On July 29, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied 10 petitions challenging its 2009 determination that
- climate change is real,
- it is occurring due to emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities, and
- it threatens human health and the environment.
EPA’s decision rejected claims that climate science cannot be trusted and that collusion (dare we say, a “conspiracy”?) among members of leading research bodies to suppress conflicting data and hide errors or gaps in their own research invalidates the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Having given “months of serious consideration” to the petitions and to the state of climate change science, EPA found no evidence to support these claims. In fact, EPA has determined that climate science is credible, compelling, and growing stronger!
EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson blamed the petitions on “defenders of the status quo [who] will try to slow our efforts to get America running on clean energy,” and called on petitioners “to join the vast majority of the American people who want to see more green jobs, more clean energy innovation and an end to the oil addiction that pollutes our planet and jeopardizes our national security.”
The basic assertions by the petitioners and EPA responses follow.
Claim: Emails disclosed from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate global temperature data.
Response: EPA reviewed “every” e-mail and concluded that this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large complex data sets.
Claim: Errors in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report call the entire body of work into question.
Response: EPA confirmed only two alleged errors in the entire, 3,000 page report. Not surprisingly, the confirmed errors were the now infamous notes pertaining to the rate of Himalayan glacier melt and to the percentage of the Netherlands below sea level. EPA concluded that none of the errors undermines the basic facts that the climate is changing in ways that threaten our health and welfare.
Claim: Certain studies were not included in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, demonstrating that the IPCC is biased and cannot be trusted as a source of reliable information.
Response: According to EPA, the studies in question were in fact included in the IPCC report, which provided a “comprehensive and balanced” discussion of climate science.
Claim: New scientific studies refute evidence supporting the Endangerment Finding.
Response: EPA says that the Petitioners misinterpreted the results of these studies, and that many of the papers they submitted as evidence were consistent with EPA’s Finding. Further, EPA concluded that other studies submitted by the petitioners were based on unsound methodologies.
What do you think? Is climate change already happening, and is human activity a significant, if not the primary, contributor? Should this action by EPA put further questions to rest, or are aspects of the “ClimateGate” expose and other shortcomings in the scientific record still unresolved? Furthermore, can and should we base regulatory actions with potentially significant – to hear some say, disastrous – economic impacts on scientific models projecting decades, even centuries into the future, when, as the skeptics note, we can’t even reliably predict the path of hurricanes or even tomorrow’s weather?
Please comment below…
For more information on EPA’s findings and the petitions, visit http://epa.gov/climatechange/endangerment/petitions.html
For our perspective on greenhouse gases and climate change, see www.tcozzie.com/guidance/air/ghgs/.