The EPA's Faulty Science Can Be Stopped

[Geee]

American Thinker:

United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-sponsored and funded "human health effects science" research is unreliable and makes irresponsible and outrageous claims about how air pollution causes thousands of deaths. Then the EPA claims that it can prevent those deaths with its latest set of regulations of emissions. This junk science can be challenged effectively, legally, and politically, as described below.

The science misconduct is the result of the politicization of public health science, something Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech in 1961. There are political, judicial, and administrative solutions to this perfidy.

First, what is the junk science?

Judging Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Federal Courts ( MIT press, 1995), by Peter Huber, Ph.D., J.D. and Ken Foster, Ph.D. -- written two years after the Supreme Court decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow 509 U.S. 579 (1993), is a comprehensive and thorough book on junk science and legal solutions to prevent junk evidence. The book also explains Daubert evidentiary dicta, discussed in a previous essay. We also discussed the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence (RSME) (1994, 2000, and 2011), published by the Federal Judicial Center, intended to educate judges on their Daubert duty to be gatekeepers for reliable scientific evidence in the courtroom.

Fallacious thinking makes EPA research in human health effects science unreliable, forsaking the most important responsibility of a scientist: be your own most severe critic, and retain a skeptical attitude about your ideas and theories. The key is to test your hypothesis -- your theory. If it can't be tested, it isn't science.

The scientific method is based on skeptical experimentation that looks for reliable evidence. Fallacies of scientific inquiry include confusing temporal with causal relationships (post hoc, propter hoc fallacy); reporting results that are within normal range of events (noise) or projecting observations of a specific event and projecting it to a general rule without good evidence (inductive error); and relying on a theory by an authority, by consensus, or by popularity without proper evidentiary challenge.