The New York Times has the vapours over the news that the E.P.A. “Is Said To Have Drafted a Plan to End Its Ability to Fight Climate Change/ According to two people familiar with the draft, it would eliminate the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse-gas emissions threaten human life by dangerously warming the planet.” Questions that might be asked by informed, sensible people include: Could the EPA actually “fight climate change” even if it had an opinion that greenhouse-gas emissions threaten human life? And also: Do greenhouse-gas emissions “threaten human life”. But they’re not that kind of journalists.

Instead the piece began:

“The Trump administration has drafted a plan to repeal a fundamental scientific finding that gives the United States government its authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change, according to two people familiar with the plan.”

But of course the Trump administration, or the United States Congress, or indeed the United Federation of Planets, can no more repeal a scientific finding than it can make one. Scientific findings are hypotheses that withstand repeated empirical tests, especially ones designed to refute them. And a bureaucracy, a legislature or a Ministry of Truth saying greenhouse-gas emissions threaten human life no more makes it a finding, let alone a solid one, than such a body saying plants can pass on acquired characteristics. Or for that matter that they can’t.

The shrill insistence among climate alarmists that science is a matter of authorities laying down dogma is among their least attractive qualities, including the total misunderstanding of the scientific process it embodies. For instance from that Times piece:

“The proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinds a 2009 declaration known as the ‘endangerment finding,’ which scientifically established that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives. That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s only tool to limit the climate pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industries that is dangerously heating the planet.”

Again, this declaration can no more “establish” that GHGs “endanger human lives” than a legislature could “establish” the value of pi at 3.2. And the author also doesn’t seem to know much about lawmaking or the United States Constitution.

It might be that the specific wording of the Clean Air Act requires that tendentious political finding in order to twist its plain meaning into an anti-climate-change law. But if the American Congress really wanted to give the Executive Branch power to fix the weather, it could easily pass a No Naughty Temperature Increases Act. As it could have done in 2009.

It didn’t, because the majority of voters didn’t want one. So that “endangerment finding” was legal as well as scientific jiggery-pokery by the Obama Administration in 2009 to bypass the legislature, the sort of thing outfits like the New York Times rightly find obnoxious when Republican presidents do it.

Despite which Heatmap emails about “EPA’s Climate Kill Shot” and says:

“The Environmental Protection Agency is days away from proposing a rule to rescind the endangerment finding, the 2009 decision that established the federal government’s legal right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act….The finding came in response to the 2007 Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the nation’s highest court ruled that the danger planet-heating emissions posed to human health made them subject to limits under the same law that restricts other forms of air pollution.”

Now of course the American executive branch can no more repeal a Supreme Court ruling than it can a law of physics. Or of economics, a subject for another day. Nor could it or anyone else change the fact that, as Heatmap does blurt out, “Argentina’s brutal cold snap is back after a brief pause, threatening gas infrastructure and freezing crops”.

Roger Pielke Jr., typically, looked at actual facts. Including that it’s not about science. Nor about endangering human life. Instead, the Clean Air Act says that the EPA administrator:

“shall by regulation prescribe (and from time to time revise) in accordance with the provisions of this section, standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines, which in his judgment cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

It doesn’t even say what kind of standards. It certainly doesn’t mandate Net Zero. But it is, he notes, “a very low bar”, and hence:

“The endangerment finding in place today exists based on a previous EPA administrator’s judgment that greenhouse gas emissions ‘may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.’”

As a current administrator might judge that they may not reasonably be so anticipated. It’s a policy question unless and until Congress makes it a legal one. Or rather, until someone other than Pielke Jr. notices that they did, as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act “refers explicitly to ‘greenhouse gas air pollution’” and the Inflation Reduction Act says “the term ‘greenhouse gas’ means the air pollutants carbon dioxide, hydrofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride.”

That a majority of elected representatives call something pollution doesn’t make it pollution scientifically. But it does make it pollution legally unless and until someone changes it. Or just fails to notice. But we’re not in the world of facts here. We’re in the world where it’s all in the mind.