EPW Special Report

In this report, Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works examine key documents and emails from the University of East Anglia‘s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). We have concluded:

 The emails were written by the world’s top climate scientists, who work at the most prestigious and influential climate research institutions in the world.

 Many of them were lead authors and coordinating lead authors of UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, meaning that they had been intimately involved in writing and editing the IPCC’s science assessments. They also helped write reports by the United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).

 The CRU controversy and recent revelations about errors in the IPCC’s most recent science assessment cast serious doubt on the validity of EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The IPCC serves as the primary basis for EPA’s endangerment finding for greenhouse gases.

 Instead of moving forward on greenhouse gas regulation, the Agency should fully address the CRU controversy and the IPCC’s flawed science.

The scientists involved in the CRU controversy violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws. In addition to these findings, we believe the emails and accompanying documents seriously compromise the IPCC-backed consensus‖ and its central conclusion that anthropogenic emissions are inexorably leading to environmental catastrophes. Read the very detailed summary here.
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Lawrence Solomon: A dying initiative
By Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

The Western Climate Initiative’s cap and trade market may soon need to be renamed The Canada Climate Initiative.

Until last week, the Western Climate Initiative boasted seven U.S. states and four Canadian provinces who were working toward the launch of a regional cap and trade system on Jan. 1, 2012. Last Thursday, Arizona formally announced it was backing out of cap and trade. As the state with the fastest rate of emission growth - 61% between 1990 and 2007 - many feared a body blow to Arizona’s economy if it tried to meet the initiative’s carbon reduction goals.

The following morning neighbouring Utah indicated it might follow suit. By a 6 to 2 vote, its House Committee on Public Utilities and Technology passed a nonbinding resolution to urge Governor Gary Herbert to pull out of the Western Climate Initiative. Earlier in the week, the full Utah House voted resoundingly - 56 to 17 - to curb any carbon-curbing attempts by the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency. Specifically, the resolution introduced into the House “urges the United States Environmental Protection Agency to halt its carbon dioxide reduction policies and programs and with its ‘Endangerment Finding’ and related regulations until a full and independent investigation of the climate data conspiracy and global warming science can be substantiated.”

To date, only four of the 11 jurisdictions have adopted legislation that would allow them to participate in the cap-trade-market: California, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, with Manitoba appearing close to joining. Oregon, Washington, Montana and New Mexico have not yet adopted cap-and-trade legislation and now California, which is tottering toward bankruptcy, has become iffy: A voter initiative in California, if it passes in November, would halt the cap-and-trade program until unemployment falls to 5.5%.

Even before last week’s climate revolt, many believed the Western Climate Initiative unofficially died with the ascension of Barack Obama to the presidency. When George W. Bush was U.S. president, those backing climate change legislation could argue for a regional plan on the basis that national legislation would never pass a Bush presidency. As soon as Obama came to office, pressure built in the western states to abandon the regional cap and trade plan, on the logic that the states should harmonize with federal cap and trade policy. Now that federal cap and trade legislation appears dead, the states have cooled further to regional trading.

The upshot? By the end of the year, the only jurisdictions left in the Western Climate Initiative’s cap and trade program could be the Canadian provinces.

Read more here.

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Climategate’s guerrilla warriors: pesky foes or careful watchdogs?
Jeet Heer, Toronto’s Globe and Mail

Much remains murky about the scandal dubbed Climategate, which involves the release last fall of e-mails leaked or stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Initial accounts focused on e-mails that seemed to show scientists deliberately distorting research to make the danger of global warming appear worse than it is. Others have suggested this could be a misreading of the e-mails, most of which, though not all, simply suggest working professionals wrangling over contentious issues and occasionally slagging their critics.

The question of scientific misconduct is still under investigation at East Anglia. But what’s clear is that the scandal - one of the biggest to hit the science community in the past decade - wouldn’t still be hanging so heavily over climate-change researchers if it weren’t for bloggers such as Stephen McIntyre.

A Toronto-based retired mining executive who has emerged as a uniquely polarizing figure in one of our era’s most contentious issues, Mr. McIntyre has been an outspoken critic of the CRU’s research on his blog, Climate Audit, and has launched countless freedom-of-information requests for data used by its scientists. He likes to speculate that the Climategate e-mails were released by a whistleblower unhappy at the research unit’s intransigence over making data public. That may or may not be true, but whoever got hold of the e-mails and made them public clearly kept a close eye on Mr. McIntyre’s struggles with the CRU, which form a strong theme in the leaked e-mails.

Many reveal researchers bristling at the armchair scientist’s criticism. One e-mail, written by Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, called Mr. McIntyre “the self-appointed Joe McCarthy of climate science.” Another referred to him as a “bozo.” But Mr. McIntyre doesn’t mind the criticism: His website is now getting a million hits a month, double what it got before Climategate.

In the wake of the scandal, blogs that question the reality of man-made global warming have surged in public attention, leading new readers to websites such as Wattsupwiththat.com (run by weatherman Anthony Watts) and climatedepot.com (run by conservative activist Marc Morano). The sites’ rising popularity, and the growing influence they appear to wield in shaping public debate, is deeply worrying to the scientific community.

“There has been a transition in the way people get their news over the last decade or so, from the traditional print media to online sources of news,” says Michael Mann, one of the key researchers behind the now-famous “hockey stick” graph (which shows the temperature of the Earth steeply rising in the 20th century after a long period of stability - data hotly disputed by the online skeptics, although accepted by the scientific community).

“I think the climate-change-denial movement has recognized that transition was taking place and has really invested a lot of effort and resources in creating this huge infrastructure of online disinformation. And I think it is a challenge for legitimate news organizations to compete with that massive disinformation network.”

Science journalist Chris Mooney, co-author of the 2009 book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, calls the Internet a “complete Wild, Wild West for scientific information.”

Mr. Mooney thinks the belief in the reality of man-made global warming, which is the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community, is losing ground in public opinion because of these blogs. “It’s a drumming,” he laments. “If it’s a football game, it would be 56-0.” Read much more here.

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Editorial: More errors in temperature data
The Washington Times

Yvo de Boer, the United Nations’ top climate-change official, announced his resignation yesterday. Good riddance. The bureaucrat’s departure is no surprise because his pseudo-scientific global warming religion was proved to be a hoax on his watch.

The list of problems central to the global warming fraud just doesn’t seem to end. As if hiding and losing data, the numerous errors in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the suppression of academic research that disagrees with global warming weren’t bad enough, now comes word that basic ground-based temperature data may have been biased towards incorrectly showing temperature increases.

Joseph D’Aleo, the first director of meteorology and co-founder of the Weather Channel, and Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and founder of SurfaceStations.org, are well-known and well-respected scientists. On Jan. 29, they released a startling study on SPPI showing that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate-measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures drove up the average measured temperature. The stations eliminated were in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea and more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.

Enlarged here. Temperatures in rose and station count in blue.

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Watts provide some amazing graphs showing that the jumps in measured global temperature occurred just when the number of weather stations was cut. But there is another bias that this change to more urban stations also exacerbates. Recorded temperatures in more urban areas rise over time simply because more densely populated areas produce more heat. Combining the greater share of weather stations in more urban areas over time with this urban heat effect also tends to increase the rate that recorded temperatures tend to rise over time.

See editorial here.

EPW Blog

In his column today, Tom Friedman of the New York Times wonders whether “we can have a serious discussion about the climate-energy issue anymore.” From our end, we believe the answer is yes.  That is, one can simultaneously see the good-humored fun in kids building an igloo in honor of Al Gore and legitimately question whether the IPCC-backed consensus on global warming - that a climate catastrophe is well-nigh upon us - suffers from serious flaws (think Himalayan glaciers).  And we believe one can support an energy policy that draws on all of America’s domestic resources-coal, natural gas, oil, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear-and that such advocacy can be rooted in prudential concern for cost, jobs, energy security, and reliability, rather than rank corporate shilling.

We lament the fact that Mr. Friedman, justly regarded as he is for the eloquence of his prose and the force of his arguments, categorically dismisses those of a skeptical bent as given to “errors and wild exaggerations.” Some may be, but many are not.  Such a dismissal is simply incorrect - one thinks of the University of Alabama-Huntsville’s John Christy or Australia’s Ian Plimer - and contrary to the spirit of open intellectual engagement.  Nevertheless, in hope of serious debate, we take issue with several of Mr. Friedman’s assertions:

FRIEDMAN: “Avoid the term ‘global warming.’ I prefer the term ‘global weirding,’ because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.”

RESPONSE: It’s appropriate that Mr. Friedman drop “global warming,” for the simple fact that there has been “no statistically significant warming” for the last 15 years.  This is not the judgment of a skeptic, but of Phil Jones, the former director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), who is at the center of the ‘Climategate’ scandal (Jones did say that in his view that the overall temperature trend is one of warming). 

Moreover, at some point, the notion, suggested by Friedman, that anything and everything-blizzards, heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, floods, and otherwise ‘weird weather’-are caused by global warming becomes unfalsifiable, thereby rendering the catastrophic global warming hypothesis meaningless.  We would also caution Mr. Friedman against relying too heavily on the “storms-get-stormier” hypothesis. 

Recall that in 2005, Christopher Landsea, of the National Hurricane Center, and one of the nation’s foremost experts on hurricanes, resigned in protest from the IPCC.  At the time, Landsea wrote, “I am withdrawing [from the IPCC] because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.” He wrote further that, “The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today...It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.”

FRIEDMAN: “Those who favor taking action are saying: ‘Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let’s buy some insurance - by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit - because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.’ We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.”

RESPONSE: Taking out insurance is wise.  But Mr. Friedman’s insurance policy means exorbitant premiums with no protection in the event disaster occurs.  Take the Waxman-Markey bill.  According to the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Waxman-Markey would cause a net reduction-yes, even taking into account “green jobs"-of up to 3.6 million jobs.  It would reduce GDP by 1.5 percent compared to business-as-usual.  And the climate benefit?  According to Chip Knappenberger of Master Resource, by the year 2050, Waxman-Markey “would result in a global temperature ‘savings’ of about 0.05C regardless of the IPCC scenario used.” In other words: no climate benefit.  Even if one chooses a carbon tax to reduce emissions, the climate impact arguably would be even less, given that reductions are not guaranteed.

There are more economical options, and they are not the work of industry robber barons.  We call Mr. Friedman’s attention to a 2008 Department of Energy study titled “Combined Heat and Power: Effective Energy Solutions for a Sustainable Future.”

As the study noted, the generating capacity of the more than 3,300 US combined heat and power (CHP) sites “stands at 85 gigawatts (GW)-almost 9 percent of total US capacity.” In 2006 CHP produced 506 billion Kilowatt Hour (kWh) of electricity-more than 12 percent of total US power generation for that year.” According to DOE, if the United States adopted high-deployment policies to achieve 20 percent of generation capacity from CHP by 2030, it could:

- Save an estimated 5.3 quadrillion Btu (Quads) of fuel annually, the equivalent of nearly half the total energy currently consumed by US households;

- Generate (cumulatively through 2030) $234 billion in new investments and create nearly 1 million new highly-skilled, technical jobs4 throughout the United States.

DOE also concluded CO2 emissions could be reduced “by more than 800 million metric tons (MMT) per year, the equivalent of taking more than half of the current passenger vehicles in the US off the road.  In this 20 percent scenario, over 60 percent of the projected increase in CO2 emissions between now and 2030 could be avoided.”

As an insurance policy, this is something the American people would probably be more inclined to support than taxes that impose all cost for no climate benefit.

FRIEDMAN: “Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

“China, of course, understands that, which is why it is investing heavily in clean-tech, efficiency and high-speed rail. It sees the future trends and is betting on them. Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now.”

RESPONSE: China is pursuing an all-of-the-above energy policy-exactly what Republicans have been supporting for years.  Yes, China is investing in renewable energy, but it is also building advanced coal and nuclear power plants.  According to the Energy Information Administration, “Coal consists of roughly three-quarters of [China’s] power generation feedstock and the EIA forecasts they will maintain this market share through 2030.”

Here in the U.S., green pressure groups and the Obama EPA-and, we suspect, Mr. Friedman-- oppose construction of new, more efficient (therefore lower emitting) coal plants.  They might say they have to be equipped with “carbon capture and storage technology"-which won’t happen on a commercial scale for years (and assuming environmentalists will even allow construction of the infrastructure needed to support it).

As for nuclear, according to the “Nuclear Street” website, “there are 12 newly-approved” nuclear units under construction in China that will have a combined capacity of 34.76 million kW.” We are pleased the Administration has signaled support for new nuclear plants, but by pulling the plug on Yucca Mountain, it fails the consistency test.

FRIEDMAN: “And Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other. Nothing better serves their interests than to see Americans becoming confused about climate change, and, therefore, less inclined to move toward clean-tech and, therefore, more certain to remain addicted to oil. Yes, sir, it is morning in Saudi Arabia.”

RESPONSE: According to a recently released report from the Congressional Research Service, America’s combined recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal endowment is the largest on earth.  America’s recoverable resources are far larger than those of Saudi Arabia (3rd), China (4th), and Canada (6th) combined.  And that’s without including America’s absolutely immense oil shale and methane hydrates deposits.  We suspect the “whole OPEC gang” would become more than a little nervous if the U.S. got serious about developing its resources-all of them. Read full blog with links.

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Inhofe Response to White House Announcement on NEPA
EPW Blog

Washington, DC-Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, issued the following statement in response to the Obama Administration’s release of draft guidance on how federal agencies should use the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to address greenhouse gas emissions that result from major federal actions, as well as establishing and applying “categorical exclusions” under NEPA.

“I commend the Obama Administration for addressing the interplay between NEPA and greenhouse gas emissions,” Sen. Inhofe said. “I look forward to working with them to ensure that NEPA is used judiciously and according to its original statutory purpose.

“Using NEPA as a backdoor tool to regulate greenhouse gases will stifle job creation and create greater uncertainty for the economy.  The Administration’s proposed NEPA guidance for GHGs appears to do exactly that: it will enable federal agencies to block or delay production of America’s domestic energy resources, which are the largest in the world. 

“In addition,” Sen. Inhofe continued, “if the intent of the Obama Administration’s proposal on categorical exclusions is to clarify NEPA to help advance production of America’s energy resources, then the Administration should be commended.  If, however, the intent is to create jobs for environmental lawyers by adding greater burdens on an already cumbersome NEPA process, then it should be vigorously opposed. 

“Again, I look forward to working with the Administration to ensure NEPA reforms help create jobs and increase American energy production.”

See post here.

By Noel Sheppard

The absolutely stunning global warming revelations this weekend by the man in the middle of the ClimateGate scandal have gone almost completely ignored by America’s press.

As NewsBusters reported Saturday, Phil Jones, the head of the British Climatic Research Unit at the heart of ClimateGate, told the BBC: the recent warming trend that began in 1975 is not at all different than two other planetary warming phases since 1850; there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995, and; it is possible the Medieval Warm Period was indeed a global phenomenon thereby making the temperatures seen in the latter part of the 20th century by no means unprecedented.

Jones also admitted that he and his fellow scientists manipulated figures to hide a decline in crucial tree-ring data thereby questioning the validity of the entire global warming theory.

Despite the seriousness of these revelations, much as what happened when the ClimateGate scandal first broke, with the exception of Fox News, America’s media have almost totally boycotted this amazing story:

No mention by the New York Times
No mention by the Washington Post
No mention by USA Today
No mention by ANY major U.S. newspaper EXCEPT the Washington Times
No mention by the Associated Press
No mention by Reuters
No mention by UPI
No mention by ABC News
No mention by CBS News
No mention by NBC News
No mention by MSNBC
For its part, CNN FINALLY got around to covering this story with a very brief mention Tuesday:

JOHN ROBERTS, CNN ANCHOR: There’s also something else that’s out there. Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia, the climate research unit, the guy that was at the center of this recent e-mail controversy late last year, has said in an interview with the BBC that he has not seen any, quote, “statistically significant warming since 1995,” though he says he still believes that the earth’s temperature has warmed. And he also said that he might be missing some of the data that is responsible for his climate models.

Of course, skeptics are jumping all over this, saying the whole thing is a farce. Global warming doesn’t exist.

What do you think of the Professor Jones situation, the lack of statistically significant warming, and the fact that he may have misplaced some of the records?

JOHN CHRISTY, PROFESSOR, ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE, UNIV. OF ALABAMA- HUNTSVILLE: Well, I think what Phil Jones is saying is that Mother Nature is perfectly capable of making the temperature rise and fall through the past several hundred years. And in terms of the data problems, well, we do have to be careful when we’re talking about public policy, that means trillions of dollars, and we haven’t had that very hard and critical situation where you take care of data and make it publicly available to everyone. And that needs to be done now.

That’s it!

Bear in mind that the Jones BBC interview was published Saturday. NewsBusters reported the revelations at 6PM Eastern Time the same day. And yet CNN first mentioned the story possibly as much as 72 hours AFTER the BBC piece.

I guess that’s why CNN is no longer considered the most trusted name in news.

Speaking of which, much as it did when ClimateGate broke, FNC has been all over this story addressing it on “Fox News Sunday,” on Monday’s “Glenn Beck Show,” on Monday’s “Special Report,” and on Monday’s “Hannity.”

By contrast, for their part, the rest of the news media have found filmmaker Kevin Smith being thrown off a Southwest plane for being too fat MUCH more important:

The New York Times reported it
The Washington Post reported it
The Associated Press reported it
UPI reported it
ABC News reported it
CBS News reported it
CNN reported it—14 TIMES!
Well, I guess “journalists” have to have their priorities, don’t they?

Once again, much as what happened with ClimateGate, America’s press are asleep at the wheel concerning a major story involving global warming. There’s no other way of saying it: when it comes to Al Gore’s favorite money-making myth, the American media are almost criminal in their behavior.  Shame on them!!! Read more.

Update: Marc Sheppard has more.