The IPCC and the Federal District Court of Appeals

Sometimes a bunny just hangs about after quoting someone else and watches heads explode.  The Court was not amused.

 Those petitions asserted that internal emails and documents released from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU)—a contributor to one of the global temperature records and to the IPCC’s assessment report—undermined the scientific evidence supporting the Endangerment Finding by calling into question whether the IPCC scientists adhered to “best science practices.”

The petitions pointed to factual mistakes in the IPCC’s assessment report resulting from the use of non-peer-reviewed studies and several scientific studies postdating the Endangerment Finding as evidence that the Endangerment Finding was flawed.

According to EPA, the petitioners’ claims based on the CRU documents were exaggerated, contradicted by other evidence, and not a material or reliable basis for questioning the credibility of the body of science at issue; two of the factual inaccuracies alleged in the petitions were in fact mistakes, but both were “tangential and minor” and did not change the key IPCC conclusions; and the new scientific studies raised by some petitions were either already considered by EPA, misinterpreted or misrepresented by petitioners, or put forth without acknowledging other new State Petitioners have not provided substantial support for their argument that the Endangerment Finding should be revised. State Petitioners point out that some studies the IPCC referenced in its assessment were not peer-reviewed, but they ignore the fact that (1) the IPCC assessment relied on around 18,000 studies that were peer-reviewed, and (2) the IPCC’s report development procedures expressly permitted the inclusion in the assessment of some non-peer-reviewed studies (“gray” literature).

Moreover, as EPA determined, the limited inaccurate information developed from the gray literature does not appear sufficient to undermine the substantial overall evidentiary support for the Endangerment Finding. State Petitioners have not, as they assert, uncovered a “pattern” of flawed science.

Only two of the errors they point out seem to be errors at all, and EPA relied on neither in making the Endangerment Finding. First, as State Petitioners assert, the IPCC misstated the percentage of the Netherlands that is below sea level, a statistic that was used for background information. However, the IPCC corrected the error, and EPA concluded that the error was “minor and had no impact,” and the Endangerment Finding did not refer to the statistic in any way. Id. at 49,576–77. Second, the IPCC acknowledged misstating the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are receding. EPA also did not rely on that projection in the Endangerment Finding. studies.