By Selwyn Duke

President Donald Trump recently reversed the Obama-era “endangerment finding,” which had identified CO₂ as a public-health threat. Global-warming alarmists consider this a step backwards. But, says a man with actual hands-on experience working with so-called greenhouse gases, it’s a step toward sanity.

In fact, writes James T. Moodey on Sunday, “Real scientists have known the truth about global warming for decades.”

What’s more, “There’s an easy test to disprove global warming,” he states at American Thinker. “I did it myself.”

Moodey then elaborates, providing some background on climate-change alarmism’s origins:

The groupthink started in 1994 as a political movement to ban fossil fuels at our country’s first climate change bureaucracy, Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). A local professor wrote a rule for them that became known as “cap and trade.” It required our factories to reduce combustion of natural gas by an average 75 percent over five years. I owned a Weights and Measures gas-physics test-and-repair facility. The air quality district chose my company to test the factories’ gas-physics instruments for accuracy once per year. We witnessed the closing of over 1,200 factories because of that rule.

We were skeptical of the rule’s assumptions, so we tested carbon dioxide. It cools twenty degrees in less than four minutes. It cannot possibly retain heat from day to day (global warming). It does not cause any warming.

Of course, this may or may not be definitive. After all, a given researcher could always be missing something. But the scientific establishment wasn’t interested in finding out.

That is, Moodey brought his findings to a 2014 Heartland Institute conference. He was rebuffed — even by those on “his side.” As he relates:

I offered to build the test bench for a respected professor, who said to me, “We believe that carbon dioxide causes warming; we just don’t know exactly how or how much.” I walked away thinking, “That is the most unscientific statement I have ever heard.”

Moodey says he then realized that tackling all of academia was fruitless. He was astounded at the “groupthink.”

What he encountered, too, was something late author Michael Crichton warned of: “consensus” (pseudo)science. As Crichton put it in a 2003 Caltech speech:

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he … has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

Crichton later added that talk of consensus is a red flag. It “is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough,” he explained. “Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc². Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”

Not anyone, that is, except global-warming alarmists.

Realville

Moodey laments that academia’s groupthink is powered by peer review. He then tells us:

There is no such thing as peer review in the private sector, where we were trained by factory engineers who manufacture gas-physics instruments. At the factories, something either works or it does not, and everything is tested, as science demands.

The only curriculum for gas physics exists at these factories, where engineers must test, and must be correct, or their instruments will not work. Academia provides 100- to 400-year-old theories that were long ago proven useless by factory engineers.

Moodey also realizes that academics are too prideful to seek the private sector’s input. Ensconced in their ivory towers and fancying themselves “elite,” there’s a tendency to look down on uninitiated, un-PhD’ed engineer “grunts.”

The good news is that, a half-generation later, Moodey is finally getting some traction. Former professor Dr. Michael Rectenwald published Moodey’s testing in a new book, The Great Reset. The findings have also now appeared at the Mises Institute, American Thinker, The Washington Times, and Climate Change Dispatch — and now at The New American.

In addition, Moodey sent his results to Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. His correspondence included an explanation of how climate alarmism has been ravaging our factories. So, who knows? Perhaps his testing influenced the Trump administration’s endangerment-finding reversal.

Academia’s Apathy

Moodey further illustrates academia’s unscientific posture with a striking point. He mentions that his business was a major distributor of gas-physics instruments. It boasted the entire Southwest as its territory, too, and its database included every college and university. Yet, Moodey writes:

Not once in thirteen years that I owned the company did a professor call to purchase any gas physics instrument. Had they built a laboratory, like ours or Thomas Edison’s, they would have called us for training or calibration. I believe they have offices where they write papers. Once they publish, they lock their conclusion.

Clearly, many of these academics aren’t seeking Truth, but publication opportunities, fame, and government grants.

I illustrated such scientific corruption in the 2014 essay “Blinding Me With Science: Fraud and Folly for Fame and Funding.” The bottom line:

A shocking percentage of research is outright fraudulent.

And apropos to climate change is the following excerpt from my essay:

As British science writer Nigel Calder pointed out in the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, if he wanted a grant to study squirrels, he wouldn’t ask for just that. Rather, he’d say he wanted “to investigate the nut-gathering behavior of squirrels with special reference to the effects of global warming.” “And that way I get my money,” said Calder. “If I forget to mention global warming, I might not get the money.”

So they get the grant money — from working stiffs’ taxes — and the working stiffs get stiffed economically.

Moodey concludes his article with a challenge to academics: Put up or shut up. Prove your theories, professor, or stop disgorging regulatory-regime models from your ivory tower. Cease pretending to be our betters — just become better at what you do.

This article was originally published at The New American.