Much of our climate change skepticism stems from the government’s involvement and manipulation of the scientific data, and the subsequent creation of a cap and trade system, designed to punish and tax business. Cap and Trade is not about saving the planet; it is about revenues, and killing the California economy and jobs.

Not long ago, it became abundantly clear that no one in the state has a handle on the implementation of AB 32, California’s Global Warming Solution Act of 2006, or the potential repercussions from the vast law. California continues to forge ahead blinded by the potential revenues extorted from businesses and customers, despite the phony science and altered data.

Since Gov. Jerry Brown decided to monetize CO2 carbon emissions, and approved plans to tax utility customers, business owners and taxpayers for the emissions, the state stands to take in an extra $1 billion in revenues.

Phony science

The Daily Caller recently reported about this phony science. “Leaked documents obtained by the Associated Press show that the U.S. government and several European governments tried to get climate scientists to downplay the lack of global warming over the past 15 years.”

“The U.S. government along with some European nations tried to convince the report’s authors to downplay the lack of warming over the past 15 years,” the DC said. “The highly anticipated United Nations report on global warming is expected to affirm the link between human activity and global warming, but scientists are still having trouble explaining away the lull in rising global temperatures over the past 15 years despite rapidly rising greenhouse gas levels.”

And now, one MIT scientist rips the latest International Panel on Climate Change report:

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot on September 27, 2013:

“I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence.  They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.”

… in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with their being nothing to be alarmed about.  It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.

Pravda even mocks global warming

“For years, the Elites of the West have cranked up the myth of Man Made Global Warming as a means first and foremost to control the lives and behaviors of their populations,” Pravda writer Stanislav Mishin wrote in ”Global Warming, the tool of the West.”

“What better way to staunch protests at worsening economic and life conditions than to make it feel like an honourable job/duty of the people to save ‘Gia.’ At the same time, they used this ‘science’ as a new pagan religion to further push out the Christianity they hate and despise and most of all, fear?” Mishin asked.

“Gia worship, the earth ‘mother,’ has been pushed in popular culture oozing out of the West for a better part of the past 1.5 decades. This is a religion replete with an army of priests, called Government Grant Scientists.”

Mishin is right. Global warming, climate change hysteria and environmentalism has become a ‘religion’ of irrational proportions. But it has also become a giant financial scheme as evidenced by the many government subsidized ‘Solyndra-type’ clean-energy scandals.

And, even as the TIME magazine cover spoof showed in 2009, the United Nations IPCC lied about the effects of global warming by using phony science and doctored data. It was revealed that The International Panel on Climate Change science was a deliberate hoax.

This very expensive climate change hoax appears to be thriving today under the careful manipulations of the California Air Resources Board, and Gov. Jerry Brown.

But in a 2012 interview, Dr. Richard Lindzen told the NY Times, “You have politicians who are being told if they question this, they are anti-science. We are trying to tell them, no, questioning is never anti-science.”

By Wayne Lusvardi    

Anyone who remembers the choking smog of 1960s Los Angeles knows of the great advances since then in cleaning the air. But as Nobel economist Milton Friedman once quipped, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

To keep “temporary” programs going, and to advance new programs such as the state’s new cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions, reasons must be found.

Researcher Julia Heck at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health recently found a “possible” link between proximity to traffic-related air pollution and a few childhood cancers.

The UCLA study looked at 3,590 children who were born in California from 1998 to 2007 and had cancer. A control group was selected at random from birth data on 80,224 children born in California.  A control group is used for comparison purposes to determine if a study’s conclusions are valid.

To analyze the selected data, the UCLA researchers used a standard statistical analysis program called CALINE4 used by the California Department of Transportation to assess carbon monoxide impacts near major arterial streets.  This statistical tool was developed in response to the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

Questionable study methods and conclusions

Steve Milloy, who runs the blog junkscience.com, questioned the results of the study:

“If this association were true, there would have been a huge spike in childhood cancer during the 1950s and 1960s [when industry and car traffic grew and pollution was at its worst]. This is junk science because the weak statistical associations are based on unknown exposure data (exposure data is only guesstimated) and the biological implausibility of lumping different types of cancer together (i.e., if an exposure causes cancer, it probably causes one sort of cancer not all sorts).” 

Australian statistician John Ray, PhD, who is the web master of the Food and Health Skeptic blog, pointed out on April 12 that there was no control group for social class in this study.

In other words, homes adjacent to freeways tend to be comprised of lower-income families that may have adults who smoke (poor people smoke more than those better off), have bad indoor air quality, or have greater hereditary cancers in the first place.  In Los Angeles, a comparison group would be needed of, say, children from wealthier families that lived near the San Gabriel Mountains where smog concentrates but is not adjacent to freeways.  No such comparison was conducted in this study to control for socio-economic effects.

Indoor and outdoor

Moreover, without separating the effects of indoor from outdoor air pollution the results of the study are highly dubious.  Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states, “[I]ndoor levels of pollutants may be 2 to 5 times — and occasionally more than 100 times — higher than outdoor pollutant levels.” Any environment that concentrates substances in the air or water is likely to lead to pollution. The first principle of toxicology is: “the dosage is the poison,” not the substance itself.  Thus, it is more likely to be a lack of adequate building ventilation and filtering that leads to poor air quality.

The sampling and comparison methods used in the UCLA study were bogus because measuring differences in cancer rates between children who already had cancer and lived near freeways with all children born in California is going to result in a predetermined result.  Concluding that there is a 100 percent correlation that apples and oranges are not the same is junk science. Thus, the statistical correlations found in the UCLA study are spurious.

A 2009 U.C. Davis study funded by the U.S. Highway Administration comparing the CALINE4 statistical model used in the UCLA study found: “CALINE4…resulted in over-prediction when incremental concentrations due to on-road emissions were low, while under-predictions occurred when incremental concentrations were high.” In other words, the statistical model used in the UCLA study has a built-in bias toward finding higher levels of pollution.

The largest and most credible study of child cancers and smog in California was conducted by Danish scholars in 2001, “Epidemiologic Evidence for Air Pollution and Childhood Cancer.”  This study found no association between “traffic metrics and childhood cancer” in California.

Attempted link to cap-and-trade funding

The California Legislative Analysts Office has said that California’s cap-and-trade funds cannot be legally used as a slush fund to plug deficits in the state budget.  But the LAO has said that funds can only be narrowly spent on programs that specifically reduce carbon emissions, not on medical programs that treat the purported negative health effects on children.

Even the U.C. Berkeley Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment concurred with the LAO that it would be too legally risky to try to use cap-and-trade funds to plug deficits in the General Fund budget. What the studies trying to link childhood cancer with traffic-related pollution are apparently trying to do is link smog and childhood cancers so cap-and-trade pollution funding can be authorized for Medi-Cal funding for lower-income families.

The media are reporting these studies as conclusive but the nonpartisan analysts are not.