For years, anybody who wanted to study the terrible effects and causes of global warming could get government funding. Any paper that questioned the dogma, would get rejected by scientific journals which subject the papers to "peer review". Things may change.
Over the past three decades, the environmental movement has increasingly hitched its wagon to exactly one star as the overwhelming focus of the cause, namely "climate change." Sure, issues of bona fide pollution like smog and untreated sewage are still out there a little, but they are largely under control and don't really stir the emotions much any more. If you want fundraising in the billions rather than the thousands, you need a good end-of-days, sin-and-redemption scare. Human-caused global warming is your answer!
Even as this scare has advanced, a few lonely voices have warned that the radical environmentalists were taking the movement out onto a precarious limb. Isn't there a problem that there's no real evidence of impending climate disaster? But to no avail. Government funding to promote the warming scare has been lavish, and in the age of Obama has exploded. Backers of the alarm have controlled all of the relevant government bureaucracies, almost all of the scientific societies, and the access to funding and to publication for anyone who wants to have a career in the field. What could go wrong?
At least three of Trump's nominations are likely to be antagonistic against the global warming juggernaut.
Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, as Secretary of State. As of today, we still have as our chief diplomat the world leader of smugness who somehow thinks that "climate change" caused by use of fossil fuels is the greatest threat to global security. He is shortly to be replaced with the CEO of Exxon. Could there be a bigger poke in the eye to the world climate establishment? I'm trying to envision Tillerson at the next meeting of the UN climate "conference of parties" with thousands of world bureaucrats discussing how to put the fossil fuel companies out of business. Won't he be laughing his gut out?
Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy. Not only was he the longest-serving governor of the biggest fossil fuel energy-producing state, but in his own 2012 presidential campaign he advocated for the elimination of the Department of Energy. This is the department that passes out tens of billions of dollars in crony-capitalist handouts for wind and solar energy (Solyndra!), let alone more tens of billions for funding some seventeen (seventeen!) research laboratories mostly dedicated to the hopeless task of figuring out how to make intermittent sources of energy competitive for any real purpose.
And then there's Scott Pruitt for EPA. As Attorney General of Oklahoma, another of the big fossil fuel energy-producing states, he has been a leader in litigating against the Obama EPA to stop its overreaches, including the so-called Clean Power Plan that seeks to end the use of coal for electricity and to raise everyone's cost of energy.
And how about cooking the data?
Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years. Questions like: Why are recorded temperatures, particularly from satellites and weather balloons, so much lower than the alarmist models had predicted? How do you explain an almost-20-year "pause" in increasing temperatures even as CO2 emissions have accelerated? What are the details of the adjustments to the surface temperature record that have somehow reduced recorded temperatures from the 1930s and 40s, and thereby enabled continued claims of "warmest year ever" when raw temperature data show warmer years 70 and 80 years ago? Suddenly, the usual hand-waving ("the science is settled") is not going to be good enough any more. What now?
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