Tucson Citizen.com
Wry Heat - by Jonathan DuHamel

Another climate scandal brewing

by on Oct. 19, 2011, under Climate change, Politics

“The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request today with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), run by controversial White House Science Adviser (and former Mitt Romney climate adviser) John Holdren.  The FOIA request seeks records involving an apparently co-ordinated effort between OSTP and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to subvert and circumvent U.S. law.”

“The effort to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act has apparently been conducted with direct assistance by the Obama White House.” See CEI article here and the FOIA request here.

The scheme involves an attempt to circumvent Freedom of Information requests by hiding official correspondence on climate change on non-government sites in the hope that it would not have to be disclosed.  CEI alleges, “This represents politically assisting the IPCC to enable UN, EU and U.S. bureaucrats and political appointees avoid official email channels for specific official work of high public interest, performed on official time and using government computers, away from the prying eyes of increasingly skeptical taxpayers.” See more information on this story here.

See a list and links to 94 “climategate” scandals here.

This situation adds more fuel to the contention that the IPCC is a political body with a very tenuous relation to science.  That theme is expanded in a new book; see my review here.

Copyrighted by Jonathan DuHamel. Reprint is permitted provided that credit of authorship is provided and linked back to the source. Check the ARTICLE INDEX page for more posts on geology, natural history of the Sonoran desert, climate change, and energy. Also check the BOOK REVIEWS page.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 at 8:37 am and is filed under Climate change, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • Richard H

    Interesting about the Romney-Holdren connection.    Although it comes as no surprise, given that Romney is a self-confessed  AGW “believer”.   John Holdren, of course, has had a long career as outspoken critic of the carbon-based economy, and a leading voice of climate alarmism.   Under his direction,  California became the soft energy capital of the US,  including the highest power rates in the country.    So what could we expect with Romney at the helm,  more of the same? 
     

  • MJones

    The world’s leading financial weekly magazine, The Economist, today posted this on their website: just for you Mr. DuHamel,
     http://www.economist.com/node/21533360

    • Jonathan DuHamel

      I saw that article. The press continues to confuse issues. There is no argument that we have warming and cooling cycles, the real argument is the magnitude and cause.

      See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/pielke-sr-no-surprise-about-best/#more-49654
      and: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-puts-pr-before-peer-review/

      • Mikko Stenlund

        The Berkeley project run by Professor Richard Muller, notably funded by the Koch foundation, settles the issue regarding magnitude; the Earth’s average land-temperature has gone up by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-1950s.
         
        Richard Muller, who was previously a known skeptic of global warming has said: 
        “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the United States and the UK”, 
         
        and that 
         
        “This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions”.
         
        The study did not attempt to explain the cause of the rise in temperature. However, it does leave those “skeptics” who have spent their spare time trying to discredit the observations of climate scientists regarding the scale of global warming very little to work with.
         
        Curiously, Anthony Watts whose popular blog you cite, had previously publicly stated of Muller’s project that  “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.” Now that the results are in, showing his premise was wrong, he has of course changed his mind.

        Some references:
        - Homepage of the Berkeley project: http://berkeleyearth.org/
        - An informative article as a reference for the above: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/21/world/americas/climate-study-warming-real/
        - Watts’ statement quoted above: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/06/briggs-on-berkeleys-best-plus-my-thoughts-from-my-visit-there/

        • Jonathan DuHamel

          Muller’s study has by necessity used the surface temperature records which have many problems including poor siting (see http://www.surfacestations.org/ )and data manipulation all of which give a warming bias. No so with the satellite temperatures, but those records go back to only about 1979. See also my post The State of our Surface Temperature Records:
          http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/2010/01/27/the-state-of-our-surface-temperature-records/

          • Mikko Stenlund

            The data from those US surface stations has been shown to provide reliable evidence of climate warming. Read on.
             
            It is true that surfacestations.org, which you cite and which again involves Anthony Watts, examined about 70% of the 1218 version 2 stations in NOAA’s Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), classifying only 70 of those stations as good or best (class 1 or 2). So, the overwhelming majority of the stations – according to surfacestations.org – are class 3 or higher, meaning errors of 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) or more. 
             
            With these concerns in mind, the NOAA analyzed separately the data coming (A) from the 70 “good or best” stations and (B) from all 1218 stations. The results can be seen in the diagram on page 3 of the document http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf . We clearly observe that there is hardly any difference between the temperature time series for the 70 “good or best” stations and all 1218 stations.
             
            Similarly, the new Berkeley study concluded “that the difference in temperature rate of rise between poor stations and OK stations is –0.014 ± 0.028 Celsius per century. The absence of a statistically significant difference between the two sets suggests that networks of stations can reliably discern temperature trends even when individual stations have large absolute uncertainties.”
             
            I would also add that measuring temperature change (a relative concept) is different from measuring absolute temperature. In order to detect, say, a change of 1 degree Fahrenheit in the temperature it is not necessary to know the actual temperature. Hence, a station consistently recording temperatures 5 degrees higher than it is supposed to may be a problem for the local weatherman but not for the climate scientist studying trends in the temperature. In any case, the above studies abundantly demonstrate that there is no real difference between the temperature change data produced by the network of “good and best” stations and the network of all stations including the “bad” ones.
             
            Finally, here is Joe Romm’s take on the issue, which I find illuminating: http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/10/20/349544/berkeley-temperature-study-results-confirm-global-warming/

            • Jonathan DuHamel

              Your point about relative temps vs absolute temperatures is a good one. But there is another complicating factor. Urban stations show warming when rural stations do not. The warming bias results from the urban heat island effect and therefore the temperature does not reflect what is happening globally. Conclusions on temperature depend on which stations are used.
              The NOAA data you quote appears to be somewhat out of date. SurfaceStations have now visited 82% of stations of which only 7.9% are “good” in classes 1 and 2. 64.4% are in class 4 with errors greater than 2 C and 6.2% are in class 5 with errors greater that 5 C.
              Watts himself says, “we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.”

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