Very unhelpful indeed
What’s really rather remarkable, is that since 2000, the rates at which CO2 emissions and concentrations are increasing have accelerated. According to Canadell et al. (2008), fossil fuel and cement emissions increased by 3.3 percent per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.3 percent per year in the 1990s. Similarly, atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by 1.93 parts per million per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.58 ppm in the 1990s. And yet, despite accelerating emission rates and concentrations, there’s been no net warming in the 21st century, and more accurately, a decline. alan carlin, epa suppressed report via watts up with that
There are 100 pages to Carlin’s report. He lays out, chapter and verse, how the science has moved on since the last IPCC report and how as the science improves the AGW case weakens.
Which is not what the Obama EPA wanted to hear so the report was directly suppressed.
June 28th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
(Your editor still channeling John Cross…sigh. I think I have to make him a member or something.)
I have very little time for posting this week (my wife is an excellent biologist and is much better published than I am but her research takes her to the field this week so I am Mr. Mom with the kids), so I will outsource the de-bunking of this article to Deep Climate.
My personal “red-flag” is that I don’t take anyone seriously who quotes satellite records without quoting Fu. Of course the poor writing didn’t help in the report either (even for a draft).
More on this if it is still considered important after a week.
Regards,
John
June 28th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
John, good luck with the kids…been there, done that, praying it never happens again.
That is not so much a debunking as a series of smears,
“It turns out that the report, written by Alan Carlin, with assistance from John Davidson, of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, is drawn heavily from the contrarian blogosphere, especially Ken Gregory of the Calgary-based “astroturf” group Friends of Science.”
“What is [NYT] Greenwire anyway – just the environmental news that fits online, but not “fit to print”?
“Of course, as shown in excruciating detail at RealClimate, the “research” is mainly regurgitated contrarian talking points (global cooling since 1998! The sun and cosmic rays did it!), repackaged at various blogs.”
And so on.
If Carlin is so obviously wrong why not let his report be considered in the “Endagerment Finding”? The answer, of course, is that that Finding’s conclusions have nought to do with science and everything to do with the politics of global warming/climate change/extreme climate/climate turbulence. The EPa has reached the political conclusion that CO2 is bad and is now looking for some science to back it up. Carlin’s contribution was very unhelpful because, instead of finding science to support the CO2 Endangerment conclusion, he found lots of science which calls any such conclusion into serious question.
Can’t have that so Carlin was bureaucratically silenced. Not at all surprising, this long ago ceased to be about the science.
June 28th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
John: at least the first 2/3rds of the Deep Climate “debunking” was either invective or ad hominem – I didn’t bother to read further, but based on your past reasonable attitude, it seems that leaving it to them is a mistake.
It seems to me that there is no doubt that Carlin was silenced by the bureaucracy (been there, done that, got the coffee mug) – even though Deep Climate prefers to entrench damn-near everything in scare quotes. Do yourself and us a favour – think about it, and post a comment. It seems that what Carlin was looking for was real consideration of the issues, and hadn’t found it in Lisa Jackson’s EPA. That seems somewhat troublesome to me, if not to you.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:43 am
(Sigh … the time that a potentially interesting thread comes up and I am frantic this week. However I think this is important so I will provide some comments and perhaps Jay could be kind enough to bump this to the top if the conversation gets interesting.
OK, I though Deep Climate did a good job of showing that this was not a particularly good scientific document. He does clearly show that Carlin did not interpret at least one study correctly and this directly refuted one of his principal comments (page iii). However let me take a quick look at some of the others.
In one he says that global temperatures have continued to decline extending the current downward trend to 11 years. Well, yes – if you take the “right” data set (it doesn’t work on the rest) and look only at 11 years (it doesn’t work if you look at say anything over 13 years) and ignore problems in it (stratospheric cooling hence my Fu comment above) then you may see cooling. So in fact, the point is not really that strong (to put it kindly). And I have no idea where his comment about the drop in temperatures from 1907 to 1908 comes from! Even if you accept that he meant to say 1997 to 1998 it still does not make sense. And of course talking about climate in a timeframe of 1 year make very little sense anyway.
In his last point he talks about a “New 2009 paper by Scafetta and West ….”. I can find no trace of a 2009 paper by S&W anywhere – including his reference list. In the reference list there is a 2008 opinion article by S&W (obviously an opinion article is very different than a scientific paper). In the fall of 2008 , Lean gave a presentation where she showed that (among other things) the observations don’t match the information in S&W’s article. (And it would probably be petty of me to point out that the opinion piece states a number of 69% as opposed to the quoted number of 68% – yeah it would, so I won’t ;) ).
So in regards to his five principle comments, DC does away with 1 and I think I have done a good job with 2 others. If anyone wants to look at the last 2 I would be pleased to do so when I have time.
However, consider that I am only an amateur in regards to climate. I have never taken a climate course and know only what I have read and discussed. The EPA is probably like any other government agency, there is some deadwood and there are some smart cookies. So if an amateur could pick holes in it during a lunch hour, what could one of their smart people do? I suspect that someone “did” and that is why it never got anywhere.
Dcardno, hopefully, that was a more reasoned statement given my time constraints. Incidentally Jay, this is an annual thing so I am used to it.
Regards,
John
(posted by editor)