Why the EPA should have listened to Alan Carlin on global warming
June 27, 8:35 AM
As reported earlier in this series of articles (see here, here and here), EPA analyst Alan Carlin wrote a report in March that urged the EPA to conduct further review of evidence on the science of global warming. Some of the specific scientific issues he mentioned are indeed being debated within the scientific community, including what is actually happening to the ice covering Greenland, whether or not hurricanes are becoming more frequent or stronger, if IPCC calculations of CO2 emissions and concentration are accurate, and, of course whether or not temperatures are really climbing. You will not have to search very far to find active discussion of each of these points on the Internet.
But even if all of these points are eventually settled in favor of the 'Al Gore James Hansen activist' crowd that Carlin called 'warmists,' the other issue he gives for reconsideration outweighs the rest--that the science the EPA relied on for determining the validity of global warming and climate change essentially is limited to what was published before 2005. This is because the EPA is primarily relying on a report from the IPCC called AR4, which reviewed relevant scientific publications and had a cut-off date of 2005 for documents to review.
You may recall that back in 1998, Bill Clinton gave a speech to the AAAS and stated that 'human knowledge doubles every 5 years.' I actually researched that statement in another lifetime and found that, while it can double in that time frame if money and resources are lavished on a subject (such as nanotechnology or computer science), if a subject is ignored the doubling rate can be as 'slow' as 15 to 20 years. I did it by counting the number of patents and scientific publications on the subject in each year and computing the compound annual growth rate. The website Scirus.com provides access to a database of scientific publications, patent applications and articles of general interest on a variety of topics. (The tools for calculating compound annual growth rate and speed of doubling appear on this page to the right.)
Between 2005 and now, Scirus has records of 494,693 items with the phrase 'general circulation model' (which is what the computer models that project global warming are called) in the title, text or abstract of the document. Half a million documents that were not available to the IPCC at the time they wrote the document on which the EPA is relying. Of that number, 29,926 are patent applications. As there are 700,354 documents with the same phrase in the entire Scirus database, that means that the IPCC had access to less than one-third the information on computer models that is available today. 70% of everything written about general circulation models has been published in the past 5 years. If you're interested, our knowledge of general circulation models has a compound annual growth rate of 27.7% and seems to double every 2.83 years. (Obviously, some of the documents counted in the database won't really be relevant, and there are often duplications, but the percentages usually work out pretty closely.)
This shouldn't be too surprising, given the large amount of money that has been poured into research of climate change. But it is a lot of research that was not available to the IPCC at the time they wrote AR4. And it's a lot of evidence that the EPA (which, by the way, participated heavily in the review of AR4--I don't mean to suggest that they are completely shirking their duties) will not have available to it in deciding how to regulate CO2 emissions in this country.
You can play with Scirus yourself and determine the direction of science. For example, the same search for 'global warming' produces 1,597,540 items with the phrase in the title, text or abstract. Of that huge number, a staggering 93% (1,487,510) have been published in the last 5 years. Staying up to date is not going to be easy.
So Alan Carlin's advice to the EPA, that they should consider more recent evidence, is most probably correct. That doesn't mean it would be easy for the EPA to do. But certainly it would be easier than regulating CO2 without the correct information. For the EPA to stonewall Carlin's report--essentially saying that the science was 'settled' as the warmists love to claim (since when did a participant in a debate get to decide when the debate is over?), they must accept that some day they will appear in a court (probably many courts) and will have to explain why they ignored 70% of the available science in reaching their decision.
As they would say in Britain, that's bold.
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