By Steve Goreham
Originally published in The Washington Times. Republished with permission of author
With barely a whimper from the media, John Kerry is President Obama’s official nominee for Secretary of State. Mr. Kerry is the senior Senator from Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was the 2004 presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. Kerry has also been a long-time crusader in the effort to try to stop global warming.
With the possible exception of former Vice President Al Gore, Senator Kerry has been the most fervent climate hawk in the United States Congress. Kerry believes that “catastrophic climate change represents a threat to human security, global stability, and - yes - even to American national security” and that global warming is man-made. He further states that “Once you accept the science, it’s clear that such massive environmental change will create dislocation, destruction, chaos, and conflict.”
Senator Kerry and his wife authored the 2008 book This Moment on Earth: Today’s New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future, asking the question, “And what, in the face of so many powerful interests defending the status quo, are each of us willing to do, today and tomorrow, to force a change of course?”
True to his convictions, Kerry co-sponsored the American Power Act in 2010. The bill would have established a US cap-and-trade carbon trading system, but died in the Senate without a vote.
Senator Kerry parrots the “science” of man-made global warming with the starry-eyed ideology of a young environmentalist. After tornados killed 50 people in the Southeastern US in February 2008, Kerry appeared on MSNBC and concluded that man-made warming was to blame: “...this is related to the intensity of the storms that is related to the warming of Earth...the storms are more intensive and the rainfall is more intense...” But a simple look at data from the National Climatic Data Center shows that strong tornado activity in the US has decreased since the 1970s.
In a 2009 interview with the Huffington Post, Mr. Kerry stated, “Nowhere is the connection between climate and security more direct than in South Asia - home to Al Qaeda. Scientists now warn that the Himalayan glaciers which supply fresh water to a billion people in the region could disappear completely by 2035.” He was referring to a statement in Chapter 10 of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But in 2010, Dr. Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author for Chapter 10, admitted that the “melting by 2035” statement was not from peer-reviewed literature, but had been added to Chapter 10 to try to put pressure on world leaders. An accepting Senator Kerry fell prey to the ruse.
In another example last July, Senator Kerry warned about rising seas, stating, “With the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone, global sea levels could rise by as much as 3.26 meters in the coming years. And the Pacific and Atlantic coasts may be in for a 25 percent increase above average levels by century’s end.” But, empirical data indicate growth of both Antarctic sea ice and land ice over the last 30 years.
Data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show no increase in global surface temperatures for more than ten years. Nevertheless, Mr. Kerry continues his climate crusade. In a speech on the Senate floor in August of this year, Kerry declared that global climate change was “as dangerous” as nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran. President Obama recently said that climate change would be one of his top three priorities for his second term. Mr. Kerry may be just the man to lead the crusade.
During the next four years, look for Secretary Kerry to boost efforts in a futile fight to stop global warming. The real problems of the world, such as hunger, poverty and disease in developing nations, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation, may need to take a back seat.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the new book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Congressional overseers seek to determine whether the cabinet agencies under President Obama (specifically the Environmental Protection Agency), who promised “an unprecedented level of openness in government,” have hidden communications about official business with the use of private and alias email accounts.
Michigan Rep. Fred Upton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), wrote in a Dec. 13 letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson “that you describe fully the nature and extent of this practice.” Chris Horner, author of The Liberal War on Transparency, first discovered the existence of the accounts as he researched the book. He and his colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute have sued for records from the alias accounts.
At the moment the concern is over transparency, although there are countless potentially embarrassing issues that could have been addressed by Jackson and others over the secret email accounts. Among them are regional administrators whose practice is to
“crucify” oil and gas companies; EPA’s war against coal companies and utilities; excessive, controversial regulations; and heinous experiments on human beings. Other than that there probably isn’t much to conceal from their critics.
The concerns Upton, Stearns, and other congressional overseers (in addition to Horner) have is whether EPA’s records custodians responded to FOIA requests for Jackson’s correspondence by searching her (and others’
alias accounts for relevant materials. The committee leaders asked Jackson for “a detailed description of EPA’s procedures that ensure that all your ‘internal’ email accounts...are included in any search for responsive information or materials when EPA receives Congressional committee requests for information or documents...”
According to Politico (and EPA’s acknowledgment), Jackson used an email alias of “Richard Windsor,” created by the combination of the name of her dog and her former hometown of East Windsor Township, N.J. A day before Upton and Stearns sent their letter to Jackson, Texas Rep. Ralph Hall, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, received an explanation from EPA after he had sent a request to EPA’s Inspector General to review whether the agency complied with the Freedom of Information Act and Federal Records Act.
“Given the large volume of emails sent to the public account - more than 1.5 million in fiscal year 2012, for instance - the secondary email account is necessary for effective management and communication between the Administrator and colleagues,”
Associate Administrator Arvin Ganesan said in the Dec. 12 letter, which was provided by EPA to Politico. He explained that the practice is “commonly employed in both the public and the private sector.”
Clearly Jackson’s flacks are trying to play the congressmen for fools. Her email address for the public to use is “jackson.lisap@epa.gov,” which are probably messages she never sees. The only reason to use an alias that not only is a completely different name, but also a different gender, is to throw any curious outside parties off track about who’s actually involved in the conduct of internal government business. Proper formatting of an alternative email address for Jackson would have been to simply rearrange her name, use initials, or some other identifiable construct.
Other government watchdogs weren’t buying the reasons for the “Windsor” alias either.
“ don’t know any other agency that does this,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, to Politico. “Why would you pick a fictitious name of someone of different gender? To me it smacks of...trying to hide.”
Horner said the excuses were inventions to avoid transparency. In a piece for the Washington Examiner last month, he recounted how Jackson’s counterpart during the Clinton administration, Carol Browner, also maintained an extra email account. When people armed with FOIA requests asked for her electronic records, it turned out that upon search and examination that Browner’s hard drive, amazingly, had been “reformatted.”
He sees a similar pattern developing with the Obama administration, for two reasons.
“One reason is a demonstrated bureaucratic practice of inventing excuses to not search or produce certain files when they don’t want them released,” Horner wrote. “Another is that Obama officials have moved government over to private email accounts, private computers and even privately owned and managed servers. All of these acts indicate a desire to hide what the supposedly most transparent administration in history is up to.”
After Rep. Hall’s request, the EPA Inspector General initiated an audit of the handling of the agency’s electronic records. As the Congressman wrote, “unfortunately, time and again, actions by the Administration on transparency have fallen far short of the President’s rhetoric, in many instances trending away from transparency and toward greater secrecy.”
Hall’s letter (also signed by five other Republican House members) cited similar examples to evade transparency that were employed by employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office. In the case of the latter, Hall noted how the House Energy and Commerce Committee discovered that “at least fourteen DOE officials used non-government accounts to communicate about the loan guarantee program and other public business.” NLPC has detailed many puzzling and outright absurd examples of crony capitalism and inappropriate awards of Recovery Act funds to corporations for the ostensible purpose of creating “green jobs.”
That top officials throughout the Obama administration utilized deeply disguised email accounts may or may not reveal more troublesome conduct, and ought to be explored further. But whether it does or not, there’s already plenty of evidence in the public record that the ethical compass was (and is) broken.
Paul Chesser is an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center and publishes CarolinaPlottHound.com, an aggregator of North Carolina news.
Chilling climate-change news
The Washington Times, Tuesday, December 18, 2012
When politicians want evidence to back up their belief that mankind is heating up the planet, they turn to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Nobel Prize-winning organization was responsible for the famous hockey-stick graph used to demonstrate the purported warming effect of man-made carbon dioxide. IPCC’s notoriety has turned out to be a two-edged sword, as leaks continue to undermine the group’s core message.
In a statement Friday, IPCC officials confirmed the authenticity of a leaked draft of the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report on climate. Skeptics seized upon a chart within the document that compares past IPCC predictions with actual temperature readings. The scientific models of 1990’s First Assessment Report forecast temperatures would rise fast, reaching alarming levels by 2010. The mercury refused to cooperate with the warming hypothesis that year. In 2012, temperatures also were frostier than the generous assumptions in each of the group’s four previous reports.
A sensible explanation is that Mother Nature has been playing a more powerful role in determining the weather than some would care to admit. “Natural events created the biggest peaks and dips in the observations portion of the IPCC chart, and the observations run cooler than the models,” meteorologist Anthony Watts told The Washington Times. The biggest recent drop in global temperatures in 1992 was due to the lingering effects of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The highest temperature in 1998 coincided with El Nino.
Even though the official charts show no significant warming trend in the past 15 years, the planet may be even cooler than the IPCC figures suggest. Mr. Watts, who runs the Watts Up With That website, points out that IPCC is using adjusted data. In a forthcoming scientific paper, he demonstrates that improper placement of weather stations has resulted in the temperature increase being overstated by 92 percent. The last thing government officials want to hear is that the planet isn’t actually warming.
Reality puts IPCC in a bind. Despite the draft chart’s implicit admission that climate models have exaggerated warming, IPCC has not backed down from the tale that carbon dioxide, a natural byproduct of industrial society, is heating the planet. At the same time, the organization realizes it can no longer hide from the widely known temperature data. Billions of dollars are at stake, and politicians expect IPCC to continue drumming up the fears of imminent cataclysm necessary for advancing their classic tax-and-spend liberal agenda. The spending comes in the form of subsidies to trendy “green” companies (usually run by powerful Democratic donors), and cap-and-trade schemes supply the tax revenue.
David Whitehouse
Because governments control scientific research funding, it’s likely the final version of the IPCC report will find a more creative way to disguise the conflict between theory and reality. It may already be too late. Since the 2009 release of the leaked Climategate emails, the public has been less willing to fall for the claim that mankind can control the weather through public policy. In an ideal world, IPCC scientists would realize the next report is their best chance to come clean.
Whatever one’s view about the leaking of the draft IPCC AR5 report it does make fascinating reading, and given the public scrutiny it is now receiving it will be interesting to see what parts of it are changed when the final report is released in a year or so.
One part of it that should be changed is the section on global surface temperature data and its interpretation.
The analysis of global combined land and ocean surface temperature in AR5 is inadequate for what it admits is seen as the prime statistic of global warming. It is highly selective in the references it quotes and in the use of time periods which obscures important, albeit inconvenient, aspects of the temperature data. It is poorly drafted often making a strong assertion, and then somewhat later qualifying if not contradicting it by admitting its statistical insignificance. This leaves the door open for selective and incomplete quoting.
In Chapter 2 the report says that the AR4 report in 2007 said that the rate of change global temperature in the most recent 50 years is double that of the past 100 years. This is not true and is an example of blatant cherry-picking. Why choose the past 100 and the past 50 years? If you go back to the start of the instrumental era of global temperature measurements, about 1880 (the accuracy of the data is not as good as later years but there is no reason to dismiss it as AR5 does) then of the 0.8 - 0.9 deg C warming seen since then 0.5 deg C of it, i.e. most, occurred prior to 1940 when anthropogenic effects were minimal (according to the IPCC AR4).
AR5 admits that of the warmest years on record the “top ten or so years are statistically indistinguishable from one another.” This is sloppy. The “or so” is significant and should be replaced with a more accurate statement. Despite the admitted statistical indistinguishability of the past ten years (at least) AR5 then goes on to say that 2005 and 2010 “effectively” tied for the warmest years! There is no mention of the contribution to global temperature made by the El Nino in those years!
It is in its treatment of the recent global temperature standstill that AR5 is at its most unevenhanded. It says that much attention has been focused on the “apparent flattening in Hadcrut3 trends,” and it says that “similar length phases of no warming exist in all observational records and in climate model simulations.”
No it hasn’t. The IPCC says that the time when anthropogenic influence dominated began between 1960-80. AR5 takes 1979 - 2011 as a period for analysis when temperatures started rising after a 40-year standstill. The fact that is obvious from the data is that the past 16 years of no global temperature increase is unusual and is not an “apparent flattening.” It is a total flattening for 16 years (as AR5 confusingly admits later on), just over half of the duration of the recent warming spell. Flat periods have existed before but they were in the era when mankind’s influence was not significant. The 16-year flatness since mankind has been the prime climatic influence has been the cause of much discussion in the peer-reviewed literature, something that this AR5 does not reflect.
AR5 goes on to say that with the introduction of Hadcrut4 (and its inclusion of high latitude northern hemisphere data) there is now a warming trend. No it isn’t. Look at the Hadcrut4 data and, as the GWPF has demonstrated, it is warmer than Hadcrut3, but it is also flatter for the past 15 years. AR5 also adds that “all products show a warming trend since 1998.” That this is not the case seems to be something that AR5 concedes a little later in the report when it that none of the warming trends they quote are statistically significant!
Referenced And Dismissed
Consider AR5’s summary: “It is virtually certain that global near surface temperatures have increased. Globally averaged near-surface combined land and ocean temperatures, according to several independent analyses, are consistent in exhibiting warming since 1901, much of which has occurred since 1979.”
Nobody doubts that the world has warmed since 1901. But why choose 1901, and what warming is natural and what is anthropogenic? As we have seen the last comment is wrong.
AR5 says: “Super-imposed upon the long-term changes are short-term climatic variations, so warming is not monotonic and trend estimates at decadal or shorter timescales tend to be dominated by short-term variations.”
So since 1979 we have has about 16 years of warming and 16 years of temperature standstill. Which is the short-term natural variation? The warming or the standstill?
AR5 says: “A rise in global average surface temperatures is the best-known indicator of climate change. Although each year and even decade is not always warmer than the last, global surface temperatures have warmed substantially since 1900.” Nobody, of whatever “skeptical” persuasion would disagree with that.
I can’t help but conclude that the pages of the GWPF contain a better analysis than is present in AR5, which is a mess written from a point of view that wants to reference the recent standstill in global temperatures but not impartially consider its implications.
The unacknowledged (in AR5) problem of the global temperature standstill of the past 16 years is well shown in its fig 1.4, which is seen at the head of this article. Click on the image to enlarge. It shows the actual global temperature vs projections made by previous IPCC reports. It is obvious that none of the IPCC projections were any good. The inclusion of the 2012 data, which I hope will be in the 2013 report, will make the comparison between real and predicted effects appear ever starker.
In summary, the global temperature of the past 16 years is a real effect that in any realistic and thorough analysis of the scientific literature is seen to be a significant problem for climate science, indeed it may currently be the biggest problem in climate science. To have it swept under the carpet with a selective use of data and reference material supported by cherry-picked data and timescales is not going to advance its understanding, and is also a disservice to science.