By Timothy Gardner, Reuters
Eight scientific organizations urged the next U.S. president to help protect the country from climate change by pushing for increased funding for research and forecasting, saying about $2 trillion of U.S. economic output could be hurt by storms, floods and droughts. “We don’t think we have the right kind of tools to help decision makers plan for the future,” Jack Fellows, the vice president for corporate affairs of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of 71 universities, told reporters in a teleconference on Wednesday. The groups, including the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, urged Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain to support $9 billion in investments between 2010 and 2014 to help protect the country from extreme weather, which would nearly double the current U.S. budget for the area. The U.N.’s science panel says extreme weather events could hit more often as temperatures rise due to climate change. The investments would pay for satellite and ground-based instruments that observe the Earth’s climate and for computers to help make weather predictions more accurate. Neither campaign responded immediately to questions about the plea for funding.
The groups, including the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, urged Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republican rival John McCain to support $9 billion in investments between 2010 and 2014 to help protect the country from extreme weather, which would nearly double the current U.S. budget for the area. The U.N.’s science panel says extreme weather events could hit more often as temperatures rise due to climate change.
John Snow, the co-chairman of the Weather Coalition, a business and university group that advocates for better weather prediction, said improved computers would help scientists forecast extreme weather events more locally, which could help cities better prepare for weather disasters. It could also help businesses that produce virtually no greenhouse emissions, such as wind farms, know where to best locate their operations, he said. The scientists said cooler temperatures in the first half of this year are making their task more difficult. “One of the challenges we face is to make the case that while we are in a period of warming, we should not expect every year to be the warmest year on record,” Snow said. Read more here.
Icecap Note: We believe money for upgraded satellite and improved surface sensing systems is important but that funding for greenhouse warming research and modeling should be slashed. It makes no sense in throwing good money after bad. This research and the models have miserably failed in assessing the real causes of climate change and correctly predicting even the near term climate. More research dollars should be put to studying the sun and oceans, urban and local land use factors, and changes in clouds the real causes of climate changes we have observed the last century. The group of course will use the final landfall of Fay in the Gulf next week and later season storms to try and make their case but congress should resist. See how more and more scientists are saying the cooling will continue, further falsifying the AGW hypothesis here and here.
See larger image of IPCC 2007 model forecasts versus actual temperatures here.
By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That
Regular readers may recall on August 1st a posting where I stated my views on the NCDC report being produced by Dr.’s Karl and Peterson of NCDC (National Climatic Data Center) called Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. They also had a little help from Susan Hassol, writer of the HBO Special Too Hot Not to Handle, produced by none other than Laurie David. That explains the “emotionally based graphics’ in a science document.
I wrote then: “To say the least, I’m shocked that NCDC’s leadership has changed from being the nation’s record keeper of weather and climatic data, to being what appears to me now as an advocacy group. The draft document reads more like a news article in many places than it does a scientific document, and unlike a scientific document, it has a number of what I would call “emotionally based graphics” in it that have nothing to do with the science.”
About the same time, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. revealed that Ms. Hassol appeared to simply move some of her website’s claims into this self-proclaimed official U.S. government “highly influential scientific assessment.”
Readers were invited to submit comments to NCDC about the CCSP Report, and I’m pleased to report that many of you did. The National Chamber of Commerce also got involved, and submitted a very strong rebuttal to this document.
What a concept; publish the basis for the claims first, THEN publish the document that outlines the claims (The CCSP report seen above). But nobody is rushing anything, right? “Tipping points” with no definitions, calls for policy? That’s advocacy, not science.
We’ll keep a watchful eye on this as there remains potential to “synthesize” abuse of the public trust. My sincere thanks to everyone from this blog who provided comments and insight. And lets give the U.S. Chamber of Commerce a salute for taking point on this. Lots of people contributed to forcing this change; including Pielke Jr and Senior, Joe D’Aleo of Icecap, Fred Singer, Pat Michaels, Steve McIntyre, Chris Horner, Marlo Lewis, and dozens of bloggers who helped get the word out, plus thousands of readers.
Warning, strong opinion follows: This report’s contents and the “cart before the horse” way it was produced is the biggest official “crock” perpetrated on the American public I’ve ever been privy to. On a personal note, there are days when I struggle to keep doing this, at times I think I’ll just shut down the blog, turn off the surfacestations website, and return to a normal and hassle free life. Days like this keep me going. Read Anthony’s full post here.
By Chris Horner
The NOAA/Climate Change Science Program “Unified Synthesis Product,” which I previously noted, and upon which EPA has indicated it intends to rely to support its GHG regulations, has had its plug pulled - for now. Here’s how and why.
First, the U.S. Chamber pointed out that a preponderance of the 21 reports that had purportedly been “synthesized” had not actually been produced yet. Sure, that sequence sounds odd in the real world, but is reminiscent of the IPCC, to which the USP appealed as the authority for certain otherwise unsupported claims (though the IPCC openly admits that it, too, performs no scientific research). This is a point we also made in our comments. I’m informed that NOAA has now agreed to publish the underlying documents first and then put out their desired USP. The Chamber should have a release out soon.
Second, a series of scientists, including Roger Pielke Sr. and Jr., Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, Joe D’Aleo, Fred Singer, (Anthony Watts) and many others joined my colleague Marlo Lewis and me in exposing in detail the scientifically and legally unsupportable nature of the 208-page monstrosity. Key absurdities included breakout points in the Executive Summary of “Urgency of Action,” “Irreversible Losses,” “The Future Is in Our Hands” and ‘Tipping Points” (even though nowhere else did the document actually offer a discussion of “Tipping Points” that could be summarized), as well as calls for adoption of a certain policy agenda, all in a supposedly scientific document. The rest of the product was no less skewed, and I hope CEI will post many of these comments later today for your reading pleasure.
All of this flew smack in the face of the statute in whose name the document was produced - the U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990, which nowhere authorized such content - and the Information Quality Act which demands objectivity, utility, and integrity of information disseminated by the government.
None of this content came as a surprise, however, having been produced largely by the same gang responsible for the first stab at such a screed, the November 2000 National Assessment - you read that date right. (Hmm, anything else going on in November 2000 that might have prompted such a document?) Litigation by CEI, Sen. Inhofe, and Reps. Emerson and Knollenberg led to NOAA posting a disclaimer that the document had not met the IQA requirements.
This time around, the authors cited their own work more than 100 times, blowing a kiss to the Wegman Committee which exposed the self-affirming and incestuous climate-science community. One addition to the team was a Susan Hassol, writer of the HBO Special Too Hot Not to Handle, produced by none other than Laurie David (I don’t know if Sheryl Crow did the soundtrack). So much for balance. As Pielke Jr. revealed, Ms. Hassol appeared to simply move some of her website’s claims into this self-proclaimed official U.S. government “highly influential scientific assessment.”
So the obvious goal of rushing out a compendium of unsupportable red meat to wave around during this election cycle - shrieking “even George W. Bush now admits!” - has been frustrated. But stay tuned. Although I have no doubt our comments scared them enough to take paper over some of their main vulnerabilities to further litigation, they know we can’t unring the media bell even if we prevail. Unless NOAA heeds the call by us and several others to replace the drafting team with one meeting the statutory and balance requirements, an equally bad report will issue early next year. See Planet Gore here.