: http://www.larryelder.com/ ~AND~ http://www.elderstatement.com/

Sarah Silverman Caught Twisting History To Be Victim

And the response? (Via The Blaze):

That incident occurred roughly 15 years ago. Shortly after the video featuring Silverman was published online, Martin called out the comedian in a scathing Facebook post:

Are you kidding ? You come in to my club 15 years ago and ask me for a guest spot , I did not ask you to perform and you were not booked, and Then you ask me for pay ? You asked to work out some material…

Then you make this a gender pay thing ? Sarah great cause I am with it, but I did not pay you less cause of gender…. I paid you less because Todd Barry was booked and you weren’t…It was a GUEST SPOT, so I gave you some car fare, which actually is more than almost any club would have given for a GUEST Spot…Funny how in your attempt to become a super hero with a noble cause, you forgot that little fact…GUEST SPOT ….GUEST SPOT

To be clear, Democrats want equal pay across the board… for minorities and women that is. So a headliner vs. a guest spot… it is a simple concept.

Gateway Pundit notes that Sarah Silverman apologized,

  • “Silverman apologized for mentioning Martin’s name, but not for the lie. Her falsehood was legitimate, in her mind, because it supported the leftist narrative. She just regrets getting caught.”