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Friday, March 23, 2018

GWPF Newsletter: BBC Forced To Retract False Claim About Hurricanes








John Stossel: The Paris Climate Fraud

In this newsletter:

1) BBC Forced To Retract False Claim About Hurricanes
Not A Lot Of People Know That, 22 March 2018 
 
2) Big Oil Lawyer Emphasizes Climate Change ‘Uncertainties’ In Wonky Court Tutorial
McClatchy, 21 March 2018 


 
3) Alarmists Now ‘Deny’ Climate Science While Big Oil Defends It 
Daily Caller, 21 March 2018 
 
4) Prominent U.S. Scientists Submit Brief In Climate Science Court Hearing
Climate Depot, 21 March 2018 
 
5) Scott Pruitt To End EPA’s Use Of ‘Secret Science’ To Justify Regulations
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 19 March 2018
 
6) John Stossel: The Paris Climate Fraud
Fox News, 21 March 2018


Full details:

1) BBC Forced To Retract False Claim About Hurricanes
Not A Lot Of People Know That, 22 March 2018 
Paul Homewood

 

You may recall the above report by the BBC, which described how bad last year’s Atlantic hurricane season was, before commenting at the end:

A warmer world is bringing us a greater number of hurricanes and a greater risk of a hurricane becoming the most powerful category 5.

As I promised, I fired off a complaint, which at first they did their best to dodge. After my refusal to accept their reply, they have now been forced to back down.

The above sentence now no longer appears, and instead they now say:

Scientists are still analysing what this data will mean, but a warmer world may bring us a greater number of more powerful category 4 and 5 hurricanes and could bring more extreme rainfall.

Correction 29 January 2018: This story has been updated to clarify that it is modelling rather than historical data that predicts stronger and wetter hurricanes.

Of course, we have the usual problem, that those who read the article originally and who would have been deeply misled, won’t see the correction now.

Full post

2) Big Oil Lawyer Emphasizes Climate Change ‘Uncertainties’ In Wonky Court Tutorial
McClatchy, 21 March 2018 
Stuart Leavenworth

SAN FRANCISCO

In an unprecedented “tutorial” before a federal judge Wednesday, a lawyer for a major U.S. oil company accepted the scientific consensus that humans are the primary cause of global climate change. But he also emphasized uncertainties about future impacts, while deflecting industry responsibility.

The presentation by Chevron lawyer Ted Boutrous foreshadowed the strategy that oil companies will likely employ in trying to fend off climate change litigation filed by coastal cities. In this case, San Francisco and Oakland contend that oil and coal industries sought to delay emissions regulations by discrediting climate change research, and should be held liable for the impacts, including damage caused by rising seas.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup scheduled the tutorial Wednesday so both sides could summarize the history of climate change science, and the most import recent research, before scheduling further hearings.

“I read in the paper the other day that this was going to be a Scopes monkey trial. I had to laugh,” said Alsup from the bench, adding that he only wanted to get a better understanding of the science.

In their presentations, expert witnesses for the two coastal cities emphasized climate change research from the last six years, which suggest the polar ice sheets will melt faster than predicted, accelerating sea-level rise and the dangers faced by coastal cities.

By contrast, Chevron and Boutrous emphasized the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which produced its latest assessment in 2013. The IPCC report included chapters on how to mitigate potential climate impacts by reducing emissions, but Boutrous made little mention of those.

Instead, the lawyer focused on an IPCC chapter that detailed “uncertainties” about the speed and consequences of predicted global warming. This included the challenges of scientifically confirming that world-wide warming is already causing local impacts, such as sea-level rise.

Boutrous also emphasized that the five-year-old IPCC report identified population growth as a major cause in the spike of greenhouse gas emissions. “It is not (energy) production and extraction that is driving this increase, it is how people are leading their lives,” said Boutrous, a partner in the Los Angeles office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Unlike Oakland and San Francisco, Chevron did not bring expert scientists to testify at Wednesday’s five-hour tutorial. Moreover, none of the other defendants in the case — including, BP, Exxon and other oil and coal companies — made any statements to the court.

Alsup took note of that, and issued a stern order to the other fossil fuel companies, which had lawyers quietly in attendance at the hearing. Alsup said they had a week to file any disagreements with Boutrous’s presentation.
“You can’t get away in sitting there in silence, and then say he wasn’t speaking for us,” said the judge.

Alsup, appointed by former President Bill Clinton, is known for immersing himself in technical court cases, and asking for “tutorials” from both sides. Last year, he asked lawyers for a tutorial on self-driving car technology in a lawsuit that pits Google’s Waymo against Uber. He previously taught himself the Java programming language in deciding a lawsuit involving Oracle against Google. ...

Wednesday’s hearing was videotaped, and may be viewable by Thursday at the court’s website, http://www.cand.uscourts.gov/home


Full story

3) Alarmists Now ‘Deny’ Climate Science While Big Oil Defends It 
Daily Caller, 21 March 2018 
Michael Bastasch

Something bizarre happened Wednesday after the U.S. District Court for the District Northern California held a “tutorial” hearing on global warming science.

Chevron agreed with the latest scientific assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC), which was released in 2013 and 2014, the oil company’s lawyer said.

California cities, environmentalists and some scientists argued Chevron’s use of the IPCC’s latest assessment was misleading since it was outdated. Effectively, those seeking to punish oil companies are throwing aside the oft touted “consensus” on climate science.

The irony was not lost on University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr., who published peer-reviewed studies on climate science and policies.

San Francisco and Oakland filed suit against five oil companies, including Chevron, over the alleged damages man-made global warming caused. Chevron was the only defendant that chose to participate in the climate science hearing, but the oil company surprised plaintiffs by not challenging the “consensus” IPCC assessment.

That ruffled the feathers of some scientists and environmentalists, who immediately went on the offensive against Chevron, accusing the company of using the IPCC to discredit climate policies.

“Chevron’s lawyer plucked his strategy right from the climate-denier playbook,” environmental group the Center for Biological Diversity climate scientist Shaye Wolf told Earther.

Apparently, the “climate-denier playbook” includes citing the IPCC. Chevron agreed with the IPCC’s scientific assessment, while the company did not agree with policy proposals the international body suggests, the oil entity argued.

“He overemphasized and inflated narrow areas of uncertainty about global warming’s impacts. And he bobbed and weaved his way out of acknowledging the role of fossil fuels,” Wolf said.

Climate scientists Kate Marvel of NASA and Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech went on to argue the IPCC’s 2013 report was outdated and scientific studies in the years since have paint a more alarming picture of man-made warming.

Full story

4) Prominent U.S. Scientists Submit Brief In Climate Science Court Hearing
Climate Depot, 21 March 2018 

Three prominent skeptical scientists have submitted their climate report to the federal court for the landmark March 21 climate science trial hearing.

See: Federal court will hold first-ever hearing on ‘climate change’ science – “A federal judge in San Francisco has ordered parties in a landmark global warming lawsuit to hold what could be the first-ever U.S. court hearing on the science of climate change.”

Full submitted skeptical scientists report: Tutorial Professor Presentation

Excerpts:

Professors William Happer, Steven E. Koonin, and Richard S. Lindzen respectfully ask the Court to accept their presentation (attached to this motion as Exhibit A) in response to the Court’s questions. The professors would be honored to participate directly in the tutorial if the Court desires.

William Happer is the Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics Emeritus at Princeton University. Dr. Happer also has extensive experience advising the government on energy research and policy, having served President George H.W. Bush’s administration as the director of energy research in the Department of Energy.

Steven E. Koonin is the founding director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. Dr. Koonin previously served as the second Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy in President Barack Obama’s administration. In this role, Dr. Koonin oversaw science, energy, and security activities.

Richard S. Lindzen is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Lindzen’s research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity.

Each of the professors has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, a highly selective nonprofit organization recognizing the country’s most distinguished researchers.

The Court’s specified questions include topics that have been the subject of the professors’ study and analysis for decades. These men have been thought and policy leaders in the scientific community and in the administrations of two different U.S. Presidents. They have extensive research experience with the specific issues the Court identified. As such, they offer a valuable perspective on these issues.

The attached presentation contains three sections: (1) an overview; (2) responses to the Court’s questions; and (3) biographies of the professors.

The short overview section makes the following points: (1) the climate is always changing; changes like those of the past half-century are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful natural phenomena; (2) human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation to natural energy flows; (3) it is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be ascribed to human influences; and (4) there have been no detrimental changes observed in most salient climate variables and projections of future changes are highly uncertain.

The second section carefully goes through each of the questions the Court has raised. Accordingly, Professors William Happer, Steven E. Koonin, and Richard S. Lindzen respectfully request that the Court accept for consideration their attached presentation. They also are available to participate in the tutorial if the Court desires.

Full document here

5) Scott Pruitt To End EPA’s Use Of ‘Secret Science’ To Justify Regulations
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 19 March 2018

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt will soon end his agency’s use of “secret science” to craft regulations.

“We need to make sure their data and methodology are published as part of the record,” Pruitt said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Otherwise, it’s not transparent. It’s not objectively measured, and that’s important.”

Pruitt will reverse long-standing EPA policy allowing regulators to rely on non-public scientific data in crafting rules. Such studies have been used to justify tens of billions of dollars worth of regulations.

EPA regulators would only be allowed to consider scientific studies that make their data available for public scrutiny under Pruitt’s new policy. Also, EPA-funded studies would need to make all their data public.

“When we do contract that science out, sometimes the findings are published; we make that part of our rule-making processes, but then we don’t publish the methodology and data that went into those findings because the third party who did the study won’t give it to us,” Pruitt added.

“And we’ve said that’s fine — we’re changing that as well,” Pruitt told TheDCNF.

Conservatives have long criticized EPA for relying on scientific studies that published their findings but not the underlying data. However, Democrats and environmental activists have challenged past attempts to bring transparency to studies used in rule making.

Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith pushed legislation to end the use of what he calls “secret science” at EPA. Pruitt instituted another policy in 2017 backed by Smith against EPA-funded scientists serving on agency advisory boards.

“If we use a third party to engage in scientific review or inquiry, and that’s the basis of rulemaking, you and every American citizen across the country deserve to know what’s the data, what’s the methodology that was used to reach that conclusion that was the underpinning of what — rules that were adopted by this agency,” Pruitt explained.

Full story

6) John Stossel: The Paris Climate Fraud
Fox News, 21 March 2018

President Trump’s pick to be the new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is not a fan of the Paris climate agreement, the treaty that claims it will slow global warning by reducing the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Politicians from most of the world’s nations signed the deal, and President Obama said “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”
That’s dubious.

Trump wisely said he will pull America out of the deal. He called it a “massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.”

Unfortunately, Trump often reverses himself.

The climate change lobby has been trying to change Trump’s mind. Al Gore called his stance “reckless and indefensible.” Most of the media agree. So do most of my neighbors in New York.

That’s why it’s good that Pompeo opposes the Paris deal. Such treaties are State Department responsibilities. Pompeo is more likely to hold Trump to his word than his soon-to-be predecessor Rex Tillerson, who liked the agreement.

The Paris accord is a bad deal because even if greenhouse gases really are a huge threat, this treaty wouldn’t do much about them.

I’ll bet Al Gore and most of the media don’t even know what’s in the accord. I didn’t until I researched it for this week’s YouTube video.



Manhattan Institute senior fellow Oren Cass is the rare person who actually read the Paris accord.

Cass tells me it’s “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” I interviewed him for a video project I am doing with City Journal, a smart policy magazine that often makes the case for smaller government. “You don’t even have to mention greenhouse gases in your commitment if you don’t want to. You send in any piece of paper you want.”

The Paris accord was just political theater, he says. “They stapled it together and held it up and said, ‘This is amazing!'”

The media announced that China and India made major commitments.

In truth, says Cass, “They either pledged to do exactly what they were already going to do anyway, or pledged even less. China, for instance said, ‘we pledge to reach peak emission by about 2030.’ Well, the United States government had already done a study to guess when Chinese emissions would peak, and their guess was about 2030.”

In other words, China simply promised to do what was going to happen anyway.

“China was actually one of the better pledges,” says Cass. “India made no pledge to limit emissions at all. They pledged only to become more efficient. But they proposed to become more efficient less quickly than they were already becoming more efficient. So their pledge was to slow down.”

It’s hard to see how that would help the planet.

“My favorite was Pakistan, whose pledge was to ‘Reach a peak at some point after which to begin reducing emissions,'” says Cass. “You can staple those together, and you can say we now have a global agreement, but what you have is an agreement to do nothing.”

However, Cass says one country did make a serious commitment. “The one country that showed up in Paris with a very costly, ambitious target was the United States. President Obama took all the zero commitments from everybody else but threw in a really expensive one for us.”

Obama pledged to reduce emissions by 26 percent. If that ever happened, it would squash America’s economy.

Nevertheless, when Trump said he was leaving the Paris accord, he was trashed by politicians around the world.

The UK’s Theresa May was “dismayed,” and Obama said, “This administration joins a handful of nations that reject the future.”

Cass counters that if “the future is worthless climate agreements … we should be proud to reject.”

Full story

see also GWPF paper: 

 


The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.

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