Daily Digest: SCOTUS blows it on guns, climate lies, another TSA failure, and the EPA's not-so-independent studies

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Daily Digest

June 9, 2015   

THE FOUNDATION

"In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years." —John Adams, Diary, 1778

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

SCOTUS Passes on Chance to Set 2A Ruling Right

Not exactly profiles in courage, but the Supreme Court declined to review two lower court rulings upholding San Francisco's draconian gun control laws. The Associated Press reports, "The court on Monday let stand court rulings in favor of a city measure that requires handgun owners to secure weapons in their homes by storing them in a locker, keeping them on their bodies or applying trigger locks.

A second ordinance bans the sale of ammunition that expands on impact, has 'no sporting purpose' and is commonly referred to as hollow-point bullets." Of course, in DC v. Heller, the Supreme Court struck down a requirement about locking down a firearm in the home, saying the Second Amendment protects the right of the people to keep a "lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense."

So by declining to hear this case, the justices are allowing a patchwork of wrong interpretations of its ruling to stand.

As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, "Despite the clarity with which we described the Second Amendment's core protection for the right of self-defense, lower courts, including the ones here, have failed to protect it." Furthermore, they're passing on an opportunity to clarify the most important point of all: The Second Amendment is not "for sporting purposes." The ban on hollow-point ammunition is beyond asinine, but the justices can't be bothered to fire anything but blanks.

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TSA: Terrorists Screening at Airports

Now, after a security breach of its own making, the Transportation Security Agency wants more of the nation's data on terrorists to sift through, as if building a bigger haystack will solve the problem. The Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security reports that the TSA let 73 people linked to terrorism work inside the nation's airports.

According to the report, the TSA checks the Consolidated Terrorist Watchlist every time it's updated. But the DHS inspector general took the list of more than 900,000 airport workers and ran it against the National Counterterrorism Center's database. "TSA acknowledged that these individuals were cleared for access to secure airport areas despite representing a potential transportation security threat," the report read. The inspector general also found the TSA works with shoddy data, clearing people with incomplete names and missing passport numbers, for example. Step one for the TSA is to clean up the data.

But questions remain: Will more access to the terrorism watchlist help? Who were the people the IG considers to have links to terrorism? Those details were redacted. And without that information, we can only take the TSA's word that this was a serious breach. On top of recent news of TSA screening failures, this doesn't increase our faith in bureaucracy.

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'Independent' EPA Study Not So Independent After All

In May, a new study commissioned by Harvard and Syracuse University claimed that the EPA's soon-to-be-released Clean Power Plan will eliminate around 3,500 pollution-related deaths annually. The celebratory reaction quickly went mainstream. The EPA, whose proposal it already posited will save lives, suddenly had the benefit of an independent verification. Or did it? Writing in Breitbart, junkscience.com publisher Steve Milloy found that the researchers of said study had personally partaken in various multi-million dollar EPA-funded studies. Furthermore, one author's assertion that the agency "did not participate in the study or interact with its authors" was found to be complete hogwash. Says Milloy, "I submitted a request to EPA under the Freedom of Information Act for email between the study authors and EPA staff.

Although subsequent wrangling with agency staff gave me doubt that I would ever get anything, I received, much to my surprise, 99 pages of emails after mere weeks. The emails reveal that [the] study co-authors ... were definitely in contact with key EPA staff regarding this research."
"This issue goes deeper than mere truth-telling," he adds. "The EPA's controversial Clean Power Plan hinges on the notion that shuttering coal plants will save lives." In fact, shuttering coal plants may very well cost lives.

Yet EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy recently postulated, "We can speak to the science because it's complicated and we do a lot of research and we do a lot of translation of the science into what it means for people so that the decisions can be made on the basis of real science and on the basis of a real technical understanding." In other words, "Trust us." But they keep giving us every reason not to.

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FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS

NOAA Lies About the Warming Hiatus

By Lewis Morris

A new report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the latest issue of the journal "Science" claims the global warming hiatus that began in the late 1990s never actually happened. In fact, according to NOAA, temperatures actually rose twice as high as the previous global scale had predicted or measured. This wouldn't by any chance be an attempt to influence climate treaty talks in Paris later this year, now would it?

"Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA's [National Centers for Environmental Information] do not support the notion of a global warming 'hiatus,'" wrote NOAA scientists, contradicting the work of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The hiatus, which in the scientific community refers to a period in which global surface temperatures appeared to stabilize, has flummoxed climate alarmists. It flies in the face of their exceedingly shrill predictions of extreme global warming — indeed, it's part of the reason they've switched their terminology to "climate change." If there's been no warming, it undermines their calls for ever more drastic measures to combat it, like dismantling the U.S. coal industry, heavily regulating fossil fuel production, and financially burdening the citizens of the world's richest countries.
By many scientific accounts, temperatures rose during the period of 1998-2013 at a much slower rate than the previous bellwether period between 1950-1998, a time frame during which global surface temperatures supposedly significantly spiked. According to satellite measurements, the most accurate tool we have, temperatures have remained flat — an ongoing trend. How is it that NOAA was able to come to its contrary conclusion?

The NOAA study was essentially able to raise the rate of warming during the pause by putting a greater emphasis on data collected from ocean buoy arrays, and slightly raising land-based temperatures that had been previously recorded. NOAA also shifted the time frame of the pause, defining it as 2000-2014 in order to conveniently include two years that supposedly saw the highest recorded temperatures on record. They ridicule skeptics for cherry-picking data, yet that's exactly what they just did.

"This new analysis exhibits more than twice as much warming as the old analysis at the global scale," NOAA scientists claim with a straight face. The report goes on to state that the overall warming trend since 1880 has not significantly changed, but the sharp uptick in temperatures in recent decades is cause for concern.

This manufactured spike in global surface temperatures in the NOAA study certainly comes at a convenient time. World leaders will be gathering in Paris at the end of this year to hammer out the details of a global warming treaty that is sure to place harsh restrictions on international commerce and energy production. That treaty is harder to justify if the lull in rising temperatures persists.
Yet the NOAA report has landed with a thud among many in the scientific community. Climate experts Bob Tisdale and Anthony Watts noted that to "manufacture warming during the hiatus, NOAA adjusted the pre-hiatus data downward. It's the same story all over again; the adjustments go towards cooling the past and thus increasing the slope of temperature rise. Their intent and methods are so obvious they're laughable." 
Georgia Tech climate scientists Judith Curry noted, "The global surface temperature datasets are clearly a moving target. So while I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on."
In its investigation of the story, the online news site Mashable talked to a dozen top climate scientists not associated with the NOAA report and found that they were nearly unanimous in refuting the conclusion that the warming pause never happened.

"It is clear that [NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information director Thomas] Karl et al. have put a lot of careful work into updating these global products," said Lisa Goddard, director of Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society. "However, they go too far when they conclude that there was no decadal-scale slowdown in the rate of warming globally. This argument seems to rely on choosing the right period — such as including the recent record-breaking 2014."

NOAA's data cherry-picking won't help advance their cause — at least not honestly. But this behavior is typical of the leftist mindset that seeks to bend others to their will by any means necessary.

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TODAY AT PATRIOTPOST.US

• ANALYSIS: Chinese Cyberattacks Reveal Obama's Lack of Leadership
• Clintons Donated to NYT, Paper Endorsed Hillary
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• Abortions Nationwide on the Decline
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BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

• Tony Perkins: The CDC's Abstinence-Minded Professors
• Dennis Prager: Differences Between Left and Right: Part III
• Ed Feulner: Showing the Ex-Im Bank the Exit
• Thomas Sowell: Who Lost Iraq?
• Arnold Ahlert: The TPP Will Destroy America's National Sovereignty

For more, visit Right Opinion.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Tony Perkins: "In [the CDC's] 2015 'Sexually Transmitted Diseases Treatment Guidelines,' a two-word change made all the difference. Five years ago, the CDC used to say abstinence and monogamy were 'a reliable way to avoid disease.' As of last Friday, the agency agrees it's '*the* most reliable way.' That may not seem like a radical edit to most people, but in this administration, moral purity is as foreign a concept as political transparency. ... Somewhere along the way, too many adults started operating from a position of lower expectations, as if teenagers were incapable of exercising any self-restraint.

It became assumed, not discouraged, that children would have sex. With or without the government's help, it's time for parents to speak up and encourage their teens to do what's counter-cultural. Too many moms and dads think their kids aren't listening to what they say about abstinence. Think again. Parents are the single biggest influence on their children's sexual decisions.

If the cultural influences from Hollywood and the media are committed to marketing promiscuity and immodesty at every turn, then as parents, we have to be just as committed to helping our teenagers fight those temptations."

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SHORT CUTS

Insight: "One's first step in wisdom is to question everything — and one's last is to come to terms with everything." —German scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Upright: "Congress does two things well: nothing and overreact. Well, I have some good news: Doing nothing when it comes to the Ex-Im Bank is exactly what we need right now. That's because the charter for the Export-Import Bank, which provides taxpayer-backed loans to foreign countries and companies to pay for U.S. products, is set to expire June 30. To get rid of this poster child for crony capitalism, lawmakers don't have to lift a finger. Imagine: For a change, we'd have good reason to applaud a 'do-nothing' Congress." —Ed Feulner

Non Compos Mentis: "[King v. Burwell] should be an easy case. Frankly, it shouldn't have even been taken up [by SCOTUS]. ... There is no reason why the existing exchanges should be overturned through a court case. ... I think it's important for us to go ahead and assume that the Supreme Court is going to do what most legal scholars who've looked at this would expect them to do. ... Part of what's bizarre about this whole thing is, we haven't had a lot of conversation about the horrors of ObamaCare because none of them have come to pass." —Barack Obama, politically attacking the Supreme Court yet again, this time for ObamaCare subsidies as outlined by the law itself
Ya think?

"We don't yet have a complete strategy." —Barack Obama on decimating the Islamic State
Village Idiots:

"A new Pew Research Center report states that 52 percent of Americans support gun rights, the highest percentage in the last two decades. Yet the gun rights that they believe are guaranteed by law may very well be an illusion. That's because we have allowed lawyers instead of language professionals to interpret the Constitution of the United States." —Chicago Tribune contributor and College of DuPage professor David McGrath

Late-night humor: "The TSA is under fire for major security lapses. Because of the security lapses, the TSA has let through pipe bombs, knives, and the last three Nicolas Cage movies." —Conan O'Brien

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