Word on the street is that tomorrow is the big day when the federal government’s phony-baloney greenhouse gas “Endangerment Finding” will finally get rescinded by EPA. It has now been more than 16 years since this idiotic and massive government power grab got foisted on the American people by the Obama EPA in December 2009.

I don’t have any good insight into what the rescission documentation will look like. If the people writing it do what is really appropriate, they will heap mounds of scorn, derision and ridicule upon the Finding itself, and upon the legions fools, dopes and grifters who continue to try to support it.

While we all hold our breaths for this big moment, I am shamelessly shilling for the February 19 Net Zero Watch in-person event in New York, “Net Zero and Freedom.”

My last two posts have been about the new Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, just out (December 31) from the Federal Justice Center. The Chair of that Center is U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts. The latest version of the Manual is the Fourth Edition. The prior version in 2011 was the Third Edition; and there were also two prior Editions from 2000 and 1994.

In those previous two posts, I principally criticized a newly-added chapter in the Fourth Edition titled “Reference Guide on Climate Science.” Today, I want to take a look at another chapter titled “How Science Works.”

There was no such chapter in the First Edition, but a chapter by that title, written by a guy named David Goodstein (an Emeritus Professor at Caltech), was added in the Second Edition. In the Third Edition, Goodstein’s chapter was somewhat modified and slightly expanded (from 16 pages to 18). Goodstein died in 2024, and in the Fourth Edition he has been replaced by Michael Weisberg and Anastasia Thanukos, who have now produced a chapter with the same title, but now running to some 61 pages.

In my January 31 post, my comment on the Weisberg/Thanukos work product was that it was “not too terrible,” but that it was “way longer than it needs to be” and “the most important points are buried.” Further comparing this chapter to the chapter on (so-called) “climate science” (which is entirely hoakum) I continue the view that there are some good points here. However, there are also some serious flaws, and I don’t want to move on without pointing some of those out.