April 21, 2014

There are good reasons Cape Wind has struggled to get off the ground for the past 13 years. Not only is the project outdated, but its location in the heart of Nantucket Sound has now been determined to pose significant risks to a variety of endangered and threatened species. These environmental impacts are the basis of a recent federal court decision that sent both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service back to the drawing board to conduct more scientific reviews.

But Cape Wind’s impacts extend far beyond the environment. The controversial project would also jeopardize public safety, put fishermen’s livelihoods at risk and desecrate sacred tribal lands. As a result of these impacts and the choice of a highly conflicted location, Cape Wind continues to face litigation and opposition.

Likely the single biggest reason Cape Wind is no closer to being built today than it was 13 years ago is simple economics: Its cost is exorbitantly high. Any electricity Cape Wind would produce is guaranteed to be some of the most expensive in New England and the nation.

Cape Wind’s contracted electricity prices start at roughly 20 cents per kilowatt-hour and would increase by 3.5 percent each year to reach an exorbitant 34 cents per kwh in the final contract year. To put these numbers in perspective, Cape Wind would cost $3 billion more than electricity bought at market rates. It would also be more than three times as expensive as competing land-based wind projects that sell electricity at a flat 8 cents per kwh with no annual increase. Cape Wind’s high rates would burden families, businesses and communities throughout the commonwealth.

Leading business groups in Massachusetts organizations that clearly support renewable energy have sounded the alarm about the high cost of Cape Wind. Groups such as the Associated Industries of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership have warned that the state’s energy costs, already far higher than those in most other states, would become even less competitive. Cape Wind’s billions of dollars in added costs would make a difference on where businesses choose to locate and expand.

While Massachusetts businesses and residents would get saddled with the bills, the commonwealth wouldn’t have any new jobs to show for it. Middleboro’s Mass Tank worked tirelessly for two years meeting milestones for Cape Wind after being promised the job to manufacture its turbine foundations. The result? Cape Wind spurned Mass Tank in favor of a European competitor in Germany.

And after years of touting the economic benefits of the project for the commonwealth, Cape Wind signed a contract with a Maine-based company for an electrical service platform, breaking another promise, according to the National Electrical Contractors Association of Greater Boston, and leaving thousands of Massachusetts electricians and contractors out in the cold.

At the end of last year, in an attempt to qualify for $800 million of expiring tax credits, Cape Wind signed a contract with Siemens to manufacture its turbines in Denmark, meaning the outsourcing of even more jobs.

Cape Wind’s longtime struggle to secure financing even with overpriced power contracts in hand, is another strong indicator of just how much of a financial boondoggle the project is. For years the developer has asked the Department of Energy for help by having U.S. taxpayers guarantee its loans. In 2011, Cape Wind was denied a $2 billion loan guarantee from the Energy Department, an amount nearly four times that lost on the now-bankrupt Solyndra. Today, Cape Wind continues to seek hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars from the same agency under a different loan program. And while promises of Danish employment may have helped Cape Wind attract conditional foreign investments from groups like EKF, Denmark’s export credit agency, Cape Wind has yet to receive financing from a single U.S. entity.

Massachusetts is a hub for energy innovation. With all of this talent and creativity, the commonwealth could do so much better than be saddled by an industrial relic with high costs and few benefits. After 13 years, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Cape Wind shouldn’t be built, and it won’t be.

Audra Parker is the president of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

One of my stories in the local newspaper received some kudos but also a mixed review from someone who used Wikipedia to fact check which lead him astray. I thought I would comment on that. I find Wikipedia useful for finding out about people dead or alive and events that occurred. Entries about prior storms for example are generally fact filled and accurate. But not so references about climate skeptics and global warming. That part of Wikipedia can not be trusted as it is carefully controlled as this story from 2008 by Lawrence Solomon on CBSNEWS.com showed. I felt it was worth repeating.

By Lawrence Solomon, National Review On-Line on CBS News

Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus” confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works. As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month. In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia” written and edited by the people who read it - anyone with an Internet connection. So on controversial topics, one might expect to see a broad range of opinion.

Not on global warming. On global warming we get consensus, Gore-style: a consensus forged by censorship, intimidation, and deceit. I first noticed this when I entered a correction to a Wikipedia page on the work of Naomi Oreskes, author of the now-infamous paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, claiming to have exhaustively reviewed the scientific literature and found not one single article dissenting from the alarmist version of global warming. Of course Oreskes’s conclusions were absurd, and have been widely ridiculed. I myself have profiled dozens of truly world-eminent scientists whose work casts doubt on the Gore-U.N. version of global warming. Following the references in my book The Deniers, one can find hundreds of refereed papers that cast doubt on some aspect of the Gore/U.N. case, and that only scratches the surface.

Naturally I was surprised to read on Wikipedia that Oreskes’s work had been vindicated and that, for instance, one of her most thorough critics, British scientist and publisher Bennie Peiser, not only had been discredited but had grudgingly conceded Oreskes was right. I checked with Peiser, who said he had done no such thing. I then corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so. Peiser wrote back saying he couldn’t see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again. I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

Turns out that on Wikipedia some folks are more equal than others. Kim Dabelstein Petersen is a Wikipedia “editor” who seems to devote a large part of his life to editing reams and reams of Wikipedia pages to pump the assertions of global-warming alarmists and deprecate or make disappear the arguments of skeptics. Holding the far more prestigious and powerful position of “administrator” is William Connolley. Connolley is a software engineer and sometime climatologist (he used to hold a job in the British Antarctic Survey), as well as a serial (but so far unsuccessful) office seeker for England’s Green party. And yet by virtue of his power at Wikipedia, Connolley, a ruthless enforcer of the doomsday consensus, may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate after Al Gore. Connolley routinely uses his editorial clout to tear down scientists of great accomplishment such as Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service and a scientist with dazzling achievements. Under Connolley’s supervision, Wikipedia relentlessly smears Singer as a kook who believes in Martians and a hack in the pay of the oil industry. Wikipedia is full of rules that editors are supposed to follow, and it has a code of civility. Those rules and codes don’t apply to Connolley, or to those he favors. “Peisers crap shouldn’t be in here,” Connolley wrote several weeks ago, in berating a Wikipedian colleague during an “edit war,” as they’re called. Read full story here.

By the way in 2010, Wikipedia stepped up self policing but it wasn’t working with Connolley.

We have pieces of this story before, but felt it was newsworthy it appeared on cbsnews.com. Also it is a reminder to you and your children not to trust Wiki as a reliable source. It was a good idea let go astray.

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This was the post he was responding to.

Weather Whys and Climate Wise
By joseph D’Aleo, CCM

This was for the nation one of the coldest winters on record, a throwback to the late 1970s when the world was worried about a coming ice age. Many cities in the north central had their coldest winter ever going back into the 1800s. In Wisconsin, the October to March period was the coldest since 1895. Chicago had the coldest November to March period since records began in 1872. It was also among the snowiest - third snowiest ever in Chicago, snowiest ever in Detroit and second only to 2009/10 in Philadelphia.

What was most remarkable was how persistent the pattern has been since November. The warm interludes were brief. The snow did not come in monstrous snows like 2013 but in frequent moderate events.

POLAR VORTEX

Yes, you can blame it on the now infamous polar vortex. Meteorologists know it is not new but a permanent feature of the Polar Regions. It is an upper level low pressure enclosing the coldest air in the hemisphere and is there winter and summer. In winter it expands unevenly (driven by other factors). In 2009/10 it expanded into the US and brought a record cold winter to the southeast. In December 2010, it was displaced to near the UK, where it brought the second coldest December since the Little Ice age in 1659 and later in the winter the US where it brought big snows. The vortex took aim at Alaska, Europe and China the in the last two winters but this year it was North America’s turn.

This year, it was a warm ocean pool in the Gulf of Alaska that buckled the jet stream and anchored the polar vortex over central North America. This drove persistent cold from the Canadian arctic into the central and eastern US. with a steady stream of storms and frequent snows and many below zero nights.  Chicago had the third most sub-zero days, other locations like Green Bay, the most ever.  The result of all the cold was 92.2% of the Great Lakes froze solid, the greatest since 1978/79. On April 1, the Great Lakes were still 69.1% ice covered, around 700% of normal.

A mass of Siberian air, typically 10-20F colder than Canadian arctic air was captured in January and really amplified the vortex into the central states.  That’s when the media became enthralled with the term, “polar vortex”.

The media in general though has not acknowledged that global warming stopped almost 18 years ago (why it is now called climate change) and in the US winter temperatures have cooled for 20 years (2.26F). Here in the northeast region, the two decade cooling was 1.2F.  Snow, which was supposed to be rare by 2010, instead is occurring at a record pace. In the eastern states, we have had 14 high impact snowstorms this decade (just 4 years in), beating out the 1960s, which had 11 events,

But some might say “Yes it was cold and snowy but that is weather not climate and we hear 97% scientists agree our climate is warming”.

97% CONSENSUS

The late, great Dr. Michael Crichton wrote “Historically the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels, it is a way to avoid debate by claiming the matter is already settled”. 

Surveys of the public and economists find global warming at the bottom of their priorities. Those pushing the warming theory have been trying to convince you that your gut instinct this might be hype based on your wearing out your snowblower and all the snow days eating away our children’s summer vacation and of course those fuel bills is wrong by telling you there’s a 97% consensus of the world’s climate scientists. 

The first ‘97%’ study was an email survey of 10,000 scientists that in the end tallied only the responses from just 77 climate scientists who had published on climate.  They asked (1) is it now warmer than 1800 (the Little Ice Age) and (2) does man play an important role in climate. The answer to both is yes. Surprisingly only 97% agreed. We are fortunately not now in a Little Ice Age and yes man through urbanization and land use changes, has an effect on ‘local’ climates. Another literature study survey that proclaimed 97% consensus has been debunked by follow up peer review and a rework of the first study was rejected by the journals.

That did not stop the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the administration from using 97% as rationale for the policies that Hollywood and environmentalists (both with plenty of money to fund election campaigns) are pushing for. 

The Oregon Petition (http://www.petitionproject.org/) meanwhile lists 31,487 legitimate scientists and 9,029 PhDs who agreed there is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of CO2 or other greenhouse gases will cause in the foreseeable future a catastrophic warming and disruption of the climate and moreover there are many benefits of CO2, an essential element of plant photosynthesis.

BENEFITS OF CO2 ENRICHMENT

Indeed, increased CO2 is a plant fertilizer not a pollutant. Nurseries pump it into the greenhouses. It also makes plants more drought resistant, reducing water needs. Yields for rice, corn, beans and wheat have increased 3 to 5 fold worldwide since the 1960s. Corn yields have increased 6 fold in the US as CO2 rose and are expected to double again by 2030 according to Dr Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan. The economic benefit from increased crop production by CO2 enrichment may total $9.8 trillion by 2050.

The carbon pollution they now talk about is really soot. Soot has been virtually eliminated by ‘scrubbers’ here in the US where particulates are well below current EPA standards but is a problem in China without scrubbers on their coal plants.

The real threat to our physical and economic health comes not from warming and CO2 but potential continued acceleration into colder conditions while we pursue unwise and unnecessary environmental regulations and energy policies.

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And he addressed also this response to a rant letter to the editor by a local recycling committee environmentalist to which I replied:

Thanks for your reply and thank you for the opportunity to set the record straight.

Climate is always changing. Our current climate is remarkably benign compared to the past. This last century continued the recovery from the ice age of prior centuries. We warmed from the 1920s to 1940s, cooled to the 1970s, warmed to the 1990s then have stabilized and begun to cool again this century. This temperature pattern fits to a tee the natural multidecadal changes in the oceans and solar cycles.

The UN commissioned greenhouse theory based climate models continue to fail MISERABLY because they ignore the real climate drivers. We don’t live in the virtual world of the models but in the real world where only real data matters.

When the earth did warm from the 1970s to 1990s, it was in northern latitudes only and that warming stopped 18 years ago. There has been no warming in the tropical atmosphere and oceans for 35 years as shown by balloons, satellite and buoys that measure temperatures down to 300 meters.  This is the area where ALL the greenhouse models forecast warming would be most robust. There has been no increase in drought or flood (NOAA), or heat waves (the 1930s holds 23 of the 50 state records, 38 came before 1960 and there were more cold record than heat records since the 1940s). Hurricanes globally are at a 34 year low. Tornadoes in 2013 were 142 less than any other year on record and the number of forest fires in the US last year was the lowest in the record since 1984. These events will happen, always have and always will but man is not responsible.

You seemed most concerned about sea levels.  The sea level hype has gone on for decades with promises of global increases of 20 feet by Gore and even 264 feet by Hansen. In actual fact, the global sea level rises have slowed dramatically to an average of less than 4 inches a century. NOAA US tide gauges are rising at an average rate of 3.6 inches/century. See this story by Nils Axel Morner, the world’s foremost sea level expert.

Bangladesh is seeing sea levels rise because the land is sinking, as it is along the Mid Atlantic. There has been no rise in sea level at Tuvalu or the Maldives, the poster children of the ‘scare the world’ program of the UN. The author you mentioned to me, Church is a UN IPCC chapter co-lead author and his projections are based on ‘adjusted’ data and model projections. Don’t buy into the disinformation, they are peddling. It is driven by politics.

The real threat comes not from warming but potential continued acceleration into colder conditions. Solar scientists have warned of a major cooling from greatly diminished solar activity, down already 60% since 1990. That would be far more problematic for the world food production and energy needs than an imperceptible, gentle warming.

This is the 212 year solar cycle that caused the last mini ice age in the early 1800s and the major one in the 1600s that caused crop failures and famine and disease.  Russian (here ). German, UK, American (NASA) and many other scientists are warning of this but Washington has ignored it. While we chase a phantom warming based on a failed theory, many worry we may get slammed from a very different, far more threatening change.  Cold is far more dangerous and deadly than warmth.

But many politicians and the environmentalists are determined to destroy our fossil fuel energy industry even as we discover we are blessed with the world’s greatest supply, all to allegedly save the planet, but in reality to gain even more control over our lives.  They put us all in jeopardy of even more unaffordable or unavailable energy in an increasingly brutal climate. Europe has discovered that renewables are not yet the answer. The wind farms will be dismantled starting next year in the UK and they are slant drilling to extract coal from beneath the North Sea) and Germany is building 24 new coal fired plants. They awoke to the reality that those that can afford it the least, the poor and middle class, were hurt most by bad, idealistic, feel good policies.

As of 2011, NASA showed a large spike in eastern Arctic temperatures around the year 1940

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/show_station.cgi?id=620040300000&dt=1&ds=1
Animating

During the previous year, climategate scientists discussed their desire to get rid of the 1940s spike

From: Tom Wigley
To: Phil Jones Subject: 1940s
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 0600
Cc: Ben Santer

It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with “why the blip”.

di2.nu/foia/1254108338.txt

By 2013, they had done exactly what they wanted to, removed the 1930s blip

They accomplished this by an impressive 2 degrees (3.6F) of data tampering, lowering 1940 temperatures and increasing present temperatures.

So were the Climategate scientists justified in removing the 1940s Arctic spike? Scientists in 1940 reported 6C warming and rapidly disappearing ice. The warming was real, and modern climate scientists are trying to rewrite history.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/

Papers Past - Auckland Star - 14 December 1940 WARMER ARCTIC

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The game is Up for Climate Change Believers
Charles Moore

Most of us pay some attention to the weather forecast. If it says it will rain in your area tomorrow, it probably will. But if it says the same for a month, let alone a year, later, it is much less likely to be right. There are too many imponderables.

The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding") has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is - which is, in principle, knowable - and is consequently very cautious about the future which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.

Some of the utterances of the warmists are preposterously specific. In March 2009, the Prince of Wales declared that the world had “only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”. How could he possibly calculate such a thing? Similarly, in his 2006 report on the economic consequences of climate change, Sir Nicholas Stern wrote that, “If we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least five per cent of global GDP each year, now and forever.” To the extent that this sentence means anything, it is clearly wrong (how are we losing five per cent GDP “now”, before most of the bad things have happened? How can he put a percentage on “forever”?). It is charlatanry.

Like most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been inflicted on us over the past 30 years or so in the name of saving the planet.

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.").

These beliefs began to take organized, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolized, the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.

The G7 Summit in Toronto in 1988 endorsed the theory of global warming. In the same year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up. The capture of the world’s elites was under way. Its high point was the Kyoto Summit in 1998, which enabled the entire world to yell at the United States for not signing up, while also exempting developing nations, such as China and India, from its rigours.

The final push, brilliantly described here by Darwall, was the Copenhagen Summit of 2009. Before it, a desperate Gordon Brown warned of “50 days to avoid catastrophe”, but the “catastrophe” came all the same. The warmists’ idea was that the global fight against carbon emissions would work only if the whole world signed up to it. Despite being ordered to by President Obama, who had just collected his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the developing countries refused. The Left-wing dream that what used to be called the Third World would finally be emancipated from Western power had come true. The developing countries were perfectly happy for the West to have “the green crap”, but not to have it themselves. The Western goody-goodies were hoist by their own petard.

Since then, the international war against carbon totters on, because Western governments see their green policies, like zombie banks, as too big to fail. The EU, including Britain, continues to inflict expensive pain upon itself. Last week, the latest IPCC report made the usual warnings about climate change, but behind its rhetoric was a huge concession. The answer to the problems of climate change lay in adaptation, not in mitigation, it admitted. So the game is up.

Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the “subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to learning from the past”. If they read this tremendous book they will see those lessons set out with painful clarity.

Noble cause corruption gone wild. People tend to think of scientists as being unbiased, in climate science, apparently if you aren’t biased, you aren’t doing useful work.

From CFACT: A new peer-reviewed paper published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, titled “Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements”, is openly advocating that global warming proponents engage in mendacious claims in order to further their cause.

The paper appears to openly advocates “information manipulation” to further the cause of man-made global warming and “enhance global welfare.”

The authors, Assistant Professors of Economics Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao, note how the media and environmental groups “exaggerate” global warming and then the offer their paper to “provide a rationale for this tendency” to exaggerate for the good of the cause.

The paper was published on February 24, 2014.

The author’s boldly note in the abstract of the study that the “news media and some pro-environmental have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency.”

“We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA (International Environmental Agreement) which will eventually enhance global welfare.”

The authors of the paper, Fuhai Hong is an assistant professor in the Division of Economics, Nanyang Technological University. Xiaojian Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

The complete Abstract of the paper is reproduced below:

The paper:

Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements

Fuhai Hong⇑ and Xiaojian Zhao
+ Author Affiliations

Fuhai Hong is an assistant professor in the Division of Economics, Nanyang Technological University. Xiaojian Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Correspondence may be sent to: fhhong@ntu.edu.sg.

The authors thank Larry Karp, Madhu Khanna, Jinhua Zhao, two anonymous referees, and participants in the Conference on Global Environmental Challenges: the Role of China for their helpful comments.

Abstract

It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency by using a modified International Environmental Agreement (IEA) model with asymmetric information. We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA, which will eventually enhance global welfare. From the ex ante perspective, however, the impact that manipulating information has on the level of participation in an IEA and on welfare is ambiguous.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science must be getting desperate. More people are growing wise to the lies, doctored data and climate model subterfuge of the anthropogenic global warming crowd. Their lies are disintegrating in harsh winter temperatures and because of the fact that actual temperatures show that the Earth is not getting warmer and that it has not in almost 20 years.

Last week, AAAS issued a new report, stating: “The rate of climate change may now be as fast as any extended warming period over the past 65 million years, and it is projected to accelerate in the coming decades.”

The scientists predicted, according to The Guardian: “An 8F rise - among the most likely scenarios could make once rare extreme weather events - 100-year floods, droughts and heat waves - almost annual occurrences.

“Other sudden systemic changes could lie ahead - such as large scale collapse of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, collapse of part of the Gulf Stream, loss of the Amazon rain forest, die-off of coral reefs, and mass extinctions,” the scientists claim.

The AAAS report presaged the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which is scheduled in coming days, because the AAAS was concerned Americans failed to appreciate the “gravity of climate change.”

“Despite ‘overwhelming evidence’, the AAAS said Americans had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the risks posed by climate change, and had yet to mobilize at a pace and scale needed to avoid a climate catastrophe,” The Guardian reported.

So now no warming is overwhelming evidence of warming? And 100 years of accurate measurements are now predictive of 65 million years?

The AAAS has given up any pretense of science. It should change its name to the American Association for the Advancement of Lies.

Icecap Note Lincoln would have tear dropping from his eyes if he could see how politicized and unscientific the AAAS, which he founded to give him unbiased scientific advice for decision making has evolved to.