EPA announcement on 7/29/2010:

EPA Rejects Claims of Flawed Climate Science

Roger Pielke Sr. responds:

Comment On The Denial of Petitions for Reconsideration of the Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings For Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) Of The Clean Air Act”

Roger Pielke Jr. has written often on the disaster claims in the IPCC report:

IPCC Statement on Trends in Disaster Losses

IPCC Disinformation

Castles Built on Sand

“Fabrication” or “Lie” in the IPCC AR4 WGI

See Peilke Jr.’s blog for guest posts by IPCC author Richard Tol as well.

Former EPA employee Alan Carlin has a blog on the general topic, but has not commented so far on this specific announcement:

Carlin Economics and Science

Donna LaFramboise has written extensively on the IPPC Document:

http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/search/label/IPCC

The EPA’s response is political, as expected. How anyone can take the IPCC report at face value and an unbiased view of the science is not credible.  We know the IPCC authors violated their own rules (see climategate emails), ignored comments from other authors, and reworded key sections after other reviewers could not longer submit comments. The IPPC document, while based on science, is a political document that presents an unbalanced alarmist view of the cause and implications of global warming.

There’s an excellent dialog at Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog in the post:

Next Steps on Climate and Energy

There appears to be a rash of realists posting on this topic.  For example:

• coddington.morton

“Yeah, well, we had one back in the 70′s, it was called “nuclear”. The environmental movement killed it off, so no completed plants have been started in three decades in the U.S.”

• kkloor

“In the wake of recent Congressional events and the likelihood of little substantive legislation in the near term, it’ll be interesting to see if influential voices on climate policy–such as Joe Romm and Thomas Friedman–take a different tack.”

• wmar

“The real and true best result will only happen when science rules and wins the day and when ideologies (all of them) take a distant back seat to scientific and economic validity. Proffer a competitive functional and practical alternative and watch how quickly more that 90% support develops passing the senate 95-0 rather than failing, but to do this, will require the truth – not more scary IPCC-speak which has failed so badly and any other easily falsifiable assertions.”

• Mark – Dallas

“Somewhere deep inside I’m kinda glad our dysfunctional legislative branch didn’t force a change with a really dumb committee decision full of unhealthy compromise. We don’t really want to follow the leadership of either Barbara Boxer or James Inhofe. They’re both dolts.”

• JD

“First, the state of climate science is horrendous. When incompetence or wrongdoing is suspected, instead of investigating, the sponsors of the research engage in cover-ups. (See Oxburgh report for example, which did not even question people who had complaints against the UEA ) The fact that anyone would do such a pathetically inept report and call it an investigation is about the most devastating critique of the UEA’s work that can be imagined. It is obvious the UEA is afraid of what it would turn up if it did a real investigation. The Michael Mann “investigation” was similarly flawed.”

Read the post and all the comments.  Nice to see some intelligent dialog.

I’ve not been kind to New Scientist in the past. Examples:

• New Scientist magazine asleep at the wheel?
• Joanne Nova: New Scientist becomes Non Scientist

I am, however, largely in agreement with their recent editorial on the Climategate “investigations”:

Without candour, we can’t trust climate science

Some excerpts:

IS CLIMATEGATE finally over? It ought to be, with the publication of the third UK report into the emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Incredibly, none looked at the quality of the science itself.

Oxburgh declared “the science was not the subject of our study“. Finally, last week came former civil servant Muir Russell’s 150-page report. Like the others, he lambasted the CRU for its secrecy but upheld its integrity – despite declaring his study “was not about… the content or quality of [CRU's] scientific work“

They have not studied hundreds of thousands more unpublished emails from the CRU. Surely openness would require their release.

All this, plus the failure to investigate whether emails were deleted to prevent their release under freedom of information laws, makes it harder to accept Russell’s conclusion that the “rigour and honesty” of the scientists concerned “are not in doubt”.

When panels such as these don’t even look at the real issues, such as whether emails were deleted, what else are we supposed to do but proclaim the proceedings a whitewash?

Phil Jones’ emails are very clear, and no other context is needed:

May 29, 2008

From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers

Phil

December 4, 2008, in an email:

 ”About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little – if anything at all.”

November 24, 2009, in the Guardian UK:

“We’ve not deleted any emails or data here at CRU.”

Read the emails yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Update 7/23/2010:  Steve McIntyre covers the entire “deleted” issue in much greater detail here.

First up, Oklahoma and a collapse (click images to view video):

Next up is New York, with a shutdown due to faulty gearing:

Next, let’s move on to CA and a windmill on fire:

And back to NY for another collapse:

So tell me, are wind turbines ready to produce reliable energy or is this just an expensive experiment with huge amounts of taxpayer dollars going to “test” the technology?

I can’t believe that Newsweek is again moving in the direction toward balanced reporting, at least on climate. Consider this recent article:

A Green Retreat: Why the environment is no longer a surefire political winner

“Yet above all, it is climate politics itself that has turned murky and double-edged. No longer does it lend itself to the easy categories of good and bad…And controlling the global climate turned out to be a lot more complicated than the advocates of fierce and fast CO2 cuts would have us believe.”

“Policies that push trendy green fuels also cost much more than other options, such as replacing dirty coal with cleaner gas or emissions-free nuclear power. Some schemes, such as America’s corn ethanol and Europe’s biodiesel made from rapeseed, have virtually zero net emissions savings, but any petroleum they displace is quickly bought up by China. Even in the ideal case that the United Nations’ goal of 80 percent emissions reduction by 2050 is technologically and politically feasible, economists disagree widely on whether the cost of the current set of policies, such as carbon caps and green-fuel subsidies, is justified by the avoided damage from warmer temperatures.”

Needless to say, I’m encouraged that at least some in the mainstream media are starting to act rationally and report a more balanced view of the climate and energy issues.

Who knew? After all the fear mongering telling us that islands in the Pacific were going to succumb to climate change, a new study shows this not to be the case.  New Scientist has this recent story:

Shape-shifting islands defy sea-level rise

“For years, people have warned that the smallest nations on the planet – island states that barely rise out of the ocean – face being wiped off the map by rising sea levels. Now the first analysis of the data broadly suggests the opposite: most have remained stable over the last 60 years, while some have even grown.”

“It has been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown. “But they won’t. The sea level will go up and the island will start responding.”

Of course, they have to include some alarmist comments, such as this one:

“Yet warnings about rising sea levels must still be taken seriously. Earlier this year, people living on the low-lying Carteret Islands, part of Papua New Guinea, had to relocate. Kench says anecdotal reports that the islands have been submerged are “incorrect”, saying that instead erosion has changed the shape of the islands, forcing people to move.”

So this is new? Sounds like normal geological and erosion processes to me. Or how about this one regarding sea level rise:

“Barry Brook, a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide in Australia and a supporter of the 350 campaign – which calls for the most stringent global emissions targets in the hope of saving low-lying states from sea-level rise – points out that sea-level rise is already accelerating.”

Last time I checked it seemed that sea level rise was not accelerating:

University of Colorado at Boulder:  Sea Level Change

At 3.2mm per year, that is about 12.6 inches per century. Is this unusual, or just ordinary?

The coverage of this story by the mainstream media is entertaining, kind of like the game of “telephone” where the story changes each time it is told.  Here’s coverage on news.com.au:

Climate change ‘increases island size’

Not a bad summary, but the editors obviously felt obligated to include the standard “scary” boilerplate as the last sentence in the article:

“However, the study warned that rising sea levels would still be a threat in many parts of the world, and that factors such as erosion could not be discounted as threats to the islands.”

It gets even better at Fox News:

In Face of Rising Seas, Pacific Islands Are Growing

They take this sentence from the New Scientist article:

“During that time [the last 60 years], local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres, or 2 millimetres per year on average.”

And turn it into this:

“In the same period sea levels have risen by 4 feet 7 inches (120 millimeters).”

Apparently the editors at Fox/NewsCore can’t do math and don’t even know that if you Google “120mm to inches” you’ll get the correct answer of 4.7 inches.

I guess I can still plan that trip to the South Pacific.

Thomas Fuller

Tom Fuller has had a few excellent pieces in the last few days:

• Global warming: Climate crimes
• Global warming: Looking in the wrong direction
• Global warming: The science is settled, the debate is over

Tom has hit the nail on the head with this series.

I can’t quite believe I read this in Newsweek:

Uncertain Science: Bickering and defensive, climate researchers have lost the public’s trust.

“Very few scientists dispute a link between man-made CO2 and global warming. Where it gets fuzzy is the extent and time frame of the effect. One crucial point of contention is climate “sensitivity”—the mathematical formula that translates changes in CO2 production to changes in temperature. In addition, scientists are not sure how to explain a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures that began about a decade ago.”

They must have had Sharon Begley bound and gagged in the back room when they sent this off to press!

What’s more interesting than this article, that really gets to the gist of the climate debate, is some of the nonsensical comments (flat earthers, etc.).  Maybe if the warmists had told a coherent story without all the politics, exaggerations, manipulations, cherry picking, etc., they’d have had a better chance of convincing us the alarm was warranted.  But they didn’t.

Alex Miller, Managing Editor, Summit Daily News

Update 5/26/2010: Alex Miller replies in comments and defends name calling.

“As for name-calling, what else to label those who simply can’t see this glaring truth right under their noses? Flat earthers seems all too kind.”

- Alex Miller, Managing Editor, Summit Daily News

- – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Alex Miller, managing editor of the Summit Daily News, predictably displays his alarmist colors in this editorial:

Click the image above to get your own free carbon offsets

Carbon trading, with all the funds slushing around, seems to be a prime target for criminals.  Here’s the latest probe in the UK:

Tax officers arrest 22 in UK carbon fraud probe

“… European authorities revealed that carbon-trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries.”

I just can’t wait until we get “cap and fraud” here in the U.S.