Clearing up some misconceptions about the DoE report

From Climate Etc.

by Ross McKitrick

Last year I had the privilege of working with a small team (me, Judy Curry, John Christy, Steve Koonin and Roy Spencer) on a draft report for U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright on the topic of climate change impacts on the United States. After its release two environmental groups sued the Department of Energy (DOE) under something called the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) alleging our group was not legally constituted, which led to a suspension of our work.

We don’t have comparable legislation in Canada so I found the process baffling. Politicians in Canada routinely assemble groups of experts and ask them to write reports. In the U.S., FACA applies if an expert committee has been convened to advise on policies. We were not asked to do so nor did we. Nonetheless the judge decided that we should have been bound by the terms of FACA, including requirements to hold public hearings, and since we hadn’t done so we were out of compliance. The court ordered our work suspended and our drafts and internal emails to be released. The green groups must have found them tedious to go through, but there was one with a bit of spicy language which I’ll explain later.

Meanwhile let me clear up a few misunderstandings about our project.

First, it is alleged we were “secretive” and kept our work from public scrutiny. Far from it. I’ve been an invited reviewer for many Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. The IPCC selects chapter authors in a closed-door process, the chapter drafts are written in secret, reviewers are bound to secrecy, and we are forbidden from sharing either drafts or our own comments until after the final version is published. Academic journals likewise demand secrecy of referees regarding submitted drafts and review comments. Our group, by contrast, knew that our draft would be released for public comment, the comments would be published before our responses were, and everything would be out in the open. The process under which we have been working was far more transparent than either the IPCC or academic journals—indeed uncomfortably so.

Second, our report is sometimes described as “attacking climate science.” Such nonsense is intended to discredit it and stop people from reading it. We quote extensively from past IPCC reports and rely on mainstream peer-reviewed science and data. We aimed to explain important topics and lines of evidence that have typically been downplayed in public discussions, in other words to broaden the scientific discussion, not attack it.

Third, it has been alleged that we were ordered to write a report attacking the 2009 Endangerment Finding (EF), a rule underpinning US greenhouse gas regulations. In truth we were kept well away from the EF reconsideration process. In early conversations we learned that the EF was up for reconsideration but also that we weren’t going to be involved in the draft rulemaking. For our part we demanded, and received, complete editorial independence. The EF team was housed at the Environmental Protection Agency while we were at the DOE, and we neither met them, knew who they were, nor what they were doing.

When news broke that the EPA would publish a draft rulemaking rescinding the EF we asked that our report be published separately so the two projects would not be conflated in the public mind. Alas the Administration did not avail themselves of our wisdom on that point and confusion ensued. But the final version of the EF rulemaking contains a footnote clarifying that they did not rely on our report for their decision.

Fourth, and on that point, there is now a view out there that—ha ha—the Administration “abandoned” our report. No, the EPA neither accepted nor rejected it because they concluded they lacked statutory authority to do either. The rescission of the EF was based on recent court rulings that limit U.S. Agency powers to regulate in areas not specified in legislation. The EPA concluded they lacked regulatory authority over greenhouse gases, so neither can they issue findings on climate science, just as they have no authority to issue scientific findings on vaccines or cancer treatment.

Fifth we have been accused of ignoring our critics. No, due to the FACA lawsuit we are under court-imposed conditions not to function as the Climate Working Group, not even to respond to the comments we received, and not to publish a revised report. The “follow the science” crowd succeeded in using litigation to shut down the debate. But we have been individually going through the critical comments, corresponding directly with colleagues and developing response material. If the legalities get sorted out we will finish what we started by releasing a final report and a complete set of responses to the public comments.

There seem to be a lot of misconceptions out there, abetted by careless reporting from hostile media. For instance, a friend sent me a Desmog newsletter quoting one of my emails as saying “The extreme weather alarmism angle has been non-stop for years. … At this point, I want to hold the readers’ faces in it until their limbs stop twitching.” The omitted part changes the meaning of the quote. Far from recommending we repeat the media’s lies over and over, the “it” I referred to was material from the IPCC. I had inserted into our extreme weather chapter 12 pages of extracts from IPCC reports that contradict media hysteria about extreme weather trends. Others on our team questioned why we needed it. In my reply I argued, grouchily, that an extended tutorial on what the IPCC says on the subject would alleviate public fears, even at the risk of boring readers to death.

I’m very proud of the report our team produced. I hope we get to publish a final edition and if we do, people will see how open and constructive debate among people with differing perspectives can lead to top quality science.  Stay tuned.