From CONTRARIAN MANHATTAN
The briefing is now complete in Concerned Appliances Consumer Council v. EPA. Such is the case, currently pending in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, where a small group of intrepid electrical consumers, CHECC, challenges the “science” behind the EPA’s 2009 finding that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” that endanger human health and welfare. I am one of CHECC’s attorneys.
Our Final Summary of Response was submitted initially on Tuesday, February 7, then returned in revised form the following day. (The “repair” reason is too trivial to include here. DC Circuit clerks are happy to come up with trivial reasons to ask an attorney to file a “corrected” summary.) Here is a link to the summary. It may require registration for access. Over the next few days, we may think of a way to provide a publicly accessible link to all summaries in this case.
In this case, we are asking the court to force the EPA to go back and reassess the “science” of the “danger” of greenhouse gases. The summary process gave EPA the opportunity to present its best account of the scientific basis on which the hazard discovery was based. What is truly remarkable is the extent to which the EPA, not to mention the entire government-backed scientific establishment, completely lacks any real scientific basis for its claims of major “danger.” The briefing made that shamelessly clear.
Equally remarkable is that the EPA’s work on challenging the pseudoscience of the smoke screen was assigned to a handful of individuals who worked as a full-fledged professional. The fear of being labeled “scientific deniers” by leftist ideologues is clearly strong enough to force most of the better-informed people out of the battlefield. However, we are very grateful to the CO2 Alliance for its support in the form of an excellent amicus compendium. The CO2 Coalition is the main group of real scientists willing to continue speaking out about the fake science behind the fear of climate change. The CO2 Alliance amicus brief is primarily the work of Professor William Happer of Princeton and Richard Lindzen of MIT.
I won’t try to go into detail about the arguments in the summary, but here are two of the main ones:
Surface temperature record generated
The EPA is based on so-called “surface temperature” data, dating from the late 1800s, which shows significant warming of the atmosphere during that period. The data comes from a network of terrestrial thermometers. There are a lot of problems with these data, mainly related to the undeniable fact that the people responsible for compiling and maintaining the data have distorted, manipulated and populated it for a variety of purposes. different, resulting in an overall profile that is completely corrupted and unsuitable for any policy purpose. My Thirty Part Series “The Greatest Science Fraud of All Time” refers to procedures where massage and manipulation lead to a previously reported decrease in temperature to enhance the apparent warming trend in the record.
But for the purposes of this case, we focused on one aspect of the surface temperature record that is even clearer and less ambiguous: there is almost no reported data on the surface temperature of Southern Hemisphere oceans pre-2000. Southern Hemisphere oceans cover approximately 40% of the earth’s surface, and the pre-2000 period is more than 80% of the surface temperature record. All the data for much of that record has been generated by people who are fueling fears about climate change. That fact leaves a gap in the EPA’s rationale for Hazard Detection. In its Summary, the EPA simply tries to avoid this topic. From the summary response, page 14:
The EPA says this argument offers nothing new and has previously rejected similar arguments and the DC Circuit asserted in Coal. for Responsible Regulation., Inc. v. EPA, 684 F.3d 102 (DC Cir. 2012). But the EPA did not indicate where in the Hazard Search documents the lack of data from the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere was addressed.
The failure of real-world data to validate the models on which the EPA relies
You might think that using real-world data to validate hypotheses is the essence of science. But in the field of climate science, and especially government-supported climate science, when the data does not support the model, the response is a series of excuses and evasions.
Besides the fact that temperatures cannot rise close to the rate the models have predicted, there is an even more obvious and embarrassing failure of the model: the absence of a “hot spot”. zone” predicted. The “hotspot” underpinning the EPA’s confirmed understanding of the mechanisms of the world’s climate forms one of the foundations of the Hazard Detection. On pages 15-19 of the Response Summary, we beat the EPA with the fact that a “hot spot” could not be found.
In the EPA Summary, it responded to the “hotspot” not by indicating that it existed, but by claiming that it never said it was important. From the summary response, page 18:
The EPA’s dispute at p. 48 of its abstract, and p. 21 of Denying that the mismatch between the model and the observations on the Tropical Hotspot is insignificant is inconsistent with their previous views on the subject. Technical Support for Hazard Detection 2009 at p. 50 said that if Hotspots were missing it would be “an important contradiction.” Now that it has been shown to be missing, even by the IPCC, the EPA says it’s an inconsequential inconsistency. The EPA’s ambiguity does not meet the requirement for rational decision-making.
There’s a lot more in the Summary Answer for your reading comfort, if you have time.
For the full article read here.
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