gamingscience
The grandfather of alt-science.
Art Robinson has seeded scientific skepticism within the GOP for decades. Now he wants to use urine to save lives.
Arthur B. Robinson, renegade chemist, failed politician, grandpa of the climate skeptics — and maybe, just maybe, our nation’s next scientist-in-chief — padded across the carpet of his homemade lab in a pair of white athletic socks. “This room, everything you see here, was built by my own sons with their own hands, including the concrete,” he said. Robinson raised and home-schooled six children in this tawny valley scratched into the hills near the town of Cave Junction, Oregon. Now his wife is dead and one of his daughters has moved away, but the rest of his kids — two veterinarians, a biochemist and a pair of nuclear engineers — remain nearby. They’ve got a lot to do: Feed the animals; maintain the lab; ward off cougars; publish their popular home-school curriculums; manage Robinson’s repeated, unsuccessful congressional campaigns; and, of course, perform high-stakes research into medicine and biochemistry.
A stuffed antelope with curly horns stares across the lab at a bank of instruments with flashing lights. “That’s a rectifier, and this machine measures the rotation of light,” said Robinson, a spritely 75-year-old in pleated khakis and a button shirt, with white hair parted neatly on his small, round head. Then he pointed at a massive cylinder, about the size of a hippopotamus and groaning like a locomotive. “And this,” he said, beaming — “this is our miracle in a box.”
Lo, the Robinson family spectrometer — a $2 million, 7-tesla magnet super-cooled by liquid helium and used for analyzing chemicals. It’s not the sort of thing one would expect to find in private hands, let alone in a DIY laboratory on a modest sheep ranch in a rural corner of the Pacific Northwest. But Robinson and his scientific colleagues — that is to say, his children — have big plans for the hulking, gray device with strands of a cobweb tethered to its back. They believe it will provide a novel way to diagnose disease and then, perhaps, to extend the human lifespan.
Here at what Robinson calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, the family has been assembling an archive of human urine. Eventually they hope to gather 50,000 samples, drawn from 5,000 volunteers across a five-year span. The pee is kept in cryogenic vials and stored in dozens of military-grade, minus-80 freezers on the property. Robinson and his kids have already started placing tiny urine samples, each not much bigger than a raindrop, into the family spectrometer, so they can record its chemical fingerprint — the set of peaks and valleys corresponding to its thousands of component parts. Once their catalog of prints has gotten big enough, they’ll start sifting through for hidden patterns in the data, anything that might provide a hint about our health. According to Robinson, these records could contain the telltale marks of, say, early-stage breast cancer or an approaching heart attack, or they might allow him to track the effects of treating those conditions in real time. Once the details have been worked out, he said, this cheap and noninvasive test — a tiny dab of urine fed into the hippopotamus — could spit out a dossier of diagnostic information.
Whatever you think of this endeavor, let alone its chances of success, the mere fact of its existence is remarkable. At a time when almost all biomedical research flows from either major public grants or industrial R&D;, Robinson has made the choice to strike out on his own. Instead of taking money from bureaucrats in Washington, he’s been raising millions for his big-data research from a set of ultra-wealthy donors who share his conservative values and wariness of government intrusion.
That is to say, Arthur B. Robinson is not some lonesome crank tinkering in his garage. He’s something more unusual: an extremely well-connected crank, with ample funding and an influential perch at the wild outskirts of both politics and science. If he once seemed destined for a respectable career in academia — 45 years ago, he was a young professor on the tenure track at the University of California, San Diego, working side-by-side with the legendary double-Nobelist Linus Pauling — he’s long since cut all ties to conventional research institutions and remade himself as a cowboy chemist, if not an oracle frontiersman for what might be termed America’s “alt-science” movement.
One could view his setup with idle curiosity: the science maverick on his ranch, with a seven-figure budget for his indie urinalysis. But the movement in which Robinson belongs (as a member, if not a shepherd) has nudged a few steps closer, in recent months, to the center of our national politics. Alternative theories of climate change — that is to say, those at odds with mainstream science — are now ascendant at the highest level of government, along with deep suspicion of environmental regulations. And other alt-science points of view — on vaccination, nuclear power, intelligent design — have been showing signs of purchase in the Trump administration. Even Robinson himself may soon be making tracks for Pennsylvania Avenue. Chief among his financial backers are the Mercers — hedge-fund billionaire Robert and his daughter Rebekah — who are better known these days for their avid right-wing activism and sponsorship of Steve Bannon. In March, reports emerged that Rebekah Mercer had made the case for Robinson to be the nation’s new national science adviser. “It would be an honor to do it,” he told me.
“He’s one of the founders of this whole movement,” says Joseph Bast, CEO of the Heartland Institute, which has served for 20 years as the leading think tank of the push to challenge climate science. Last year, when Robinson joined Heartland’s board of directors, Bast called him “as bold and brave a person as I have ever met.” Now Bast says that courage has been vindicated. “Time will tell,” he promised, “but it certainly seems like Robinson’s views are winning the day.”
“I’m ordinarily smart,” Robinson likes to say, as if that means he were no more clever than the average man. In fact, he has an extraordinary gift for selling average men on his ideas, and for making even subtle science seem like common sense. He’s been raising private money for his research since the 1970s, mostly on the basis of his grit-and-wit appeals to reason. Robinson is, if nothing else, a master simplifier. It’s a skill he learned from Linus Pauling: He’s the sort of guy who can flatten any topic, no matter how abstruse, into a pair of axes hand-drawn in the air. He mimes the X and Y dimensions with his fingers as he talks, explaining, for example, how samples of a person’s urine, taken over time, could yield a running readout of their health. “When you hear about a scientific subject that is said to be very, very complex, with lots of things to know, and only the expert can approach it,” he tells me, “you know they’re blowing smoke in your eyes.”
In the late-1990s, when Robinson first got into questioning the evidence for human-caused climate change, he spent six months reading through all the science he could find on atmospheric carbon dioxide. His final report, written with his son Zachary (the veterinarian) and two other scholars, cited about 150 academic papers and concluded — in a characteristic plain-spoken manner — that human activity “has not harmfully warmed the Earth.” In fact, Robinson and his colleagues went further still, claiming both in their review and an attached petition that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 would produce “a host of beneficial effects” for the planet. (His belief in the likely benefits of global warming makes Robinson somewhat unusual even among his cohort of contrarians.)
That review of climate science has been hugely influential among climate skeptics, says Bast, precisely on account of its simplicity. “It was a standard reference tool and an important publication,” he explains. “Art was one of the first to say, ‘This isn’t too hard for the layman to figure out.’ … You can go through it, even though you’re not a scientist, and say, ‘You’re right, that doesn’t make sense.’”
The same approach — simplify, clarify, persuade — has been on display for more than 20 years in Access to Energy, a libertarian newsletter that Robinson writes for 3,500 annual subscribers. (Robert Mercer is a reader.) The publication’s subject matter ranges far beyond the power grid: Robinson says it’s meant to serve as his corrective for all manner of irrational and unscientific thought; to counteract panics over pesticides and freak-outs over global warming; to teach its readers, as he puts it, “not to ‘trust and parrot’ the politically motivated statements of the press, politicians, and other self-interested parties” on scientific matters; to preach data directly to the people, so they can reach their own conclusions instead of being force-fed their ideas by science-policy elites in Washington. That is to say, Access to Energy has functioned as the house organ for Robinson’s peculiar brand of science populism — as if Breitbart had been crossed with Discover.
“Science is entirely a populist subject,” he tells me. If we don’t need some expert committee to tell us whether the atmosphere is warming, then we certainly shouldn’t let ourselves be bullied by whatever “custom and culture” happens to prevail in any other scientific circle. Custom and culture: these are dirty words for Robinson, representing the creaky machinery of public science, funded by the government through rusted peer-review committees and indifferent to nonconformists like himself. We can cast aside the custom and the culture, he says, and learn about the science for ourselves. That’s alt-science in a nutshell: It’s the freedom to draw one’s own conclusions from the facts.
Robinson has made ample use of that freedom. He currently serves as vice president of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness — an outré association of science-minded nonconformists, conspiracy theorists and dissenters (also funded by Robert Mercer). “Art is revered by those people,” says Bast, who has attended several of DDP’s annual meetings. At this year’s event, which took place in August on the theme of “Restoring Greatness in American Science and Health,” presenters spoke about the bullying of climate skeptics, the widespread use of phony global-warming models, scientific misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency and the story of Chernobyl and other “radioactive fairytales.” Robinson himself gave a talk on the “vaccine controversy” — he believes they’re given too early in a child’s life, as a rule — and there was a banquet reception for the infamous anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield. Earlier meetings have attacked the science linking HIV and AIDS and questioned claims that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction.
Several of these radical positions were aired in a contentious interview between Robinson and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in 2010. Four years later, Maddow said Robinson “currently leads for The Rachel Maddow Show hall of fame balloting for weirdest interview on this show ever.”
“Science is entirely a populist thing,” Robinson says again. “It’s a way of using the individual human mind. That means one man can be right, and everybody else can be wrong.
“And if he’s right?” he continues. “Well, then, their ideas are going to fall.”
In a dusty and defunct building on the Oregon ranch, what used to be a mouse room now is home to a handful of flies. In the old days, Robinson would irradiate his lab animals, frying their backs with ultraviolet light until they developed squamous cell carcinoma. Then he’d check to see how their cancers might respond to changes in their diets. “We could vary the growth rate of cancer by tenfold, according to what we fed ’em,” he said, describing the results of some 40 experiments going back to his time on the faculty of the Salk Institute at UC-San Diego in La Jolla.1 “The poorer you feed ’em, the poorer the cancer grows.”
Robinson’s elfin face perks up whenever the subject turns to science, and he likes to punctuate his stories with a wheezy, blurted exclamation of delight. It wasn’t just that poor nutrition stopped the cancers’ growth, he said; according to his research, a wholesome diet seemed to make the mouse tumors more robust. “Take a gram of vitamin C per day, and it improves your health, but it’ll make your cancer grow faster, too. Heeeh!”
This alarming result — that eating well can feed the thing that kills you — all but wrecked Robinson’s career, he said: “I worked with Linus Pauling for 15 years, and then he and I got in a fight over those mice.” Pauling had been insisting that a daily mega-dose of vitamin C could prevent or cure three-quarters of all cancers; now Robinson had data that pointed in the opposite direction. “That experiment was the end of our collaboration. The 15 years were over.”
One can say the break with Pauling set the stage for much of what followed: Robinson’s decampment with his family to this secluded ranch; his turn toward radical conservatism; his reinvention of himself as a cowboy scientist; his pursuit of longer life in freezers full of urine; and now, finally, astoundingly, the prospect of his going to the White House.
It took only the slightest interrogatory nudge for Robinson to launch into a wistful account of his relationship with his former mentor, starting with the moment when they met, while Robinson was still an undergraduate at Caltech in the early 1960s.
It was right around the time that Pauling won his second Nobel Prize. The first had been for chemistry; the second, a Nobel Peace Prize, recognized Pauling’s anti-nuclear activism. In 1958, the world-famous chemist had submitted a petition, signed by 9,000 scientists (including 35 other Nobel Prize winners), to the United Nations, calling for a ban on nuclear-weapons testing.
But Pauling’s activism — and sympathy for left-wing politics — had repercussions for his career. Though he was still a member of the faculty, Pauling didn’t have access to a lab at Caltech. So instead he found a bunch of undergrads to run experiments for him while school was not in session. And in 1962, he hired Robinson — a young man from Texas with a natural gift for laboratory work — to supervise the summer research.
Back then, Robinson never read the newspaper and paid no mind to Pauling’s politics, nor in fact to politics of any kind. He’d been “raised a normal American,” he said — the only child of a homemaker and a senior engineer for Union Carbide: “My father was in love with petrochemical plants, and my mother was in love with him, and that was it.” When he got to California and started taking classes, he found himself ensorcelled by Professor Pauling’s brilliance and enthusiasm.
A few years later, their paths would cross again at UC-San Diego, where Robinson had been hired to the faculty as a biochemist. Pauling, who arrived there in 1968, was about to make a sharp left turn in his career, to pursue an alt-science theory of his own: Though his ample expertise had been in biophysics, he’d lately grown obsessed by the healing power of vitamins. One day he came into Robinson’s office with a paper that he’d written for Science magazine. Pauling already held a strong belief that large doses of vitamin C would yield enormous benefits for health; now he was proposing, in the nation’s most prestigious scientific journal, that nutritional supplements might also be a salve for mental illness.
Robinson’s idol, and one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, was asking him for help in pursuit of this unusual idea. Pauling would be the theoretician and Robinson the experimentalist. The two began by running simple tests to figure out what happens to your body when you mega-dose with vitamins. Robinson would analyze samples of his subjects’ urine so he could figure out how much of each nutrient would be excreted — and thus how much had been absorbed. What he and Pauling really wanted, though, was a global readout of well-being — a yardstick they could use to optimize their dosing. That’s when Robinson had the thought to measure all the metabolites in urine that he could and to try to use the pattern as a master-code for diagnosis, a “metabolic profile” that could serve as a holistic estimate for health.
The two would spend so much time together on this project, hashing out ideas at Pauling’s ranch in Big Sur, that Robinson — whose parents had passed away quite suddenly and tragically just a few years prior — began to think of Pauling as a second father. Eventually the two men hatched a plan to start a private institute where their out-there studies could be financed through direct appeals to donors. For Pauling, at the end of his career, the move off-campus was not so risky. For Robinson it would be a leap of faith. At just 31, he’d already been told by his department head in San Diego that he was close to getting tenure. Yet the promise of the work with Pauling, and of their search for gold in human urine, proved irresistible. So in March 1973, Robinson resigned from UCSD and kicked in $100,000 from his family inheritance to rent out a small, brick building on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. This would be the site of the duo’s new nutrition labs, at what they dubbed the Institute for Orthomolecular Medicine.
Robinson and Pauling had always been a mismatched pair: the older man, a brilliant theoretician from the Pacific Northwest, and his earnest protégé, a whiz-kid experimentalist from Houston. Pauling wore a beatnik’s black beret; Robinson favored jeans and button-shirts in situations where others might be wearing suits. Their differences went still deeper: Pauling leaned toward socialism; Robinson turned out to be a vocal libertarian. Pauling was an atheist, Robinson a faithful Christian.
The polar split extended even to each one’s fundamental sense of purpose. Pauling saw the world in pain and said it was his mission to diminish human suffering. Robinson arranged his goals around the sanctity of human life and any means that he might use to increase its quality, quantity and length. The bylaws of their institute tried to span this philosophical divide: The purpose of its research, they declared, was both to extend people’s lives and also to make those lives less miserable.
For a time, the rival forces of their personalities seemed to foster a productive tension, like the pulling of the cables on a suspension bridge. Then their partnership collapsed. Robinson claims the falling-out began with that mouse experiment — the one in which he showed that too much vitamin C could make a tumor grow instead of shrink. In contemporary press reports, Pauling called that work “amateurish.” Pauling’s wife, Ava Helen, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, and Pauling was convinced that he could save her with 10-gram doses of ascorbic acid — more than 150 times the recommended daily amount. (She died of the disease in 1981, five years after her diagnosis.) Others say the rift between the men had nothing much to do with those experiments or with Ava Helen’s cancer; rather it arose from administrative disagreements. In any case, in late-summer 1978, Pauling had Robinson removed from his position as the president in Menlo Park.
The man who once felt like Pauling’s surrogate son now found himself orphaned for a second time. He responded to his firing with a $25 million lawsuit that would drag on for another half-decade, while his work on metabolic profiling — the reason he’d quit his job at UCSD and the centerpiece of his plan to save the world — came to a sudden halt. According to Robinson, a thousand cryogenic urine samples drawn from newborn infants, along with 200 magnetic tapes and 15 filing cabinets full of paper records, were summarily tossed out. “We lost everything,” he told me.
***
By the age of 36, Robinson had turned his back on academia and been evicted from the institute he’d helped create. Now he set off into the wilderness with a plan for starting over.
The more he tried to pull away from Pauling, though, the more it seemed their fates were drawn together. It was as if the falling-out had left Robinson with a driving need to be his former mentor’s mirror-opposite — a Pauling anti-particle, flung into a rival orbit. In 1980, Robinson took his family to Oregon — where Pauling had grown up — and built a lab so he could finish up their research on his own. He brought along the sign that had been out in front of his and Pauling’s place on Sand Hill Road: The same letters that once spelled out INSTITUTE OF ORTHOMOLECULAR MEDICINE were now scrambled and affixed (with a few new ones added) to the front wall of his homemade laboratory: OREGON INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE.
Robinson’s politics,2 like his science, also seemed to bloom in Pauling’s shadow. Pauling and Ava Helen had been terrified at the prospect of a nuclear war, and they’d spent a major portion of their later years organizing to abolish nuclear testing. Robinson and his wife (and research partner) Laurelee were also scared of nuclear devastation, but took a different tack: Starting in 1985, they became involved in “civil defense” and the disputed notion that a war with the Soviets would be survivable in shelters. From their ranch in Oregon, they started building these shelters in trailers and selling them to FEMA. They also worked on developing a nuclear-fallout diet and distributed a book on “Nuclear War Survival Skills,” which gave instructions for how to make a radiation meter from an old beer can, among many other patched-together doodads.
And where Pauling had been vocal on the health risks posed by radiation — in 1958, he participated in a famous televised debate on this topic with the theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project pioneer Edward Teller — Robinson spoke out in favor of nuclear energy. He forged his own, more cordial relationship with Teller and became an advocate for the unconventional theory of “radiation hormesis,” which holds that small doses of ionizing radiation are actually a boon for public health.3 It’s not coincidental that half of Robinson’s children have Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering: As the years went by, the Robinsons have been exactly as devoted to atomic power as the Paulings were against atomic weapons.
Then there was the Paulings’ influential 1958 petition, signed by 9,000 scientists, calling for an end to nuclear-weapons testing. (This would be the activism for which Pauling won his Nobel Peace Prize.) In 1997, Robinson organized his own petition, applying Pauling’s method to a different cause — that of climate-change skepticism. Robinson sent around his take on atmospheric science with the petition, with a cover letter from the well-known physicist, contrarian and tobacco-industry consultant Frederick Seitz. Eventually this mailing would yield 31,000 signatures, including that of Pauling’s adversary, Edward Teller, and many of the nation’s other leading skeptic scientists. Among these were a set of deregulatory pundits, the so-called “Merchants of Doubt,” who had spoken out for years on behalf of conservative think tanks and big business: Seitz, as well as Fred Singer, William Neirenberg and Robert Jastrow.
Robinson’s petition would be just as influential, in its way, as Pauling’s work on nuclear testing. Sen. James Inhofe, author of “The Greatest Hoax” and the Capitol’s leading climate-change skeptic, has described the document as “one of the first things [he] looked at” as his doubts developed, and he’s referenced it repeatedly on the floor of Congress, in claiming that the notion of “consensus” on the matter is a fraud.
“I think [the petition] was tremendously important,” another signer, the Princeton physicist and noted climate-change contrarian William Happer, told me recently. “It showed there are lots of highly credentialed scientists who really know a lot about the details of the science and don’t agree with the alarmists.” (In the past few months, Happer, like Robinson, has been short-listed for the job of science adviser to President Trump.)
Those climate skeptics are still in the minority: In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey of scientists connected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 87 percent said climate change was mostly due to human activity. But Robinson’s work has been instrumental to the others.
“Art Robinson is the reason many of us are in this room,” the Heartland Institute’s Bast told a conference of climate skeptics several years ago, in reference to the 1997 review paper and petition. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here.”
***
The Robinsons served me lunch across the gravel road from their homemade lab and urine freezers, in the home where Robinson still lives with his two unmarried sons, Noah and Matthew. There’s an embroidered sign posted on the wall beside the kitchen: “The more laws, the less justice.” The living room feels somewhat wedged between a large wood stove that heats the house and a full-size church organ, about 15 feet wide with lanky pipes that loom into the rafters where dust bunnies dangle to their metal tips from a skylight.
“This was made in 1878,” Noah told me. He bought the instrument for several thousand dollars from a beautiful stone church in Vermont after he’d come across a listing on eBay. “It’s a little out of tune, but it plays.”
Matthew gave a demonstration, briefly banging out a spell of dirge-like music that reverberated throughout the house. “It’s a nice hobby,” Robinson said when his son had finished playing. The boys have been picking up colossal and unwanted instruments from churches all across the country; by now, they’ve accumulated six or seven, toting them back to Cave Junction in pieces, then assembling them on-site. “Laurelee loved the pipe organ,” he added. “She would have loved to have had a pipe organ.”
The loss of Laurelee was the next of Robinson’s misfortunes, following his falling-out with Pauling. In the fall of 1988, not so many years after Ava Helen succumbed to cancer of the gut, Laurelee started feeling ill. One night she felt a pain inside her abdomen before she went to bed. By sunrise her pancreas, diseased and inflamed, had secreted digestive enzymes onto a nearby artery, boring through its wall. Laurelee bled to death before anyone had any idea of what was happening.
The tragedy left Robinson a hypochondriac. With every minor ache, he worried that he might die and leave his kids as he had been, without a parent. Again, it seemed to him there ought to be a simple diagnostic tool — a quick and easy way for people to obtain a global readout of their health. “My wife was sitting here with a very bad stomachache, and any profiling tool could have immediately diagnosed her, and surgery would have saved her,” he said, referring to the technology that he’d been working on with Pauling and which he’s once again pursuing on the ranch. “I brought Laurelee up here and we built this place,” he said. “I don’t know where she got that disease, but my guess is that if we’d stayed in La Jolla, she’d still be alive. It would have been a different life. So I look at all this, and I know I’m lucky — I’ve got six wonderful young people working here, and they’re all brighter than me so I’m having fun. But she’s dead and the profiling was delayed for many, many years. So if I could do it over again …”
He paused. If he could do it over again, he might have kept his job at UCSD and tried to to do some work on profiling on the side. Or else he might have figured out a way to stave off Pauling’s “self-destruction” and continued with their work in Menlo Park.
That’s not what happened, though. The split from Pauling, and the death of Laurelee, sent Robinson hurtling further out into the fringe, where he found a small but ardent caucus of contrarians: scientists, like him, who had abandoned — or been ejected from — the normie, left-leaning research community and who made common cause in puncturing prevailing views on smoking, DDT, radiation, depletion of the ozone hole and changes to the climate. When his old life fell apart, Robinson had to find a new and different one, and a new and different way of doing science.
***
After lunch — a plate of watermelon slices, with cream of mushroom soup poured over white rice — Robinson told me more about his urine project. It sounded like the end point of his long, peculiar journey as a scientist and the knotty nexus of his life’s loose ends. While much of Robinson’s philosophy and many of his scientific views are informed by his politics, the work on profiling seems to float above all that, buoyed mainly by the goal that he put forth so many years ago when he started work with Pauling: to increase the quality and quantity of human life. But then it’s also anchored in the grief and grievance that cast him out into the wilderness, almost 40 years ago.
We headed back across the gravel road, past the schoolhouse building where Robinson used to sit and do his work, after Laurelee had died, while his kids did theirs with barely any supervision. When it got too cold in there, he put UV lights above the children’s heads to keep them warm. From there we strolled by a dilapidated chicken coop and a truck-sized billboard for one of his congressional campaigns, and then back into the lab with its hippopotamus spectrometer.
Other, more mainstream biochemists have been far too conservative in their attempts to do profiling, he told me, showing off some sample data on a poster, a broad array of spectrographic peaks. Instead of looking at all the different compounds in a sample, and a dataset with thousands of dimensions, they play it safe and study just a handful. “Their papers have one foot in what we’re doing, but they also have one foot in the past,” he said. “I’m sure the field will move, until 50 years from now, it will just be this” — he gestured at his poster — “but the move will be a slow one, because of custom and culture.”
Robinson’s “custom and culture” would seem to be a product of what he sees as the present, fallen age of science, if not of society at large. He likes to talk about the time before “the bureaucracy got control of science,” back when the nation’s “wild cards,” its humble and inventive folks, could still puzzle out their theories over many years of private work. They’d toil in a basement on their own, he said, solving problems for themselves, and then they would appear one day, blinking in the light, to share their big discoveries.
“Progress in science requires freedom to do what you want,” Robinson declared.
Standing there beside him in the hills of Oregon, I was tempted by the epic sweep of this idea. If the government won’t pay to build a giant urine archive, Robinson will build one on his own. Maybe sifting through those drops of pee really will extend our lives, or maybe it won’t. Why not celebrate the fact that someone has the guts to try?
Robinson’s plan isn’t even so far-fetched, at least in principle. Other, more mainstream scientists have pursued the same idea, skimming diagnoses from body fluids using giant reams of spectrographic data. This approach has at times been perilous: In one prominent case from 2002, a team of researchers claimed to have discovered a data pattern in patients’ blood showing whether they had ovarian cancer; that finding, published in The Lancet and cited several thousand times, turned out to be an artifact of statistical noise. Yet many still see promise in this grand approach to data-driven medicine: In April, the life-sciences division of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, began a major trial along the lines of Robinson’s. “Project Baseline,” which involves both Stanford and Duke universities and is likely to cost more than $100 million, will follow 10,000 people over four years to see what clues about their health might be gleaned from samples of their blood, saliva, tears and feces.
Indeed, several of the contrarian arguments that alt-science types have championed now seem pretty reasonable, and certain beliefs in Robinson’s portfolio have won out, in a sense, even among environmentalists. It’s no longer off the wall, for example, to suggest that DDT should be used in fighting malaria in Africa, or that we might benefit from greater use of nuclear power (which, after all, is carbon free).
But then, how are we to know which refutations of consensus science will end up seeming more or less correct, and which are nothing more than dangerous denialism? Which diversions from the mainstream path might lead us somewhere fruitful, and which are guaranteed dead ends? Can we really trust Art Robinson to help us make these weighty judgments, just because he’s plain-spoken and persuasive?
Or put another way: If science really is a populist phenomenon, then aren’t we at risk from science demagogues? Take Pauling, another master simplifier. In the 1950s, he convinced a lot of people that nuclear testing was a major risk to public health, based on data that Robinson now claims was “entirely incorrect.” And later on Pauling was nearly as persuasive, for a time, on his theory that vitamin C could eradicate all cancers. What if a great scientist’s skill as a communicator leads us into ruin?
“Linus was a very convincing individual,” Robinson admitted. “This is a failing of human nature that people can be driven by the most effective speaker, and that’s something we have to live with.” But if the wrong guy wins a debate or two, he said, that’s OK, because usually, the truth will come out in the end.
“Suppose I’m a charlatan, but a convincing charlatan,” he continued. “Then some people will voluntarily provide money for my work, and that’s perhaps a loss because they were fooled. But that’s not a big loss. When they earn money, it’s their privilege to spend it as they wish. … That’s a different thing than imposing something from above, something that diminishes the freedom of scientists.”
It occurred to me that the movement Robinson helped create often presents itself as free and independent — as embodying pure and populist resistance to a groupthink status quo, imposed by the elites. Yet I’ve also learned from past experience that scientific-skeptic views are often nurtured with specific ends in mind. Scientists who took tobacco money had a stake in saying cigarettes were not so bad. The Heartland Institute takes aim at mainstream climatology, while critics note its links to ExxonMobil and other companies that benefit from fighting regulation.4 All this to say: Alt-science often doubles as a beachhead for self-interest, if not a vehicle for greed.
Robinson’s ties to Heartland connect him to big business, at least indirectly, and it’s possible that the Mercers, or other wealthy donors, are in his ears on certain matters. (The Mercers did not respond to requests for comment on this story.) Still, I get the sense that he’s secured a different kind of independence. It’s hard to figure how his plans to study pee would carry water for his funders. Working only with his family, raising money as he does, Robinson seems to have walled off a space in which he can set his own alt-scientist’s agenda. On this sheep ranch in the hills, strewn with scrap metal and iron horseshoes, kitted out with electronics purchased second-hand, taxidermy animals and reconstituted pipe organs, his views do not appear to be controlled by any corporation. His way-out research is his own.
That doesn’t mean he’s free, exactly; only that his constraints come from within. His work is tied into a lifetime’s worth of trauma, and a long-held tendency to flout convention. I don’t mean to flatten out a complicated life into a pair of X-Y axes, but sometimes it does make sense to simplify: Robinson has tried to build a private fortress up in Oregon; he’s tried to break apart the shackles of consensus science; he’s tried to liberate his thinking from the so-called experts’ point of view. But in the end, he’s just as stifled and constrained as all the rest of us, wrapped up in the conflicts of his past.
Daniel Engber writes about science and culture. @danengber
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Trump's NOAA nominee supported privatizing weather data.
AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers is a businessman, not a scientist. His nomination to oversee U.S. weather and climate data is raising concerns.
President Donald Trump has nominated a businessman who has supported the privatization of weather data to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees the National Weather Service.
The nomination of Barry Myers, the chief executive of AccuWeather, has raised concerns among some that installing a non-scientist with a vested interest in privatizing government data could result in the hobbling of an agency that provides a critical function in weather forecasting, oceanography and climate science.
"We've now had several nominees at NASA and NOAA who have really pushed the idea of privatization of government functions," said Andrew Rosenberg, the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "That just flat out worries me."
In announcing Myer's nomination, AccuWeather issued a statement calling him a veteran leader and saying he would step down from the company if confirmed. His brother, AccuWeather Founder, Chairman and President Joel Myers, said: "On a personal note, as his brother, I have known him all his life, and I know he will be fully dedicated to serve the nation's needs in a rational and ethical way."
In 2005, AccuWeather worked with Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill that would have severely restricted public access to the National Weather Service's forecasts. Two days before Santorum introduced the bill, his political action committee received a $2,000 donation from then-CEO of AccuWeather Joel Myers.
From 2003 until mid-2005, the Myers brothers donated more than $11,000 to Santorum and the Republican party, according to the Associated Press.
The bill, which died in committee, would have allowed commercial weather information providers like AccuWeather to continue to access NOAA's weather data, but it would have blocked NOAA from putting out products that could be considered in competition with what the private sector was making available.
What's to Ensure Future Data Get Collected?
At the time Santorum's bill was introduced, Paul Sandifer was working as a senior scientist at NOAA. He remembers how concerned scientists within the agency were then at the prospect of privatizing data. "Those concerns are some of what I'm worried about now," he said.
"If the collection of data is turned over to the business community, what's to ensure that the data that are really needed for the future get collected? Particularly if it's given over to politically motivated private sector folks," said Sandifer, who was the chief science advisor for NOAA's National Ocean Service when he retired at the end of 2014.
In the last few months, in particular, the strength of NOAA's data and forecasting has been evident as Americans have been caught up in several natural disasters, including wildfires and hurricanes.
"Think about the recent disasters: in every one of those situations there were NOAA government officials talking about the information they had on hand and people understood the validity of that information," Sandifer said. "It wasn't coming from one side or another—it was the right information."
Another NOAA Nominee with Business Interests
Myers is not the only recent NOAA nominee with a business interest in NOAA's work.
In early October, Trump nominated Neil Jacobs to be the assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction. Jacobs is the chief atmospheric scientist for Panasonic Weather Solutions, a private company that, like AccuWeather, has worked toward the privatization of certain data.
In July, Jacobs testified before the House Science Committee, advocating for the proprietary model that his company developed, which he said was "better" than NOAA models. Panasonic currently sells some its data to NOAA—a relationship that could fall under Jacobs' purview if confirmed for the NOAA position.
In announcing the nominations, the Trump administration touted the business acumen of both men.
Myers' Family Business Presents a Conundrum
Rosenberg worried in a blog post that the companies' past ambitions may come to fruition.
"It is easy to see how private weather companies like AccuWeather or Panasonic could directly benefit from decisions made by Myers and Jacobs," he wrote.
In an interview with InsideClimate News, he elaborated: "Myers is going to make decisions on what happens to the Weather Service, the climate programs and so on. And that will directly affect the business that he has built, his family owns and presumably he goes back to."
It presents a conundrum, Rosenberg said: "Does he recuse himself from those decisions? Then he's heading an agency and recuses himself from a quarter of decisions. And if he doesn't, how does he serve the public interest?"
A third NOAA nominee, Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, who is a former Navy oceanographer, has been named to assistant secretary of commerce for conservation and management. His nomination was met with praise by members of the scientific community.
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Now even climate-change believers count as ‘deniers.'
Even if an opinion is wrong, debating it will teach more people what is right. And if the opinion is right, it offers an opportunity to exchange error for truth. Instead, we’re left with just one “right” way of thinking.
Al Gore recently had a telling altercation with a journalist. The Spectator’s Ross Clark wanted to ask him about Miami sea-level rises suggested in the new film, “An Inconvenient Sequel.” The reporter started to explain that he had consulted Florida International University sea-level-rise expert Shimon Wdowinski. Gore’s response: “Never heard of him — is he a denier?” Then he asked the journalist, “Are you a denier?”
When Clark responded that he was sure climate change is a problem but didn’t know how big, Gore declared, “You are a denier.”
I was recently on the receiving end of a similar rebuff from Chile’s environment minister. I’d written an op-ed for a Chilean newspaper that, among other things, quoted UN findings on how little the Paris climate treaty would achieve and argued that vast investment in green energy research and development is a better policy. Marcelo Mena proclaimed, “There is no room for your climate-denying rhetoric in Chile.”
Something odd — and dangerous — is happening when even people who accept the reality of man-made climate change are labeled “deniers.” The unwillingness to discuss which policies work best means we end up with worse choices.
Consider the case of Roger Pielke, Jr, a political scientist who worked extensively on climate change. He believes that climate change is real, human emissions of greenhouse gases justify action and there should be a carbon tax.
But he drew the ire of climate campaigners because his research has shown that the increasing costs from hurricane damage is not caused by storms made more intense by climate-change but by more and pricier property built in vulnerable areas. He took issue with the UN’s influential International Panel for Climate Change over a chart in its 2007 report that seemed to imply causation when there was only circumstantial evidence.
Pielke was proven right, and the IPCC’s subsequent outputs mostly accepted his arguments. Yet, he was the target of a years-long campaign, including a massive but baseless takedown that later turned out to have been coordinated by a climate-campaigning think tank funded by a green billionaire, alongside an investigation launched by a congressman.
Pielke left climate change for other fields where “no one is trying to get me fired.” And sidelining him has made it easier for climate-campaigners to use hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria to argue for carbon-cut policies, even though these will do very little to prevent future hurricane damage.
Pielke finds that we should make relatively cheap investments to reduce vulnerability, like limiting floodplain construction and increasing porous surfaces. Ignoring this means more harm.
“Ten years ago we did ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ Its predictions...
Leaving out dissention echoes the worst of the leaked “ClimateGate” e-mails. In 2004, the head of a leading climate-research organization wrote about two inconvenient papers: “Kevin and I will keep them out [of the IPCC report] somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Journalists also ensure debate “purity.” In Scientific American, climate writer and former CNN producer Peter Dykstra stated baldly that “climate denial extends beyond rejecting climate science,” comparing policy questioners to Holocaust deniers and dismissing my own decade of advocacy for a green energy R&D; fund as “minimization.”
This intolerance for discussion is alarming. Believe in climate change but wonder how bad it will be? You’re a “denier,” says Gore. Believe, but argue that today’s policies aren’t the best response? You’re a denier, says Chile’s environment minister. Believe, but point out problematic findings or media reporting? There’s no room for you, say the self-appointed gatekeepers of debate.
The expanding definition of “denial” is an attempt to ensure that public and policy-makers hear from an ever-smaller clique. John Stuart Mill calls this “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion.”
But even if an opinion is wrong, debating it will teach more people what is right. And if the opinion is right, it offers an opportunity to exchange error for truth. Instead, we’re left with just one “right” way of thinking.
With dissidence on the Paris Treaty not allowed, we are on track to lose $1 trillion to $2 trillion annually to achieve what the United Nations finds will be 1 percent of the carbon cuts needed to keep temperature rises under 2°C.
That’s not the right way to solve climate change. Saying so denies nothing but economic illiteracy.
Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
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GAO to probe whether Trump administration is protecting agencies’ scientific integrity.
The Government Accountability Office will look at whether the Trump administration has violated the scientific integrity policies of two dozen departments and agencies.
Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), left, and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), right, talk with Michael Sparks, the chief executive of the industry group Florida Citrus Mutual, in September. (Tamara Lush/AP)
The Government Accountability Office will look into whether the Trump administration is safeguarding scientific integrity.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) asked the GAO to investigate the issue on Sept. 25, calling media reports of political appointees screening Environmental Protection Agency grants and officials at multiple agencies purging references to climate change and other scientific information “troubling.”
“It is vital that science be impartial and free from interference, suppression or distortion,” wrote Nelson, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
In 2009, President Barack Obama instructed all federal science agencies to develop and adopt scientific integrity policies; by last December, 24 departments and agencies had complied. Nelson requested that GAO assess the status of those policies within the federal government, including how adequate they are in ensuring impartial research and communication, whether “the administration has violated scientific integrity policies” and whether federal scientists are aware of their rights.
GAO informed Nelson on Tuesday that it would accept his request but said the work “will begin in about four months when staff will become available.”
“Reports that administration officials are trying to muzzle and intimidate government scientists, especially those engaged in climate research, are deeply disturbing and must not be tolerated,” Nelson said in a statement. “We have to get to the bottom of this and put a stop to any meddling that occurs. Scientists must be free to carry out their work without interference.”
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Coal boss takes climate change denial to the extreme.
Bob Murray claims Earth’s getting colder (just ignore those rising global temperatures). A Murray Energy lobbyist is now Trump’s nominee for No. 2 at EPA.
Bob Murray claims Earth’s getting colder (just ignore those rising global temperatures). A Murray Energy lobbyist is now Trump’s nominee for No. 2 at EPA.
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
OCT 11, 2017
Bob Murray, CEO of the nation's largest privately held coal company, adamantly propounded some common talking points of climate denialism while lauding plans to repeal the Clean Power Plan during an appearance on PBS NewsHour. Credit: PBS NewsHour
The Trump administration avoided making any statement on the science of global warming as it moved to revoke the Clean Power Plan, but one of its most influential coal-industry allies made clear he is pushing outright rejection of the scientific consensus.
"We do not have a climate change problem," Murray Energy Chairman and CEO Robert Murray said Tuesday on PBS Newshour as he lauded the repeal decision. He asserted that "4,000 scientists" had told him that "mankind is not affecting climate change."
This is a level of denial that even the most ardent opponents of climate action in the Trump administration rarely speak out loud, and it flies in the face of the scientific consensus.
But Murray, who is head of the nation's largest privately held coal company, adamantly propounded some of the most common, and thoroughly debunked, talking points of the denialist camp.
"The Earth has cooled for the last 19 years," he said—an utter falsehood.
Murray dismissed all evidence to the contrary as "a natural cycle," not the result of a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, mostly from the combustion of fossil fuels, which scientists say is the principal cause.
Coal Baron Urges Trump to Go Farther
Murray said he has counseled President Trump to go further than reversing the power plant rule that is the Obama administration's signature climate change policy; he has also urged repeal of the 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endangered public health and welfare. That finding, grounded in peer-reviewed science, is the underpinning of the Environmental Protection Agency's actions on climate change under the Clean Air Act.
"My stand is that the endangerment finding needs to be repealed, that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant," he said.
Although Murray has made similar statements in the past, his latest refutation is more detailed, and comes at a time when his position to influence policy has become increasingly apparent. Last week, President Donald Trump nominated Murray Energy lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to be deputy administrator of the EPA. Wheeler, who is also a former aide to hard-core climate denier Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), must be confirmed by the Senate for the post as No. 2 to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Hearings have not yet been scheduled.
Pruitt, like many in the Trump administration, has stopped short of outright denial of climate change. In his rationale for repealing the Clean Power Plan, he did not discuss science but focused on EPA's authority under the Clean Air Act and its method of cost-benefit analysis.
Hard-line opponents of federal climate policy, like Murray, have argued that that effort will be on shaky legal ground unless the Trump administration rejects the finding that carbon dioxide causes harm. This puts them at odds with a number of industry groups, including other fossil fuel companies, which have urged a more cautious policy—continued engagement in the Paris climate agreement and replacement of the Clean Power Plan with a more narrow set of regulations.
Murray, who supported Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris accord, made clear his advice to the administration now is to dismiss mainstream assessments of climate science as a hoax.
Deeply Invested in a Fossil Fuel Future
Murray has bet heavily on the future of coal through a series of acquisitions over the past decade. With a dozen mines in six states, the company says it has capacity to produce 65 million tons of coal per year, and says it owns three billion "salable" tons of reserves.
Murray has worked assiduously for years to head off federal climate regulation. In fact, emails obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy showed that Murray conferred with then-Oklahoma Attorney General Pruitt in 2015 after the Obama EPA announced its plans for reducing carbon emissions from the electric power sector. Inhofe acted as a go-between, arranging a phone meeting between the two.
Murray Energy is a leading plaintiff in the ongoing litigation over the Clean Power Plan.
Murray was an enthusiastic supporter of Trump during last year's presidential campaign; at a time when many fossil fuel executives held off on supporting his campaign, Murray hosted a fundraiser for him in Charleston, West Virginia, weeks before the Republican convention that netted at least $580,000 in donations. Murray also was one of the top donors to Trump's record-breaking inaugural fund, with a $300,000 contribution.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marianne Lavelle
Marianne Lavelle is a reporter for InsideClimate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, "Unequal Protection," on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities.
She can be reached at marianne.lavelle@insideclimatenews.org. PGP key: bit.ly/PGPML15
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The myth that ‘business’ hated Obama’s clean power plan.
“It was really just a small minority of businesses that were against it.”
The Trump administration has long portrayed the Clean Power Plan, a signature Obama-era initiative to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, as a policy overreach that was bound to cost the economy jobs and constrain economic growth. That’s why, in announcing Monday he would repeal the Clean Power Plan, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said that the reversal was a way of listening to the needs of businesses. Regulations “ought to work with folks all over the country and say, how do we achieve better incomes by working with industry, not against industry,” Pruitt said Monday, in Hazard, Kentucky.
He was partially correct. Some business groups did indeed laud the reversal Tuesday. The president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute said that the group had “always believed that there is a better way to approach greenhouse gas regulations than the [Clean Power Plan].” Peabody, the nation’s biggest private-sector coal company, said it supported the repeal, adding that the plan would have raised power costs and damaged reliability.
But the Clean Power Plan, which which would have required states to meet certain individualized targets to limit emissions from existing power plants, was also supported by a wide array of businesses. Many big companies that have publicly pledged to reduce their environmental footprint would have been happy to see a shift toward more renewable energy, and even stood to benefit from it if it brought their energy costs down. The divide highlights something that is becoming increasingly obvious as the Trump administration rolls back various Obama-era policies: The business world isn’t a monolith, and some benefit from regulations that others detest.
In the legal battle over the Clean Power Plan that eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which put the plan on hold last year, many of America’s biggest companies filed briefs in support of the plan. Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft were in that camp, writing that while they are big consumers of electricity, they have all tried to limit their environmental impact because of concerns about climate change. Thus far, they have had to develop their own renewable energy facilities in order to meet their own goals, but the Clean Power Plan would provide them with more—cheaper—options, they argued. They also suggested that they want to take steps to protect the environment to forestall future natural disasters and global public health crises—events that would be both humanitarian and business disasters. “Delaying action on climate change will be costly in economic and human terms,” they argued.
When asked for comment Tuesday, Google referred The Atlantic to a joint statement from Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft in March, when President Trump issued an executive order calling for a review of the Clean Power Plan. “We believe that strong clean energy and climate policies, like the Clean Power Plan, can make renewable energy supplies more robust and address the serious threat of climate change while also supporting American competitiveness, innovation, and job growth,” the statement read.
Consumer brands such as Adobe, Mars, Ikea, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts supported the plan too, writing that, as businesses that buy a large amount of power, they are sometimes challenged to find enough renewable-energy sources. The Clean Power Plan would have made it easier for them to meet renewable energy goals that they have already issued; revoking it will make that more difficult. Furthermore, they argued, the Clean Power Plan helped create a timeline for how the mix of energy sources would be changing in the future, which meant they could make plans taking those changes into account; repeal of it will create further uncertainty.
Dominion Resources, an energy company that operates Dominion Virginia Power, a utility that serves 2.4 million customers in Virginia and 100,000 in North Carolina, also filed a brief supporting the Clean Power Plan, in part because the way the state of Virginia was implementing the plan would allow the company to build more natural gas plants—something that would have meant that in the long run Dominion could have been ahead of other utilities in power-generation capacity. Wind and solar energy companies supported the plan, too.
“It was really just a small minority of businesses that were against it,” John Quigley, the former Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, told me. Quigley held hearings around the state about the Clean Power Plan, and told me that while coal companies and manufacturing associations were against it, utilities said they just wanted some sort of regulatory certainty, and gas companies stayed out of the debate. Overall, he said, about 80 percent of the comments received by the state of Pennsylvania were positive, though that also included comments from private citizens and advocacy groups.
Indeed, the list of companies supporting the Clean Power Plan raises the question of who Pruitt was referring to when he said the Trump administration wanted to work with, rather than against, industry. The companies supporting the Clean Power Plan are among the biggest employers in the country, and also contribute the most to economic growth—the four combined tech companies have a market value of $1.7 trillion.
There may have been some reason for small manufacturers to be worried about the Clean Power Plan, according to Stephen Munro, a policy specialist at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research firm. A credit system set up through the Clean Power Plan to incentivize low-carbon energy could have raised the cost of electric power. Opposition was really concentrated among small and mid-sized manufacturers that were big consumers of power, including the metals industry and textile companies, he said.
Businesses opposing the rule in court include the railway Norfolk Southern, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, and the coal company Peabody. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has already lost the membership of dozens of U.S. companies over its stance on environmental protection, and various state and local Chambers of Commerce also opposed the Clean Power Plan, arguing that it would make it more difficult for local businesses to operate because it would increase energy costs. They argued the plan would increase unemployment for people who work at coal plants and those businesses that support coal workers. The rule, they argued in a brief, would affect rural communities whose utilities would shut down because they won’t be able to afford to make the shift away from coal. “The result will be economic disaster,” the brief from 166 state and local business associations argued.
But many energy-industry analysts say predictions of economic disaster are overblown. In fact, said John Larsen, an analyst with The Rhodium Group, current market trends mean that many businesses are shifting away from coal anyway. Natural gas costs continue to stay low, and the price of renewables like solar and wind keep falling, motivating more companies and utilities to make the shift. According to a recent analysis by the Rhodium Group, at most 21 states would have had to do something to comply with the Clean Power Plan, while the rest would have met requirements of the rule through their existing efforts. “I think there’s a small group of very vocal critics of the Clean Power Plan that are happy today,” Larsen told me. Other businesses may have to become more vocal if they want to achieve similar results.
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Five charts that show Tony Abbott is the one who has lost sight of the science.
Tony Abbott's speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation provides a mix of partial truths that are designed to create a plausible whole.
Tony Abbott's speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation provides a mix of partial truths that are designed to create a plausible whole.
As one leading climate change scientist noted in private on Tuesday, "most statements have the classic element of truth but once confronted by the balance of evidence the statements are true but irrelevant, or true to a point and then misleading - classic sceptics' stuff".
Still, there are enough clangers to suggest Abbott either can't read a chart or is tapping some data source that has somehow escaped the attention of the many global climate monitoring bodies from NASA to the UK Met Office or Australia's Bureau of Meteorology.
Here are some of Abbott's standout claims, and the charts that counter them.
'Only 0.3 degrees'
"Temperatures in Australia have only increased by 0.3 degrees over the past century, not the 1 degree usually claimed," is one of Abbott's statements.
According to the bureau and CSIRO's State of the Climate 2016, here's what we're seeing in Australia:
The only pockets of Australia to have warmed less than 0.5 degrees since 1910 are located in a couple of places in NSW (though not Manly, as it happens) and Western Australia.
'Photos show no sealevel rise'
Staying local, Abbott has this to say about sea-level rise: "More than 100 years of photography at Manly Beach in my electorate does not suggest that sea levels have risen despite frequent reports from climate alarmists that this is imminent."
Consider, first, the lean likelihood of avid snappers catching the same point of the tide at the same place over the years.
Imagine, too, the future lawsuits when owners of coastal developments that have been washed away submit to the court grainy, faded photographs explaining they had no idea what they were buying into.
Coastal sea-level rise can be quirky, but for those wanting to project future development, Geoscience Australia provides projections, even for Manly.
In the meantime, this readily available information from CSIRO showing global sea-level rise is accelerating:
Abbott might want to acquaint himself with the reasons for that rise in sea levels, including the well-understood fact 93 per cent of the extra heat being trapped by extra greenhouse gases ends up in the ocean.
A warmer ocean, not surprisingly expands. The melting ice caps, glaciers and sea ice absorb about 2 per cent of that extra heat and most of that ice melt ends up in the ocean, lifting their levels.
While just 2.3 per cent of the extra warming ends up in the atmosphere and 2.1 per cent in the land, that happens to be where most of the temperature readings are made and where our own lives are lived out.
Blame the sun
So here's Abbott's interpretation of what's been going on, temperature wise: "Certainly, no big change has accompanied the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over the past century from roughly 300 to roughly 400 parts per million or from 0.03 to 0.04 per cent."
And if anything is going on, let's not blame it all on CO2, he would have us believe: "Evidence suggests that other factors such as sun spot cycles and oscillations in the Earth's orbit are at least as important for climate change as this trace gas."
Blaming the sun, as it happens, is one of the top two climate myths raised by deniers, according to the Skeptical Science website, and one of the first ruled out.
The following chart from that website helps to knock a few of Abbott's misleading interpretations on the head:
Solar radiation has in fact been on a cooling trend for the past three decades, and yet temperatures have continued to climb. And they are clearly much closer to 1 degree higher over the past century than 0.3 degrees.
This chart, also helps to put this claim by Abbott into perspective: "Even the high priests of climate change now seem to concede that there was a pause in warming between the 1990s and 2014."
News Corp commentators such as Andrew Bolt regularly play up that "no warming" has occurred in the past 10, 15, 18 or so years.
By taking the top of the record-high El Nino year in 1998 it is possible to see warming slowed. But note Abbott conveniently ends in 2014, forgetting to include the fact that year - a record for warming - was then beaten by 2015 and 2016.
While examining a single month rarely tells us about longer-term trends, September surprisingly set global records according to preliminary data even without an El Nino influence.
'More good than harm'
Abbott would like to have it both ways. If there is warming, and if we were to be driving it, perhaps it's not a bad thing after all.
"At least so far, it's climate change policy that's doing harm; climate change itself is probably doing good; or at least, more good than harm," he said in his speech.
Australians happen to live in a nation with a highly variable climate, especially for rain.
There are ample signs of recent heatwaves, including in this spring, to have people worried with reason about the threat of worse bushfires, among other challenges.
Recent research pointing to Sydney and Melbourne likely to have 50-degree days in coming summers was dismissed as "groupthink" by Abbott on Fairfax Media's 2GB.
As the bureau and CSIRO note in their report, though, Australia has been reporting a big increase in the number of extreme heat events, with all the stresses on the health of humans (and other creatures) that they bring:
As the report notes, extreme days are defined as those above the 99th percentile of each month from the years 1910 to 2015.
"In 2013 there were 28 days over this threshold," the report said. "This compares to the period prior to 1950 when more than half the years had no extreme days."
Abbott's speech made little of the fact it was during his two-year stint as prime minister that Australia signed up to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 per cent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels.
The pledge "was a compromise based on the advice that we could achieve it largely through efficiencies, without additional environmental imposts, using the highly successful emissions reduction fund; because, as I said at the time, the last thing we want to do is strengthen the environment (but) damage our economy".
What's 'Herculean' in Chinese?
Quite apart from the ERF being "highly successful" (see here or here), Abbott goes on to say this: "Even if reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely better than futile; because Australia's total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China's."
Well, it turns out China's emissions have actually been flat for several years.
Whether the recent plateau holds or starts to climb again remains to be seen. Concern about urban pollution and the massive construction that has already filled many of the major cities with ample subway lines, highways and tower blocks suggest returning to the run-up of emissions during the 2000-2010 is unlikely.
Perhaps the following chart from Climate Change News, though, is a better pointer to the trends in China, the world's largest carbon emitter:
It shows annual growth of energy consumption. Fossil fuel use has a diminishing share of the extra energy needed to drive what will soon be the world's largest economy.
Giving the cost of solar and wind energy continues to decline at a rapid rate - while fossil fuel extraction is if anything getting more costly as easy to access resources disappear - it's a fair bet if China's energy demand does pick up, coal and oil aren't likely to provide the lion's share of extra supply.
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