Conclusions from suppressed EPA report on CO2 Endangerment

[TimBikes]

Originally Posted by SageBrush

If you want to see suppression of EPA, turn the clock back to the Bush era. Reports that reached the White House were returned to the EPA with writing guidance what to include and what to delete; what to discuss, and what to ignore.

So we have yet another instance of the Obama administration continuing Bush policy. Great.

[chogan2]

I'm done/. Not worth responding to.

[quillsinister]

Originally Posted by TimBikes

So we have yet another instance of the Obama administration continuing Bush policy. Great.

That's the exact opposite of true. As the scientists at realclimate.org made perfectly clear, this is a politically motivated study done by unqualified individuals that wouldn't come close to surviving a proper peer review, which is moot anyway because it never got one before the authors attempted to make it a vehicle of policy. It looks to me like the report was squashed because it was an embarrassment. President Bush, by contrast, went so far as to bury Pentagon reports on this issue, disregarding advice from military planners that contingencies be drawn up to deal with the potential geopolitical consequences of climate change; refugees destabilizing governments and such.

You would only have a point if this report in any way constituted good science. It doesn't.

[Shawn Clark]

Originally Posted by SageBrush

If you want to see suppression of EPA, turn the clock back to the Bush era. Reports that reached the White House were returned to the EPA with writing guidance what to include and what to delete; what to discuss, and what to ignore.

Dubya and his fellow conservatives swore to run govt. like a business, and they sure as hell did. What they didn't tell America was that the model was Enron with a bit of Lehman brothers thrown in for good measure.

The above sort of direction is EXACTLY what you see coming from the corporate types...a friend of mine called it "embossment" (vs. empowerment.)

Dubya's admin hired and promoted based on loyalty/faith rather than expertise or competence. I've heard many lifetime conservatives who actually interviewed for positions complain about this (some of whom even got the job.)

[TimBikes]

Originally Posted by quillsinister

That's the exact opposite of true. As the scientists at realclimate.org made perfectly clear, this is a politically motivated study done by unqualified individuals that wouldn't come close to surviving a proper peer review....

So you are telling me that the final EPA endangerment report will undergo peer review? As if.

And RealClimate? They conveniently ignore key points raised by Carlin & Davidson. Current lack of warming (even cooling) in global temperatures. Nor do they comment on PDO. Or hurricane frequency & intensity. Or the lack of evidence for greenhouse warming in the satellite record. In fact, they really don't provide any arguments against any of this, unless you count a lot of meaningless arm waving, talking in circles, and side stepping.

[TimBikes]

Originally Posted by Shawn Clark

Dubya's admin hired and promoted based on loyalty/faith rather than expertise or competence.

And who did Obama appoint to head CIA? Leon Panetta? Haha. Janet Napolitano to head Homeland Security? LOL. Tax cheat Tim Geithner at treasury. Mmhmm - the irony there is just comic. Bill Richardson at Commerce - at least until his transportation corruption scandal broke. Again - what comic irony. Lisa Jackson at EPA - who couldn't even run NJ's toxic waste cleanups correctly so the Bush EPA had to take over. And if your kids go to preschool in an old mercury contaminated thermometer factory, I'm sure she'll get right on it just like she did in NJ. Not.

[robbyr2]

Neither scientists nor administration officials are swayed much by Carlin's or Inhofe's claims. For one -- and the EPA is quick to point out -- Carlin isn't an environmental researcher, he's an economist. What's more, the report was entirely his idea to research and produce. EPA officials never asked him to do it, hence why they didn't give it top billing when he finished. "Claims that this individual's opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false,'' the EPA said in a statement. "The individual in question...was not part of the working group dealing with this issue.'' Climate scientists have also taken to a respected science blog to point out shaky scientific ground on which Carlin built his claims.

The above quotation is from Newsweek. Going on to realclimate.org, I learn that there were two environmental scientists involved, one a coworker of Mr. Carlin's, and one a from the Canadian-based "Friends of Science". This collaboration may well mean that this opinion piece was not written at the taxpayers' expense. All three are entitled to their opinions as is our resident flamer.

There are still some people who believe the earth is flat too, and have scientific evidence to support their conclusion.

And I was unaware that Sen. Inhofe had backpedaled on his view that this "suppression" was a criminal matter. Maybe he isn't so unintelligent. Neither is his status as a climate change denier- coming from Oklahoma (built on and getting by because of fossil fuels- and a nice place to live as I remember).

[Politburo]

Originally Posted by TimBikes

That unresolved issue alone should be more than enough to derail a factual finding of endangerment - since the facts are not entirely known. Carlin's other points - whether you believe he should have released them in the manner that he did or not - only raise additional questions of the EPA's integrity in its endangerment analysis.

As the EPA email notes, "the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment"... facts be damned.

When you add your own opinion into the quote, it does make it much more damning... now you've convinced me!

In any case, this isn't the first finding that EPA has completed. At any point in the past, we did not have the knowledge we have today about many aspects of atmospheric pollution. Using your logic, that we cannot come to a conclusion without understanding every single mechanism at work, we would have never regulated CO, NOX, PM, SO2 and Lead. We would still have widespread acid rain. I could go on, but I know it's just a further waste of time.

[Mike Dimmick]

Originally Posted by TimBikes

So you are telling me that the final EPA endangerment report will undergo peer review? As if.

And RealClimate? They conveniently ignore key points raised by Carlin & Davidson. Current lack of warming (even cooling) in global temperatures. Nor do they comment on PDO. Or hurricane frequency & intensity. Or the lack of evidence for greenhouse warming in the satellite record. In fact, they really don't provide any arguments against any of this, unless you count a lot of meaningless arm waving, talking in circles, and side stepping.

In each of those cases, you're talking about maybe one or two papers that contradict the vast majority of papers on climate science. When results come out differently, that don't fit the prevailing hypothesis, either the hypothesis is wrong, or the data has problems. If you're going to claim that the hypothesis is wrong, you have to come up with a new hypothesis that fits both the new data and all of the old data, or point out the systemic error in the old data that allows that old data to be discarded. You can't simply discard all the satellite data for water vapour, but you do have to reconcile this new source of data with it. The burden of proof is generally on the outlying data because of the mass of data which supports the hypothesis.

One of the features of the scientific method is the prediction part - that hypotheses should predict what will happen in future. You then compare those predictions against what actually happened, to confirm whether the hypothesis is correct or where it needs refining. Then you repeat, constantly refining the hypothesis to make (hopefully) ever more accurate predictions.

The vast, vast majority of data already collected over about 30 years supports the man-made climate change hypothesis. Further, the predictive models - which have been tuned by many iterations of prediction, data capture and comparison - are making pretty good predictions.

Peer review does not mean suppressing data that doesn't fit your worldview. A good scientist should always want data that disproves his hypothesis. But that data has to be weighed against the other data that has already been reviewed, many times over in some cases, and if the data does not fit there is always a suspicion that the way the data was gathered was in some way erroneous, or it was analyzed incorrectly.

This whole problem comes about due to the media's idea of 'balance' being to give both sides equal time. In reality, thousands of scientists agree with the basic hypothesis, because their evidence fits it - very few don't.

The likelihood that the hypothesis is incorrect is very small, and the consequences of it being correct are very serious. Therefore we have to take the steps that the hypothesis tells us are necessary.

[donee]

Hi All,

I have an opinion. Its an intuitive thing, not based on strick facts analysis. But here goes. Is it not suspicious that the paper that supposedly squashed is being portrayed in the same context as the original EPA scientist paper that was squashed by the Bush administration? I think so. As Chogan2 has indicated, to a trained researcher, the recent paper is so faulty, it would not be released by a pier-reviewed originasation. So, I have to think it is a contrivance of the right -worth no more consideration than other such contrivances of the right in the past few years. Why do I conclude this? Because the peer reviewed physical sciences concensus is against this paper.

Which makes this a wholely different situation than the original EPA scientist paper squashing by the Bush Administration. That administration squashed the summary of decades of research by thosands of scientists. This recent paper is none of the above.

So, the apparent goal of the writers will not succeed. And that goal was not to make an effective comment. But to contrive to confuse.