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In 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act, the Congress created the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), a body of scientists whose job is to advise EPA on the setting of National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS).

NAAQS is the primary regulatory regime established by the Clean Air Act. The regulation does exactly what its name suggests–it establishes numerical nation-wide ambient air standards for “criteria” pollutants (sulfur dioxide, lead, particulate matter, ozone, nitrogen oxides, and carbon monoxide). There are two types of NAAQS: primary and secondary. Primary NAAQS are set at levels requisite to protect public health, with an adequate margin of safety, while secondary NAAQS are set at levels necessary to protect public welfare.

EPA is required to take CASAC’s advice into account, and, when it publishes any NAAQS, the agency must explain any differences it had with CASAC’s advice. In 2006 and 2008, George W. Bush’s EPA promulgated revised primary NAAQS for particulate matter and ozone, respectively. Both of the regulations were set at levels that were less stringent than the range recommended by CASAC.

In a 2009 ruling, American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA, the D.C. Circuit Court rejected Bush’s 2006 primary NAAQS for particulate matter. The court reasoned that the agency had inadequately explained its differences with CASAC’s advice.

In a ruling announced last Monday, Mississippi et al. v. EPA, this same court upheld Bush’s 2008 ozone primary NAAQS, despite the fact that it was less stringent than what CASAC had recommended. This time, the court found that EPA had adequately explained the difference.

By the Court’s own admission in the Mississippi et al. v. EPA opinion, there are no clear cut criteria by which EPA’s reasoning is judged. The primary standard seems to be derivative of whether CASAC’s advice is rooted in science versus policy considerations. The former (science considerations) is construed as pertaining to the component of the primary NAAQS that is requisite to protect public health. The latter (policy considerations) is the component of the primary NAAQS that represents an adequate margin of safety. The Court reasoned that EPA’s discretion rises along a decision-making continuum, from “science” to “policy” differences with CASAC. CASAC’s judgment matters more for science–in practice, determining a NAAQS level requisite to protect public health. EPA’s judgement matters more for policy–in practice determining the NAAQS level necessary to achieve an adequate margin of public safety. In this instance, the judges found that CASAC hadn’t explicitly stated which parts of its recommended ozone NAAQS were science-based reasoning, and which parts were policy-based reasoning. In the face of this uncertainty, EPA’s explanation met the low bar by which an agency’s decision is deemed reasonable.

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When it comes to extreme weather, climate activists want to have their cake and eat it. Many acknowledge that it is unscientific to attribute any particular weather event to global warming. But then, in the same breath, they’ll say that this or that drought, flood, or hurricane is “consistent with” the types of weather “scientists” predict will become more frequent in a warming world.

Or they’ll say that such weather is “exactly what global warming looks like.” Or they’ll say that because “all weather events are affected by a warming planet,” the burden of proof is now on skeptics to show that climate change did not cause or contribute to a particular weather-related disaster.

Some activists, though, simply come right out and assert what others insinuate. Plaintiffs in Comer v. Murphy Oil, a case that made it all the way to a federal appeals court, claimed that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from ExxonMobil, American Electric Power, and other U.S. energy and power companies contributed to global warming, which intensified Hurricane Katrina, which in turn wrought death and destruction upon the citizens of New Orleans.

There was a major “anthropogenic” component to the New Orleans disaster — but it was not the emissions. Decade after decade, policymakers failed to improve a levee system “predicted to fail in a major hurricane,” as Cato Institute climatologist Patrick Michaels noted at the time.

Although always a staple of global warming advocacy, climate activists have turned up the rhetorical heat on extreme weather in recent years. The reasons aren’t hard to fathom. The 15-year pause in global warming makes it harder to scare people about warming itself. The two greatest terrors featured in An Inconvenient Truth — rapid ice sheet disintegration leading to catastrophic sea-level rise and ocean circulation shutdown precipitating a new ice age — have no credibility. Nobody takes seriously the prospect of warming-induced malaria epidemics either. If you want to scare people, extreme weather is the only card left in the climate alarm deck.

In addition, a rationally-ignorant public can easily be fooled into confusing climate change risk with plain old climate risk (the nasty surprises Mother Nature generates all on her own). Part of the reason is psychological. Due to their sheer magnitude and terror, natural catastrophes have an almost supernatural aspect. People are naturally inclined to imagine that natural disasters have non-natural causes. Thus, each time disaster strikes, pundits, especially those with scientific credentials, can plausibly blame fossil fuels — just as in earlier ages political or religious authorities blamed “sinners” (i.e., their adversaries) for floods, plagues, crop failures, and the like.

Perhaps the leading debunker of extreme-weather hype on the scene today is University of Colorado Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr., who testified last week before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at a hearing titled “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now.”

As his testimony notes, Pielke, Jr. is not a climate change skeptic. He affirms, for example, that “Humans influence the climate system in profound ways, including through the emission of carbon dioxide via the combustion of fossil fuels.” However, he regards the oft-asserted linkage between global warming and recent hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and drought as “unsupportable based on research and evidence.” Highlights of his testimony appear below. [click to continue…]

Last week the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) held a hearing titled “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now.” That’s right folks, global warming is not going to strike “The Day After Tomorrow,” as alarmists previously predicted. It’s going to happen “Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow” — today. 

But before you sell the beach house, move to North Dakota, or join a survivalist group, you might want to read the testimonies by University of Colorado Prof. Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Alabama in Huntsville Prof. Roy Spencer, and Institute for Energy Research scholar Robert Murphy.

I’ll discuss Murphy’s testimony today and Pielke, Jr.’s later this week. (I covered the basic argument of Roy Spencer’s testimony in a previous post: Climate Models: “Epic Failure” or “Spot on Consistent” with Observed Warming?)

Murphy challenges the intellectual bona fides of the Obama administration’s May 2013 Technical Support Document (TSD) on the social cost of carbon (SCC). Climate activists increasingly invoke SCC estimates to justify the imposition of carbon taxes, fuel economy mandates, Soviet-style production quota for wind farms, fracking bans, and other interventions to rig the marketplace against reliable, affordable, fossil energy. They speak as if SCC estimates disclose an objective reality like the boiling point of water or the specific gravity of iron. In fact, SCC estimates are assumption-driven hocus-pocus or, as my colleague Myron Ebell prefers to say, “hogwash.”

SCC analysts purport to measure the damage, in monetary terms, that an incremental ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions inflicts on humanity and the biosphere. As discussed previously on this blog, SCC estimates depend on assumptions about highly speculative issues such as climate sensitivity (how feedback mechanisms, positive or negative, will amplify or damp down the direct warming effect of rising greenhouse gas concentrations), climate impacts (how projected warming will affect weather patterns, ice-sheet dynamics, and eco-system services), economic impacts (how projected changes in global temperature, weather, and sea-level rise will affect agriculture, forestry, tourism, and other climate-related activities), and technological change (how adaptive capacities will develop as climate changes).

Each layer of the analysis is fraught with uncertainty and is educated guesswork at best. By adjusting the assumptions, the SCC analyst can get pretty much any result he desires.

Murphy zeroes in on the simplest part of the analysis: Which discount rates federal agencies use to estimate the present value of future projected climate change damages.   [click to continue…]

The Department of Energy last week released a report on U. S. Energy Sector Vulnerabilities to Climate Change and Extreme Weather. John Broder in the New York Times summarizes its findings:

“The blackouts and other energy disruptions of Hurricane Sandy were just a foretaste, the report says. Every corner of the country’s energy infrastructure — oil wells, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants — will be stressed in coming years by more intense storms, rising seas, higher temperatures and more frequent droughts.”

Broder goes on to quote Jonathan Pershing, deputy assistant secretary of energy for climate change policy and technology, who was in charge of producing the report: “We don’t have a robust energy system, and the costs are significant.  The cost today is measured in the billions.  Over the coming decades, it will be in the trillions.  You can’t just put your head in the sand anymore.”

Neither the Department of Energy’s report nor any of the news stories I’ve read consider the major reason why the energy sector is becoming less robust and resilient.  It’s largely because of all the regulations and mandates that require the energy sector to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in technologies that provide very little energy, which means that there is little capital available to invest in improving and enlarging the energy infrastructure.

In particular, the margin that provides electric reliability in times of stress to the system has been declining because electric utilities have been building lots of windmills and solar panels that provide small amounts of unreliable and expensive electricity while preparing to close conventional coal-fired power plants that produce large amounts of reliable and inexpensive electricity in order to comply with EPA regulations. It’s not climate change, but climate change policies that are harming the energy sector.