Joe Romm (here and here) and Brad Johnson (here and here) are all over the deadline fillings of Virginia and Texas against the US EPA's proposed limitations on CO2 emission. Brad and Joe point to the take of climatologists at UVa and the Texas State Climatologist, John Nielson-Gammon's on the petitions. To say that they don't think much of either is an understatement. They can be accurately summed up by the conclusion of the Texas petitionSince the CRU emails first appeared on the Internet in November, 2009, there has been a parade of controversies as new examples of improprieties and erroneous information are revealed to the public. Because the Administrator chose to rely on assessments by the IPCC, USGCRP, and the NRC—the latter two of which this petition has shown relied on the IPCC—as the primary scientific and technical basis for her Endangerment Finding, the Administrator’s decision is of central relevance to the Endangerment Finding within the meaning of Chapter 307 of the Clean Air Act. Thus, in light of the serious misconduct the State has demonstrated—data manipulation, loss or destruction of information, reliance on questionable source materials, abuse of the peer review process, suppression of dissent, conflicts of interest, and failure to comply with freedom of information laws—the EPA should grant this petition and reconsider the Endangerment Finding.EVERYONE is missing the dog that is not barking in the night. Both of these petitions are absolutely dependent on making false claims about the CRU emails and the few errors that have been dug out of the IPCC report. All the Klotzbachs, Douglass et al., Gerlich and friend, Soon, and the rest of that wallpaper has been swept into the memory hole. While Cuccinelli, the VA AG was elected in November, the Texas AG's office KNEW they were going to file this challenge as soon as the EPA proposed regulation came out, and THIS is the best they could come up with??? Even in VA, where were Pat Michaels, Chip Knappenberger, Fred Singer and Co?
It's going to be hard for Va and Texas to drag the cat into court after this weak start.
Eli, there are procedural issues here, as N-G pointed out.
ReplyDeleteThe petition to reconsider has to rely on new information that wasn't available at the time when the EPA made the endangerment finding.
So with that time span, they're a bit limited in what they can use. So they try to milk the emails to death, and then scoured the sceptic blogs for whatever scraps they could find.
Unless I'm mistaken. In which case, ignore all of the above.
ReplyDeletedata manipulation, loss or destruction of information, reliance on questionable source materials, abuse of the peer review process, suppression of dissent, conflicts of interest, and failure to comply with freedom of information laws
Huh? Does not this pretty much sum up everything in a single sentence?
Not for Jesus followers, it would seem, no. They never give up!
Guys, Rev. Phil Jones reneged on you on 14 Feb 2010 by saying there was no significant warning since 1995. Which part of his statement you dont get?
Hello, it's time to come back home. The war's over! Get off that virtual guilt ride, it's OK to be alive and breath out CO2.
Peace
"Guys, Rev. Phil Jones reneged on you on 14 Feb 2010 by saying there was no significant warning since 1995. Which part of his statement you dont get?"
ReplyDeleteWe get it just fine. Seems like you're the one who's confused.
"it's OK to be alive and breath out CO2."
Are you under the impression that breathing raises the atmospheric concentration of CO2?
"Are you under the impression that breathing raises the atmospheric concentration of CO2?"
ReplyDeleteHmm, does not it? Does not my body temperature warm the planet either?
Oh God, not more anonymous, mendacious D-K trolls!
ReplyDeleteMapleLeaf
I suppose it depends, anonymouse.
ReplyDeleteI am human, and eat plants and animals. Mainly carrots, though.
Do you eat coal?
On the vanishingly slim off-chance, that this is not a troll.
ReplyDeleteWhich part of his statement you dont get?
I can only tell you what I get. The trend from 1995 is about 0.1°C / decade. Jones told the paper, there is a 1 in 19 chance, that this trend is just noise. There is the convention of only calling trends with a 1 in 20 chance or better "statistically significant"; hence the trend is not "significant", i.e. in the "statistically significant" sense, but barely so. Keep in mind, that Jones was specifically asked about the 15-year trend, it was not his own choosing. It was a trick question to begin with, as 15-year is usually too short a period to have statistically significant temperature trends. Jones should better have told them so and give a reply for 30 year trends, alas he did not.
it's OK to be alive and breath out CO2.
Not all CO2 is created equal. The CO2 you breath out was taken out of the atmosphere mere years or even only months ago, depending on whether you are eating meat or plants. The CO2 from fossil fuel was taken out millions of years ago. If you look at both of emissions over the course of a few years the first is an almost zero sum game, whereas the latter adds to the atmosphere.
bluegrue:
ReplyDeleteJones did say all that. He said 15 years is too short, and that the trend over the last 30 years (or was it 35?) was significant.
They don't give a damn if it's true or not. All they want is more "reconsideration", more investigation, more delay.
ReplyDelete> Do you eat coal?
ReplyDeleteDon't assume otherwise.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/46/17855.full
"... U.S. corn agriculture has been criticized as environmentally unsustainable (19) and conspicuously subsidized (20). Of 160 food products we purchased at Wendy's throughout the United States, not 1 item could be traced back to a noncorn source. Our work also identified corn feed as the overwhelming source of food for tissue growth, hence for beef and chicken meat, at fast food restaurants...."
And that's not even counting the fossil carbon in the corn sweetener in the soft drinks, nor that in the pesticide residues.
It takes about 30 calories of fossil fuel energy to put one calorie of food energy (as California lettuce) on a plate in a NYC restaurant. Most of that fossil energy goes to irrigation, cultivation, production of fertilizer, and pesticides. Transport is way down the list.
ReplyDeleteLow cost fossil fuel subsidizes our commercially produced agricultural products of all types – even local products.
Our problems with fossil fuel run deep.
I think it's most reasonable to separate out the fossil fuel usage of agriculture from breathing.
ReplyDeleteThe carbon that's in the plant itself came from the air. Fertiliser, even if made from methane, doesn't provide carbon that ends up inside the plant.
'....Our National Food Administration recommends that we eat food providing 2,500 kilocalories (kcal) per day. Kcal is a unit for measurement of energy.
ReplyDeleteTo obtain and prepare this amount of food takes around five times as many kcal as in the food itself.
This is provided by, principally, oil and natural gas. Agriculture, transport, preparation, trade and food preparation – all these require oil and gas. If these numbers apply globally then as much as 40% of all oil and natural gas use goes to provision of food....
....The research group, Global Energy Systems at Uppsala University has studied in detail the energy content of 129 of the world’s agricultural products and their byproducts – i.e. agriculture’s total bioenergy production (read the relevant Master thesis at www.fysast.uu.se/ges). Globally, this is about 20,000 TWh per day. This is nearly as much energy as is consumed daily by transport worldwide. Of the total harvest, nearly 90% is edible but some must be conserved as seed stock for the following year’s harvest, some is lost during storage and some is used for animal feed and so on. In our calculations we have also kept in mind that 3% of our food comes from the oceans. We have concluded that the energy content of the world’s food that is currently available for human consumption is 7,225 TWh per day. The food we actually consume contains nearly as much energy. In other words, the global food reserves available to provide for a rapidly growing population are very small – approximately 2% more than current consumption.
How to rescue our climate for future generations is considered by many to be the most important question. The figure of 350 ppm is given as a permissible upper threshold for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. But the future’s greatest challenge is that too many people must share too little energy. It is time that we began discussing the figure of 2500 kcal and how, in future, the world’s population will be provided with its daily bread without having it soaked in oil.'
Can agriculture provide us with both food and fuel? - A survey of present agricultural production - Johansson & Liljequist, 2009
http://www.tsl.uu.se/uhdsg/publications/agriculture.pdf
Kjell Aleklett is Professor of Physics at Global Energy Systems, Uppsala University. He also blogs on energy issues at aleklett.wordpress.com.
If this correct, we are all in for a very nasty shock if we can't phase-out fossil-fuels, before peak fossil-energy occurs.
"Guys, Rev. Phil Jones reneged on you on 14 Feb 2010 by saying there was no significant warning since 1995. Which part of his statement you don't get?"
ReplyDeleteThe bit where that is a relevant statement to climate change. What bit of that don't you get?
Wadard said...
ReplyDelete'"Guys, Rev. Phil Jones reneged on you on 14 Feb 2010 by saying there was no significant warning since 1995. Which part of his statement you don't get?"
The bit where that is a relevant statement to climate change. What bit of that don't you get?'
We get it just fine, but the quote-mining is tedious. It seems you omitted the context and that isn't nice, and it annoys the the mice.
Here's Dr. Phil Jones' interview in full, on the BBC website.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm
The immediate rationale for the Texas petition appears to be to thwart/delay impending expansion of ground level ozone regulation in counties around the largest Texas cities, and to boost Perry's anti-regulation standing ahead of the primary election (which he won). Perry is saying suburban counties can live with the existing excessive air pollution and the corresponding health issues. Besides auto emissions, it involves cement kiln emissions for Dallas, and chemical plant emissions for Houston, two large lobby/campaign contribution forces. The Texas petition for reconsideration is an expensive PR stunt, no more, no less. It probably is the worst example of an administrative petition that this mouse has seen.
ReplyDeleteA remarkable thing about the Texas petition is that it presents Tea Party Perry as demanding an enormous expansion of the EPA, its budget, and its authority. That conclusion results from the petition's attack on using non-EPA data as support for the Endangerment Rule. The effect is to demand that EPA preclude reliance on research from NASA, the Energy Department, universities, and everything else that is non-EPA. Growing the EPA large enough to launch its own satellites and perform all the research others do would be huge expansion. If nothing else, it adds to the internal contradictions that make Perry so special. s/Minnie.