Politics Trumps Science at the Environmental Protection Agency

Summary.  The Environmental Protection Agency cancelled presentations by three EPA scientists at a conference about the effects of climate change on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.  Their work focused on the effects of climate change on the ecology of the Bay.  EPA gave no reason.  It has been supporting this research for decades, but in its draft budget for the coming year the agency has zeroed out support for all 28 of its estuary projects.

Administrator Pruitt has publicly rejected the role of humans in causing climate change, suggesting there remains some disagreement over the issue.  In fact, 99.99% of climate scientists affirm the reality that humans cause global warming.  Scientists the world over agree fossil fuel use emits excess carbon dioxide which retains extra heat in the earth system, leading to warming and its harmful consequences.

Politicization of science harms the public because political considerations supersede scientific reality in developing policy.  Here EPA suppressed research findings characterizing effects of worsening climate change.  A professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island considers the muffling of his colleagues a deliberate act of scientific censorship.  We must all resist further efforts at stifling research.  We must reinstate bona fide science as the guide for our policies.

 

EPA Scientists Prevented from Speaking.  The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) abruptly cancelled the speaking presentations of three EPA scientists at a conference about the effects of climate change on Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island, held on Oct. 23, 2017.   One of them, a research ecologist at the EPA’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory Atlantic Ecology Division in Rhode Island was to give the keynote address.  The other two, a postdoctoral researcher at the same EPA facility and a scientific contractor for EPA, were to be on a panel addressing the topic “The Present and Future Biological Implications of Climate Change.”  EPA’s decision was relayed to the meeting organizers just one business day before the conference.  No substantive reason was provided for the prohibition. 

The NBE Program was the host for the conference.  It issued a 500-page Technical Report, entitled “The State of Narragansett Bay and Its Watershed”, on the day of the conference.  Of three effects stressing the condition of the bay, climate change was identified as one.  This in turn was broken down to effects of temperature change, precipitation intensity and frequency, and sea level rise.

The Narragansett Bay Estuary Program (NBE Program), long supported by EPA, has been studying the ecological health of the bay since 1985.  The NBE was recognized as an “estuary of national significance” by the EPA’s National Estuary Program in 1988.  For reasons such as these colleagues were surprised at the EPA’s prohibition.

Research support of US$26 million for all the 28 Estuary Programs, including the NBE Program, has been dropped from EPA’s proposed budget for 2018. 

Politicization of science harms the public because political considerations supersede scientific reality in developing policy.  Here EPA suppressed research findings characterizing effects of worsening climate change.  EPA’s interference with its NBE Program employees stifles scientific study related to climate change. “It’s definitely a blatant example of the scientific censorship we all suspected was going to start being enforced at EPA,” said John King, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, the head of the science advisory committee of the NBE Program. He continued “[t]hey don’t believe in climate change, so I think what they’re trying to do is stifle discussions of the impacts of climate change.”

Adminstrator Pruitt rejects human-caused climate change.  The NBE Program case is but one of the agency’s many political actions.  In March 2017 the Administrator, Scott Pruitt, said “…there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact [of ‘human activity on the climate’], so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see”.  Pruitt’s assertion conflicts directly with EPA’s own statement, reported by The Guardian on March 9, 2017, “carbon dioxide is the ‘primary greenhouse gas that is contributing to recent climate change’”. (This statement could not be accessed on Oct. 26, 2017 using the Guardian’s link to the EPA page.)   Pruitt’s statement is also contradicted by James Lawrence Powell’s journal article (Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 1–4, 2016; DOI:10.1177/0270467616634958).  He found that during 2013 and 2014 only 4 of 69,406 (0.0058%) authors of peer-reviewed journal articles dealing with climate change rejected the reality of man-made global warming.  That is, there is no disagreement on impact of human activity on the climate.

EPA is cleansing its sites of references to climate change.  EPA has purged most content dealing with climate change from its web pages related to helping state and local governments deal with climate change.  The site, previously called “Climate and Energy Resources for State, Local and Tribal Governments” is now titled “Energy Resources for State, Local and Tribal Governments,” dropping the lead word “Climate”.  The original 375 web pages now are reduced to 175, with changes in content that an outside group terms “substantial”.  Looking to the future, a draft outline of EPA’s plans for the next four years omits mention of climate change.

EPA is undertaking a review of automobile Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that were intended to increase efficiency and reduce fuel use by about half by 2025, the Portland Press Herald reports.  “Administrator Scott Pruitt is intent on subverting that agency’s mission. At the behest of automakers, he is now reconsidering vehicular emission standards that help protect public health, save consumers money, and guard against further climate disruption”, the newspaper writes.  It reports that William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA director under two Republican presidents, says that Pruitt’s approach appears more like “taking a meat ax to the protections of public health and the environment and then hiding [the ax].” 

EPA recently announced a draft rule overturning the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the Obama administration’s detailed program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from large electric generating plants.  While Scott Pruitt was Attorney General of Oklahoma he helped lead more than 24 states in suing to overturn the CPP.  Gina McCarthy, EPA Administrator under President Obama, said the proposal “is a wholesale retreat from EPA’s legal, scientific and moral obligation to address the threats of climate change.”

Discussion

Carbon dioxide was identified as a greenhouse gas in the middle of the nineteenth century.  A warning that the gas would contribute to warming of the atmosphere was first made in 1896.  More recently the work of hundreds of climate scientists from countries all around the world have been researching this field for decades.  As noted above, essentially all agree: Man-made emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, and other greenhouse gases, are warming the earth system at geologically unprecedented speed.  The effects of fossil fuel use lead to weather extremes, wildfires, sea level rise and changing habitats of pests and disease carriers.  Toxins released from fossil fuels cause illnesses among the public.  The costs of future mitigation of, and adaptation to, global warming keep rising, as the threats become more severe. 

The United States is the only country of the more than 190 nations that joined the Paris Agreement to withdraw from it.  Of the other nations, only Syria never acceded to the Agreement.  (In October 2017 the only other holdout, Nicaragua, joined the Agreement.)  It is unconscionable that a nation as respected as the United States has consistently refused to join the other nations of the world in recognizing the irrefutable scientific evidence, and acted accordingly.  The present U. S. administration, instead of mitigating emission rates of greenhouse gases, is consciously reversing previously enacted policies.  The result can only be accelerated emissions of greenhouse gases, with the consequent worsening of all the effects of warming.  This will be a legacy for all our children and further progeny, one our leaders cannot be proud of.

For these reasons we here in the U.S. must act to restrain Pruitt’s EPA policies and the framework envisioned by the Trump administration.  We must reinstate bona fide science as the guide for our actions.

© 2017 Henry Auer

EPA Administrator Pruitt Wrongly Dismisses Reality of Man-Made Warming

Summary: The Administrator of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, stated in a television interview that he does not agree that human activity is a prime contributor to global warming.

This statement is in direct contradiction to the well-established objective scientific reality that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels adds excess, long-lasting, burdens of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.  Since this gas exhibits the greenhouse effect, this excess gas contributes to raising the global average temperature, and brings on harmful extremes of weather and climate.

Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the U. S. National Climate Assessment, provide detailed support for such conclusions.  Climate scientists subscribe essentially unanimously to the reality of man-made global warming according to a search of the scientific literature.

Administrator Pruitt ignores these findings at great peril to the wellbeing of Americans, and indeed, of all humanity the world over.

The Administrator of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, in an interview on CNBC on March 9, 2017 stated he did not agree that carbon dioxide contributes importantly to global warming.  Here is this writer’s transcript from CNBC’s video of the interview:

Interviewer: “Do you believe that it’s been proven that carbon dioxide is the primary control knob for climate?”

Pruitt: “No I think that measuring …precision human activity [sic] on the climate is something very challenging to do and there is tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see …. [W]e need to continue the debate…..” (Emphasis added.)

The world’s climate scientists have shown conclusively in peer-reviewed publications that Administrator Pruitt improperly rejects the reality of man-made warming. 

·        Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is an important atmospheric greenhouse gas (a gas that traps heat leaving the surface of the earth and returns some of it to the surface.) 

 

·        CO₂ is formed by burning fossil fuels; the excess CO₂ released when humans use fossil fuels for energy has been accumulating in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began.

·        Most CO₂ we add to the air stays in the atmosphere for centuries or longer.  So the fuels burned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries released CO₂ that’s still in the air today.  This is why man-made CO₂ is such a problem.

 

·        A particular property of CO₂ (carbon isotope ratios) measured over time shows categorically and irrefutably that the increasing amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere originates from humans’ use of fossil fuels, and not from any other possible source.

·        For the last 800,000 years atmospheric CO₂ has never exceeded 280 volumes per million volumes of air (parts per million, ppm).  Humanity’s burning of fossil fuels has now pushed that above 400 ppm.  The rate by which we are adding new CO₂ is many-fold faster than at any period in the last 800,000 years.

·        Because of the greenhouse activity of CO₂ the earth’s temperature has been increasing, following the same long-term trend as the increase in CO₂.

·        Climate models show that the recent increase in global average temperature is only accounted for when the increase in excess man-made CO₂ is included in the models.  Using CO₂ only from natural physical sources does not reproduce observed global temperatures.

·        Annual global average surface temperatures in 2014, 2015 and 2016, each in turn, reached record highs never seen in the historical record (beginning 1880).

·        Increasing numbers of extreme weather and climatic events have been directly attributed to worsening global warming, or their effects made worse from warming.

Contrary to Administrator Pruitt’s claim, there is no debate over the human cause of global warming.  The United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports (ARs) and the U. S. Third National Climate Assessment (NCA) present the unambiguous conclusions of climate scientists worldwide that global warming is man-made.  In a survey of peer-reviewed journal articles on climate change, the authors are essentially completely unanimous in this conclusion.

The IPCC has issued five Assessment Reports (ARs) at 5 to 7 year intervals; the Fifth Assessment Report (5AR) was released in 2013-14 in three parts. Each part is prepared by hundreds of eminent climate scientists selected from among all member nations of the U. N.  

For example, for the first part of AR5, a first draft involved 659 experts and considered 21,400 comments by external reviewers; the second draft involved 800 experts different from the first group and 26 governments, and considered 31,422 comments. Only then was the final product released, approved by the scientists and by member governments. For this reason, 5AR meets every reasonable standard for scientific rigor, objectivity and validity.  It represents a worldwide consensus on the current status of climate science, including projections of future effects as the world continues to warm.  Its validity cannot legitimately be challenged.

The NCA was issued May 6, 2014 as mandated under the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to “assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change”.

The NCA was prepared under the supervision of a federal advisory committee whose members are drawn from thirteen departments and agencies substantively involved in an aspect of global change science or policy.  It was drafted by over 300 scientists and experts drawn from academic research settings, federal agencies and research facilities, state agencies, nongovernmental organizations, private consulting organizations, corporations and foreign research organizations.  They critically reviewed original research articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and other reports of comparable scientific validity.  A draft of the Assessment was reviewed by others in federal agencies, the academic community, the public, and the National Academy of Sciences.  To issue the final Assessment 4,000 comments submitted by the reviewers were taken into consideration.  There can be no reasonable basis for doubting or dismissing the impartiality, cogency and veracity of the NCA’s findings.

Virtually Complete Unanimity of Acceptance of Man-Made Global Warming.  James Lawrence Powell recently published an article (Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 1–4, 2016; DOI:10.1177/0270467616634958) which found that during 2013 and 2014 only 0.0058% of authors of peer-reviewed journal articles rejected the reality of man-made global warming.  Of the almost 70,000 authors of those articles only 4 reached that conclusion, giving a ratio of 1:17,352.  

Powell writes “[t]he extent of the consensus among scientists on [man-made] global warming [(MGW)] has the potential to influence public opinion and the attitude of political leaders and thus matters greatly to society.  [The results developed here show] the consensus on [MGW] among publishing scientists is above 99.99%, verging on unanimity.” (Emphasis added.)

Contrary to Administrator Pruitt’s claim, there is strong agreement on the degree of impact arising from global warming.  Both AR5 and NCA present extended discussions of the harms and damages arising from the impacts of global warming, and the prospects for more severe damages in the future as warming worsens.

Conclusion.  Administrator Scott Pruitt is wrong in “not agree[ing] that [human activity, burning fossil fuels is] a primary contributor to … global warming”.  The global community of climate scientists whose research is published in peer-reviewed journals agree essentially unanimously that man-made global warming is real.  The Administrator may continue to make such assertions, but they are not founded in objective scientific reality.  The consequences for federal policy of maintaining such views are alarmingly fraught.

© 2017 Henry Auer