"The risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it."

April 16, 2011

More Obama Administration Whatever...

Russ Vaughn
Many links on this post

Yesterday I wrote here at AT about Obama either being incompetently ignorant of the fact that Medicare does not provide a long term care nursing home benefit or deliberately trying to mislead the public about that issue in his Wednesday speech. After reading this piece at the Washington Examiner, I am inclined to lean to the latter explanation. The Examiner's Ron Arnold points out that the EPA is certainly not above deliberately ignoring facts and reality in its efforts to deceive Congress and the public into allowing yet another federal agency to seize ever more control over the American economy.

This issue has been reported on earlier by other contributors here and here at American Thinker, but an update is in order considering that the scientific information and conclusions of one of EPA's most senior scientists that EPA leadership (read the Obama administration) has been trying to suppress, have finally been published in a peer reviewed, scientific journal, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Here's the quick summary: One of EPA's senior research analysts, 38-year veteran, Dr. Alan Carlin, a couple of years back reviewed all the data the United Nations and his own agency were using to support their theory of catastrophic global warming. Here is the abstract containing Dr. Carlin's major conclusions from the actual 47-page scientific article:

Abstract: Economic analyses of environmental mitigation and other interdisciplinary public policy issues can be much more useful if they critically examine what other disciplines have to say, insist on using the most relevant observational data and the scientific method, and examine lower cost alternatives to the change proposed. These general principles are illustrated by applying them to the case of climate change mitigation, one of the most interdisciplinary of public policy issues. The analysis shows how use of these principles leads to quite different conclusions than those of most previous such economic analyses, as follows:

* The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity factor (CSF) is much lower than assumed by the United Nations because feedback is negative rather than positive and the effects of CO2 emissions reductions on atmospheric CO2 appear to be short rather than long lasting.

* The costs of CO2 emissions reductions are very much higher than usually estimated because of technological and implementation problems recently identified.

* Geoengineering such as solar radiation management is a controversial alternative to CO2 emissions reductions that offers opportunities to greatly decrease these large costs, change global temperatures with far greater assurance of success, and eliminate the possibility of low probability, high consequence risks of rising temperatures, but has been largely ignored by economists.

* CO2 emissions reductions are economically unattractive since the very modest benefits remaining after the corrections for the above effects are quite unlikely to economically justify the much higher costs unless much lower cost geoengineering is used.

* The risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not currently worth doing anything to try to control it, including geoengineering.

Read that last conclusion again. Remember this is the considered scientific opinion of one of EPA's most senior analysts; then think about the effort expended by EPA officials and the Obama administration, as described by Messrs Arnold, Sheppard, Moran and the Wall Street Journal, to suppress this respected scientist's opinion, so that liberal political entities can seize ever more control of the world economy, then tell me you don't smell a big, fat rat. In any scenario other than Democratic politics, such political and intellectual dishonesty would be considered disgraceful.

For the Obama administration, Democrats and the United Nations bureaucrats, it's just policy.

Whatever...

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 ... _what.html