Trust us (but don’t verify) – we are saving the world from climate change.

EPA Inspector General Finds Serious Flaws in Centerpiece of Obama (and Ms Gillard’s) Global Warming Agenda

In Dec 2009, the US EPA declared CO2 and other GHG’s to be endangering public health and environment and announced its intention to regulate it under the Clean Air Act. This is the closest that CO2 comes to having the status of ‘pollution’.

The EPA was criticised at the time by Alan Carlin, a 35-year veteran EPA employee who ran the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, in a 98-page analysis concluding that the EPA relied uncritically on IPCC climate change reports despite serious concerns about the integrity of its procedures and thus its conclusions. He was ignored and later ‘left’ the EPA.

In Oct 2010, the InterAcademy Council confirmed these concerns about the IPCC reports in their ‘Review of the processes and procedures of the IPCC‘, which found many serious flaws in the way the IPCC generates its reports allowing bias, conflicts of interest and political interference. They recommended substantial changes to the processes and enforcement of procedures (which have been accepted by the IPCC, but, inexplicably, will not be implemented until after the next AR5 report).

Last week, EPS’s process of determining the ‘endangerment’ (pollution) status of CO2 and GHG’s was found to be flawed by EPA’s own Inspector General’s report, “Procedural Review of EPA’s Greenhouse Gases Endangerment Finding Data Quality Processes” as summarised in the New York Times account from Wednesday:

“In a report with wide-reaching political implications, U.S. EPA’s inspector general has found that the scientific assessment backing U.S. EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous did not go through sufficient peer review for a document of its importance. . .

According to the IG report, EPA failed to follow the Office of Management and Budget’s peer review procedures for a “highly influential scientific assessment,” which is defined as an assessment that could have an impact of more than $500 million in one year and OR is “novel, controversial, or precedent setting.”

In particular, the document was reviewed by a 12-member panel that included an EPA employee, violating rules on neutrality. EPA also did not make the review results public, as required, or certify whether it complied with internal or OMB requirements.

In a statement, IG Arthur Elkins Jr. emphasized that his office “did not test the validity of the scientific or technical information used to support the endangerment finding.”

“While it may be debatable what impact, if any, this had on EPA’s finding, it is clear that EPA did not follow all required steps for a highly influential scientific assessment,” he said.”

Defenders of the EPA erroneously claim that the IG erred and that because the science is settled and uncontroversial, the EPA did not need to follow the processes in question.  Even if we accepted this ‘science is settled’ slogan, requirements for the EPA process is triggered by the unquestioningly  ‘highly influential’ nature of this scientific assessment.

Comment:

We have come to understand that integrity of findings are only as good as the processes that led to them. In criminal justice, we tolerate letting murderers off on technicalities, where policing and legal protocols were not followed. We do this because we understand that cutting corners on procedures, whether well intentioned or not, inevitably leads to miscarriage of justice in the short term and corruption of policing and justice itself in the long run,

In the pharmaceutical and medical industries, in the aviation industry and civil engineering, in fact in every area critical to public safety, processes are well defined and enforced by regulatory or independent auditing bodies.

But in the infant area of climate change, these critical quality and integrity processes are repeatedly and widely unimplemented, or disregarded or subverted and when challenged, excused by virtually every scientific and public body involved. Climate change, an issue of critical global importance, allegedly endangering the whole planet, necessitating a revolution in energy generation, affecting every industry and every individual on the planet and driving a New World Order of increasing global governance by an unelected United Nations, is somehow claimed to be so urgent and so morally unimpeachable, that it is robust enough without such procedural safeguards.

Apparently, the climate change industry does not need to adhere to standards and does not need public scrutiny of its climate models. It does not need  software and data quality standards, independent auditors and government regulators. No, a nod and a wink from three expert colleagues in the form of peer review is all you needed, all of whose careers are built on climate change fear and all of whom you probably know from a dozen conferences. The frequent defense of peer review that colleagues will gladly enhance their status by finding errors in your work goes only so deep; it does not extend to finding errors in fundementals which would would endanger a consensus favourable to their their own grants. Why are pharmaceutical trials independently supervised and audited by the FDA and not just peer reviewed at the end? Anyone?

But this is just nit-picking, I hear you say. The evidence is overwhelming, so we can forgive a few oversights. Well lets list these few oversights in the chain of cAGW evidence:

Many adjusted temperature data sets have lost or do not reveal the justification for often very large adjustments and so have not been able to be audited.

Climate models using this data, their assumptions, parameterisation, and implementation are not independently reviewed or publicly available.

Climate model software implementation does not adhere to any industry software quality standards.

Resulting climate models are not verified or validated to any degree acceptable by any industry or science that affects public safety.

Peer review of the results of these models has been shown by Climategate and other events to be inadequate or outright manipulated.

IPCC’s summaries of such literature have been officially found to be politicised and it’s quality and integrity processes compromised towards exaggeration of climate fears.

EPA’s adoption of IPCC’s biased reports in deciding to regulate CO2 is now demonstrated to have circumvented some of their own quality safeguards.

Australian Labor (and early Liberal) party’s decision to price carbon accepts uncritically the biased IPCC’s alarmist cAGW and their choice of CO2 reduction response, to the tiny extent that science affects this mainly political decision.

The cost-benefit analysis of action on climate by non-scientist Prof Ross Garnaud accepts and regurgitates uncritically all IPCC assumptions and biased conclusions and bases analysis on incredible and undefended assumptions of global actions and economic benefits.

The methods and assumptions behind the economic modelling  by our Treasury of the effects of this carbon tax on our economy remains unreleased by the government and unavailable for public audit.

Contents and implications of UN IPCC and UNFCCC  binding international conventions and treaties on Climate Change, which Australian bureaucrats sign are generally not communicated to the public, nor is public discussion or public’s acceptance sought.

So, if there is one characteristic that pervades the climate change industry, from scientific theory to the global carbon energy governance, it is a lack of transparency and disclosure, absence or circumvention of quality processes and a complete absence of independent audit. Apparently we should accept a New World Order… ON TRUST…of people who stand to benefit from it. Whether climate catastrophe is a valid concern or not, only a fool or an irresponsible government would accept this.

UPDATE: Minor spelling and content edits.