While the GAO issues a report today saying that the US Historical Climatological Monitoring Network has real tangible problems (as I have been saying for years) the Inspector General just released a report this week saying that EPA rushed their CO2 endangerment finding, skipping annoying steps like doing proper review. The lone man holding up his hand at the EPA saying “wait a minute” was Alan Carlin, who was excoriated for doing so.
From Powerline Blog:
Here’s a refresher: in 2009, when the EPA announced its “endangerment” finding to justify its planned regulation of greenhouse gases under 
the Clean Air Act, Alan Carlin, a 35-year veteran EPA employee who ran the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, produced a 98-page critique of the climate science the EPA used in its finding. Carlin’s report concluded, “We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by the EPA.”
You can guess what happened next. The Obama Administration, the one supposedly dedicated to transparency and “restoring science” in public policy making, squashed Carlin’s report and told him to cease and desist any further analysis on climate change issues. Carlin’s supervisor (a political appointee) emailed his: “I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc.” Shortly after this episode Carlin left EPA. (By the way, Carlin was the chairman of the Los Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club in California at one time, and helped with the Sierra Club’s campaign to stop two dam projects back in the 1960s. In other words, he’s no right-wing ideologue, as the smears of the climate campaigners would have you think.)
This story is relevant again this week not simply for the obvious hypocrisy and double standard (insert the old joke about liberals and double-standards here), but because the issue of the EPA’s climate science has resurfaced in the form of an EPA inspector general’s report that essentially says that Carlin was right about the EPA’s shoddy scientific review. Here’s the New York Times account from Wednesday:
In a report with wide-reaching political implications, U.S. EPA’s inspector general has found that the scientific assessment backing U.S. EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous did not go through sufficient peer review for a document of its importance. . .
According to the IG report, EPA failed to follow the Office of Management and Budget’s peer review procedures for a “highly influential scientific assessment,” which is defined as an assessment that could have an impact of more than $500 million in one year and is “novel, controversial, or precedent setting.”
In particular, the document was reviewed by a 12-member panel that included an EPA employee, violating rules on neutrality. EPA also did not make the review results public, as required, or certify whether it complied with internal or OMB requirements.
In a statement, IG Arthur Elkins Jr. emphasized that his office “did not test the validity of the scientific or technical information used to support the endangerment finding.”
“While it may be debatable what impact, if any, this had on EPA’s finding, it is clear that EPA did not follow all required steps for a highly influential scientific assessment,” he said.
Roger Pielke Jr. observes how the climate campaigners are all circling the wagons, saying “move along, nothing to see here,” and noting that “I’d speculate that these observers would have had different reactions had this report been requested by Henry Waxman in 2006 about the last administration’s EPA. . . during the Bush Administration concern about processes to ensure scientific integrity were all the rage. At that time it was generally understood that process matters, not simply because it helps to improve the quality of scientific assessments, but also because it helps to establish their legitimacy in the political process. One sneers at process at some risk.”
More at Powerline Blog
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I’m proud to say that Alan used materials from WUWT in his report, and that he has been vindicated for standing up to the sloppy rush job.
Thank you Mr. Carlin, for having integrity where others did not.
UPDATE: Climatologist Pat Michaels sums up the whole affair pretty well at Forbes: The EPA’s Endangerment Finding Is Very Endangered
Realclimate is not a source to be trusted on anything related to climate science.
And only an idiot uses Wikiedia to explain HADCRUT.
HADCRUT is not showing any relationship to GISTEMP. There is no explanation here.
GISTEMP is manipulated by Hansen to lower past temperatures and increase preset. GISTEMP is divergent from HACDRUT, UAH and RSS.
All the IPCC and AGW science has been done based on HADCRUT.
Why don’t you write to Phil Jones, Trenberth and Schmidt and ask them if it is cooling or warming since 1998?
Or even more simply let us know which year has been warmer than 1998 in the past 13 years.
Answer : None
@Mark harrigan:
But – let us part on good terms.
Goodby, fair “Punisher”, for surely if you are not he, yet you have performed to his standard!
Oh NO the end of chocolate! (ref: Mark’s Forbes article) It seems like I have seen thousands of studies that start out with IF or WHEN it gets warmer some terrible thing will happen . . . .
What I would like to see just once is, IF it gets colder . . . .
It could happen you know!
Bernie
mark harrigan says:
October 5, 2011 at 6:17 am
By your biased perspective you are actually clueless as to how science works in industry. You must be an academic, who lives in a world of conjecture, lacking empirical experience. Most scientific papers are eventually proven wrong. Why write papers about things industry uses as SOP… it is a waste of time.
@ur momisugly Steve Keohane – hmmm – an unjustified assumption leading to a fallacious conclusion about an irrelevance Steve? Sounds like a typical denier to me – lol.
I’m not an academic. I’ve been a researcher in industry although mostly over the last two decades have worked running businesses, including building and selling my own. I think it’s possible I just may understand far more about how science is used in industry than you do perhaps?
as for the statement “Most scientific papeprs are eventually proven wrong”? – evidence?? or just another myth.
Deny this
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111020/full/news.2011.607.html
Who’s biased I wonder
Mark Harrigan says:
October 20, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Mark, I apologize if I mislabeled you. I retired from industry twenty years ago. From your insinuation of my being a denier, What do I deny? The climate changes, it always has. The fraction of a degree of inferred warming is smaller than the standard deviation. It is cooler now than when Greenland was settled, because retreating glaciers show pre-existing flora to the glaciers. The Gulf of Mexico was 2 meters higher 2000 years ago because the coast was 50 miles inland and the inhabitants left piles of shells where they lived on then current shores.
One can play all the games one wants with temperatures, but they do not over rule empirical observation. None of the catastrophic predictions have occurred, are occurring, nor will occur at the current rates of change of alleged warming.
The work I did with NIST beating the world’s first 32-bit CPU’s linewidths into submission,
+/-0.1μ, 3σ, in about 1985, was all about temperature measurement and control. I did this via temperature control at key process points of +/- 0.1°F. While this was important enough to be incorporated into SemaTech, it was a temporary step to whatever is being done now with better technology I’m sure.
You must be joking about the BEST “analysis” of surface stations…GIGO
Steve – I appreciate your courteous reply. However I would dispute your analysis and conclusions.
1) The BEST analysis (which by the way Mr Watts said he would accept no matter whether it agreed with his anti AGW stance or not – and it’s a bit rich h now appeals to the Peer reveiw process as a “get out” given that he has been a laeding critic of Peer Review as a process) clearly shows there has been warming. It IS based on empirical observation – so it seems to me you are in denial.
2) You say “The Climate changes, it always has” – but why?? Is it by magic?? No – of course not – the climate changes in response to some sort of climate forcing and that change is either amplified or reduced by positive or negative feedback. In the current times that’s due to CO2 forcing from (somewhat mislabelled but nevertheless real) greenhouse effect. The physics of that is beyond dispute. Water Vapour becomes a positive feedback to that. The only real uncertainty relates to how warm/how fast as there are, of course, many influences – such as Solar irradiation, albedo changes etc – but generally they are, if anything, at the moment tending to mitigate CO2 warming (for which we can be grateful). And such an assessment needs to be considered over decades, not just a few years.
3) Also, has GLOBAL climate actually changed all that much (except for recently). There is clear evidence that, in fact, GLOBAL climate (as opposed to just northern hermispheric or other regional climate) has NOT changed as much as it has in the last 30-40 years for nearly 20,000 years – you might like to look at this paper that establishes that – http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/cr/v48/n1/p5-11
4) Re your comments about measureement uncertainty and errors – I actually worked in Metrology for many years (I’m a PhD physicist by training) – they are simmply untrue. If you have a careful look at the measurment uncertainty available in the NASA or GISS data (for example) you will see it is WAY less than the amount of warming in the last 30 years
5) As for the “disasters” – you really out to google that – there is a powerful emerging series of staudies showing that the increasing frequency and severity of climate related incidents (flooding in Pakistan, Australia, USA, Thailand etc) and heat waves in places like Russia and droughts in Africa etc – are starting to statistically add up as being not readily explained by “natural” variations.
Mark Harrigan,
I shouldn’t pile on, but you make it too easy. Your CV posted above could just as well be Elmer Gantry’s CV. And you avoided Steve Keohane’s questions – for good reason, I suspect.
To answer your comments, Anthony Watts said he would accept the BEST conclusions. But Muller has been far from honest, and BEST diddled with the data, producing conclusions that show both warming and cooling; take your pick.
At this point I would not accept Muller’s word that the sun rises in the east. Muller is a slippery eel whose smile is a front for his devious mind. His overt backstabbing has been documented here, when he welshed on his promise of confidentiality to Anthony. Would you trust a devious trickster like that?
I also worked in a Metrology lab, for 30 years. We had over 140 engineers and technicians, and not one of them believed in the CO2=CAGW nonsense. You say, “…has GLOBAL climate actually changed all that much (except for recently). There is clear evidence that, in fact, GLOBAL climate (as opposed to just northern hermispheric or other regional climate) has NOT changed as much as it has in the last 30-40 years for nearly 20,000 years…”
That is simply incorrect. The fact is that the planet is still emerging from the LIA along its same long-term trend line. There is no evidence showing that anything unusual is occurring. The deceptive use of charts with a zero or specific temperature y-axis makes them look alarming. But when the actual long-term trend is used, we can see that the planet’s warming is natural and nothing to be concerned about.
When most everyone else in this thread constantly corrects your misinformation, maybe you should accept the fact that you’re on the wrong track.
🙂 Smokey – you reference the bloggorhea on a blog site (with dubious data) – I reference a science paper (which apparently you did not even read). Your simply “deny” its conclusions but offer no evidence to support your claim.
I talk science, you talk politics and make an ad hom comment.
Doesn’t speak much for your arguments – and “belief” of your work colleagues is not really relevant is it? If neither you or your colleages accept the physical reality that CO2 absorbs and back reflects long wave IR then you don;t know basic science.
Now here’s a little bit of elementary logic for you.
It’s quite reasonable for those who have difficulty coming to grips with AGW to have questions. That’s what real skeptics do.
But you have to question the motivation and open mindedness when, despite continually being shown the data and paper after paper concluding the issue is real they continue to object and bluster.
The scientific endeavour is not simply an individual effort – it is a collective domain – those who promote personal views about the reality of AGW without submitting their work to proper peer review are not part of that domain. They are pushing a personal view (to which they are entitled). But they are not entitled to their own facts.
I think one should remember Occam’s razor – namely
Person on web post claims to have in their self-published “paper”/website a comprehensive refutation of AGW which is full of important looking science and formulae but has not had any of the work subjected to review and evaluation by people who understand the science. Nevertheless it is clear in their own estimation that they have it right and the world’s climate scientists have it wrong.
Possible reasons?
Hypothesis 1) Author rightly believes the “real” science of Climate published in the reputable peer reviewed climate science journals is fundamentally flawed.
For this to be true there must be thousands of climate scientists, atmospheric physicists, journal editors and prestigious bodies of science who are either subject to mass delusion, associated with some vast conspiracy theory or just plain dumb.
Hypothesis 2) The Author wrongly believes their arguments or “science” are valid whereas in fact their unpublished refutation of AGW is complete junk, unable to be substantiated by evidence or to survive even a cursory peer review by properly trained scientists who know what they are doing because the Author has not even a rudimentary grasp of what they are saying
For this to be true the unpublished “refutation” of AGW has no real scientific basis.
Occam’s Razor recommends, when faced with competing hypotheses that are equal in other respects, select the one that makes the fewest new assumptions or to paraphrase
“simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones”
Mark Harrigan,
As I said above, you make it too easy.
First, you misunderstand Occam’s Razor: “One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.” ~William of Ockham, 1285-1349
By adding an unnecessary, extraneous variable [CO2] to describe what controls the climate, the result is confusion. That’s why not one GCM has been able to accurately predict the climate.
With a 40% increase in the dreaded “carbon”, the climate doomsters expected a steep ratcheting up of global temperatures by now. That has not happened, and the extremely *mild* temperature rise since the mid 19th century can be fully explained by natural variability; the null hypothesis has never been falsified, and global temperatures are not accelerating as endlessly predicted. Neither is sea level rise accelerating. Rising thermal expansion would be an early indicator of accelerated global warming. But it’s just not happening.
Now, before your head explodes, let me make clear that there is probably a minor component of radiative warming from GHG’s. But it is so small that it can be dismissed for all practical purposes. The planet has warmed from 288K to 288.8K in 150 years. Big deal. At times during the Holocene, temperatures have risen by 15°C in a shorter time frame — when CO2 levels were much lower than they are now.
So go ahead and scare yourself silly over AGW. But the rest of us see things in a more normal and rational perspective.
[Snip. We don’t tolerate accusations of “denialism” here. ~dbs, mod.]
Well – I’m actually pleased to see there is some editorial management here – it’s a refreshing change compared to some blogs and I do commend you for it 🙂
Smokey claims “The planet has warmed from 288K to 288.8K in 150 years. Big deal. At times during the Holocene, temperatures have risen by 15°C in a shorter time frame — when CO2 levels were much lower than they are now.”
The second claim – a 15 degree rise in less than 150 years is without substantiation and I would suggest is plainly incorrect. That has NEVER happened.
The first claim is misrepresentative – of the 0.8 degree rise in the last 150 years 75% of it has happened in the last 40 years.
The BEST data (and other data sources) clearly show the planet is warming. There is ample evidence (such as the paper I linked to above which I doubt Smokey has actually read) that these recent increases in warming (over, say the last 40-50 years) are far in excess of any natural variation for thousands of years.
The climate does not change by “magic” – something has to be causing it – so an appeal to the null hypothesis is fallacious. It has CLEARLY been shown to be false.
The best science, based on measured increases in CO2 levels, the basic physics of the (somewhat misnamed but real) greenhouse effect, and the measured satellite observations of reduced long wave IR precisely where you would expect CO2 absorption and remissions to occur. We can be grateful that warming has slowed somewhat in the last 10 years thanks to the natural variations – which are well explained and illustrated here http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/fig/figure-spm-2-l.png
So I stand by my comments with respect to Occam’s razor.
I would also point out that I showed above that the entire premise of this thread (that the GAO’s challenge to the EPA somehow invalidated the science) is completely false – something most posters on this thread rushed to embrace without checking their facts.
I would have though that might at least give some posters pause
By the way – it IS apparently okay to call people Trolls on this thread as Anthony Watts has done – so it seems a little hypocritical to censor based on the word “denier” – but so be it 🙂