Tempest In A Teapot

One of the more vocal neo-cons at my office walked up to my desk and dropped a 96-page report in my inbox with a smug grin. "Got something for you to read," he told me. "A report that the EPA has censored because it proves there's no such thing as global warming."

I thanked him because I had heard about this report but had not actually seen it before. The report, "Proposed NCEE Comments on Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under the Clean Air Act," was prepared by the National Center for Environmental Economics (the NCEE of the report's title), part of the EPA's Office of Policy, Economics and Innovation. The report was allegedly suppressed and its author silenced because of pressure from the Obama Administration to support their agenda of regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act.

This would be disturbing if it were true, especially in light of Obama's pledge not to let science take a back seat to policy. The report claims that EPA is relying on outdated research in declaring carbon dioxide to be a harmful greenhouse gas and is ignoring major new developments, including a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature. The report also maintains that ocean cycles are probably the single most important factor in explaining temperature fluctuations (though solar cycles may play a role as well). All of this demonstrates to the report's authors that EPA should independently analyze the science, rather than just adopt the conclusions of outside organizations.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank funded by Exxon Mobil, Ford, Pfizer, and other like-minded foundations, has made a big deal out of this, and has released the "suppressed" EPA report along with copies of emails allegedly documenting its suppression. According to CEI, the dissenter wanted to include “a significant internal critique of the agency’s global warming position” but was stifled because the report didn’t fit the political conclusions that the EPA had already reached.

The truth, however, turns out to be something else. The author was in fact not a climate scientist but an economist working at the NCEE, which conducts economic analysis, including cost-benefit studies, risk assessment, and economic impact modeling, for the EPA. Although the NCEE does number crunching, not scientific research, one of its analysts took it upon himself to prepare an unauthorized, dissenting opinion outside of his area of expertise, and EPA, in effect, told him to go back to his own business.

It's obvious that unlike the scientific community, the American public is not unanimously convinced of the science of climate change, thanks, in part, to the efforts of groups like the CEI and others. Last year, a Gallup Poll noted that only 42% of Republicans agreed that not only is global warming occurring but that to a large degree it is caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels, rather than being a natural phenomenon (73% of Democrats agreed with the statement). So it's not surprising that in a huge bureaucracy like the U.S. EPA, an individual exists who falls outside of these percentages, and has taken it upon himself to try to use the Agency's authority to promote his own views on the topic.

And those views are the just the same tired, old arguments that the climate change debunkers have been citing for some time now. The argument that global temperatures are in fact declining is based on the observation that 1998 was the hottest year on record, and all subsequent years have been cooler. However, temperatures in 1998 were elevated far above the norm and broke the record (set in 1997) for the hottest year on record because it was also the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. Choosing that year as a starting point ignores the increasing temperature trends prior to '98, which have continued to the present. In fact, the planet as a whole has warmed since 1998. According to NASA, 2005 has bumped 1998 out of first place as the hottest year on record, and 1998 is now tied with 2007 as the second-hottest year. And all of the claims regarding the effects of water vapor and ocean currents have long been addressed by the scientific community. But since I'm not a climatologist either, instead of debunking the claims one by one, I refer the interested reader to just such an article by an actual climate scientist here.

So there really is no scandal. A climate-change dissenter wrote an unauthorized paper criticizing the Agency's position. Nothing new or novel was presented in the report and EPA told the author to stick to his job and area of expertise. But groups like the CEI are trying to make it sound like the Agency was censoring evidence that shreds the consensus opinion on climate change just as the Waxman-Markey Bill was going before Congress (it passed anyway).

But what's more interesting to me is why my co-workers feel compelled to try to "convert" me to their opinions. I know that they do not agree with my views on this and other issues, and I'm secure enough in my opinions to not feel challenged by the dissenting and uninformed opinions of others. Yet, the neo-cons in my office relentlessly try to confront me with their latest "evidence" against climate change and a host of other current events, ranging from the cause of the current economic downturn to the alleged place of the President's birth, and get extremely frustrated when I don't fall into line with their views.

After I did not renounce my views on the science of climate change after being confronted with the spectacle of an actual printed copy of the dissenting report dropped into my inbox, I was called a "flat-Earther" by my co-worker as he stormed out of my office. This after he denied that carbon dioxide was even a greenhouse gas or had any heat-trapping properties at all, and in one interesting aside, that diamonds had formed during the Eocene Period from biological processes (don't ask).

I'm secure enough in my opinions not to be challenged by the existence of those who disagree with me. I wonder why the opposite is not true.