National Climate Assessment and the Trump administration

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The National Climate Assessment must be redirected or terminated

by Patrick J. Michaels

Periodic National Assessments of the effects of climate change on the U.S. are mandated by the 1990 Global Change Research Act. The next Assessment Report is scheduled to be published in late 2018.

The Assessment Report will be produced by civil servants in the federal government (mainly unfireable GS15’s reporting to Obama Administration bosses), many of whom handle large amounts of climate research money. It has always been in their interest to portray global warming as alarming, and therefore in need of even more federal research dollars.

The easiest path for the Trump administration would be to simply not produce a Report. The first Report didn’t appear until 2000, in the dying days of the Clinton Administration, and there were none during George W. Bush’s time. The Obama Administration produced the second (2009) and third (2014). Obviously there was no penalty handed out to the Bush Administration.

The 2000 edition—I am not making this up because I discovered it—used climate models that performed worse than a table of random numbers when simulating simple ten year running averages of coterminous U.S. temperatures. The track record of these reports shows if there is going to be a 2018 version, it had better be at least a “red team/blue team report,” as each predecessor report has been comically bad.

The second (2009) indeed did prompt a non-governmental “red team” response in the form of a palimpsest containing more references than the government’s “blue team” version. The third was billed by its creators specifically as a “key deliverable in President Obama’s Climate Action Plan;” no politics there, just science (sarc).

The latest Assessment — NCA4 — is in full swing. NCA4 promises to be as bad or worse than its predecessors unless the Trump Administration intervenes.

The National Climate Assessment is a huge federal interagency effort, meaning it belongs to no particular agency. It is run by the U.S. Global Change Research Program USGCRP, which is tasked with coordinating the climate research efforts of thirteen federal agencies.

The Assessments have ballooned into massive thousand-page tomes, rivaling the IPCC Assessment Reports in length. The third National Assessment Report in 2014 (NCA3) had a 60-person federal advisory committee, over 300 authors, plus input from over 1000 scientists. It featured this scary introduction: “Evidence of climate change appears in every region and impacts are visible in every state. Explore how climate is already affecting and will continue to affect your region.”

The supposed climate change impacts are almost all bad and projected to get much worse. Actual climate change in the United States is small and what little we see is largely beneficial. Satellite data show virtually all landmasses are becoming greener. Bad weather is not climate change, but you would never know this from reading the National Assessments. Extreme weather in the U.S. was much worse in the 1930’s and 1950’s than in recent decades.

In fact, the authors are specifically required to focus on wild worst-case scenarios. The NCA4 instructions say “It will be especially critical for authors to consider low-probability, high-consequence, climate futures…” Thus the National Assessment promises to be nothing but a big book of scares.

In each Assessment Report, virtually no effort was made by the authors to include any dissenting opinion to their declarative statements, despite the peer-reviewed scientific literature being full of legitimate and applicable reports and observations that provide contrasting findings.

Now is the time for the Trump Administration to act. The direction of NCA4 is supposed to come from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but that job is vacant pending the appointment of a Science Advisor. Director of the NCA4 is David Reidmiller, now with the USGCRP. According to the USGCRP, he “led U.S. negotiations related to science and technology in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that played a central role in the development and adoption of the Paris Agreement.” More on Reidmiller’s profoundly bad fit with Trump’s Admiminstration is here.

Given that Trump just extricated the U.S. from Paris, maybe it’s time to replace Reidmiller with someone who is not associated with President Obama’s climate policies.

The Draft NCA4 chapters are about to go out to agencies for review. Here the Trump people are in charge and they need make the National Assessment realistic and in line with the best and newest data. EPA in particular should take a hard look at these draft chapters, since risk assessment is a big part of their mission.

If there has been regional climate change, let’s see what it is, good and bad. I suspect it is mostly good, like longer growing seasons and warmer winter nights. If this cannot be done objectively, then NCA4 should simply be delayed while a “red team” produces a palimpsest similar to the one done for the second Assessment, providing balance that the federal agencies have lost. The pervasive climate of exaggeration must change in order for federal climatology to maintain at least a shred of credibility.

JC comments: I think that the idea of a National Climate Assessment Report is a good one. Documentation of regional climate change and variability, and interpretation of this change in context of land use changes, natural variability and external forcing would be a valuable exercise. Historical records as far back as we can go, and the regional paleoclimate analyses are necessary to provide context for any recent changes. Interpretation of these changes in context of local and regional vulnerabilities would be valuable.

What is NOT needed is naïve attribution of everything ‘bad’ to human-caused CO2 emissions, and projections using climate models that are most definitely not fit for the purpose.

Let’s see what the Report looks like (I wonder if there will be ‘leaks’ so we can see what it is like), but I am not optimistic given the problems with the previous Assessment Reports. My suspicion is that the Trump administration will find that it needs to push the ‘reset’ button on National Climate Assessment process.

Or, this could be the perfect opportunity to implement the red team/blue team approach that has been advocated by Steve Koonin, John Christy and myself.

Moderation note:  As with all guest posts, please keep your comments civil and relevant.

via Climate Etc. https://judithcurry.com

June 21, 2017 at 05:40PM

The Curiosity rover and other spacecraft are learning to think for themselves

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It takes up to 24 minutes for a signal to travel between Earth and Mars. If you’re a Mars rover wondering which rock to drill into, that means waiting at least 48 minutes to send images of your new location to NASA and then receive marching orders. It’s a lot of idle time for a […]

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June 21, 2017 at 02:29PM

EPA’s suspect science

via Watts Up With That?
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Its practices have defiled scientific integrity, but proposed corrections bring shock and defiance.

Guest essay by John Rafuse

President Trump’s budget guidance sought to cut $1.6 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency’s $8.1 billion expectation. Shrieks of looming Armageddon prompted Congress to fund EPA in full until September 2017, when the battle will be joined again.

Then EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said he would prioritize Superfund cleanups based on toxicity, health-impact and other factors. The ensuing caterwauling suggested that EPA had no priorities since Bill Ruckelshaus (EPA’s first administrator, 1970-1975). But consider some standard EPA practices:

1. EPA advocates claim the US is unhealthy and dirty. They won’t admit that US water quality has improved dramatically since 1970. They deny that factories, cars and power plants are far more efficient and clean. They ignore that, while most nations continue to cut down forest habitats for fuel, the Lower 48 states have more forest coverage than when the Pilgrims landed in 1620.

They never mention that the US did not sign the 1992 Kyoto Accord, nor that it is the only nation to meet its Kyoto targets. Is it ignorance? malignance? eco-professional propaganda? Yes, yes, and yes.

The United States is one of the cleanest, healthiest nations on earth. Our progress will continue because we rejected the Paris Accord and thus will not cripple our economy, jobs or environmental progress. Other nations must work hard to catch us. They may work hard, but they won’t catch up, and they’ll blame us.

2. Eco-militants at EPA tricked the Supreme Court into letting it label plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide a pollutant. Meanwhile, professional enviros demand “zero tolerance” for pollutants – because they claim “any dose kills.”

However, CO2 is plant fertilizer, the trace gas that makes plant and animal life possible on our planet. Atmospheric CO2 is just 400 parts per million (ppm), or 0.04% of the air we breathe, compared to 21% oxygen and almost 1% argon. Classrooms average 1,000 to 2,000 ppm; US nuclear submarines average 5,000 to 8,000ppm. We inhale 400 ppm and exhale 40,000 to 50,000 ppm.

That means 100 to 125 times the “fatal dose” of a “zero tolerance pollutant” is always in our lungs. We don’t die, because CO2 is not a pollutant and because real scientists know that dosage, not microscopic presence, is the key.

EPA keeps cheating, but dosage always determines poisonous impact. In fact, EPA experiments illegally exposed human test subjects to 10 and even 30 times the levels of fine soot particles that EPA claims are lethal. No one got sick or died, and yet EPA continues its “standards” and lies.

3. DDT saved millions in World War II from death by typhus. By 1970 DDT had helped wipe out malaria in 99 countries, including the USA. Administrator Ruckelshaus appointed a scientific committee to examine claims that the pesticide caused cancer and other problems. The experts said it did not, because dosage determines effect.

Ruckelshaus ignored them, never attended a minute of their hearings, never read a page of their extensive report. He simply banned DDT in 1972. He later said he had a “political problem” due to Rachel Carson’s misinformed book Silent Spring and pressure from the Environmental Defense Fund, and he needed to “fix it.”

Other nations followed suit, banning DDT. Since 1972, some 40 million children and parents have needlessly died from malaria. Today DDT is partially reinstated, but P.A. Offit, Pandora’s Lab, Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong, quotes Michael Crichton, MD: “Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in twentieth century America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die, and we didn’t give a damn.”

4. EPA knowingly relies on fake science. Data from point-source “pollution” are used to “project” thousands of asthma cases and cancer deaths. EPA “validates” the analyses by “assuming” that each projected death and illness happened to someone who had spent every second of a 70-year life at the point-source – within 6 feet of the measurement point. But Newton’s Law of Inverse Squares proves that dosage wanes by the inverse square of the distance; 5 units of distance cuts dosage impact to 1/25 what it was at its source. At 10 units, the impact is 1/100th. EPA’s analysis is a dishonest, purposeful scam.

The 70-year/6-foot/no-movement assumption makes a joke of all its calculations and projections. EPA has relied on that scam for decades to “prove” need for a non-scientific regulatory remedy for every newly invented threat.

5. EPA colludes with professional environmentalists to “fix” “inadequate” draft regulations. EPA then “settles” cases, pays co-conspirators’ fees with taxpayer funds and wins excessive regulatory powers it sought from the beginning. Parties who oppose the decision never get a day in court, and the “sue-and-settle” cases ensure high costs but provide no health or environmental benefits.

6. EPA covers up crimes. As the auto industry cratered since 2000, Flint, Michigan has lost 25,000 citizens and become poorer and more minority. The 2010 Census Report concluded that 42% of the population was in a “level of poverty and health … not comparable to other geographic levels of these estimates.” Yet EPA (and state and local authorities) did nothing to protect them. What happened?

The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act delegated compliance to EPA, which typically approves a State Compliance Plan, re-delegates authority, and oversees State and local enforcement. Flint’s drinking water has been lead-poisoned for three years – ever since state and local officials switched water sources to save money with no hearings, approvals or notifications to EPA or affected citizens.

Drinking, tasting and smelling nauseating newly-brown water alerted residents to potential dangers. An EPA expert tested the water in 2014 and wrote repeated warnings to Agency officials. A February 2015 Detroit News report said EPA’s Regional Administrator knew the facts but claimed her “hands were tied.”

Then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy forbade the staff expert from meeting, writing or speaking about the issue, and reassigned him. Thus the two most senior and directly responsible EPA officials “washed their hands” of the problem.

But Flint Medical Center tested for lead in the water and sounded the alarm. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added powerful voices. Flint’s mayor and Michigan’s governor took heat until the state’s attorney general initially charged five Flint and Michigan officials with wrongful issuance of permits, and tampering, altering and falsifying evidence. That has now expanded to more than 50 criminal charges against 15 state officials; including one of involuntary manslaughter (an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease took 12 lives).

The two “clean-handed” EPA officials kept mum until June 12, 2016, when Gina McCarthy wrote to Michigan’s governor and Flint’s mayor. Citing “major challenges” and her “long-term” clean water goal, she blamed state and local staffs and old and (newly) over-large piping. She said EPA had no money to help. Will Michigan’s AG indict EPA officials involved in the EPA cover-ups? That would be logical, but don’t bet on it.

McCarthy’s was a nasty letter from a culpable official. Later in 2016, Congress voted $110 million to repair Flint’s drinking water, no thanks to EPA. The work will go on for years as Flint residents get bottled water from EPA and the state.

President Trump’s budget guidance exposed decades-old EPA abuses. The evidence exposes EPA’s lack of mission, commitment and integrity. If EPA would use honest, evidence-based science to protect the nation’s health, it would be a welcome and long overdue change – perhaps a miracle. What’s your bet?

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Independent consultant John Rafuse worked for government agencies, a think-tank and an international oil and gas company on energy, trade, environmental, regulatory and national security issues.

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June 21, 2017 at 02:17PM

Natural Southwest heat causes propaganda to rise like the Phoenix

via Climate Change Dispatch
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It’s hot in the American Southwest.

Really hot.

So hot that airlines have been delaying flights for their smaller planes, waiting for cooler, denser air to provide better lift.

June, however, is a particularly hot month in the region.  Temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit are the norm.  Phoenix’s “all-time high of 122 degrees has stood since June 26, 1990.”

All that heat is historically normal.

Nonetheless, the usual suspects just can’t resist attributing natural heat waves to global warming.

“The Southwest is broiling. Are you paying attention, President Trump?” asks Jill Filipovic at CNN, “If you’re stranded in Phoenix right now, or worried about an elderly acquaintance in California, or are without power in the Bay Area, or nervous about a wildfire taking your home, you can thank the long list of politicians who do the bidding of polluting corporations instead of their constituents and protect profit over the environment… You can thank the President who tore up the Paris climate agreement.”

“It’s a well-known problem” writes the reliably warmist BBC, “a 2016 report from the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) even warned that higher temperatures caused by climate change could ‘have severe consequences for aircraft take-off performance, where high altitudes or short runways limit the payload or even the fuel-carrying capacity.’”

The Atlantic asks, “Did climate change ground flights in Phoenix?” and concludes, “Yes, but it didn’t act alone.”

This is all nonsense.

Global warming, climate change, call it what you will, is not a significant factor driving today’s weather.  Global warming is not broiling the southwest, nor is it grounding flights in Phoenix.

Local weather happens.

The warming that took place last century, with little or none in this, is simply too small.  Even after they got done fiddling with the data, the most warming researchers can come up with amounts to less than one degree Celsius above the global temperature baseline.

Extreme global warming capable of meaningfully impacting the weather remains a figment of climate computer simulations that never check out when compared to real world observations.  They continually predict higher temperatures than actually occur.

Hyping hot days as climate and poo-pooing cold days as “the weather” is one of the oldest tricks in the global-warming playbook.

So is attributing extreme weather to climate change by obscuring the fact that today’s weather is normal outside the alternate world of computer simulations.

We live on the real Earth, not a computer-derived Matrix. 

Weather, as it always has, remains the average of extremes.  Exploiting extreme weather to score propaganda points is a shameful tactic.  Warming campaigners should knock it off.  The media should do its job and fact check this kind of fake climate news out of existence.

Read more at CFACT

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June 21, 2017 at 02:15PM