NOTE: In the headline, the word “pull” has been replaced with the word “hold” which better represents the process that will now occur. My thought for that word was “pull from the planned schedule”, but that was the wrong word to use. Note the paragraph below that speaks of the plan, based on criticisms received, to publish all parts of the Unified synthesis report first. These must be published before the main report, containing conclusions, can go forward. – Anthony
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.”
In that posting, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr also noted that we had a post outlining how NCDC had used a photoshopped image to illustrate flooding. Something of a no-no in “science” document:
Image above taken directly from the CCSP report. Read more here
And finally you may also recall the posting where I advertised for comments on the NOAA CCSP report, shown below:
Dr. Ben Herman of the University of Arizona was kind enough to offer a guest post outlining the flaws of this document. You can read his essay here.
Dr. Herman writes:
It is my feeling that these bullets and the additional detail discussions contain much information that requires further input due to it being still controversial, incomplete, and in some instances very misleading.
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.
Chris Horner writes on NRO Planet Gore:
…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.
…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.
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.
Ed Darrel. I’m going to leave your latest post embargoed for awhile. We do not allow religious discussions here and while statePoet1775 started it, I’m now stopping it. There are also rather offensive use of words in your post which I’m going to leave to Anthony to judge. He may allow the post, but I’m leaving the judgement to him.
statePoet1775, try not to do that.
~charles the moderator.
Me bad. Sorry I riled you Ed. No offense intended.
state Poet 1775, “Bad” is in the eyes of beholder. I’m with you!
REPLY: Maybe so, but keep the religion in one’s own personal domain please. – Anthony
Sorry Anthony, not intended to be about “religion”, but common sense. We all lose if we don’t convince the world we are right.
Regardless whether warming has anything to do with the cause of the storms, they illustrate the point I was making, which you cannot “disprove,” that the poor are harmed by disasters disproportionately over people with money. I assume you just missed the point, and are not dodging the issue. Pick any effect from climate change you choose, the poor are harmed in greater proportion than the non-poor. That is true for almost all policy issues. The claim that fighting environmental damage harms the poor is historically inaccurate. If you can cite one environmental issue where the poor were not the chief victims, I’d like to see it.
Again, I’ll assume you’re not intentionally dodging the issue. I said nothing about your financing. I only note that the Rockefellers called Exxon-Mobil to stop spreading disinformation about climate change and do something constructive about it. If anyone is in the inside on what the oil companies are doing, it’s the Rockefellers. Your silence on the issue is telling — not about your financing (though now I’m curious why you’re so sensitive about it), but about your biases.
REPLY:
You wrote: Anthony — when do you take after Exxon-Mobil for their PhotoShopping equivalents?) Perhaps its the way you worded it, but the “take” implied to me “on the take”.
I’m happy to talk about it. I started surfacestations.org out of my own pocket, I own the server, and pay the monthly server co-lo fees ($130/month) myself. I put that server out of my office because I feared it would be attacked by agenda wielding hackers, and I didn’t want to risk my network and servers at my business for a hobby project. Serving up thousands of pictures that I make available to the public also takes bandwidth. So off-site for that server was indeed the best choice. This blog is hosted by wordpress.com, and is a free service, so I pay nothign there. But if wordpress is owned by an oil company, then I suppose you have me there, I didn’t ask. I also bought the Stevenson Screens to do the paint tests with, and the dataloggers/probes to the tune of about $5000 total. I do get some donations to help pay the bills on occasion from the PayPal button. I have no corporate sponsors, I pay most of this out of my own pocket, and I get help from like minded people. Most of this project is sweat equity. I like to accomplish things, to do experiments, and I like to write. I write from work, from home, from the coffee shop, and from airports and hotels when I travel thanks to WiFi. Many of the surfacestation photos have come from time I make to do this while on buiness travel. A few trips here in California and Nevada were done specifically for the pupose of survey. One trip this year to NCDC was financed by donations from my readers. There you have it, that’s it.
As for biases, well you’d probably be amazed to learn that I once very much believed in global warming being caused by CO2 alone, so much in fact that shortly after the 1988 speech by Hansen, I took it upon myself to do something about it. In 1990 and again in 1991, I created and managed “Arbor Day Weather Week” which provided computer graphics outlining the benfits of planting trees and narrative to TV meteorologists all over the country to coincide with Arbor Day. This was sent by satellite video feed. The push was to plant trees to offset CO2. Over 250,000 trees were planted (based on the orders for saplings Arbor Day Foundation got) each year. about 175 TV stations participated. Since then I’ve learned a lot more about the data and mechanisms, and slowly, I changed my mind based on study. By about 1997, I no lomger thought CO2 was the root of “global warming” and that the answers would be found in instrumentation issues, and natural variation. But I never did anything with it.
The catalyst came last year on this blog when I spoke with another engineer about thermometers.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2007/03/31/in-search-of-the-perfect-thermometer/
You made no mention of the sorts of things you are doing in pollution reduction and energy conservation, so it appears that you have intentionally diodged that issue. I’ll ask the question again Ed, other than complain about others, what have you done to practice what you preach?
Hmmm…picking effects from climate change (not necessarily man made, but they could be).
Longer growing seasons don’t hurt the poor.
Milder weather doesn’t hurt the poor.
Warmer winter nights don’t hurt the poor.
More reliable rain fall doesn’t hurt the poor.
More snowfall in mountains above farmland doesn’t hurt the poor.
Fewer hurricanes don’t hurt the poor.
Fewer tornadoes don’t hurt the poor.
Ed Darrell, the examples above illustrate your central fallacy–that we are somehow or were, say ten or twenty years ago, living in the best possible climate in every single part of the planet, and that any change must hurt those most vulnerable. What you are completely unaware of is that there is no solid trend in any of the items cited above.
None, there are simply no clear trends. The weather is as it has always been, unpredictable and without a clear direction as to any changes worldwide. Are there regional changes such as warmer winters in Siberia? Possibly, but I guarantee you the people in Siberia are not complaining. Are there colder trends elsewhere? Yes.
Weather trends change. They have always changed, and people either take advantage of improved conditions or adapt to harsher conditions. That has been occurring since before the invention of agriculture, and now we are much much better at adapting.
As for your question:
All conversion of prairie or forest to agriculture can be considered environmental damage-destroying natural habitats of plants and animals and replacing them with man made artifacts of mass food production.
Does all agriculture harm the poor or perhaps does it help them eat?
Fishing destroys living natural fish–killing them instead of letting them live.
Does a poor fisherman benefit from fishing or is he harmed by this ongoing environmental damage?
All construction takes place on what was once pristine natural landscape. All construction rapes the natural environment replacing it with monstrous human artifacts. Do you live in a house Ed Darrel? Are you poor? Do you know of any poor people that make take shelter from the outdoors in a building on once what was a natural environment.
It is very difficult to take such dogma as yours seriously Mister Darrell.
I know you will respond that somehow damage is only done by those large corporations or you meant things like Love Canal (by the way, dioxin isn’t remotely dangerous to humans at those levels), or Three Mile Island, or perhaps a case where actually some harm was caused like the Exxon Valdez incident. You will talk about “sustainable” agriculture as an alternative (BTW less productive and more environmentally damaging than conventional agriculture). You will distance yourself from the fact that you live and are supported by the raping of nature.
You will tell yourself that you have a low carbon footprint and that you donate to good causes, but when it all comes down to it Ed Darrell, you exist because you participate in the raping of nature by human civilization, and can continue to eat and sleep under a roof because of it. The poor want to eat, have shelter, and access to more than a bare existence. You are not helping the poor by telling them they can’t build damns or coal fired plants to generate electricity, or roads to help transport their goods to market.
And you are really not helping them by burning food, driving up food prices worldwide so that millions can no longer afford it because it makes you feel you are saving the world instead chasing mythical environmental chimeras.
[I apologize to all posters if it appears I have stepped over the line~jeez]
Oh and one more point. By definition, poor people have fewer resources to deal with problems than people who are less poor. To somehow claim there is something unique about the effects of environmental problems on the poor is twisted logic. The poor are less able to deal with all problems, whether they be environmental, economic, mobility, job security, housing–it doesn’t matter. By definition poor people have fewer resources to cope with problems, any kind of problem.
The way to help the poor is to help them be less poor. To help them with the infrastructure required to generate economic prosperity–yes growth. Attempting to keep the poor under a glass jar in a misguided attempt to preserve the status quo does not help them one iota.
The assumption that to help the poor we must profligately and wastefully use fossil fuels in the dirtiest way possible is simply incorrect.
Industries argued that controlling particulates would absolutely stop the use of coal in the U.S. Didn’t. They said control of NOX and SOX from autos would be impossible, or at least double the price of the cars. Didn’t. Health improved with each of those changes, industry flourished, and poverty expansion occurred for other reasons well beyond the cleaning of the air.
One might do well to recall that the first connection of air pollution to cancers was the discovery that soot causes scrotum cancers — discovered among the chimney sweeps in London, not exactly your upper class group. One might do well to recall why we have “vitamin D” in milk, to overcome the rickets among the middle and poor classes caused by industrial pollution’s blotting out the sunshine. One might want to pay some attention to the idea of “environmental justice,” to see which groups are usually injured by industrial pollution, and why they don’t have powerful lobby groups and attorneys to protect them.
Don’t ignore the entire history of conservation in the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, please.
So the challenge is the same: Offer any example by which cleaning the air hurt poor people. It’s a wild claim, completely unevidenced, and so far as I can see, totally disconnected from reality, certainly disconnected from history.
Ah, I see — yes, if we define all progress as “pollution,” then stopping pollution would harm progress.
Get in the real world, please. Wise use of the land, wise development, does not need to be environmentally destructive.
And especially if you want to talk development, you need to control pollution. Recall that it was siltation that wiped out Babylon. Remember it was erosion of the mountains caused by profligate wasting of the Cedars that doomed Lebanon to be a desert some thousands of years ago. Remember that it was poor conservation practices that led directly to the Dust Bowl, which chased off the land the very people who you claim could be helped.
Development need not be wasteful. Wasteful and polluting development almost always produces crippling harms.
Tourists to Easter Island don’t go there to see the thriving forest products industry among the tens of thousands of happy people. History does not bear out the claim that destructive development is necessary, nor beneficial to poor people, in the short run and especially the long run.
“Offer any example by which cleaning the air hurt poor people.” Ed Darrell
Well, I dispute that CO2 (plant food) is a pollutant. But for the sake of argument let’s assume it is. As jeez mentioned, ethanol from corn (which is supposed to be carbon neutral but apparently isn’t) has caused food shortages and even food riots. So, an attempt to clean the air of a “pollutant”, ends up hurting the poor.
Ed, this is not about lead or mercury poisoning or particulates in the air. It is about one of the most natural and necessary substances there is. Furthermore, CO2 is produced by burning fossil fuels for energy. Energy is vital to the world’s economy. Damage to the economy can lead to political instability which can lead to war. One of the least consequences of war is damage to the environment.
The assumption that to help the poor we must profligately and wastefully use fossil fuels in the dirtiest way possible is simply incorrect.
Straw man argument, Ed. Let us know when you have any actual science. Thanks for playing.
[…] you may have already read, the CCSP Unified Synthesis Product report, which contains a multitude of errors and misrepresentations,Â… while the various “synthesis products” catch up in publishing. These are essentially […]
Ed Darrell
What does your view about real pollution have to do with CO2 drives the climate theory?
If you use the theory as a means to justify the end then you are no better than Enron was.
Congratulations, Anthony. Love your website too. Let us not forget the EPA is asking for public comments on the ridiculous “CO2 is a pollutant ” issue that the Supreme Court ruled on earlier. 120 days from July 30th allowed for comment. Docket ID EPA-HQ-OAR-2008-3018
On line http://www.regulations.gov
For e-mail comments “a-and-rDocket@epa.gov
FAX 202-566-9744.
Maybe , the power of the people is a possibility!
jeez (03:26:55)
That was a really excellent response! Folks like Mr. Darrell are long on Malthusian/Luddite guilt trips for others, but I suspect very short on personal charitable giving themselves. Darrell states:
Mr. Darrell’s implication is clear: the U.S. is a filthy polluter, and if we only followed his expert advice, America wouldn’t be such a dirty polluter. But Darrell’s assumption is completely false.
Maybe Mr. Darrell is a young’un, but I remember Pittsburgh in the 1950’s, when you couldn’t look across the river and see the other side due to all the industrial smoke. Now the air is clear. And I remember when the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland caught fire in the ’60’s from all the industrial pollution. Now people fish there, and the EPA says the fish are fit for human consumption.
Today the U.S. is one of the very cleanest, if not the cleanest countries on Earth — with a much higher population.
We’ve already cleaned up the country without the help of the Darrells. Now, the most effective thing Mr. Darrell could do for the poor would be to dig deep into his own pocket, and give his dollars to any charity he thinks is doing a good job helping poor folks, instead of telling everyone else what bad people they are.
Telling other folks [that’s us] that we should be taxed to fund Darrel’s great ideas reminds me of a point that economics professor Walter E. Williams often makes: when you dig in your own pocket to help out someone less fortunate, that is charity. But when you want the government to dig onto someone else’s pocket… that’s something completely different.
You’re right, it’s a straw man argument, completely unevidenced. I didn’t make it, you guys did. Let the world know when the [snip we don’t use that word here] have some real science. Please get out of the game until you do.
No, Jeez. It was your assumption. I responded to your claim that cleaning the air would harm poor people.
The U.S. in fact refutes your claims. We have cleaned the air while expanding our economy, and in fact clean air has played a huge role in the expansion. Getting lead out of our gasoline raised the national IQ. Smarter people use resources more efficiently, make more money, pay more taxes, stay out of poverty better, expand the economy more.
As I said, your original claims, that we can’t clean up the air without damaging the poor, are simply absurd.
Feel free to cut and paste. I’m sure you could improve it. My organizational structure was a bit weak, but it was a semi drunken rant at 3:30 in the morning.
“As I said, your original claims, that we can’t clean up the air without damaging the poor, are simply absurd.” Darrell
No one here is in favor of pollution only CO2 is not a pollutant. The differences between CO2 and lead for instance are numerous. You seem to be pro-human and that is good. Some of the radical greenies would like to see most of us gone (themselves excluded of course).
Everybody take a time out. No more bickering please.
Pick any effect from climate change you choose, the poor are harmed in greater proportion than the non-poor.
Naturally. The poor are always more vulnerable.
Look what baleful effects the combo of the current global cooling and the ethanol crunch have had on the poor. We have seen sporadic food riots all over the third world.
And direct mitigation efforts (on the Kyoto or Stern Models) harm the poor FAR more than the non-poor.
PattI: That’s terrible. And sublimely unliberal. I will keep my ears open for it.
Lucy, are you British, by any chance?
While the battle continues, it would be nice to see a post on “Does CO2 even have a greenhouse effect as stated officially”
I think it is a greenhouse gas and has a small effect, but without positive feedback loops it amounts to little more than spit in the ocean.
He was graceful in his concession to Bush, a concession a lesser man wouldn’t have made (though the nation now suffers from his concession).
I must respectfully beg to disagree. He unleashed party operatives to interfere in the dispute. I think that was a direct and serious threat to the democratic process and did the country terrible, terrible harm. (This is quite apart form any opinion of Bush, which is beside the point.)
Also, I heard his concession speech and did not consider it to be gracious. YMMV, of course. Besides, once the court hand bunged him 7-2, what would have been his choice in the matter?
Your mileage may vary, of course. I know I am in a minority among my liberal brethren in this opinion.
Not only are polluting industries, and roads, generally built where they affect the poor disproportionately,
But you need to consider that the poor are direct beneficiaries as well. Look at poverty in India or China fifty years ago and compare it with that of today.
It comes down to an unavoidable choice between permanent poverty (which knocks decades off life expectancy) and two or three decades of pollution (which is bad, but not nearly as bad) followed by a massive cleanup when they achieve affluence (for the exact same reasons the west cleaned up once it achieved affluence).
but we have tens of millions of people living in river deltas and other lowlands that are already disproportionately damaged by warming.
If you are thinking “Bangladesh”, they are gaining, not losing ground. Sedimentation has been occurring faster than sea level has been rising. (And over the last couple of years, sea level has dropped, even with the applied positive “adjustments”.)
The assumption that to help the poor we must profligately and wastefully use fossil fuels in the dirtiest way possible is simply incorrect.
Depending on your definitions, it may be an awful lot closer to correct than you may think.
Remember, this is a temporary situation. Once China and India achieve basic affluence, they will become much more environmentally responsible. The cleanup will probably take a lot less time than it took the industrialized west. But first things first.
We have cleaned the air while expanding our economy, and in fact clean air has played a huge role in the expansion.
This is true. But it did not occur until we were very well off economically. And the east will follow the same path. It’s all part of a demographic process.
Sometimes this place appears like a rabbit hole, complete with hatters.
Anthony, my question is this: When do you criticize Exxon Mobil for their photoshopping work promoting the idea that there is no global warming, that there is little or no human effect on warming, and there is little humans can do? If it’s the photoshopping that concerns you, and if you’re fair, you’ll criticize photoshopping wherever it appears to advance an agenda contrary to the evidence. The history of your efforts here is impressive, but not at all what I was talking about.
You make no mention of the efforts you’re taking to stop urban crime, advance education among economically-depressed peoples, or relief for Darfur. I won’t do you the disservice of accusing you of dodging those questions. They weren’t on the table.
I’m fail to see what relevance my conservation efforts have to this discussion, other than your attempts to find a wider barn for your commenters to shoot at.
You need to get cracking on your comments, they’re due today.