Rules and procedures are for little people
By Norman Leahy | Wednesday, October 5th, 2011 | Policy, VirginiaWhat passes for the left in Virginia cursed and clucked when Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency over its finding that carbon dioxide generated from the burning of fossil fuels poses a threat to human life. The whole thing was just another one of Cuccinelli’s anti-science crusades.
Well a funny thing has happened on the way to the courthouse. In late September, the EPA’s inspector general issued a report charging that the Agency didn’t follow its own rules and procedures in creating the endangerment finding. And they weren’t minor corner cuttings and flubs, either.
That’s all the opening Cuccinelli needed to issue a scathing press release, in which he says:
“The EPA’s failure to follow its own rules calls into question everything it has done. True science is testable, and true scientists willingly show their work and allow others to test their data, hypotheses, and conclusions. Whenever a government agency states a conclusion that is allegedly based on science, but refuses to comply with its own rules that require it to ‘show its work,’ we should all be concerned.”
Showing ones work isn’t among the global warming crowd’s stronger suits, as witnessed by the continuing legal tussle to compel former UVA professor Michael Mann to turn over his emails under Virginia’s FOIA law. Cuccinelli’s (stalled) lawsuit in that matter was assailed as an affront to free inquiry and much worse. Those emails are dribbling out owing to separate legal action by the American Tradition Institute.
UVA fought and lost its fight (but hasn’t given up entirely). The EPA, though, refuses to acknowledge it did anything wrong and shows no intention of paying the slightest heed to its own IG’s recommendations. A statement from the IG’s office on September 28th notes:
“We make recommendations that we think will strengthen EPA’s control over data quality processes. EPA disagreed with our conclusions and did not agree to take any corrective actions in response to this report. All the report’s recommendations are unresolved.”
And they are likely to remain unresolved until someone forces a resolution to occur.
That someone may be Ken Cuccinelli.
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About the author
Norm Leahy has written about Virginia and national politics online since 2002, beginning with One Man's Trash (OMT), and continuing through Bacon's Rebellion (both the blog and the e-zine), Sic Semper Tyrannis, NBC12's Decision Virginia, Richmond.com and Tertium Quids. He is the chief blogger at "The Score" and a producer of "The Score" radio show as well as being a Washington Examiner contributor.
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4 Responses to "Rules and procedures are for little people"
The rules and procedures are there simply to provide the desired results. When they don’t they are ignored or changed. This was formerly known as the king’s prerogative I believe, to decide how he saw fit at any given moment. Strange how these wonderful guardians of the less privileged act like corrupt royalty or tyrants. All for the children.
Another scandal in the making by EPA’s policies of dictating by decree with no Congressional oversight. Another reason to cut the arms and legs of the torso and drown this agency in Obama’s cesspool.
Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works does a great job staying on top on this.
The Inspector General’s investigation uncovered that EPA failed to engage in the required record-keeping process leading up to the endangerment finding decision, and it also did not follow its own peer review procedures to ensure that the science behind the decision was sound. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson readily admitted in 2009 that EPA had outsourced its scientific review to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is an institution whose credibility has already been called into question.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=8409
I am starting to see reports that blame the current global recession on Barry and the “green democrats” religion of “man made CO2 is evil”. And it must be a religion because it is not based on science.
There are problems at the IPCC. What is really going on there? Is the IPCC actually run by Green Peace?
a list of just 50 former IPCC experts
1. Dr Robert Balling: “The IPCC notes that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected.” (This did not appear in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers).
2. Dr. Lucka Bogataj: “Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don’t cause global temperatures to rise…. temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.”
3. Dr John Christy: “Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report.”
4. Dr Rosa Compagnucci: “Humans have only contributed a few tenths of a degree to warming on Earth. Solar activity is a key driver of climate.”
5. Dr Richard Courtney: “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong.”
6. Dr Judith Curry: “I’m not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don’t have confidence in the process.”
7. Dr Robert Davis: “Global temperatures have not been changing as state of the art climate models predicted they would. Not a single mention of satellite temperature observations appears in the (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers.”
8. Dr Willem de Lange: “In 1996, the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3,000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernable human influence on climate. I didn’t. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities.”
9. Dr Chris de Freitas: “Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the longstanding claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned; along with it the hitherto assumed need for costly measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. If they have not heard, it is because of the din of global warming hysteria that relies on the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’ and predictions of computer models.”
10. Dr Oliver Frauenfeld: “Much more progress is necessary regarding our current understanding of climate and our abilities to model it.”
11. Dr Peter Dietze: “Using a flawed eddy diffusion model, the IPCC has grossly underestimated the future oceanic carbon dioxide uptake.”
12. Dr John Everett: “It is time for a reality check. The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I have reviewed the IPCC and more recent scientific literature and believe that there is not a problem with increased acidification, even up to the unlikely levels in the most-used IPCC scenarios.”
13. Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: “The IPCC refused to consider the sun’s effect on the Earth’s climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.”
14. Dr Lee Gerhard: “I never fully accepted or denied the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) concept until the furor started after [NASA's James] Hansen’s wild claims in the late 1980′s. I went to the [scientific] literature to study the basis of the claim, starting at first principles. My studies then led me to believe that the claims were false.”
15. Dr Indur Goklany: “Climate change is unlikely to be the world’s most important environmental problem of the 21st century. There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.”
16. Dr Vincent Gray: “The (IPCC) climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies.”
17. Dr Kenneth Green: “We can expect the climate crisis industry to grow increasingly shrill, and increasingly hostile toward anyone who questions their authority.”
18. Dr Mike Hulme: “Claims such as ’2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous … The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen.”
19. Dr Kiminori Itoh: “There are many factors which cause climate change. Considering only greenhouse gases is nonsense and harmful. When people know what the truth is they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”
20. Dr Yuri Izrael: “There is no proven link between human activity and global warming. I think the panic over global warming is totally unjustified. There is no serious threat to the climate.”
21. Dr Steven Japar: “Temperature measurements show that the climate model-predicted mid-troposphere hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them.”
22. Dr Georg Kaser: “This number (of receding glaciers reported by the IPCC) is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude … It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing,”
23. Dr Aynsley Kellow: “I’m not holding my breath for criticism to be taken on board, which underscores a fault in the whole peer review process for the IPCC: there is no chance of a chapter [of the IPCC report] ever being rejected for publication, no matter how flawed it might be.”
24. Dr Madhav Khandekar: “I have carefully analysed adverse impacts of climate change as projected by the IPCC and have discounted these claims as exaggerated and lacking any supporting evidence.”
25. Dr Hans Labohm: “The alarmist passages in the (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers have been skewed through an elaborate and sophisticated process of spin-doctoring.”
26. Dr. Andrew Lacis: “There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department.”
27. Dr Chris Landsea: “I cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”
28. Dr Richard Lindzen: “The IPCC process is driven by politics rather than science. It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say and exploits public ignorance.”
29. Dr Harry Lins: “Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. The case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.”
30. Dr Philip Lloyd: “I am doing a detailed assessment of the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science. I have found examples of a summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said.”
31. Dr Martin Manning: “Some government delegates influencing the IPCC Summary for Policymakers misrepresent or contradict the lead authors.”
32. Stephen McIntyre: “The many references in the popular media to a “consensus of thousands of scientists” are both a great exaggeration and also misleading.”
33. Dr Patrick Michaels: “The rates of warming, on multiple time scales have now invalidated the suite of IPCC climate models. No, the science is not settled.”
34. Dr Nils-Axel Morner: “If you go around the globe, you find no sea level rise anywhere.”
35. Dr Johannes Oerlemans: “The IPCC has become too political. Many scientists have not been able to resist the siren call of fame, research funding and meetings in exotic places that awaits them if they are willing to compromise scientific principles and integrity in support of the man-made global-warming doctrine.”
36. Dr Roger Pielke: “All of my comments were ignored without even a rebuttal. At that point, I concluded that the IPCC Reports were actually intended to be advocacy documents designed to produce particular policy actions, but not as a true and honest assessment of the understanding of the climate system.”
37. Dr Jan Pretel: “It’s nonsense to drastically reduce emissions … predicting about the distant future-100 years can’t be predicted due to uncertainties.”
38. Dr Paul Reiter: “As far as the science being ‘settled,’ I think that is an obscenity. The fact is the science is being distorted by people who are not scientists.”
39. Dr Murray Salby: “I have an involuntary gag reflex whenever someone says the “science is settled. Anyone who thinks the science is settled on this topic is in fantasia.”
40. Dr Tom Segalstad: “The IPCC global warming model is not supported by the scientific data.”
41. Dr Fred Singer: “Isn’t it remarkable that the Policymakers Summary of the IPCC report avoids mentioning the satellite data altogether, or even the existence of satellites–probably because the data show a (slight) cooling over the last 18 years, in direct contradiction to the calculations from climate models?”
42. Dr Hajo Smit: “There is clear cut solar-climate coupling and a very strong natural variability of climate on all historical time scales. Currently I hardly believe anymore that there is any relevant relationship between human CO2 emissions and climate change.”
43. Dr Roy Spencer: “The IPCC is not a scientific organization and was formed to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Claims of human-cause global warming are only a means to that goal.”
44. Dr Richard Tol: “The IPCC attracted more people with political rather than academic motives. In AR4, green activists held key positions in the IPCC and they succeeded in excluding or neutralising opposite voices.”
45. Dr Tom Tripp: “There is so much of a natural variability in weather it makes it difficult to come to a scientifically valid conclusion that global warming is man made.”
46. Dr Robert Watson: “The (IPCC) mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”
47. Dr Gerd-Rainer Weber: “Most of the extremist views about climate change have little or no scientific basis.”
48. Dr David Wojick: “The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”
49. Dr Miklos Zagoni: “I am positively convinced that the anthropogenic global warming theory is wrong.”
50. Dr. Eduardo Zorita: “Editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. By writing these lines… a few of my future studies will not see the light of publication.”
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