Obama EPA blocks its own report questioning 'climate change'

[ozzmdj]

Transparency?

 

[KittenKoder]

Bah! The EPA is the biggest con job since the Mob.

 

[Alan Partridge]

One report on the science of climate change has been blocked by this administration.

How many reports on science, regardless of climate change were blocked by the Bush administration?

 

[Old Rocks]

Transparency?

So why don't you give us a link to this blocked report? Maybe because it was an unsolicited report from someone who works for the EPA as an economist? And that report was total talking points shit? Alan Carlin is not a climatologist, has not published any paper in that field, and, from the paper he authored, never will have a paper published in a peer reviewed journal.


EPA’s Alan Carlin channels Patrick Michaels and the Friends of Science « Deep Climate

EPA’s Alan Carlin channels Patrick Michaels and the Friends of Science
June 28, 2009 · 19 Comments
A new uproar in the blogosphere has broken out over the supposed “suppression” by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) of an internal review of the EPA’s proposed endangerment finding on greenhouse gases. The review purported to show that the latest “research” calls into question the scientific consensus on climate change. It turns out that the report, written by Alan Carlin, with assistance from John Davidson, of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, is drawn heavily from the contrarian blogosphere, especially Ken Gregory of the Calgary-based “astroturf” group Friends of Science.

And in one case, a lengthy “analysis” of a recent peer-reviewed paper has been lifted, without attribution, straight out of World Climate Report, the climate “news” blog run by uber-contrarian Patrick Michaels.

[Update, June 29: In the immediately subsequent post, I've now established that the Carlin report's central premise, along with four key sections, came directly from a November, 2008 World Climate Report blog attack on the EPA proposed endangerment finding on greenhouse gas emissions.]

The saga began with the release by the “skeptic” think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute of email exchanges between Carlin and his boss, Alan McGartland (who appears to have been wearily determined to get Carlin back working at his real job). This was followed by the release of an 90-page early draft of the report, entitled “Proposed NCEE Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act”. (Warning: At 4 megabytes, this OCR PDF version is only a little smaller than the scanned version at CEI. But the text is searchable!).

[Update June 27: Alan Carlin has just released a slightly revised version of the final report on WattsUpWiththat.com, with all sections completed. (You can download the PDF directly here.) Authorship has reverted to Carlin alone. ]

Surprisingly, the CEI press release was reported with a more or less straight face by at least two media outlets, CBS News and New York Times Greenwire, without any questioning of CEI’s own motivations or role in the affair. (What is Greenwire anyway – just the environmental news that fits online, but not “fit to print”?) Not to be outdone, self-described “liberal skeptic” Tom Fuller of the San Francisco Examiner has been devoting his column daily to the heroic Carlin, who Fuller claims is a victim of a hidebound EPA’s refusal to consider new “research”.

Of course, as shown in excruciating detail at RealClimate, the “research” is mainly regurgitated contrarian talking points (global cooling since 1998! The sun and cosmic rays did it!), repackaged at various blogs. In particular, Carlin has leaned very heavily indeed on Friends of Science director Ken Gregory’s “climate science overview” and in particular his explication of Miskolczi’s” saturated greenhouse effect”. So taken is Carlin with the various explanations of the deficiencies of climate models, that even Gregory’s ramblings at the obscure Niche Modeling blog get quoted at length. Here is Gregory expanding on the idea that “IPCC models all assume that global relative humidity is a constant.”

Yes, I agree. I don’t mean to suggest someone types in relative humidity = constant into the computer code. I said in my write-up “Relative humidity = constant (or various parameters to achieve the same effect.) Is this O.K? They model evaporation and precipitation to achieve an almost constant relative humidity. This is based on short term observations of temperature changes. During these observations C02 concentrations are approximately constant, so these observations only hold true over periods when C02 does not change much. It is invalid to extrapolate these observations to long term periods with increasing C02. [p. 69]

But surely, there has been some actual scientific research published since the cutoff date of 2005 for the IPCC’s Fourth Assesment Report (AR4). Well, yes, as noted in the recent Synthesis Report of the Copenhagen Climate Congress, sea levels are rising and Arctic sea ice disappearing at the upper range of IPCC projections.

 

[Old Rocks]

Did you hear the one about how the Obama administration is fostering a "culture of secrecy and suppression" of science?

That was the claim made by Senator John Barrasso (R-Wy.). At this morning's hearing of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. Barrasso spent most of his time projecting onto the Obama administration a phenomenon he didn't seem to mind when it was actually practiced by the Bush-Cheney administration: censorship of scientific data on climate change, and suppression of the words and works of federal employees.

While Democratic and some of his GOP colleagues spent the morning discussing how to take action on clean energy and global warming with four members of the Obama cabinet, Sen. Barrasso tried to hamstring the hearing. He charged that an EPA economist was squelched from above when he disagreed with the agency's endangerment finding on carbon dioxide.

"What I've seen so far is an administration that is saying, yes we can hide the truth, yes we can hide the facts, and yes we can intimidate career government employees," said Sen. Barrasso.

Calling the accusation of censoring science "a brutal charge to levy," Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the committee chair, addressed it to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.

"I will be brief, because I think this committee has more important and substantive issues to deal with," said Ms. Jackson.

Citing materials released by the free-market advocacy think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, including an exchange of emails between the EPA staffer at the creamy center of this story and his managers, Jackson stated that the "facts do not justify the CEI release."

The EPA employee, economist Alan Carlin, was given permission and encouraged to speak his mind, and find peer-reviewed work to back up his disagreement to the EPA's finding, she said. "I personally instructed staff that Carlin should feel free to circulate [his] memo to anyone he wished," Jackson said, adding, "I don't believe process debates like this are serving the American people" by finding solutions to clean energy generation and ways to stop global warming.

As Grist reporter Jonathan Hiskes has written, there's nothing to speak of to this conspiracy allegation by Sen. Barrasso and others on the right. "EPA Press Secretary Adora Andy noted that Carlin’s education and work expertise are largely in economics, not climatology," says Hiskes. "That’s why his comments on climate science were not included" in the endangerment finding.

Carlin's own report does not back up CEI's allegations, says Hiskes, and recycles several well-debunked global warming hoaxes: that the science is so rapidly evolving that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's reports cannot be trusted; that the globe is really cooling; that the mass of Greenland's ice cap is stable; and others.

The science in the document doesn't hold up. NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt wrote on RealClimate (and Hiskes reposted to Grist, as I'm reposting here):

...what solid peer reviewed science do they cite for support? A heavily-criticised blog posting showing that there are bi-decadal periods in climate data and that this proves it was the sun wot done it. The work of an award-winning astrologer (one Theodor Landscheidt, who also thought that the rise of Hitler and Stalin were due to cosmic cycles), a classic Courtillot paper we've discussed before, the aforementioned FoS web page, another web page run by Doug Hoyt, a paper by Garth Paltridge reporting on artifacts in the NCEP reanalysis of water vapour that are in contradiction to every other reanalysis, direct observations and satellite data, a complete reprint of another un-peer reviewed paper by William Gray, a nonsense paper by Miskolczi etc. etc.

I'm not quite sure how this is supposed to compete with the four rounds of international scientific and governmental review of the IPCC or the rounds of review of the CCSP reports ...

...Finally, they end up with the oddest claim in the submission: That because human welfare has increased over the twentieth century at a time when CO2 was increasing, this somehow implies that no amount of CO2 increases can ever cause a danger to human society. This is just boneheadly stupid.

So in summary, what we have is a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at. Seriously, if that's the best they can do, the EPA's ruling is on pretty safe ground.


Stop Global Warming - Change.org: Boxer, Jackson Blast Sen. Barrasso's "Suppressed EPA Memo" Meme

 

[Modbert]

Ozz did last night with a 22 year old in England who died because he didn't get a Liver transplant. He didn't post the article and tried to blame it on the health care. He however forgot to mention the part about how the 22 year old was an alcoholic.

He only gives the side that makes his beliefs look good.