Catallaxy Files

One of our regular and valued bloggers, Homer, has regularly made the following statement:

I know understanding facts is foreign to you but if you actually understood how to look at economic statistics you would find that when Howard won office the period of economic growth was the longest period since the war. Hint other periods were curtailed by negative growth. Another hint it doesn’t start at 1990.

Since this is an assertion of fact, I thought it would be helpful to check.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like the government is going for broke on the CPRS business. Penny Wong has just given a speech that denies the allegations and defies the allegators (I think Merton Miller first said that).

Red herrings and arguments at the fringes of the debate cannot dismiss the fact that that the world is warming, nor is it justification to ignore the range of scientific work on climate change.

A question all of us should consider is what will happen in 20 years.

In 20 years time, can we seriously look our children and grand children in the eye and say we sat on our hands because of a computer hacker?

To the best of my knowledge Wong doesn’t have any children, so that final sentence must be placed into the Clive Hamilton basket of weirdness.

This is a speech that promises to be the source of many What they said posts (Rudd’s speech to the Lowy Institute should also feature). Consider this great comment (emphasis added).

the IPCC chairs themselves announced that one paragraph in its 2007 Assessment relating to loss of Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was poorly based. It had been erroneously stated that 80 per cent of Himalayan glacier area would very likely be gone by 2035.

That’s not quite how I recall things happening. I’m just wondering how the Guardian Newspaper first reported this story?

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN agency which evaluates the risk from global warming, warned the glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could “disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner”.

Today Ramesh denied any such risk existed: “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers.” The minister added although some glaciers are receding they were doing so at a rate that was not “historically alarming”.

However, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.”
…
Pachauri dismissed the report saying it was not “peer reviewed” and had few “scientific citations”.

“With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.”
…
In response Pachauri said that such statements were reminiscent of “climate change deniers and school boy science”.

“I cannot see what the minister’s motives are. We do need more extensive measurement of the Himalayan range but it is clear from satellite pictures what is happening.”

Unfortunately I can’t find the sentence or instance where Pachauri called this ‘voodoo science’ – I can find lots of instances where it is reported he said ‘voodoo science’ but not the original context. As I was telling someone just this afternoon, the AGW lobby are going to try to brazen this out.

(HT: Andrew Bolt)

A US mining corporation is taking the US EPA to court.

Peabody filed a petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Feb. 12 that seeks review of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decision Dec. 7 that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health.

Quite right. The Obama Administration is trying to use regulatory powers to bypass the Congress. Stealth policy is fundamentally anti-democratic and should be resisted.

Peabody has put out a 240 page document making its case. From the executive summary.

EPA must reconsider its Endangerment Finding based on new material that was not available during the comment period and which is central to the outcome that EPA reached in promulgating its Endangerment Finding. EPA failed to properly exercise its judgment as required by the Clean Air Act (“CAA”) and acted in an arbitrary and capricious fashion by relying almost exclusively on flawed reports of the IPCC in attributing climate change to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions. As evidenced by material that became available last fall from CRU, as well as additional information that has become available since the Endangerment Finding was issued, the IPCC reports were not the product of a rigorous, transparent and neutral scientific process.
Indeed, contrary to the CAA and the Information Quality Act (“IQA”), EPA largely ceded its obligation to make a “judgment” as to whether GHGs may endanger public health and welfare to the IPCC, an international body that is not subject to U.S. data quality and transparency standards and whose reports were prepared in direct disregard of those standards. As a result, EPA is set to begin regulating GHG emissions based on a scientific process that was conducted without the basic procedural safeguards set forth in U.S. law to ensure the reliability and accuracy of the scientific conclusions underlying the Agency’s Endangerment Finding. As an agency of the United States, however, whose regulatory actions will have far-reaching consequences for U.S. citizens, EPA must abide by U.S. standards and not the standards of international bodies whose actions are governed by different norms.
Accordingly, the EPA should reconsider its Endangerment Finding in light of the recently discovered defects in the IPCC’s procedures and convene full evidentiary hearings to provide an open and fair reconsideration process.

It looks like the basis for the case is that the EPA ruling falls foul of the Information Quality Act also known as the Data Quality Act. This legislation was specifically introduced to deal with ‘junk science’ and progressives hate it. Chris Mooney has a long discussion on the legislation in his The Republican War on Science (I’ve lent my copy out and it is a good read, even if incredibly biased and wrong-headed). Here is Mooney in the Washington Monthly complaining about it.

A ‘junk science’ ruling against the IPCC and the CRU would be devastating. It would also be problematic for what is an important avenue of research. Ideally the EPA, and more importantly the Obama Administration, will back away from the issue and pursue their legislative program in the market of ideas and in the Congress.

(HT: Climategate)