By David Middleton
OPINION
A climate roadmap for President Trump
by Patrick Michaels | Jul 14, 2017
This week, President Trump is likely getting an earful in Paris over his extrication of the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement earlier this year. But our withdrawal will be meaningless unless he follows up with two important actions before he leaves office.
First, the administration must vacate the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 “Endangerment Finding” from carbon dioxide. Under the 2007 Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA, this finding is required for the Agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. No finding, no policy.
Second, the U.S. must pull out of the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This treaty, which was ratified by the Senate, is the document that enables subsequent emissions agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol (not ratified) and the Paris agreement (an executive agreement).
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At first glance, Dr. Michaels’ “roadmap” appears to be a short trip over a simple route. There are a multitude of reasons for withdrawing from the UNFCCC and no reasons to remain a party to this organization… And withdrawal is wholly within the powers of and at the discretion of the President. So, the last stop on Dr. Michaels’ itinerary is the easy bit.
Vacating the EPA’s endangerment finding may sound easy, but it may not be…
Is the EPA’s Landmark ‘Endangerment Finding’ Now Itself Imperiled?
The EPA’s court-backed determination that greenhouse gases are a threat to America’s health and security might prove hard for a Trump administration to undo.
by Abrahm Lustgarten
ProPublica, Nov. 22, 2016
[…]
The agency’s conclusion rested on thousands of pages of peer-reviewed research, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from the U.S. Global Climate Research Program, and from the National Research Council. The agency wrote its rules and subjected them to public criticism. The public submitted voluminous comments, all of which were reviewed by the EPA before it issued a final rule.
The original rule-writing process alone took 14 months, (or 10 years if you count the arguments leading up to the 2007 Supreme Court fight). After its completion, The American Chemistry Council and other groups petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia to review the validity of the finding. In 2012, that court upheld the EPA’s endangerment rule, finding that the agency’s interpretation of its authority and of its obligation to regulate carbon dioxide “is unambiguously correct.”
In order to effectively eliminate the rule now, one former EPA attorney told ProPublica, the Trump administration would likely have to reargue the original decision, including the merits of the scientific evidence, and then build on it.
Per the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision, the new administration would have to use existing evidence to prove no risk is posed by climate gases. Then it would have to explain how new information that has emerged since 2009 — a period including the hottest years on record, some of the biggest storms and driest droughts, and destabilizing mass human migration — demonstrate how the EPA erred in its 2009 conclusion.
It’s a steep hill to climb, and, as Gerrard points out, would inevitably lead to a fresh wave of lawsuits both against the EPA and against polluters directly in courts across the country.
[…]
Per the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision, the new administration would have to use existing evidence to prove no risk is posed by climate gases.
Setting aside the fact that there is no such thing as “climate gases”… The “existing evidence” for the endangerment finding consists of climate models which forecast a a multitude of doomsday scenarios without deep reductions in so-called “greenhouse” gas emissions.
It’s basically impossible to use the existing evidence to vacate the endangerment finding unless the Trump administration can invalidate the models… And Dr. Michael’s roadmap may have a pathway to invalidating the models…
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One of the foundational documents for the Endangerment Finding is the 2009 “National Assessment” of climate change. Its next iteration, in 2014, claimed it was “the most comprehensive and authoritative report ever generated about climate change,” as well as being “a key deliverable of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.”
The problem is, these “assessments” rely solely upon computer climate models for their future scenarios of gloom and doom. As it turns out, climate modeling (or forecasting) isn’t necessarily climate science, because the modeler gets to choose a preferred answer, and then tune the internal equations to get there.
The forecast models are known as “general circulation models,” or GCMs, and are generated by various government research groups around the world. Every six years, the U.S. Department of Energy supervises a “model intercomparison” project. For the most recent one, in 2013, 34 modeling teams sent in a “frozen code” model to be compared with the predictions from other groups. These form a community of base models, which the researchers feel are their “best” version, and after this point the code cannot be changed until the inter-comparison is done.
According to an Oct. 2016 news story in Science magazine, the modeling team from Germany’s Max Planck Institute was finalizing their inter-comparison version when the team leader, Erich Roeckner, became temporarily unavailable to participate in the work. As the team tested the model before submitting it, they found it now predicted twice as much warming (7 degrees Celsius) for doubled carbon dioxide as it had in its previous iteration. Science reported that Roeckner had a unique ability to tune the model’s cloud formation algorithm, and so in his absence, the model produced heating way outside the norm. Roeckner’s team eventually got the warming down to a level that was within the range of the other models.
Enter Frederic Hourdin, who headed up the French modeling effort. He rounded up modelers from 13 other groups and recently published “The Art and Science of Climate Model Tuning” in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. All of the climate models the world uses to create and justify things like the U.N. Framework Convention, the EPA endangerment finding, and the Paris agreement, are “tuned” to arrive at parameters forecast within an “anticipated acceptable range,” to quote Hourdin. But the big question is, acceptable to whom? One of Roeckner’s senior scientists, Thorsten Mauritsen, told Science, “The model we produced with 7 degrees [Celsius] was a damn good model.” But in his opinion that was too hot, so it had to be tuned.
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It will be a considerable task to document the tuning problem. But if the Trump administration does this, it will have sufficient justification to warrant vacating the Endangerment Finding, which itself will justify getting the U.S. out of the U.N. Framework Climate Convention, and out of Paris for good.
Patrick J. Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute.
In anticipation of, ‘The climate models are not tuned!”…
[1] Hourdin, F., T. Mauritsen, A. Gettelman, J. Golaz, V. Balaji, Q. Duan, D. Folini, D. Ji, D. Klocke, Y. Qian, F. Rauser, C. Rio, L. Tomassini, M. Watanabe, and D. Williamson, 2016: The art and science of climate model tuning. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00135.1, in press. [link to full manuscript].
[2] Climate model tuning, July 9, 2013 by Judith Curry
[3] The art and science of climate model tuning, August 1, 2016 by Judith Curry
One would think that this would be the only evidence needed to vacate the endangerment finding:
Either way, EPA Administrator Pruitt’s “Red Team” should focus like a laser beam” on the climate models and snuff out the CAGW flashlight.
Dave wrote: “One would think that this would be the only evidence needed to vacate the endangerment finding” and then presented UAH and RSS data vs. model predictions.
How does one prove that a model or group of models used in the endangerment finding were invalid? Tough question. Remember, your “proof” must convince the Supreme Court. As long as Chevron Deference exists, the court believes that the head of the EPA (approved by Congress) is the one best able to make such a decision.
How far off do the need to be to be invalid? If there were a reasonable consensus the EBMs were correct, would that be enough to prove they were invalid? For that matter, would an ECS of 2, be low enough to prove that there is no danger from rising GHGs? How about an ECS of 1? Even the smallest amount of future warming that can be assigned to GHG’s will cause sea level rise and therefore damage. Even if natural variability were larger than a forced change in SLR, one could argue that GHGs made it worse.
Even if the US withdrew from the UNFCCC, the EPA could still regulate GHGs under the Clean Air Act.
If we can’t stop GHG emissions from being regulated under the Clean Air Act and we can’t amend it without Democratic votes, then the only choice is to make rules that minimize the amount of harm any future EPA could do. Could the EPA or Congress issue a rule saying that regulation of GHG emissions must make sense from a domestic cost-benefit perspective. US costs must be lower by US benefits. Foreign benefits would count only if a binding treaty between the US and that foreign nation existed. The Social Cost of Carbon is zero if we regulate by those rules. The other big factor in the Social Cost of Carbon is the discount rate. If we think our descendant are going to be far richer than we are, then it makes sense economically to let them spend some of their riches adapting to whatever comes rather than asking the current generation to mitigate. Create a precedent of using the growth rate over the last century in projections for the next century. If we can’t stop the EPA from regulating, we must prevent the future damage they can cause.
Findings that the 1.5 and 2.0 degC targets adopted by the Paris Treaty are not based on sound science and economics might eliminate their use by any future head of the EPA.
Dr. Spencer compared models to UAH and HadCRUT4 in that particular graph…
The endangerment finding is based on model projections.
Reality runs cooler than 90-95% of the models.
David: Massachusetts sued the Bush II EPA for not regulating GHG emissions and won, giving the EPA the power to regulate under the Clean Air Act. Massachusetts didn’t claim that climate models must be right; they claimed that SLR (from a non-specified amount of warming) was going to damage their coasts. Your graph shows that both HadCRU4 and UAH show warming. Warming means thermal expansion, some loss of ice from Greenland, some SLR, and some damage. AFAIK, the amount of warming and damage is irrelevant to the EPA’s ability to regulate. (IIRC, the original Clean Air Act didn’t even require that the benefits of any regulations exceed their costs. Cost-benefit analysis came later and isn’t always a requirement.)
So your graph doesn’t answer my question, how low can climate sensitivity (ECS) before the EPA is not allowed to regulate? What scientific evidence can prove that the case that reached the Supreme Court was wrongly decided? From a lukewarmer perspective, it can’t be done. The best we can do (as long as Chevron deference exists) is to make sure the EPA uses the proper information to decide on a Social Cost for Carbon. At $10/ton or less (calculated by using a low ECS, high discount rate and benefits only from the US), the cost of regulation will be negligible. At $100/ton or more (calculated using a high ECS, a low discount rate and world-wide benefits), coal becomes uneconomic partly because it has additional costs via traditional particulate air pollution. Gasoline only costs an additional $0.25 per gallon and it has fewer smaller liabilities in terms of traditional air pollution.
It’s not a matter of the EPA being allowed to regulate and SCOTUS didn’t base their ruling on science. They left the science up to the EPA.
SCOTUS ruled that under the Clean Air Act, the EPA must regulate GHG emissions if they deem them hazardous through an endangerment finding.
The Obama EPA issued an endangerment finding based on the models which predicted all sorts of hazardous impacts from GHG emissions. The Social Cost of Carbon is also based on the model projections of future impacts.
If the EPA can demonstrate that the models were wrong… or “tuned” to yield hazardous impacts, it could revoke the endangerment finding.
The models don’t use realistic climate sensitivities.
The discount rate applied to the SCC is a different matter. SCC is used to estimate a present day value of future damages for the purpose of pricing GHG emissions. If the EPA applies a real world discount rate of 7% to the SCC, it would drop to $0/ton or less. This wouldn’t vacate the endangerment finding. But it would render a carbon tax or cap & trade totally moot.
David: We are mostly in agreement, but you seem to be dodging my point: How wrong do climate models need to be to get rid of the EPA’s Engenderment Ruling? Suppose a Trump Administration red team says the central estimate for ECS should be based on observations (ie EBMs), not AOGCMs with tuned parameters. Or a compromise between EBMs and AOGCMs. What would that do to the endangerment finding????
As best I can tell, an endangerment finding is driven by the precautionary principle. If something with both good and bad aspects is happening, the EPA looks at the bad aspects and issues an endangerment finding. If new science says that the danger of warming has been cut in half, some danger is still left and the endangerment finding stands. If so, Pat Michaels call to vacate the endangerment finding is a waste of time. See the 2009 EPA Endangerment Finding below.
When the EPA gets around to issuing RULES after an endangerment finding, they often (always?) do some kind of cost-benefit analysis to prove that the country as a whole will be better off under their new rules. With new information about ECS, the cost-benefit analysis can change radically. Obama’s Regulatory Czar in OBM, Cass Sunstein (the nation’s most cited law professor, not scientist or economist) managed the process of setting a SCC for regulatory purposes. This link explains a little of that process – which may be the ONLY means left by which lukewarmers can influence policy. Which is why a red team should focus on ECS and SCC – more radical options may turn out to be fantasies.
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/02/understanding-the-social-cost-of-carbon-and-connecting-it-to-our-lives/
This link suggests that the discount rate is an adjustable parameter to be chosen by a political process. For economists, however, an optimum discount rate if given by a mathematical theorem involving the future economic growth rate. In words, the richer you think the next generation will be, the less you should ask the current generation to spent on mitigation and the more the next generation should spend on adaptation.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-08/documents/endangerment_tsd.pdf
On December 7, 2009, the Administrator signed two distinct findings regarding greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act:
Endangerment Finding: The Administrator finds that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)—in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.
Cause or Contribute Finding: The Administrator finds that the combined emissions of these well-mixed greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution which threatens public health and welfare.
These findings do not themselves impose any requirements on industry or other entities. However, this action was a prerequisite for implementing greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles. In collaboration with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, EPA finalized emission standards for light-duty vehicles (2012-2016 model years) in May of 2010 and heavy-duty vehicles (2014-2018 model years) in August of 2011.
Note: We are unlikely to emit enough SF6 to cause a significant amount of climate. Nevertheless it is a “danger”.
The models need to be wrong enough for the EPA to revoke its endangerment finding. The starting point would be to demonstrate that the models were “tuned” to yield certain results.
Then models which incorporated realistic climate sensitivities would have to run. If these models eliminated the justification of the endangerment finding, it could be revoked. Of course this would lead to more litigation.
In an ideal world, Congress would amend the CAA to exclude climate change and GHG’s. Or Trump would get to replace one of the 5 justices who sided with Massachusetts, the EPA would revoke the endangerment finding and SCOTUS would uphold the revocation.
David says: “The models need to be wrong enough for the EPA to revoke its endangerment finding. The starting point would be to demonstrate that the models were “tuned” to yield certain results.”
How wrong is “wrong enough”? EBMs have a central estimate for ECS of 1.5-2.0 K, but their 95% confidence interval is more like 1.0-4.0 K (unless one uses an unbiased prior). What happens to the endangerment finding when the average model had an ECS of 3.3 and a few greater than 4. (My guess is that wouldn’t be considered to be wrong enough.)
It is possible to calculate the confidence interval or the difference between two means given the confidence interval for both means. If AOGCMs – EBMs difference is 1.5 +/- 1.0 that would imply the models were wrong. However, is this a 70%, 90%, 95% or 99% confidence interval? In other words, do the models need to be “likely wrong”, “very likely wrong”, “extremely likely wrong”, or “virtually certainly wrong”. And which of these meets a legal standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” or a “preponderance of the evidence. Certainly the hiatus didn’t prove that AOGCMs were wrong.
Being able to demonstrating that models were tuned to yield a specific result is even more unlikely. Studies with ensembles of simpler models show that there are lots of sets of parameters that are equally good (or bad if you prefer) at representing today’s climate. Few of them have a climate sensitivity as low as EBMs. In the process of tuning a model, a scientist might have some idea which of two mediocre choices made while tuning a model is more likely to yield a higher climate sensitivity, but proving intentional bias is extremely unlikely.
I’d love to hear someone propose a convincing solution to the problem of scientifically getting rid of the endangerment finding that is quantitative and practical. Until then, it appears to be a fantasy.
Looking at Dr Spencer’s models graphic there’s 1 model which is running just about spot on, in yellow, and another in purple running very close. Shouldn’t those 2 be subject to much closer scrutiny because at present they’re the closest to observations?
Surely, from an American’s point of view it is plain crazy to have an endangerment finding based solely on a projection of currently (very) inaccurate models showing warming that is an artifact of higher “minimum” temperatures.
So the endangerment finding (presumably for the health of Americans) solves these problems by:-
spending billions on a duplicate power system that is not reliable
forcing the costs onto power bills, which affects the poorest the most
forces companies to move their jobs abroad to somewhere with cheaper labour/energy costs
causing lower wages, unemployment, higher energy costs – presumably these are thought to improve peoples welfare and mental health (do I need a sarc?)
What are the benefits of the endangerment finding? Given the accelerating technological progress of the last 80 years, I challenge anyone to give an accurate assessment of what the world will look like in 40 years, let alone the end of the century.
SteveT
If you think Co2 is a problem, stop breathing. If you think this entire AGW game is nothing more but a pathetic attempt to create a technocratic elite that wants to control “EVERYTHING” and wishes you and your family nothing fleeced and eventually dead, get back at them. http//green-agenda.com