“Receiving end of justifiable criticism”. I presume that Kelly is staying pretty quiet these days.

Kelly previously made a complaint that would not be opposed by the severest IPCC critic:

(i) I take real exception to having simulation runs described as experiments (without at least the qualification of ‘computer’ experiments). It does a disservice to centuries of real experimentation and allows simulations output to be considered as real data. This last is a very serious matter, as it can lead to the idea that real ‘real data’ might be wrong simply because it disagrees with the models! That is turning centuries of science on its head.
and

(ii) I think it is easy to see how peer review within tight networks can allow new orthodoxies to appear and get established that would not happen if papers were wrtten for and peer reviewed by a wider audience. I have seen it happen elsewhere. This finding may indeed be an important outcome of the present review.

It would have been an “important outcome of the present review” had this finding appeared in the Oxburgh “report”.

Or here;

My overriding impression that this is a continuing and valiant attempt via a variety of statistical methods to find possible signals in very noisy and patchy data when several confounding factors may be at play in varying ways throughout the data. It would take an expert in statistics to comment on the appropriateness of the various techniques as they are used. The descriptions are couched within an internal language of dendrochronology, and require some patience to try and understand.

I find no evidence of blatant mal-practice. That is not to say that, working within the current paradigm, choices of data and analysis approach might be made in order to strain to get more out of the data than a dispassionate analysis might permit.

The line between positive conclusions and the null hypothesis is very fine in my book.

I worry about the sheer range and the ad hoc/subjective nature of all the adjustments, homogenisations etc of the raw data from different places

Climategate and the EPA Endangerment Finding
By Steven McIntyre, Climate Audit

While considerable attention has been paid by me and others to the cozy UK “inquiries”, Climategate is featuring prominently in another not-so-cozy forum in the US, though the connection has not been articulated to a larger audience.

A June 18 article in the New York Times reports:

Three judges issued an order (pdf) Wednesday that the motions for remand be placed on hold as EPA considers numerous petitions asking it to reconsider the finding.

The order freezes the motions for remand until two weeks after the agency makes a decision, or until Aug. 16, whichever comes first. That was the action sought by EPA, which has said it expects to decide on the petitions for reconsideration in late July.

These various petitions are animated by Climategate documents. Here’s my understanding of the present rollcall of proceedings.

(1) 10 petitions to EPA for reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding – see here ; and EPA motion here.

(2) 17 petitions in court that the Endangerment Finding be remanded to EPA for further consideration - see here - consolidated as Coalition for Responsible Regulation Inc., et al., v. EPA. (Individual states appear to be parties to these petitions.);

The decision reported on Friday delays these remand petitions pending EPA’s promised disposition of the Petitions for Reconsideration at the end of July.

The docket here commences with motions by Virginia and Alabama calling on the court to remand the Endangerment Finding to EPA requiring them to take further evidence, citing the Climategate emails. The motion (Apr 15, 2010) says:

Despite the explosive revelations of climate-gate, EPA insouciantly issued its Finding on December 15, 2009 without providing any mechanism for the consideration of this new information. Despite the pendency of motions for reconsideration, the agency has announced its intent to begin rule-making in reliance on the un-re-examined Finding.

Respondent EPA moved (further down same docket here) to hold these motions in abeyance pending the disposition of the Petitions for Reconsideration. Massachusetts intervened here. In its response, EPA stated that it anticipated a decision on the Petitions for Reconsideration by the end of July:

EPA is in the process of carefully reviewing the ten petitions for reconsideration (and seven supplements thereto) submitted to the Agency, and anticipates that it will issue its decision with respect to all the petitions on or about July 30, 2010.

The decision reported on Friday (as I understand it) pushed the petitions asking for the matter to be remanded to EPA back to the earliest of August 16 or two weeks after the EPA rules on the Petitions for Reconsideration.

What makes these motions of particular interest to those interested in Climategate is that some of the petitions for reconsideration here contain detailed summaries and commentaries on the Climategate emails - the detail of which places the negligence of the Oxburgh “inquiry”” in clear focus.

The longest petition is by Peabody Energy (238 pages), the second longest (58 pages) by Pacific Legal Foundation.

Thus in addition to the UK inquiries, the Climategate emails have embroiled the disposition of the EPA Endangerment Finding ( see here for the Endangerment Finding and many volumes of responses.)

See post and comments here.

By Hans Bader

Crucial offers to help clean up BP’s oil spill “have come from Belgian, Dutch, and Norwegian firms that… possess some of the world’s most advanced oil skimming ships.” But the Obama administration wouldn’t accept the help, because doing so would require it to do something past presidents have routinely done: waive rules imposed by the Jones Act, a law backed by unions.

The law itself permits the president to waive these requirements, and such waivers were “granted, promptly, by the Bush administration,” in the aftermath of hurricanes and other emergencies. But Obama has refused to do so, notes David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen:

“The BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed. So...the U.S. Coast Guard...can’t accept, and therefore don’t ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand.”

Instead, Obama rejected a Dutch offer to help clean up the spill, noted Voice of America News:

“The Obama administration declined the Dutch offer partly because of the Jones Act, which restricts foreign ships from certain activities in U.S. waters. During the Hurricane Katrina crisis five years ago, the Bush administration waived the Jones Act in order to facilitate some foreign assistance, but such a waiver was not given in this case.

“After the Obama administration refused help from the Netherlands, Geert Visser, the consul general for the Netherlands in Houston, told Loren Steffy: “Let’s forget about politics; let’s get it done.’” But for Obama, politics always comes first: “The explanation of Obama’s reluctance to seek this remedy is his cozy relationship with labor unions...’The unions see it [not waiving the act] as protecting jobs. They hate when the Jones Act gets waived.’”

Ironically, even the staunchest supporters of the Jones Act are now distancing themselves from refusals to accept foreign help, saying they have “not and will not stand in the way of the use of these well-established waiver procedures to address this crisis.” Obama is being more intransigently pro-union than the unions themselves.

One can only hope Obama will change his mind now, given that “Each day our European allies are prevented from helping us speed up the clean up is
another day that Gulf fishing and tourism jobs die.”

(The Obama administration has belatedly accepted some foreign equipment for use in fighting the spill, although it still blocks ships with foreign crews. As Voice of America notes, although “the Netherlands offered help in April,” such as providing “sophisticated” oil “skimmers and dredging devices,” the Obama administration blocked their crews from working in U.S. waters, and as a result, this crucial “operation was delayed until U.S. crews could be trained” in June. “The Dutch also offered assistance with building sand berms (barriers) along the coast of Louisiana to protect sensitive marshlands, but that offer was also rejected, even though Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal had been requesting such protective barriers.")

In April 2009, the Obama administration granted BP, a big supporter of Obama, a waiver of environmental regulations. But after the oil spill, it blocked Louisiana from protecting its coastline against the oil spill by delaying rather than expediting regulatory approval of essential protective measures. It has also chosen not to use what has been described as “the most effective method” of fighting the spill, a method successfully used in other oil spills. Democratic strategist James Carville called Obama’s handling of the oil spill “lackadaisical” and “unbelievable” in its “stupidity.”

Obama is now using BP’s oil spill to push the global-warming legislation that BP had lobbied for. Obama’s global warming legislation expands ethanol subsidies, which cause famine, starvation, and food riots in poor countries by shrinking the food supply. Ethanol makes gasoline costlier and dirtier, increases ozone pollution, and increases the death toll from smog and air pollution.  Ethanol production also results in deforestation, soil erosion, and water pollution. Subsidies for biofuels like ethanol are a big source of corporate welfare: “BP has lobbied for and profited from subsidies for biofuels… that cannot break even without government support.”

The $800 billion stimulus package is also using taxpayer subsidies to replace U.S. jobs with foreign green jobs. And its regulations destroy jobs in America’s export sector.

Hans Bader is Counsel for Special Projects at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Coming to CEI in 2003, Hans’s prior casework has included suits involving the First Amendment, federalism, and civil rights issues.

Read more here. 

By Ben Lieberman, NY Post

President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas.

That’s a Harvard University study’s estimate of the per-gallon price of the president’s global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.

So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?

Good question, because such measures wouldn’t do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.

The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s now-famous words, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste—and what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Obama: Using Gulf crisis to push unpopular cap-and-trade bill.

That sure was true of global-warming policy, and especially the cap-and-trade bill. Many observers thought the measure, introduced last year in the House by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), was dead: The American people didn’t seem to think that the so-called global-warming crisis justified a price-hiking, job-killing, economy-crushing redesign of our energy supply amid a fragile recovery. Passing another major piece of legislation, one every bit as unpopular as ObamaCare, appeared unlikely in an election year.

So Obama and congressional proponents of cap-and-trade spent several months rebranding it—downplaying the global-warming rationale and claiming that it was really a jobs bill (the so-called green jobs were supposed to spring from the new clean-energy economy) and an energy-independence bill (that will somehow stick it to OPEC).

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) even reportedly declined to introduce their new cap-and-trade proposal in the Senate on Earth Day, because they wanted to de-emphasize the global-warming message. Instead, Kerry called the American Power Act “a plan that creates jobs and sets us on a course toward energy independence and economic resurgence.”

But the new marketing strategy wasn’t working. Few believe the green-jobs hype—with good reason. In Spain, for example, green jobs have been an expensive bust, with each position created requiring, on average, $774,000 in government subsidies. And the logic of getting us off oil imports via a unilateral measure that punishes American coal, oil and natural gas never made any sense at all.

Now the president is repackaging cap-and-trade—again—as a long-term solution to the oil spill. But it’s the same old agenda, a huge energy tax that will raise the cost of gasoline and electricity high enough so that we’re forced to use less.

The logic linking cap-and-trade to the spill in the Gulf should frighten anyone who owns a car or truck. Such measures force up the price at the pump—Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs thinks it “may require gas prices greater than $7 a gallon by 2020” to meet Obama’s stated goal of reducing emissions 14 percent from the transportation sector.

Of course, doing so would reduce gasoline use and also raise market share for hugely expensive alternative fuels and vehicles that could never compete otherwise. Less gasoline demand means less need for drilling and thus a slightly reduced chance of a repeat of the Deepwater Horizon spill—but only slightly. Oil will still be a vital part of America’s energy mix.

Oil-spill risks should be addressed directly—such as finding out why the leak occurred and requiring new preventive measures or preparing an improved cleanup plan for the next incident. Cap-and-trade is no fix and would cause trillions of dollars in collateral economic damage along the way.

Emanuel was wrong. The administration shouldn’t view each crisis—including the oil spill—as an opportunity to be exploited, but as a problem to be addressed. And America can’t afford $7-a-gallon gas. Read more here.

Ben Lieberman is senior analyst of energy and environmental policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Roe Institute.

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More European Lessons and Questions for Senator Kerry
By Chris Horner, Planet Gore

Today’s update from CCNet, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has a few headlines which leave us begging for Sen. John Kerry to provide examples of all of those successes with central planning building a “green economy” like the one he has designed on behalf of President Obama, in the form of the Kerry-Lieberman no-longer-a-global-warming-bill bill.

Solar may be a renewable technology but government subsidies to it aren’t, Europe’s solar industry is learning. - Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, 18 June 2010

Germany’s support for renewable energy is “breaking” the nation’s ability to pay for power and threatens the competitiveness of electricity producers, Handelsblatt cited a former [green] industry group leader as saying.  - Jeremy van Loon, Bloomberg 21 June 2010

For each photovoltaic system, the Renewable Energy Act guarantees a feed-in tariff for 20 years, which is currently six times higher than the price of conventionally generated electricity. The additional costs are passed on to all electricity consumers. According to calculations by the RWI, the net cost for all photovoltaic systems built [in Germany] between 2000 and 2010 over the respective 20-year funding period add up to 85.4 billion Euros in real terms. This value corresponds to more than one quarter of Germany’s federal budget. - Handelsblatt, 21 June 2010

As the Big Green Lie ramps up in preparation for cramming Kerry-Lieberman down in the Senate (paving the way to “conference-in” the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade in a lame-duck session, we’re hearing), remember this: When candidate and president Barack Obama told us to look at the countries he was modeling his “green economy” after, we did, and discovered they were all disasters. Now we’re told that those countries - remember, the very ones he told us to look to, because he was - are just anomalies.

So, where is that green-jobs marvel? Where do we look now? They aren’t saying. Senator Kerry, in issuing that proclamation, failed to indicate where we might find the success stories. As did the president in his address Tuesday night in which he suddenly stopped telling us where to look (even if, in effect, he told us where to go).