Texas Joins The Climate Change Data Wars.
Texas has joined the climate change "Data Wars".
The gravamen of the petition is:
EPA’s Administrator…outsourced the actual scientific study, as well as her required review of the scientific literature necessary to [determine endangerment and]…relied primarily on the conclusions of outside organizations, particularly the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”). EPA’s reliance on the IPCC’s assessment to make a decision of this magnitude is not legally supported. Since the Endangerment Finding’s public comment period ended in June, 2009, troubling revelations about the conduct, objectivity, reliability, and propriety of the IPCC’s processes, assessments, and contributors have become public. Previously private email exchanges among top IPCC climatologists reveal an entrenched group of activists focused less on reaching an objective scientific conclusion than on achieving their desired outcome. These scientists worked to prevent contravening studies from being published, colluded to hide research flaws, and collaborated to obstruct the public’s legal right to public information under open records laws.
Real Climate defends the IPCC from attack asserting:
[T]he IPCC assessment reports reflect the state of scientific knowledge very well. There have been a few isolated errors, and these have been acknowledged and corrected. What is seriously amiss is something else: the public perception of the IPCC, and of climate science in general, has been massively distorted by the recent media storm. All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science. Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam.
More substantively, however, a recent study by two Israeli scientists finds:
[A]lthough greenhouse gas forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcings, global temperature and solar irradiance are not polynomially cointegrated, and AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is refuted. Although we reject AGW, we find that greenhouse gas forcings have a temporary effect on global temperature. Because the greenhouse effect is temporary rather than permanent, predictions of significant global warming in the 21st century by IPCC are not supported by the data.
Also, Professor Phil Jones, former director of the key University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit who stepped down after emails suggesting climate scientists may have been manipulating data were leaked, told the BBC his record keeping is "not as good as it should be" thus "casting doubt" on the quality of the data used by the IPCC and others to support the climate change theory. Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now (suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon) and he said that for the past 15 years there has been no "statistically significant" warming.
The Data Wars matter in two key respects. First, data quality concerns undermine political support for aggressive climate change legislation, particularly in the midst of a major recession. Second, EPA's endangerment determination, which provides the basis for its authority to regulate GHG emissions, is substantially based on the IPCC findings. If the IPCC data is flawed, then EPA's endangerment determination may not be defensible.
Data has been distorted so badly by media and concerned parties on both sides of the argument that I wonder if we'll ever be able to sort it all out. In the meantime, I try to follow common sense habits that are green and promote sustainability. There is no reason not to.