Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli is absolutely right to file a petition against the Environmental Protection Agency for attempting to regulate greenhouse gases, including carbon dixoide, by means of executive fiat. And he is absolutely right to cite the East Anglia email scandals as justification for questioning the so-called “science” underlying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming.
Most Americans wouldn’t know it from relying upon such U.S. media luminaries as the New York Times, Washington Post and network television, but U.K. media news organizations, even the leftist Guardian, have been all over the East Anglia email story. The Labor government has initiated reviews and investigations to examine the integrity of the scientific process. Far from being a “mini-scandal,” as my friend Peter portrays it in the previous post, East Anglia is the tip of the iceberg of what could prove to be the greatest scientific scandal in modern history: the hijacking of science by politicians and ideologues for the purpose of reorganizing society according to their ideological tenets.
As Cuccinelli pithily puts it, “It is political science, not real science.”
Of course, Cuccinelli is himself a politician, and as Peter describes him, “a staunch social conservative” — and as we all know, social conservatives, most of whom who are Bible thumpers who don’t believe in Darwinian evolution, are anti-science. So, let’s not accept Cuccinelli’s appraisal of the significance of the East Anglia scandal. Let’s see what the U.K.-based Institute of Physics, which claims a worldwide membership of 36,000, has to say in a memorandum submitted to Parliament:
The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital.
This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.
The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the [temperature] reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented.
The “mini-scandal” is growing. Numerous reports have surfaced, calling into question the accuracy of the IPCC report — most notoriously the claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, which even the IPCC concedes represented a failure to live up to its own standards. If you rely upon the Washington Post for updates on the IPCC, you would read that “critics have found a few unsettling errors” due to typos and sloppy sourcing, with virtually no explanation of why the international body might feel compelled to restore public trust in its findings. You’d have to read the British press, such as this somewhat polemical column in the Telegraph, for an understanding of what is going on. By the way, has the Post or NY Times yet to seriously report on IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri’s conflicts of interest?
Have the Post or the NY Times yet to report on the extraordinary concessions made by Climate Research Unit chief Phil Jones, who was at the heart of the East Anglia scandal, among others that: (1) there is still legitimate debate over whether the current warming period is unprecedented, as it is proclaimed to be, or whether the Medieval Warming Period was even warmer — gee, we thought those matters were “settled” — and (2) that the sources of the data (not the data itself) in the East Anglia database are “probably not as good as they should be.”
Nor have the Post or NY Times yet to acknowledge concerns that the data in the U.S. databases at NASA and NOAA might not be as good as they should be. A recent report, “Surface Temperature Records: A Policy Driven Deception?” has documented how NOAA has systematically reduced the number of weather stations around the world from which to calculate average global temperatures, showing a bias toward eliminating stations in colder regions and substituting statistical interpolations. The authors do come across as polemical in their conclusions about the motives of the NOAA temperature record keepers, but their underlying case about the bias in the measurements has at least superficial merit worth a closer look. (David W. Schnare with the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy has taken a closer look at one weather station near Harrisonburg and concludes that NOAA’s statistical adjustments have doubled the actual observed warming.)
Finally, there is the stubborn refusal of global temperatures to actually rise over the past 12 years. While the data can be explained away as the result of natural climatic fluctuations temporarily masking the inevitable rise, stable temperatures suggest that the broader trend is consistent only with the “low” range of temperature increases predicted by the climate models, and totally inconsistent with the alarmist scenarios.
None of this is to say that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has been “disproven,” or is a “hoax,” as the Rush Limbaugh crowd would maintain. What we should conclude from recent developments is that the case for AGW remains unproven. Any “consensus,” if it ever existed, rested upon faith in the integrity of contemporary temperature measurements, reconstructions of past temperatures through proxies like tree rings, and the integrity of the IPCC synthesis of the science. We can no longer have faith in those assumptions.
Therefore, it is entirely reasonable for Ken Cuccinelli to suggest that the EPA is making an extra-constitutional power grab on the basis of unproven science.
Warning to environmentalists: I expect that the overwhelming majority of environmentalists have become so attached to the AGW hypothesis that they will reject the recent round of criticisms out of hand. They have too much invested not to defend it to the death. But if the AGW hypothesis ever is discredited, they will go down with the sinking ship, and the entire environmental movement will be tarred. And that would be a tragedy. The world is full of proven environmental problems, too numerous to list here. While we certainly need to continue researching the dynamics of climate change, we should focus on fixing what we know is broken.
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