Conclusions from suppressed EPA report on CO2 Endangerment

ok so in a nut shell, the OP refers to a study by someone who basically went out, searched (frantically i'm guessing) until they found "A" (probably couldnt find two) study backing his premise.

and we call this report unusual why?? this is standard fare over GCC, mostly funded by the oil companies and has been going on for decades, so why all this discussion over "business as usual?" i would think that PC'er being more informed on average, than the general public, would have learned by now that responding to these kinds of posts is futile and lends indirect credibility.

 

Point well taken. Unfortunately, most of my relatives are hard-core right-wingers. It all gets a little too familiar.

 

I want to be clear why I consider this little tempest in a teapot to be fundamentally different than the Bush era of quashing science that did not match political agenda:

The EPA is a big place, and conflicting opinions can be expected, even sought. Position papers that reach the White House should be a summary judgement of a concensus of intrepetation of the best science available. I don't think that the exclusion of one shitty paper by an economist who is not competent to write on climate change is worthy of comment.

For comparison .. The Bush White House *refused* summary EPA papers it didn't like. The distinction is vast to any thinking person.

 

This post may broaden the discussion in reference to the EPA's own guidelines concerning scientific data from outside sources and why the IPCC seems to fall outside the EPA's own policies - and yet, they apparently accept the IPCC report as gospel.

Climate Audit Submission to EPA

by Steve McIntyre on June 23rd, 2009

A couple of months ago, I posted on the EPA Endangerment Finding. In Canada, the government would just go ahead and pass the regulations without the long U.S. regulatory processes. In practical terms, some odd coalitions can form for specific policies between people who are worried about energy supply or the impact of energy imports on the U.S. economy and people who are worried about climate. I'm not opposed to governments making decisions, even if I don't agree with the decision.

Contrary to what people on the one hand assume and contrary to urgings of people on the other hand, I don't actually have an opinion on the merits of this particular policy. But there is an aspect to the process that annoys me - the implicit laundering of past stonewalling and obstruction.

EPA guidelines require that highly influential scientific assessments meet a variety of sensible standards for transparency, data availability and due diligence - policies that CA readers know not to have been implemented by the IPCC. I discussed these issues in my prior post and have amplified these arguments in my submission which is online here .
In the submission, I included a consideration of some interesting clauses from the EPA Peer Review Handbook (which appears to be incorporated by reference into EPA Guidelines.)
EPA has to carry out some required processes in order to use a scientific assessment by an external party (mentioning international bodies). One of the requirements is that external party has to submit the assessment to EPA, together with the peer review record, following which EPA officials are obliged to evaluate the material to ensure that if complies with EPA standards (which in this case appear to me to be considerably more rigorous than IPCC standards.)

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is obviously a public document, but it doesn't appear to me that anyone bothered to submit it to EPA (together with the peer review record.) Such a submission would create some interesting issues for ongoing FOI obstruction, e.g. the withholding of Mitchell's Review Comments and Ammann's "private" review comments.
Indeed, the various discussions that we've had over the past months over IPCC's amorphous legal status - i.e. IPCC participants having dual status as government employees, with their IPCC affiliation being applied to yield a cone of darkness over activities which would be subject to FOI if they were "merely" government employees.
Evasion of transparency has been a long-running concern of this site and I've used this comment opportunity to place this and related concerns on the record.
| Category: Disclosure and Diligence, Peer Review | Comments (41)

As to the submission by the EPA employee, apparently he had a window of about 5 days to produce his report. I suspect ther are errors, omisions, oversights etc.

 

We are disputing all of them, because they do not fit the overwhelming weight of evidence that exists to support the hypothesis that human activity is having an effect on the climate, and one of the primary drivers ('forcings') is increase in CO2 levels.

Frequently comparisons made are disingenuous, based on very selective use of start points. Claims that there has been cooling over some period of time typically have chosen a very hot year as their starting point. There are always outliers in data, and you don't get a good sense of trends if you anchor your series on an outlier.

There is disagreement among climate scientists of the exact rate of climate change, and the exact effects we can expect to occur, but it is not in dispute that there is climate change and we can expect disadvantageous outcomes.

 

IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's a collaboration between government environmental agencies.

IPCC's reports are consensus (compromise) reports of hundreds of scientists, some of whom work for EPA - it is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They have had a much higher standard of peer review than your average academic article. There is no need for further review within your government's regulatory agency because pretty much everyone who would have anything worthwhile to say has already had their say at IPCC.

"Review is an essential part of the IPCC process. Since the IPCC is an intergovernmental body, review of IPCC documents should involve both peer review by experts and review by governments."

- from Principles Governing IPCC Work

 

I'm sure it's come up before. It's a common denier talking point.

I'm too much of a n00b to post a URL, but there's a link on skepticalscience . com that I'd recommend. I'll check the archives of RealClimate, too, and see if I can't find anything.

But anyway, the data still shows a pretty significant linear trend.

 

There's also a writeup in NewScientist's Climate Myths section, aptly titled "Climate myths: The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming".

newscientistDOTcom/article/dn11660-climate-myths-the-lower-atmosphere-is-cooling-not-warming.html

And here's the skeptical science link I mentioned (since I found a workaround until I'm less of a n00b):

skepticalscienceDOTcom/satellite-measurements-warming-troposphere.htm

 

If you're seriously trying to convince me that the entire scientific community is involved in a massive, worldwide conspiracy, involving multiple governments (and multiple administrations), all the scientific institutions of national and international standing, in addition to the entire peer review process spanning numerous journals across multiple scientific disciplines, you really need to come armed with something a bit more significant than Bob Carter/Lorne Gunter's classic cherry pick. I'm a heretic, not an idiot.

I have, it's regurgitated often enough by "skeptics", which is why I noted the significant linear trend:



As I pointed out in my post above, the requisite analyses all agree the planet is still warming.

Consistency of Modelled and Observed Temperature Trends in the Tropical Troposphere
Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere
MSU & AMSU Data - Figures
Uncertainty, noise and the art of model-data comparison

And the lower troposphere data isn't our only indicator of warming. There's also magnitudes of observable data that wouldn't exist if the planet were indeed cooling. This, for instance. The Hadley Center puts has the top 8 warmest years on record as 1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2007, similar to NASA's temperature analyses. Cooling? Really?

"Fully" attributable? I haven't seen anyone realistically suggest that. And 4-6? I thought the more likely scenario still hovered around the 2-3 range.

 

An absolutely beautiful post and right to the guts of this issue. But it won't help Tim. His head is too far up his own butt - he'll never admit that his whole argument is based on a big fat LIE! The right-wing blinders are too thick. He's a classic example of biased and entrenched brainwarping. (His next move will be to label me the same way - it's a standard retort, but how easily he forgets that mountains of evidence and the scientific community is against him not us).

 

I've been caught in a lie!! HAH! Since when?

I've said several times, I don't play climatologist - I go with the scientific consensus. Unlike you, I let it do my talking for me.

You are arrogant and idiotic beyond belief to claim that there is cooling when the consensus says there is warming.

 

If Tim were to read realclimate instead of just come here to troll, he would know that the concurrent forcings are down for this decade, which just shows that AGW is preventing what should be earth cooling.

I am *so* bored by denialists.