Alan Carlin, November 9, 2016
In March, 2009 I prepared almost 100 pages of comments to EPA concerning the need to revise the draft Technical Support Document (TSD) for the EPA Endangerment Finding for Greenhouse Gases (GHGs).
The three main points in my comments were that the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis is invalid from a scientific viewpoint because it fails a number of critical comparisons with available observable data, that the TSD draft was seriously dated and the updates made to an earlier 2007 version were inadequate, and that EPA should make an independent analysis of the science of global warming rather than adopting the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and US Government reports based on it.
EPA chose to suppress my comments, ignore these recommendations, and issue its GHG Endangerment Finding late in 2009. As I had feared the Finding laid the legal framework for the issuance of a number of EPA regulations intended to reduce emissions of GHGs.
Subsequent research outlined in my book, Environmentalism Gone Mad, made an even stronger case that the alarmist “science” presented in the EPA GHG Endangerment Finding TSD as well as the IPCC reports are scientifically invalid. A new report provides even more conclusive evidence in this regard. There is now overwhelming evidence that the EPA GHG Endangerment Finding is simply wrong and needs to be reconsidered and withdrawn before it leads to even greater economic harm by incorrectly justifying CO2 EPA-imposed emissions reductions that have no measurable effects on global temperatures.
I hope that the new Trump Administration will make this an early priority at EPA if the outgoing Obama Administration fails to do so.
The following letter to five current EPA officials makes the formal case for this:
November 5, 2016
Mr. Arthur A. Elkins, Jr.
Inspector General
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Mailcode 2410T)
1200 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20460
Dear Mr. Elkins:
We write to request that EPA forthwith reconsider - or, more accurately, that it properly consider for the first time - its so-called “Endangerment Finding” (EF) of December 2009 with respect to atmospheric greenhouse gases. As you know, in the EF EPA concluded that certain atmospheric greenhouse gases “endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.”
Real-world events described below, both prior and subsequent to the adoption of the EF, have thoroughly discredited the basis on which EPA purported to adopt the Finding, and indeed have completely undermined each of the three “lines of evidence” on which EPA said it relied for its action. In short, the EF has been definitively invalidated by real-world evidence in accordance with the scientific method. This highly embarrassing situation for EPA is not unexpected, as the EF was adopted by means of a completely deficient process.
As Inspector General of EPA, you are the key person in a position to right this ship. Because of the numerous glaring deficiencies in the process by which the EF was adopted, you have the ability, and indeed the obligation, to takes steps that should lead to a proper reconsideration of the Finding.
During 2009, in the period leading to adoption of the EF, numerous public comments and submissions were provided to EPA. In one such submission, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a petition in which it, among other things, (1) requested a hearing on the proposed EF under 5 U.S.C. Sections 556-57, with all proceedings on the record, and with parties able to submit supporting documents, data and presentations, and (2) asked that EPA have the benefit of full input from its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee. EPA declined to grant these requests.
A key comment submitted to EPA in connection with its adoption of the EF, dated October 7, 2009, came from a large group of some thirty-five prominent scientists. I attach a copy of that comment letter. In addition to pointing out deficiencies in EPA’s process, the October 7, 2009 Letter also enumerated the major questions that EPA would need to answer definitively in order to have proper support for the EF. The letter stated:
“[W]e urge the EPA to address four critical questions, which, in addition to the issues enumerated in the Chamber’s Petition, are central to the EPA’s proposed rulemaking. Indeed, these questions require careful analysis before intelligent public policy can be promulgated. They are:
1 Is the Earth’s climate changing in an unusual or anomalous fashion?
2 Does the science permit rejection of the hypothesis that CO2 is only a minor player in the Earth’s climate system?
3 Can climate models that assume CO2 is a key determinant of climate change provide forecasts of future conditions that are adequate for policy analysis?
4 Can we reject the hypothesis that the primary drivers of the Earth’s climate system will continue to be natural (non-anthropogenic) forces and internal climate variability?”
EPA failed properly to address or answer any of these questions. Instead, it proceeded largely on the basis of unverified climate models and politicized lobbying.
The accumulation of real-world evidence since 2009 has completely undermined whatever basis ever existed for the EF. Most recently, on September 21, 2016 a major Research Report by Wallace, et al., was published on the ICECAP website and at various other locations.
The new Research Report is a definitive invalidation of each of EPA’s three lines of evidence for its EF. The Research Report is based on the best available empirical evidence of world temperatures from thirteen independently-constructed sources, and utilizes the most mathematically rigorous mathematical techniques. The three principal conclusions of the Research Report, which relate directly to each of EPA’s Lines of Evidence, are as follows:
* “These analysis results would appear to leave very, very little doubt but that EPA’s claim of a Tropical Hot Spot (THS), caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world.
* “Once EPA’s THS assumption is invalidated, it is obvious why the climate models they claim can be relied upon, are also invalid.”
* “[T]his analysis failed to find that the steadily rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series data analyzed.” ----"[T]hese results clearly demonstrate - 13 times in fact - that once just the ENSO [El Nino/La Nina] impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no “record setting” warming to be concerned about. In fact, there is no ENSO-Adjusted Warming at all.”
Based on the Research Report, the undersigned sent letters to each of the various scientific societies that have backed EPA’s “consensus science” approach to climate change issues, asking them to reconsider their positions. An exemplar of one of those letters is attached.
This situation is rapidly developing into a serious embarrassment for EPA. The economic stakes could not be higher. European nations that have pursued energy policies similar to those pushed by EPA have seen their costs of electricity multiply, and millions of their citizens thrown into energy poverty. It is high time that EPA conduct a proper evaluation of its endangerment hypothesis. Such a proper evaluation should at the minimum include on the record hearings, with opportunities for parties to present supporting data and evidence, as well as full involvement from the Scientific Advisory Committee.
Very truly yours,
Francis Menton
Law Office of Francis Menton
85 Broad Street, 18th floor
New York, New York 10004
212-627-1796
fmenton@manhattancontrarian.com
Alan Carlin
Webmaster, carlineconomics.com
Mr. Menton is a lawyer in New York. He has represented numerous scientists, among them the authors and many of the reviewers of the Research Report cited in this letter, in making submissions as amici curiae to courts including the D.C. Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court on issues related to energy and climate matters.
Dr. Carlin is a retired senior analyst and manager at the US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 1971-2010; previously he was an economist at the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA. He is the author of Environmentalism Gone Mad, Stairway Press, and the author or coauthor of about 40 other professional publications including many on climate science and economics. He has a PhD in economics from MIT and a BS in physics from Caltech.
cc:
Ms. Gina McCarthy
Administrator
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Ms. Janet McCabe
Acting Administrator for Air and Radiation
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Dr. Ana V. Diez Roux
Chairperson, Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Dr. Peter S. Thorne
Chairman, Science Advisory Board
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
EXCLUSIVE: The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States is a “real and imminent threat” to the fight against climate change, and “completely upends every single element” of the Paris Agreement, making it almost impossible to deliver, the MEP leading EU carbon market reform has warned.
Trump, elected today (9 November), has called climate change a hoax, saying it was “fictional”, and “created by the Chinese”.
The president-elect has threatened to pull the US out of the UN deal to cap global warming at no more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels with an aspirational 1.5 degree target. Today, EU Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete wrote to Trump, stressing the need for continued EU-US cooperation.
Ian Duncan is the Conservative member of the European Parliament leading the reform of the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS), the world’s largest scheme for trading emissions allowances.
Reforming the ETS is a major part of the EU strategy to cut emissions in line with the bloc’s climate commitments.
World governments are this week meeting in Marrakech, Morocco for the COP22 climate conference, which aims to thrash out the practical implication of the landmark pact to cap global warming.
“It completely upends every single element of the Paris Accord and almost certainly makes it impossible to deliver,” Duncan said.
Who will listen to US Secretary of State John Kerry in Marrakech now?, he asked. US officials in Morocco are “speaking for nobody but themselves and for an outgoing administration.”
China and the US, the world’s two biggest emitters, ratified the Agreement at the same time, giving impetus to the push that brought the deal into force on 4 November, much earlier than expected.
US AND CHINA RATIFY PARIS CLIMATE PACT, LEAVING EU BEHIND
The United States has joined China to formally ratify the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions, the world’s two biggest economies said on Saturday, which could help put the pact into force before the end of the year.
“The extraordinary thing about Paris was that it came together in the way it did. The 1.5 degree ambition was an incredible thing to see,” Duncan said, One year on and the US participation is now in jeopardy.
“You can’t have the EU alone addressing climate change and nobody else doing it. Your industries will suffer immediately.”
Duncan, who represents Scotland, added, “The ramifications for climate change are a real and immediate threat.”
Dark mood in European Parliament
Duncan spent this morning at a meeting of MEPs from the other major European political parties. They discussed compromised amendments on the ETS bill but there was “no doubt that everyone recognised what Trump’s victory means.”
“A dark mood is the best description,” Duncan said of the meeting. “If we look behind our shoulders and no longer see allies to our left and right, then how far ahead of the pack can we go?”
Duncan, who has argued for climate change to be excluded from any Brexit negotiations, predicted that EU unity on climate action could splinter.
Paris is based on the global pain and cost of climate action being shared, he said. Greater costs being borne by the EU as a result of US recalcitrance could sap political will.
“Carbon trading is one of the best ways to fight climate change and it can be one of the most cost effective, Duncan said.
“If a significant part of the globe has chosen not to accept the Paris accord and its thresholds and targets then it is an issue for some MS who will view their competitiveness in a different way.”
Rust belt and climate denial
One of the major planks in Trump’s victory was his triumph in the Rust Belt, an area dominated by polluting industry and where he said old industries were from yesterday but also for tomorrow.
“I don’t see how you can retreat from that and say global warming is real. That’s a 180-degree volte face,” said Duncan.
“Trump’s views are beyond the established understanding of any of the big questions. It may well be he reflects and moderates but I haven’t seen any reflection or moderation in his approach this far.”
Trump’s victory was welcomed by some MEPs. Roger Helmer, of UKIP, does not believe in climate change.
He tweeted, “Paris is dead, as is COP22.”
There was a post on TWTW that did some follow up on the paper published on Tropical Hot Spot model failures that had a commenter that challenged the ramp step regression that he thought was used. The author has responded, correcting the commenter’s errors, in an email titled Errors, shown below.
ERRORS (in comment not in the paper)
Jim Wallace:
First, I never used the words “ramp step regression” in my discussions with you or in the paper; where did that come from? As the report clearly states, the first step in the analysis is called Time Series Decomposition which was used to determine which functional form best represents the underlying trend in the data. That might or might not be a Ramp Step. Moreover , unlike what you stated, it frequently was not a Ramp Step. See pages 22 & 23, which include the following:
“Section VIII. Tropical Upper Troposphere Balloon Data
The analysis results are shown first for Tropical Upper Troposphere Balloon (1959-2015) data in Figures VIII 1-4 below. In this analysis, for each temperature time series, the first step was to determine via “time series decomposition” the “best fit trend line” among standard functional forms such as Linear, Ramp Step, Step, Multiple Step, etc. The selected trend lines were best of those tested in the sense that they had the maximum R Bar Squared value.----”
And, second to my knowledge, there were no errors in any of the graphs - only 2 mislabeled Figure numbers and one Table number - all three of which were missed by our 7 reviewers and 3 authors! It was easy because the 2 Figures and one Table were right below the text which so stated.
Finally, again to my knowledge, only one person had a problem with charts and Joe responded to him by email as well the 22 people that were copied on his original email. There was nothing wrong with the chart. The commenter did not understand the time series decomposition analysis that was carried out. Furthermore, I seem to recall telling you about this situation.
As an important aside, you stated the following:
“For purposes of government regulations, it is not what the science demonstrates, but what the courts believe. And the courts believed the EPA.”
As I have indicated to you before, EPA won the Endangerment Finding case before the D.C. circuit because our side allowed itself to be in an “Our Paper Vs Their Paper” situation in which case, as a matter of (CAA) law, EPA is deemed the expert and wins - period. That did not have to happen. An empirical evidence based attack on each of EPA’s 3 Lines of Evidence was not made by the plaintiffs.
Ken, in my view, your comments regarding our paper were highly misleading. You might find interesting Alan Carlin’s comments (below)) on our paper. At his request we are adding his name to our list of reviewers.
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The Importance and Unique Aspects of the New Wallace et al. Report
Alan Carlin
Although the very new Wallace et al. report focuses on a new approach to showing the critical absence of a tropical hot spot, which indeed has an important inference of invalidity for USEPA’s principal “line of evidence” in their GHG Endangerment Finding, the report has even more interesting findings about other aspects of climate science. The absence of the tropical hot spot has been discussed for several years, and been ignored by climate alarmists despite the implication of this new finding that CAGW is invalid scientifically. I discussed some of these more interesting findings last week. The report provides considerable support to several of the new hypotheses highlighted here.
The importance of this new study is that the authors very carefully specified multiple simultaneous functional relationships between the most important climate science variables including the critical (in terms of alarmist science) possible dual relationships between CO2 and global temperatures and then allowed the available data to determine the importance of each variable. The report ends by asking why alarmists have apparently never used this approach to determine or assess their “science. Most of their “science” is based on alleged relationships between the variables based on their interpretations of physical science and particularly various computer models of their creation using these interpretations (despite the inherent inability of such models to accurately portray future climate due to the chaotic nature of climate).
The Wallace et al. 2016 study represents a new and interesting approach to climate science research which should yield very interesting and much more valid results since the weight given to each likely variable is determined by available evidence rather than the guesses of carefully selected “experts” and incorporated into their largely arbitrary computer models. As Wallace et al. 2011 said:
The simplest model that can characterize the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration levels and temperature levels must contain at least two simultaneous equations, one for each of these two state variables. Therefore, the climate system must be analyzed using simultaneous equation estimation techniques. Otherwise the parameter estimates of any structural equations will be both biased and inconsistent, which implies they are useless for policy analysis purposes. The existence of a robust atmospheric CO2 equation has been amply demonstrated, thus guaranteeing that ANY modeling system designed to forecast temperature must include at least two equations.
The much more appropriate simultaneous equation approach used in the Wallace et al. 2016 report is notable by its apparent absence (to my knowledge) in alarmist climate science despite the contribution it could and must make if climate science is ever to have any validity.