Upon the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, the UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton 3rd Viscount of Brenchley proposed a plan for fundamental reform of climate science and climate policy.

With climate disengagement becoming a clear Trump priority, Monckton’s guide is more pertinent than ever.

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1. U.S. withdrawal from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, from the Paris climate agreement and from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The President of the United States should invite the Secretary of State to serve upon the Secretary General of the United Nations, qua Depositary, immediate notification of withdrawal from the Framework Convention on Climate Change and from all protocols or agreements thereunder, including the Paris climate agreement, in terms of Article 25 [withdrawal] of the Convention, which provides for a year’s delay before the withdrawal takes effect.…

“Government reports, writers of opinion pieces, and bloggers posting graphs purporting to show rising or record air temperatures or ocean heat, are misleading you. This is not actual raw data. It is plots of data that have been “adjusted” or “homogenized” (i.e., manipulated) by scientists – or it is output from models that are based on assumptions, many of them incorrect.”

My philosophy when I taught college was to show my students how to think – not what to think. As Socrates said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”

Data is king, I told my students, and models are only useful tools. Any model’s output or any theory needed to be examined and validated using data–and even then used with caution.

The great Nobel Laureate Physicist Richard Feynman taught students that if a theory or educated guess or hypothesis disagrees with experiment or data or experience,

it’s wrong.

“The world’s leaders can’t control their borders, yet they think they can change the weather. The sheer hubris is amazing.”

President Barack Obama may have the worst understanding of the true threats to the U.S.’s other nations’ national security and domestic tranquility of any President in our country’s history.

In 2014, President Obama was proclaiming through his proxies, including Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, climate change was the most important threat facing our nation’s national security. Then in his 2015 State of the Union address Obama stated, “No challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” a claim he reiterated at his commencement address to the Coast Guard Academy in May, stating, “no challenge poses a greater threat to our future and future generations than a change in climate.”…

“The climate-crisis industry is much larger than merely the IPCC and vaguely defined government agencies. Other major players include wealthy, powerful Big Green pressure groups; wind, solar and biofuel companies that offer supposed alternatives to fossil fuels; politicians who have tied their careers, influence and campaign contributions to the global warming/climate change/extreme weather mantra; and journalists and media outlets that have also hitched their wagons to this global movement.”

Georgia Institute of Technology climate sciences professor Judith Curry has perceptively interpreted a recent analysis by economists William Butos and Thomas McQuade on how “Big Players” can distort climate research and other scientific endeavors. Their discussion, and hundreds of comments that followed, deserve careful consideration.

Big Players are institutions and officials who have the funding, influence and power to dictate who receives grants, what research gets published, whose evidence and conclusions receive wide coverage, and whether the findings and related policy proposals will be debated.…