Search: climategate

Instead of exercising its “judgment,” as required by Sec. 202 of the Clean Air Act, to determine whether greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endanger public health and welfare, EPA largely deferred to the judgment of an external agency not subject to U.S. data quality and freedom of information laws — the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC developed three lines of evidence for its conclusion that GHG emissions are causing dangerous global warming. The first is based on the IPCC’s understanding of the physics of the climate system. The second is the claim that recent decades are unusually warm compared to previous centuries during the current interglacial period known as the Holocene. The third line of evidence is the asserted agreement between observations and computer model simulations.

Peabody Energy’s 240-page petition for reconsideration assesses these lines of evidence in light of new information not in EPA’s possession when it drafted the endangerment finding. Much of this new information is contained in the thousands of emails and other files that produced the Climategate scandal. The files and emails provide an insider’s look at the professional (or unprofessional) behavior of leading climate scientists at the UK’s Climate Research Unit and their colleagues in the United States. This scandal has led to the resignation (allegedly temporary) of Dr. Phil Jones as director of the CRU and an official determination that the CRU violated the UK’s freedom of information act. 

Peabody concludes that the Climategate files undermine each of the IPCC’s principal lines of evidence, and confirm what many climate “skeptics” had long suspected:

The CRU information reveals that many of the principal scientists who authored key chapters of the IPCC scientific assessments were driven by a policy agenda that caused them to cross the line from neutral science to advocacy. Indeed, they went far beyond even what is acceptable as advocacy, as they actively suppressed information that was contrary to the “nice, tidy story” that they wished to present, they refused to disclose underlying data concerning the studies in which they were involved to third parties who might use the information to critique those studies, they engaged in a wide variety of improper and indeed unethical tactics to manipulate the type of scientific information that appeared both in the IPCC reports and in the peer-reviewed scientific journals upon which the IPCC largely relied, and they relied on inaccurate and unverified information from secondary source material that was included anyway to advance the authors’ advocacy agenda. Moreover, the Information Commissioner’s Office of the United Kingdom (“U.K.”), the agency that oversees and enforces the U.K.’s freedom of information laws, after investigation, recently concluded that CRU broke those laws in refusing to respond to information requests.

EPA’s only reasonable course of action, Peabody argues, is to reopen the endangerment proceeding:

EPA has effectively delegated its judgment under section 202(a) of the CAA to an international body that acted contrary to basic U.S. standards of information quality, integrity and transparency. In the interests of good science and policy, and as required by law, EPA must now reconsider its Endangerment Finding in light of the CRU revelations. The importance of low-cost, reliable energy to the economy is too high for EPA to begin regulation based on such an uncertain foundation.

Last week the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office-the body that administers the Freedom of Information Act-said the University of East Anglia had flouted the rules in its handling of an FOI request by British amateur climate analyst Doug Kennan.

Today the Guardian reported how Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, withheld information requested under freedom of information laws.

The CRU scientist’s wrongdoing and cover-up were only revealed after thousands of University of East Anglia emails were leaked to the internet, in an incident now known as Climategate.

It should be noted that the Competitive Enterprise Institute is involved in helping to further uncover the scandal that Keenan discovered. CEI’s legal team already has submitted a number of FOIA requests to government-employed climate scientists involved in the Climategate emails.

According to the Guardian,

“Jones and his Chinese-American colleague Wei-Chyung Wang, of the University at Albany in New York, are being accused of scientific fraud by an independent British researcher over the contents of a research paper back in 1990.

That paper, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature, claimed to answer an important question in climate change science: how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?…

…The pair, with four fellow researchers, concluded that the urban influence was negligible. Some of their most compelling evidence came from a study of temperature data from eastern China, a region urbanising fast even then….

…But many climate sceptics did not believe the claim…

…But when Jones turned down requests from them to reveal details about the location of the 84 Chinese weather stations used in the study, arguing that it would be “unduly burdensome”, they concluded that he was covering up the error.

And when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud.

He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the study period, perhaps invalidating their data…

…By then, Keenan had published his charges in Energy & Environment, a peer-reviewed journal edited by a Hull University geographer, Dr Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen.

The paper was largely ignored at the time, but Guardian investigations of the hacked emails now reveal that there was concern among Jones’s colleagues about Wang’s missing data – and the apparent efforts by Jones and Wang over several years to cover this up.

Those concerns were most cogently expressed to Jones by his ex-boss, and former head of the CRU, Dr Tom Wigley. In August 2007, Wigley warned Jones by email: “It seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (W-C W at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect.”

Whaddaya know — ever since Climategate and brutal cold (snap!) sawed in half the global warming illusion that the formerly mainstream media had sold as reality, all of a sudden there’s massive upheaval: dogs and cats living together; news networks hosting climate debates; CBS exposing taxpayer-funded boondoggle junkets to Copenhagen; and politicians (other than Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe) boldly denouncing fraudulent research about the “benefits” of “solutions” to global warming. Just check out last Friday’s press release from Michigan State Rep. Tom McMillin:

McMillin made the call following a plan from the global-warming advocacy group the Center for Climate Strategies that likely overstated possible job growth and will cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars to follow a political agenda.

“To expend taxpayer money on such a biased group as CCS was just wrong and exemplifies how Governor Granholm has run this state into the ground – by putting political agendas ahead of truth and Michigan job creation,” said McMillin, R-Rochester Hills. “There will not be a net 129,000 jobs created. To follow the recommendations of this study may actually result in net job losses for Michigan.”

McMillin noted the long history of questionable action from the Center for Climate Strategies that can be found here.

“The report is intentionally false in order to promote CCS’s radical agenda, which always conveniently leave out costs to taxpayers and job providers,” McMillin said. “The results of this so-called study is as bogus as the far left group the governor chose to stage this charade – that group, CCS, is closely aligned with scientists who hide data, delete emails and contrive to bully peer review methods in order to promote their radical, non-scientific, highly questionable agenda. In effect, Michigan now has its own version of Climategate. Let’s see if, in Michigan, they’ll come clean or hide.”

McMillin is right, of course — CCS has proven to engage in the same fudge-factoring and half-baked analysis as the Climategate cooks. The failure of Copenhagen and the poor election-year forecast for national cap-and-trade passage may mean the Greens return to the state-level, pressure-up strategy. It would help if more state lawmakers like McMillin engage to expose how this scheming has worked around the country.

Here is my op-ed published in the Detroit News on December 23.

Climategate: What e-mail really means

Daniel Compton

By now, most people are aware of the scandal surrounding the leak of thousands of e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU). Among these is an e-mail exchange involving several of the world’s leading climate scientists, dated October of 2009, in which the admission is made that even their best models cannot account for the last decade of temperature data. “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” said Kevin Trenberth, one of the world’s preeminent climate scientists and lead author of the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports.

Significantly for public policy, the admission implies that efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions — including the EPA’s endangerment finding, all forms of cap-and-trade-style legislation, and any possible resolution to emerge from the recently convened Copenhagen conference –have no basis in science .

Trenberth’s statement is compelling on its own, but the subsequent discussion is even more illuminating. Later in the same e-mail thread, fellow climate scientist Tom Wigley replies that he does not agree with Trenberth’s assertion. Trenberth then responds to Wigley, clarifying and expounding upon his earlier claims:

“How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

This comment requires some scientific translation for its significance to be fully understood. The “energy budget” is the total energy gains and losses incurred by the Earth. The overwhelming majority of the energy entering the Earth comes from the Sun. Some of that energy is reflected back out into space by the atmosphere, clouds, and the Earth’s surface, while the remaining energy is absorbed, and is later reradiated as heat. The amount of energy the Earth gains is approximately equal to the amount it loses, which is why global temperatures remain relatively stable from day to day.

We have fairly good estimates of how much energy is entering the Earth, and we know from the laws of thermodynamics that energy cannot cease to exist, so “balancing the energy budget” simply entails accounting for where all that energy is going. “Global warming” refers to the condition in which the Earth as a system is taking on slightly more energy than it is losing for a sustained period, causing it to heat up over time. Therefore, it is highly significant when one of the world’s leading climate scientists asserts that we are “no where close to knowing where energy is going” and “not close to balancing the energy budget”.

In this context, “geoengineering” refers to any deliberate effort to affect net energy gains or losses to achieve a desired result, such as a cooler planet. The energy income of the planet is approximately static, and also well beyond our control, so affecting net energy flow necessarily involves changing systemic energy losses.

Greater atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), can reduce energy loss, so reducing CO2 emissions is one method of geoengineering. Indeed, Trenberth, in a letter published in the February 2009 issue of Physics Today defined “geoengineering” to include all efforts to “reduce emissions … or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” Therefore, using his own definition of “geoengineering,” Trenberth’s remark could be interpreted thus:

The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration to reduce emissions … or reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!

All policy actions that would be required under the EPA endangerment finding, cap-and-trade legislation, and any global climate treaty amount to attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Thus, by his own admission, Kevin Trenberth appears convinced that all these efforts are quite hopeless indeed.

Daniel Compton is a research associate at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and contributor to OpenMarket.org

Cato’s Pat Michaels, one of the scientists attacked in the Climategate emails, has an excellent editorial in the Wall Street Journal today with examples of how the scientists promoting catastrophic global warming shut out dissident voices in supposedly peer-reviewed journals.

Michaels notes that the EPA finding of endangerment from CO2 emissions, based on the tainted research of the Climategate emailers, should be called into question.  He writes:

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to “skeptics” (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn’t publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.

Liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson today writes about former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s policy flip-flop on global warming and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He notes her current recommendation — expressed in her own Post op-ed last week — that President Obama boycott Copenhagen, citing the Climategate scandal as reason enough to skip the climate conference. But while she was governor she held a slightly different view, as Robinson explained:

Back then, Palin was the governor of a state where “coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice, record forest fires, and other changes are affecting, and will continue to affect, the lifestyles and livelihoods of Alaskans,” as she wrote (in a 2007 administrative order creating the state’s Climate Change Sub-Cabinet). Faced with that reality, she sensibly formed the high-level working group to chart a course of action.

“Climate change is not just an environmental issue,” wrote Palin. “It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans….”

In her administrative order, Palin instructed the sub-Cabinet group to develop recommendations on “the opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from Alaska sources, including the expanded use of alternative fuels, energy conservation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, land use management, and transportation planning.” She also instructed the group to look into “carbon-trading markets.”

Robinson is right about Palin’s seeming switch, but he leaves out context and cuts no slack on how the Climategate scandal has been a game-changer. For context, the idea of setting up a blue-ribbon panel to study climate issues likely came from Tom Chapple, a greenie envirocrat in her administration who left not long after she created the Subcabinet. The responsibility for managing the project fell to his successor, Larry Hartig, who has had to juggle the interests of environmentalists and the oil industry up there.

As director of Climate Strategies Watch I studied how the Subcabinet was put together, and specifically how and why they hired the global warming alarmist Center for Climate Strategies as technical advisers and consultants to run all the Subcabinet’s activities. I had written a long narrative — linking public documents and emails — explaining the developments and the less-than-transparent process, for the CSWatch Web site last year. However, that project has been folded into the activities of the Heartland Institute — my current employer — as CSWatch (we believe the site was victimized by a hacker) was only planned to last a year (it lasted about 18 months).

For those who want to plow through the story, I am reproducing the original CSWatch narrative below with links (some of which may not work) to documents embedded. You’ll see at the end that I tend to believe that then-Gov. Palin was doing the politically correct thing at the time by signing the administrative order, but left the major decisions to Chapple, Hartig, and the Subcabinet itself. I think the views she’s expressed now only serve to confirm that theory, but I could be wrong.

The story, posted late August/early September last year:

I hate to be the Baby Ruth in the punchbowl at the celebration over John McCain’s choice for a running mate, but since it’s my job to follow these things, I’ve got to highlight one area where Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has aligned with the GOP candidate on an issue that makes many conservatives cringe: global warming.

Gov. Palin signed an administrative order last September that created the Alaska Climate Change Sub-Cabinet. Her order is perhaps not as strident on greenhouse gas emissions as some other governors, but she still buys into the argument that GHGs must be reduced.

Unfortunately her Department of Environmental Conservation hired the Center for Climate Strategies as their climate commission management team. I requested documents pertaining to the CCS hire from DEC and was sent some records, but others were identified as “deliberative” and therefore withheld from me, which officials said was allowed under state law. I still have my doubts, because other records sent to me appeared to fall into that category but were sent anyway. Regardless, the withholding of several documents with regard to an issue that does not fall under “highly-sensitive” or “security-related” undermines the governor’s reputation for greater government transparency.

As for CCS, it all began last August when DEC’s Tom Chapple (now working in the private sector) reached out to CCS’s executive director (PDF) Tom Peterson, “to discuss the opportunities and the possibility of CCS interest in helping Alaska.” In fact, it appears that Chapple was the driving force behind the state’s hiring of the Pennsylvania-based advocacy group, to manage Alaska’s development of their greenhouse gas emissions policy.

Chapple learned some about CCS from the Washington Dept. of Ecology’s Janice Adair — as his handwritten notes show (PDF) – which include a discussion about how to work out a sole source contract for CCS, and that “some states have paid some, some have paid nothing” (Washington state paid CCS $200,000). Other notes (PDF) from a conference call, presumably that included Ken Colburn of CCS, show that the typical CCS cookie-cutter process was explained, and that as elsewhere CCS would handle everything, once hired: Meetings, scheduling, technical information, Web site, preparation of pre-meeting documents, meeting minutes, etc. Oh, and we can’t forget CCS’s own grant-funding service.

In the meantime Gov. Palin signed her administrative order on Sept. 14, 2007.

A month later negotiations between Chapple of DEC and CCS representatives intensified, as they began to discuss what the typical CCS “process memo” would contain. A draft (PDF) of the agreement said, “Although additional research may be needed to help the public and policymakers better understand Alaska’s changing climate and how to anticipate and respond to its effects, the time for climate debate is over; it is now time for climate action.” Also, the document states on page 13 clearly what is off-limits: “Participants will not debate the science of climate change….” Private funders are identified as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Marisla Foundation, the Energy Foundation, and others. The opening negotiating cost (PDF, see second page) for the process was set at $480,000.

As if total control over the process wasn’t enough for CCS either, though, there’s this: CCS recommended who would be appointed (PDF) to the climate commission. Read the list and note how strongly the representation is that they want from environmentalism and government. Meanwhile private business gets short shrift, as do climate scientists, taxpayer activists, property rights activists, and other protectors of individual rights.

On November 6, 2007 the Climate Change Sub-Cabinet held its third meeting, in which CCS was allowed to make the case (PDF) for being hired as its management consultant. Ken Colburn, in his PowerPoint presentation (PDF), promoted CCS’s nonsensical economic analysis from Arizona (285,000 new jobs and $5.5 billion in net savings to the state!) and New Mexico ($2.1 billion in savings to the state). As I’ve reported in the past, those claims by CCS have been thoroughly debunked.

But unsurprisingly the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner swallowed the Colburn claims (PDF), unchallenged. The newspaper reported that Larry Hartig, Palin’s commissioner of environmental conservation, expressed interest in CCS: “If it’s not them, we should do something similar to that.” Also, Colburn explained that CCS’s services typically cost about $500,000, “but states generally pay only about 10 percent of the cost,” the News-Miner reported. “CCS covers the rest with funding from various foundations” – that is, Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Later in November DEC’s Chapple sent out a plea (PDF) – and forwarded to Colburn — to various state departments asking for help “in shaping up the scope of work for the proposed contract with (CCS).” The message was met with enthusiasm from Colburn: “This is a remarkable email, carrying precisely the right content and precisely the right tone.” Translation: “I won’t stop kissing your rump until you hire us.” More negotiations and contract details were addressed (PDF) in a conference call Nov. 29.

In early December 2007 DEC’s Hartig, with Chapple and Colburn in the loop, considered engaging the National Commission on Energy Policy (PDF) to help on climate adaptation strategies. NCEP is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which is also paying the total cost for Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter’s climate and energy policy advisers.

As the February meeting approached in which CCS would be formally approved as manager by the Sub-Cabinet, questions were raised (PDF) about why the cost for Alaska’s portion of CCS’s services rose from $49,000 to $180,000. No other documents were provided to me that addressed this situation and its resolution, but the final contract (PDF) shows that the state is indeed contributing the $180,000. However, the full budget (see pages 36-37 of the contract) for the process is double what any of these have cost in other states: $972,196. This could be attributed to the distance of the state from the lower 48, but it’s hard to believe that could account for that great an increase in the average CCS budget.

As for the holes in my story, Alaska DEC’s Gary Mendivil sent a letter with the documents that were provided, but also explained that some records were withheld (PDF) from me. My original request was received by DEC on Dec. 27, 2007, and according to an email from Mendivil on Feb. 1, 2008, he “was told that the stack of records that was sent to the (State of Alaska) attorney for review was four inches thick….” The CD containing records was mailed to me on Feb. 20 (according to DEC’s response letter), and the documents therein did not even measure a half-inch, much less anything close to four inches. Even with the documents they listed as withheld (PDF), it would be hard to believe they could measure four inches.

When asked why any records needed to be withheld in the first place, Mendivil provided a minimal explanation: “We’ve claimed a privilege under AS 40.25.120(a)(4) (“records required to be kept confidential by a federal law or regulation or by state law”).” Not satisfied, I asked which federal or state laws DEC was citing to justify keeping a lid on certain records. His answer:

“The Alaska Supreme Court has adopted the common law recognition of a deliberative process privilege. Because Alaska’s statutory definition of “state law” encompasses common law as well as positive law, the Alaska Supreme Court has held that the deliberative process privilege is one of the judicially recognized state law exceptions to public access under the public records act. This is the privilege that the State has claimed on certain documents identified on the privilege log that was most recently given to you. In other words, the documents withheld as “deliberative process” show the mental processes of government decision makers, and are thereby protected from disclosure.”

If you review the list of withheld records, and compare it to the documents DEC did provide, you might wonder what criteria they used to determine “deliberative” vs. non-deliberative. It seems clear that many of the records they did supply could have also fallen under “deliberative” status as well.

I would say it’s pretty odd that the State of Alaska could withhold documents from the public about a commission that will go a long way towards influencing its policies on energy, environment, property rights, taxes, the state budget, land use, education, and just about every other public policy area. The DEC has not given a clear explanation why, nor clearly cited a law that allows them to make a “deliberation” exception. And even if they could, what possible reason would they have to do so when there are no national or state security issues at stake, or any other sensitive issues?

DEC’s decision, as has been the case in other states where CCS is working, undermines the claim in their contracts and process memos that their “process is fully transparent.” There is no clear indication that Gov. Palin is behind these DEC decisions – on the face it looks like all she has done is sign the administrative order creating the Sub-Cabinet, then depended on her environmental agency leaders (Chapple and Hartig) to make the rest of the decisions. But the way this has played out sure does foul up her reputation as a reformer in pursuit of greater government transparency.