"Mind-Boggling" Conflicts Of Interest In Bush Climate Policy - BBC

[hatrack]

The White House's top climate advisors are like foxes "guarding the chicken coop", an anonymous source at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has told the BBC.

EDIT

The EPA source was responding to questions from the BBC's Climate Wars programme about the way the White House's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) censored passages on global warming in a major EPA report last year. Claiming that senior members of the council had close ties with the oil industry - one as a former lawyer who had represented the industry, another as a former executive of the American Petroleum Institute - the insider said there was a mind-boggling conflict of interest.

A private row between the Council and the EPA came to light last summer when a leaked memo revealed that the CEQ was trying to force a rewrite of EPA advice on climate change in its annual report. "The White House has made major edits to the climate change section of the EPA's Report on the Environment, indicating that 'no further changes may be made'," wrote the memo's author.

EDIT

The threat of a court case has led to the partial repudiation of a second official document, The National Assessment On Climate Change, which now carries a "health warning" on its online version. The warning, which says the report was not subjected to "data-quality" guidelines, was part of an out-of-court settlement the US administration reached with a conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). According to the CEI's Director of Global Warming, Myron Ebell, the lawsuit against the study was based on new legislation, the Data Quality Act, intended to prevent government agencies from publishing sub-standard science."

EDIT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3390901.stm

[mmm]

1. As often as we have seen it, it is still mind-boggling

[Kolesar]

2. "GW" Bush stands for "Global Warming" Bush eom

[Stilgar]

3. Why would the White house want to correct a flawed report

“The record shows that the Clinton White House pressured bureaucrats to rush out an incomplete and inaccurate report despite protests from government scientists,” said Christopher C. Horner, Senior Fellow at CEI. “The government also subsequently confirmed that the two climate models selected for the National Assessment are ‘outliers’ chosen to guarantee extreme results and are incapable of replicating even past climate trends.”

So the EPA used extreme models of future climate and included them in the report as if it was normal. CEI caught them and the White house changed the wording from extreme climate change to none. So an EPA guy is mad that the White House changed thier flawed report.

"EPA staff objectives are really quite simple - to get good information out. That's been in conflict with the spin the White House has wanted on environmental measures."
Thats right, they want quality information. The scientific standard that was not met was in research from the EPA. CEI sued because of the EPA's flawed report.

http://www.cei.org/gencon/003,03740.cfm

[Buzz Clik]

4. "Flawed report"?

The CEI is hardly an unbiased entity. They have their own political agenda. How seriously can we take a group that considers Bush's Clear Skies initiative "tough regulations on power plant emissions"?

[Stilgar]

8. when will people realize all research institutes are biased

Show me an unbiased entity and I will show you someone in thier organization that is biased is some way. Just because they are against your position does not make the data false or true.

"they have their own political agenda"
Who doesn't?

[Buzz Clik]

13. Political agenda...

When a so-called research group is providing information to elected officials and news media, but that research group has a political agenda, their information is worthless. You can quote CEI or Sierra Club or Cato all you like, but without an independent unbiased confirmation of their analysis, the quotations carry no weight.

[Kolesar]

16. Bollocks

Just look at which organizations have financial interests in exploiting the environment to the detriment of the rest of the world, and the motives behind their positions become clear.

To quote John Stewart: "do you people think we are all retarded!"

[blindpig]

17. here they come again

why they bring this garbage around here is beyond me.Whatever the topic, climate, ddt, evolution its always the same. Bogus reasonableness with links or references which always lead to serious money with an ax to grind. I think they're doing it just to piss me off.

[blindpig]

18. so

when it is pointed out that some socalled research is being fronted by some industrial group then the consensus of the scientific community must also be biased? I guess all science is dubious and that everything that I've read and observed over the last 40 yrs is part of a vast plot. Boy, have I been had! Thanks for the enlightenment and don't let the door hit you in the ass.

[Viking12]

5. I'm surprised...

to see such an uncritical acceptance of the CEI on this site. Maybe a more accurate word is stunned!

The CEI is not interested in accurate scientific information, they are interested in promoting their right-wing agenda.

They are funded by the right-wing Olin, Scaife, and Bradley Foundations...

http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/info_on_any_recipient.php?recipientID=81

The assesment at the center of the * White House requested CEI lawsuit was not "flawed." The CEI sued over a procedural matter, claiming the assesmnet didn't meet the qualifications of the Information Quality Act which wasn't even in effect when the assesment was produced. For more see:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0921-01.htm

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MahoneyLetter2003.pdf

[Stilgar]

7. Lets see here

These procedures will become effective on October 1, 2002, and cover information disseminated by FMS on or after October 1, 2002, regardless of when the information was first disseminated.

So it is retroactive. Though the suit was about errors, it was settled (Sept 2001) just before the law went into effect . The second suit involved the new law and was settled Nov. 6 2003.

“This started as a suit against a Clinton administration global warming report,” said CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr. “The accusations of collusion are absurd and just an attempt to divert attention from the real issue—that junk science is being used as the basis for climate change reports, which could lead to policies that cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars with little, if any, benefit.”

Sorry, it was started before Bush was in the White House. Though CEI may not have won if Clinton were still in office, It was not done "with" Bush and co.

[seasat]

6. Did Y'all also catch the study that Bush's CEQ wanted included?

It is the infamous study by Soon et al. What they did was cherry pick data from other studies that were massaged to make it appear that the current period is not the warmest in centuries. The kicker is that this study was funded by such "unbiased" :eyes: sources as the American Petroleum Institute. The statistical analysis was heavily criticized and the study was contradicted by a number of review studies before this paper and recently.

Here is a link pointing out some flaws in their analysis.

Here is a synopsis of the funding for this study the Shrub wanted included.

(LINK)

THE BACKERS:

The research was underwritten by the American Petroleum Institute, the trade association of the world's largest oil companies.

Two of the five authors are scientists who have been linked to the coal industry and have received support from the ExxonMobil Foundation.

Two others, who are affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also have the title of "senior scientists" with a Washington-based organization supported by conservative foundations and ExxonMobil Corp.

The organization, the George T. Marshall Institute, is headed by William O'Keefe, a former executive of the American Petroleum Institute.


If you look at the few desenting studies on the greenhouse gas theory of global climate change you'll find the same dozen authors and the same funding sources as this study. This is in comparison to the literally 1000's of researchers and studies that support the theory.

[Stilgar]

9. Here is the real kicker

The study - funded by NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the American Petroleum Institute - will be published in the Energy and Environment journal. A shorter paper by Soon and Baliunas appeared in the January 31, 2003 issue of the Climate Research journal.

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0310.html
from Harvards own website

Oh wait, NASA, NOAA, and the Air Force also funded the study. Why did you only pick out the API?
I guess it sounds worse if you pick out only one group.

I guess you are saying that no company, trade association, think tanks, anyone that lobbies the government, or any group that employs someone that has been a part of one of those groups is incapable of being trusted to do scientific research.

So if CEI is biased so is IPCC
"The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC does not carry out research nor does it monitor climate related data or other relevant parameters. It bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature. "

I guess if thier is no human-induced climate change that IPCC would be out of business. To prove the IPCC wrong means go up against the entire group whose job is to peer-review other IPCC members research to "prove" it exists.

So if the independent review of research finds the IPCC wrong what about Mann's work.

Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick say "The particular “hockey stick” shape derived in the MBH98 proxy construction – a temperature index that decreases slightly between the early 15th century and early 20th century and then increases dramatically up to 1980 -- is primarily an artefact of poor data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal components."
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html

Oops, that is probably wrong too since they got money from CEI.


I like the part on IPCC website that says no oil companies give them money, no shit sherlock. What oil company is going to give money to them?

[Viking12]

10. No the kicker is...

Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas (2003, January). Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years. Climate Research. 23:89-110, has been the darling of the right-wing think tanks. The study however doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

As two of the scientists explain in Scientific America: "The fact that it has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away," comments Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Similar sentiments came from Malcolm Hughes of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, "The Soon et al. paper is so fundamentally misconceived and contains so many egregious errors that it would take weeks to list and explain them all."

Given the high-level attention that the paper was drawing from the flat-earth crowd, 13 scientists took the unusual step of publishing in July an extended rebuttal in the American Geophysical Union's journal, Eos. As the Eos rebuttal states " claims are inconsistent with the preponderance of scientific evidence."
As summarized by AGU's press release on the Eos article, the problems with the Soon and Baliunas article are:

"First, in using proxy records to draw inferences about past climate, it is essential to assess their actual sensitivity to temperature variability. In particular, the authors say, Soon and Baliunas misuse proxy data reflective of changes in moisture or drought, rather than temperature, in their analysis.

Second, it is essential to distinguish between regional temperature anomalies and hemispheric mean temperature, which must represent an average of estimates over a sufficiently large number of distinct regions. For example, the concepts of a "Little Ice Age" and "Medieval Warm Period" arose from the Eurocentric origins of historic climatology. The specific periods of coldness and warmth differed from region to region and as compared with data for the northern hemisphere as a whole.

Third, it is essential to define carefully the modern base period with which past climate is to be compared and to identify and quantify uncertainties. For example, they say, the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) carefully compares data for recent decades with reconstructions of past temperatures, taking into account the uncertainties in those reconstructions. IPCC concluded that late 20th century warmth in the northern hemisphere likely exceeded that of any time in the past millennium. The method used by Soon and Baliunas, they say, considers mean conditions for the entire 20th century as the base period and determines past temperatures from proxy evidence not capable of resolving trends on a decadal basis. It is therefore, they say, of limited value in determining whether recent warming in anomalous in a long term and large scale context."

The press release also adds:

"A group of leading climate scientists has reaffirmed the "robust consensus view" emerging from the peer reviewed literature that the warmth experienced on at least a hemispheric scale in the late 20th century was an anomaly in the previous millennium and that human activity likely played an important role in causing it. In so doing, they refuted recent claims that the warmth of recent decades was not unprecedented in the context of the past thousand years."

Many scientists feel betrayed by Soon and Baliunas' misrepresentation of their data. Peter deMenocal, an associate professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used sediment records off the coast of Africa as a proxy for ocean-surface temperatures. He says Soon Baliunas could not justify their conclusions that the African record showed the 20th century as being unexceptional. "My record has no business being used to address that question," the Columbia scientist says. "It displays some ignorance putting it in there to address that question."

David E. Black, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Akron, says Soon and Baliunas did not use his data properly in concluding that the Middle Ages were warm and the 20th century ordinary. Black's record of plankton in ocean sediment collected off Venezuela provides a proxy record of the strength of trade winds from 1150 to 1989. But "winds don't meet their definition of warm, wet, or dry," he points out. Contrary to what Soon and Baliunas claim about the Venezuelan data, Black says he found no 50-year period of medieval extremes in his record. "I think they stretched the data to fit what they wanted to see," he says.

So how did such bad science get published in a peer-reviewed journal? It appears that the process was taken advantage of for purely political reasons.

Dr. Hans von Storch, who was slated to become the journal's new Editor-in-Chief in the summer of 2003 says, "The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked, as was documented by a comment in EOS" He says he suspects that "some of the skeptics had identified Climate Research as a journal where some editors were not as rigorous in the review process as is otherwise common." So he resigned from the position before he even started. Five other members of the editorial board followed suit. von Storch explains the reason for his resignation by saying, "I withdrew also as editor because I learned during the conflict that CR editors used different scales for judging the validity of an article. Some editors considered the problem of the Soon & Baliunas paper as merely a problem of "opinion", while it was really a problem of severe methodological flaws."

As a matter of fact the journal itself has openly disavowed the article in question. Otto Kinne, Climate Research's publisher, wrote that "...there was insufficient attention to the methodological basis of statements that touch on hotly debated controversies and involve pronounced political and economic interests. CR should have been more careful and insisted on solid evidence and cautious formulations before publication." Elsewhere Kinne is quoted, "I have not stood behind the paper by Soon and Baliunas, indeed: the reviewers failed to detect methodological flaws."

Even Baliunas appears to be distancing herself from the article. In the Tacoma News Tribune editorial, she writes about the "Harvard study" without even mentioning that she's one of its co-authors.

[Viking12]

11. and...

* McIntyre and McKitrick selectively censored some important data used by Mann et al. (by either eliminating it completely or substituting other data for it), especially for the period from 1400-1600 AD, where their results deviate most from Mann's. Much of the data censored were key proxy indicators that added to cooling in the fifteenth century.

* McIntyre and McKitrick claimed that some of their data omissions/substitutions were due to the fact that not all of the Mann et al. data were available to them. However, all of Mann's datasets were actually available online and have been for the last couple years.

* McIntyre's and McKitrick's methodology also had technical problems. For example, they used a decomposition based on one surface temperature data set with standardization factors based on a different temperature data set, effectively mashing together two sets of incompatible data.

* McIntyre and McKitrick requested a spreadsheet of the Mann et al. (1998) proxy data, and the data they received from one of Mann's colleagues were incorrect. Mann takes the blame for this but also wonders why the authors didn't visit the website containing all the data sets in the first place. This inaccurate data set could explain why McIntyre and McKitrick could not reproduce the Mann et al. (1998) "hockey stick" reconstruction. In addition, the data provided to McIntyre and McKitrick contained only 112 proxy indicator series, whereas Mann's work actually had 159.

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Climate/Climate_Science/CliSciFrameset.html

http://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/Mann/EandEPaperProblem.pdf

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timo/paleo/

[Viking12]

12. BTW

there is a completely independent analysis that comes to a very similar conclusion as Mann, Bradley, and Hughes' hockey-stick picture: Crowley and Lowery in Ambio, 2000.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/gcmoutput/crowley2000/crowley_lowery2000_nht.txt

[Buzz Clik]

15. Excellent analysis. n/t

[Buzz Clik]

14. Let me guess...

You've never had to compete for funding for scientific research. Am I close?

[seasat]

19. Lol, he is obviously a member of the neoluddite right.

He would have no idea about how scientific research is conducted. He would also know that these review studies are not very expensive to compile. It takes a time and a computer. The real expensive work is collecting the data, processing the data, analyzing the data, and getting it passed through a real peer review process. Also the ones that collect the data understand the limitations and meaning of it better than someone that uses it second hand. Reviews do serve a purpose when done by an unbiased source such as an educational institute with independent government (like NSF) funding but it is often best to go back to the referenced sources to see if the authors are honest.

I find it humorous that the Balinus and Soon chose to list so many funding organizations for a rather inexpensive study. It indicates to me that the API was the primary funding agency but they had minor funding from other sources that they listed to make it look legit.

The fact that they defend the Balinus and Soon study tells their bias. If they actually read the literature, they would find real studies that actually call into question certain aspects of the current green house gas theory of global warming. Many of these studies have lead to better modeling of global climate. The only reason that studies like Balinus and Soon get any play (especially when published in an obscure journal) is because they recieve money from people with interest in preserving the status quo. If they really understood or were interested in the science behind climate change then they would pay more attention to original studies.