Bad Science

TruthNews Commentary, June 21, 2002

In Houston, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission recently mandated that the speed limit be lowered to 55 mph. The edict applies to rural areas, including freeways, as far as 70 miles from Houston, and is part of an effort to reduce nitrous oxide emissions by 703 tons per day.

According to a computer model used by the TNRCC, the reduction in speed limits will cut emissions by 12.3 tons per day. This is approximately 1.75% of the required total emission reduction. This miniscule reduction achieved by inconveniencing millions of drivers makes the TNRCC's speed limit reduction questionable enough as a smog reduction tactic. But now, rural communities in the Houston area are suing the TNRCC, claiming that updated computer models show that the speed limit reduction will achiever only 1/3 of the claimed results and is hence virtually useless in the campaign to reduce smog.

The vast difference in results predicted by the two pollution models illustrates the fallacy surrounding much of the green house debate. To discover after a policy has been implemented that it will achieve only 1/3 of the desired results due to an error in the calculation is, putting it mildly, bad science.

Suppose you were going on a trip on an airplane. Your jet is waiting at the end of the runway to take off. The pilot comes on the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We're about to begin our takeoff roll. The aerodynamic models used to build this airplane predict that we'll achieve takeoff speed about halfway down the runway. However, updated aerodynamic models tell us that our wings will provide only 1/3 of the lift required. If these newer models are correct, we'll smash through the fence at the end of the runway at 200 miles per hour without ever leaving the ground. We're going to go ahead and try it and see what happens."

Would any sane person travel on an airline under these conditions? Of course not! But it seems that we're willing to implement environmental policies that affect millions or even billions of people based on little more than intuition, hunches, and guesswork. It says a lot that most environmental activists are lawyers and politicians, rather than scientists.

Question: will atmospheric pollution cause a gradual increase in the temperature or another ice age? Answer - no one knows! The majority of the "scientists" studying the issue claim that pollution will result in a green house effect that will eventually cause the polar ice caps to melt. But a substantial minority think that pollution will block the sun's rays enough to cause a net cooling effect. Before we embark on a massive program to reduce "greenhouse gases," shouldn't we be sure of the result?

Many environmentalists don't care. Like the TNRCC, they're willing to implement half-baked policies that affect billions of people and cost billions of dollars but may have the opposite effect of what's intended.

The whole global warming theory was started by climatologists who noted that the average temperature of the globe has increased about 1 degree in the past hundred years. But what no one can say is whether this occurred because of smog or would have occurred anyway. The earth's climate has made wild shifts in the past without any help from man - any one remember the ice age? Who's to say whether this 1 degree rise in temperature over the past century, even if accurately measured and statistically significant (doubtful) isn't part of a climate shift that's been going on for a thousand years.

The green house debate flies in the face of the scientific method tha6t has been painstakingly established over the last 500 years. In the centuries before Christ, science was the domain of philosophers, not scientists. Aristotle, who died in 322 B.C., was the pre-eminent "scientist" of his day. His ideas about the nature of the universe, based on observation, intuition, and philosophy (but not on experimentation), were widely accepted for the next 1800 years, even though most of his ideas were totally wrong. It was not until Galileo began performing experiments in the 1500's that many of these misconceptions were debunked. Galileo was condemned by the Catholic church, and forced to recant, not because his theories conflicted with the Bible (they don't) but because they conflicted with the pagan Aristotle's deeply ingrained philosophical notions.

After Galileo, the scientific community came to accept that theories must be proven by experimentation. This "scientific method" revolutionized scientific thought and led directly to the industrial revolution. Beginning in the latter half of the 19th century, however, some areas of science began to return to the Aristotle model. Both evolution and psychology are largely philosophical in nature and have been proven largely by the Joseph Goebbels method - that is, by repeating it often enough, people have begun to believe ideas that have little scientific evidence. If a witch turns a frog into a prince, that's a fairy tale. But if a scientist says that a frog evolved into a prince, the teachers accept it and teach it to the kids as fact. And like Galileo, you either shut up and accept the pagan philosophy, or you're burned at the intellectual stake.

The Kyoto accord, which was written ostensibly to control global warming, was born of similar fallacy but has been repeated often enough that people have begun to believe it. The Kyoto accord requires industrialized nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, but places no restrictions on developing nations. So how will the industrialized nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions? By transferring factories to China and India, which also lets them take advantage of cheap labor. And by the way, developing countries have less stringent environmental standards than the U.S., Europe, and Japan, so the same factory is allowed to produce more smog in China than in the U.S. So the total world smog will go up rather than down.

The Houston area has some of the worst traffic congestion in the nation. During rush hour, the freeways look like gigantic parking lots as a million people convert gasoline into smog. Most commuters would be happy to get up to 55 (or 25 for that matter). The obvious solution would be to widen the roads and build a mass transit system. The nation's fourth largest city has no mass transit system other than buses belching diesel fumes into the atmosphere. But the TNRCC ignores these effective solutions and instead opts for lowering the speed limit, which will affect primarily rural areas that don't have much smog to begin with. Why? Because the government doesn’t want to pay for reducing smog but wants to make everyone else foot the bill.

The TNRCC last week finally realized the error of their ways and voted to rescind the 55 mph speed limit. This comes after highway workers spent the last 5 months putting up the new 55 mph signs. With typical government double talk, the TNRCC's web site announced the change under the headline "Houston Clean Air Strategy Enhanced." In place of the 55 mph speed limit, the TNRCC has proposed a two-tiered system whereby cars can go 65 or 70 mph but trucks, being bigger polluters, will be limited to 55 mph.

Since limiting everybody to 55 mph provides only 1/2 of 1 percent of the required smog reduction, presumably lowering only the trucks to 55 will provide even less reduction. The U.S. Department of Transportation says that vehicles traveling 10 mph slower than other traffic are 6 times more likely to be involved in accidents. Apparently, the TNRCC doesn’t care about safety, only smog reduction. However, the traffic jams caused by the wrecked trucks will probably cause more smog than the miniscule reduction obtained from slowing the trucks.

The TNRCC's two-tiered speed limits awaits approval from the EPA before the Texas highway department can start replacing all the 55 mph signs that they just put up. One wonders if the advocates of the Kyoto accord will make a similar reversal in policy once we all start freezing in the dark.

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