Results from GOP inquiry on Climategate

The document you originally cited is attached to the posting. It seems like you should be able to download it -- from here, Priuschat, not .gov. By contrast, the .gov link in my post is to something else -- the minority page on the US Senate environment and public works subcommittee.

But the document is not worth reading in any case.

I think you have it right, with regard to the US Republican party. But, at some level, every country gets the government it deserves.

I blame this on leaded gasoline. Widespread use of leaded gasoline in the US through 1974 meant that the IQ of an entire generation was reduced by about 5%, from the pervasive exposure to lead. And now here we are.

 

tochatihu, you do realize that the fox article was from 2010 not 2011. Minority report has a couple of good themes. Peer review and honesty in science. Then it jumps to the conclusion that since climate gate happened everything is corrupt, and all the non related research needs to be done again. Oh well. That is what happens when the chair is from OK, and doesn't believe in science.

You do realize that lead was used for a long time and would have had more of an effect on Nixon and carter era congresses than the current one. btw IQs have been going up when you don't scale over each generation. Does that mean we should get rid of everyone in congress older than 35? It might help.

 

So there's been 4 separate studies into the data and they've all concluded the same thing? I'm reminded of a quote: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result".

That being said, the concept of "man-made climate change" to me is a little over-reaching. History has shown that climate change can, and will happen during the Earth's life. However, the issue that is darn near impossible to determine for me, is how much of human activity has caused this to accelerate extremely fast. Pollution (cars, electricity, etc) clearly increased exponentially and the chopping down of trees, plants, etc for our lifestyles clearly decreased the natural CO2 absorbers on the planet.

 

So let's use mortality as a metaphor: History has shown that all people die. Engaging in reckless behavior doesn't change that fact. Nevertheless, I wear a seat belt in the car, and I don't play Russian Roulette. I can't say whether this will actually increase my life span, but I can say that it increases the odds. Life is a betting game, and I like to stack the odds.

On the other hand, I don't sit at home in a sealed room. Doing so would help protect me from risk, but at what cost? Life is also a balancing act.

The same is true for climate. We know that all living things have an affect on our environment. Plants made our oxygen rich atmosphere, without which animals like us could not have evolved. Humans, as the dominate animal species, have profoundly influenced our natural world. Some of it is good, some very bad. We live and learn, hopefully.

Tom

 

What you fail to realize is that they are not mutually exclusive! Climate change does indeed occur naturally all the time as the climate is not static. That said, one cannot discount the influence of human activity on climate over the years,, and most especially since the dawn of the industrial age, with the greater concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Icarus

 

This is the same report?
Botched and biased reporting from the NY Times if it is.

[FONT=times new roman,times]Emails 'Warrant Further Investigation'
[/FONT][FONT=times new roman,times]Potential Breach of NOAA Contracting[/FONT]


.: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works :: Minority Page :.

 

AustinG thanks for correcting this. It leaves me having nothing on Fox about 2011 audits and hearings. But I still could have missed it. Hope springs...

Oh now let's not talk about leaded gas! But if you simply must,

Leaded gasoline: history and current situation

Lead was in white paint also, until about mid-1970's.

Anyway the current interest in carbon/climate hearings goes back to the EPA carbon/pollutant ruling. I'd probably have to track 'the hill' website to see if it gets scheduled

 

I wish more of youse guise would point out my misses (like AustinG).

The house has already voted to defund IPCC

House votes 244-179 to kill U.S. funding of IPCC | Climate Science Watch

and to block the EPA carbon/pollutant ruling

The Associated Press: House votes to block EPA's global warming power

Senate overrides? Who knows. Anyway, somebody here must be in a better position than I am to track votes with energy/environmental significance.

 

People drove much more after World War 2 than they did before, and lead in the environment dropped rapidly following the ban on leaded gas. Thus children born in the US from 1945 to 1975 were at greatest risk for brain damage due to exposure to lead. It might take another 20 or 30 years before most of the social and political effects pass away.

 

I was born during that period, and I don't tink I got no dain bramage.

Mot

 

Im a lifelong Democrat .Im actually left of the Dem party.
I think Republicans are liars and stooges to the rich and corporations.
But I must say I think the Republicans are doing the right thing here.
First time in my life Ive ever sided with Repugs on ANY issue.
After considering the lack of evidence for AGW.
It just doesn't add up.
Just remember that Ken Lay and Enron
began the AGW movement and ask yourselves,
Wth?
Today Goldman Sachs ,Morgan Stanley,and the nuke industry are the biggest lobbyists pro AGW.

 

Basically correct, but the peak was sharper and recovery was faster than your comments might suggest. I'm agreeing but filling in the details here.

I couldn't find the chart I wanted on-line but I attached a jpg of it, below, showing US leaded gas consumption, and the sharp peak circa 1970.

The US NHANES provides an accurate record of the transition in blood lead levels after 1976. Blood lead pretty much followed in lockstep with US leaded gasoline use. (And that's not just a coincidence of timing. It showed up in cross-section variation in exposure to exhaust, and recent studies of Chinese cities that have stopped leaded gas show an immediate pre-post change in blood lead levels. That is, in the main, cause-and-effect from leaded gasoline to blood lead levels.





The modern "threshold of concern" for child blood lead levels is 10 micrograms /deciliter. There's actually decent epidemiological evidence that you get some damage at levels lower than that, but since about 1990 that's the level the CDC has set. That's the point at which they are pretty sure you're seeing some neurological damage. In other words, if a doctor finds a kid with >10 ug/dl, they are supposed to take some action to correct it.

Lead (Pb) Toxicity: What Are the U.S. Standards for Lead Levels? | ATSDR - Environmental Medicine & Environmental Health Education - CSEM

By that standard, in the late 70s (peak of leaded gas use), 88% of US children had a least a mild case of lead poisoning.

A Timeline of the Clean Air Act




None of the charts you see will show blood lead back prior to 1976 because that was the first NHANES blood lead survey. Before that, any data you have is haphazard.

There is good epidemiological evidence that 10ug/ml is enough to have a noticeable impact on mental functioning later in life. If anything, as a threshold marker, that may be a bit on the high side for what constitutes a "safe" amount of lead in children.

So, what we ended up with is an entire generation of children with neurological damage from lead. They are now somewhat dumber than they would otherwise have been. And now they vote. And their late-life consequences from early lead exposure are going to raise US health care costs. You find, for example, individuals with higher lead exposure early in life are at significantly greater risk of kidney failure late in life -- those people automatically qualify for Medicare, and their average cost is about 5x the average for the rest of the Medicare program. Not a small issue at all.

I guess it goes without saying that the debate re leaded gas paralleled that on Freon, and now on climate change. It wasn't like industry simply agreed to stop.

 

That's sort of the point I was trying to make. It's not "man-made", but it's highly influenced by human activities. People tend to take them as being mutually exclusive, though. I guess I didn't quite make the point I was getting at.

 

It is funny, because I had not heard of the NOAA being investigated about the leaked emails. I am not surprised that they did not find anything out of the ordinary. It was not nearly as big of a story as Climategate was.

Als, most have moved on even from Climategate as no evidence of wrongdoing was found. Though there might have been a few scientists that may have been disappointed that the earth was not warming as fast as they predicted. The continued investigation of Michael Mann of misusing public funds is not necessary, even Steve McIntyre and Ross Mitrick who had serious doubts about his climate graph think that the investigation has gone too far.

 

On the matter of funding the IPCC, I'm not sure it really matters much. AFAIK they did not do any research. If the Europeans want to fund it that's fine. The US can analyze and fund research on its own with out this organization.

The EPA block is a little more troubling. IMHO the administration did an awful job by allowing congressional democrats to craft a bad cap and trade bill, instead of getting out in front of the issue. The stick was that if it did not pass the EPA would do it. Congress of course can take away this stick. The administration did also anger certain congressmen by granting CARB a waiver on CO2, giving the state defacto power to regulate cafe standards, and this probably brought this action more to a head.

The two main areas, coal power plants can be regulated by the other polutants mercury, SO2, and NOx and tightening restrictions can act like a restriction on these plants. The epa can also go after coal mining pollution.

The refinery side is much tougher, and I am not sure the EPA should be looking at CO2 here at all. The fines and penalties as well of levels of leaked hydrocarbons are still with in the EPAs charter, and many of us have thought they have dropped the ball on these. But regulating CO2 means favoring easy oil like that in Libya over difficult oil like that in the tar sands. This oil will be refined, if not by us, by the Chinese or some other foreign country so the net to the planet on CO2 is the same, but we have security and economic interests in having refining capacity to handle these higher sulfur heavier oils that produce more CO2. Removal of subsidies or a gas tax would make this more neutral with other energy sources, but taxing the carbon is counter productiive.

 

[FONT=times new roman,times]"Highlights from the IG Report[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman,times]Emails 'Warrant Further Investigation'[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman,times]"We found eight emails which, in our judgment, warranted further examination to clarify any possible issues involving the scientific integrity of particular NOAA scientists or NOAA's data. As a result, we conducted interviews with the relevant NOAA scientists regarding these eight emails, and have summarized their responses and explanations in the enclosure." [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman,times]Potential Breach of NOAA Contracting[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman,times]"In addition to the foregoing, we also found two other emails that raised questions, one regarding a 2002 contract NOAA awarded to the CRU...""[/FONT]

 

It's my turn to ask, Wth?

The idea that effects of man-made changes to the atmosphere could be driving up the global temperature has been around before Ken Lay was born. It wasn't until the 1960's and 70's that the mainstream science felt they had enough evidence to pursue this more thoroughly. Remember Soilant Green? That was based on the concept of global warming ruining our farmlands. Pretty sure Enron had nothing to do with that movie.

Not that movies are any guide to science (as "Day after Tomorrow", "Volcano", etc. prove quite handily), but it does show it was in the mainstream consciousness even then.

 

That's a great statement of what the IG intended to investigate. What's more important is what they actually found.

Here's the actual IG report:

http://www.oig.doc.gov/oig/reports/correspondence/2011.02.18_IG_to_Inhofe.pdf

In a nutshell, they started with more than a 1000 emails, and those ten were the only ones worth looking at. That's the context for those quoted statements.

And when they looked, they found nothing of significance. Again, read the report. They found three things:

1) Somebody from NOAA forwarded a cartoon making fun of Inhoffe. (I couldn't make that one up.) Hilariously enough, while the IG said it would be inappropriate to reproduce the comic, then they gave the URL where it is posted:



Tip: As a former fed, rule #1 is, never gratuitously tick off a member of Congress. Many of them are bright, dedicated public servants; many are vain, stupid, egotistical beasts, and the latter will de-fund you just out of spite, the public interest be damned. So whoever at NOAA did this was major league stupid for doing it.

Plus, it's not really very funny, is it? (In case you don't get the joke, just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tropic port on board this tiny ship ...)

2) Somebody at CRU had an email that the IG said suggested that some part of a NOAA grant may not have been spent appropriately. (I didn't read the email that way -- I read it as a request to see how much money was left in that grant account.) Not clear what NOAA was supposed to have done about that and in fact they did nothing.

3) It was not clear whether or not a set of four FOIA requests from 2007 got an adequate response -- the person in question followed the legal advice they were given at the time, but it was a gray area, and there is room to second-guess what they did. At the time, they thought they didn't need to. The IG now says they should have looked harder for the information that was requested.

They also noted that NOAA went over the emails, with their Office of General Counsel when they were first leaked. So this is, in effect, the second legal investigation of the topic.

So it's not whether they looked at some emails, it's what they concluded. The main conclusion, from the report:

"4. The integrity of NOAA's science and its adherence to peer review procedures and federal standards, as reflected in the CRU emails.

In our review of the CRU emails, we did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data comprising the GHCN-M dataset or failed to adhere to appropriate peer review procedures. In addition, we found no evidence to suggest that NOAA was non-compliant with the IQA or the Shelby Amendment. However, the CRU emails referenced a specific IPCC-related FOIA request received and responded to by NOAA in June 2007 that led to our further examination of how those FOIA requests were handled. We determined that, at the time, NOAA did not conduct a proper search for responsive documents as required under FOIA, and, as a result, did not have a sufficient basis to inform the requesters that it had no responsive documents. Given that federal agencies are legally obligated to publicly disclose records under the terms of FOIA, we recommend that NOAA conduct a proper search for responsive records as required by the FOIA, and reassess its response to the four FOIA requests in question, as appropriate. Additionally, based on the issues we identified in NOAA's handling ofthese particular FOIA requests, NOAA should consider whether these issues warrant an overall assessment ofthe sufficiency of its FOIA process."

As I said, read the report, make up your own mind.

Actually, better yet, don't bother. This is just more of the delaying side-show. Having lost on the basis of the science, the only thing left is stuff like this. And de-funding your enemies.

Brief time line:
2007: IPCC wins Nobel (Peace) Price for work on global warming, Arctic summer ice blows through previous record low.
2010: Warmest year on record, per NOAA and NASA (or tied, if you prefer).
2011: Arctic ice extent appears to hit record winter low (Ok, I cheat, it's a bit too early to tell.)
2011: US House votes to de-fund IPCC, Senator attacks NOAA climate researchers.

All we need to do now is repeal the incandescent ban to prove to the world that we have no sense.

I'm still blaming this on leaded gasoline.

 

Thanks for the excellent cites and detail. To clarify, my "20 to 30 years" estimate was not of the time needed for the intensity of lead exposure to decrease, but of the time needed for a significant fraction of today's voters, politicians and business executives now aged 35-65 (who suffered brain damage when they were infants and young children in the period 1945 - 1975) to stop voting, leave office, or quit business, and thus stop influencing policy.

 

Do you have any stats for brain damaged pols? I know I've seen them, but doubt its from lead. Would not the brain damage be greater in places like LA, Detroit, and NYC. If you grew up in Hawaii you were probably safe right, except for the mercury poisoning from fish.....

:focus: