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Promoting integrity in the use of climate science in government |
Climate Science Watch is a nonprofit public interest education and advocacy project dedicated to holding public officials accountable for the integrity and effectiveness with which they use climate science and related research in government policymaking, toward the goal of enabling society to respond effectively to the challenges posed by global warming and climate change. See Details |
Science-Policy Interaction
Successfully confronting the challenge of climate change will require a more functional relationship between scientists and policymakers, with greater accountability and integrity in the translation of research into effective response strategies.
IPCC Chair Pachauri on the forthcoming Fourth Assessment Report
Posted on Thursday, November 16, 2006
At the annual conference of the parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol, being held in Nairobi the past two weeks, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, gave an interview on the forthcoming IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the comprehensive and most authoritative scientific assessment of the currrent state of knowledge. Dr. Pachauri said the IPCC report “might provide just the right impetus to get the negotiations going in a more purposeful way....There’s much stronger evidence now of human actions on the change in climate that’s taken place,” Pachauri told The Associated Press. In our November 7 post we wrote on “Anticipating the denialist attack on authors of the IPCC climate change assessment.” Watch out, Dr. Pachauri.
Press coverage and comment on the National Assessment lawsuit
Posted on Thursday, November 16, 2006
The suit filed in federal court on November 14 by the Center for Biological Diversity et al. to require the production of a second National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts (see our November 14 post) was reported by the Associated Press ("White House Sued Over Global Warming"), the San Francisco Chronicle ("White House sued for not doing report on warming"), and others. “The Bush administration has failed to comply with the law,’’ said attorney Julie Teel of the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “I think the administration’s afraid to release this information because it makes climate change real for people.’’ The NOAA press office responded on behalf of the government, with the official party line that offers 21 topical reports as an alternative to an integrative, independent assessment.
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Sen. Kerry statement in support of lawsuit on National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts
Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Senator Kerry issued a statement on November 14 supporting a lawsuit filed by conservation advocates—the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth—calling for the administration to issue an overdue National Assessment on the impacts of climate change on the United States. Climate Science Watch encourages Congressional interest and oversight on this issue, to undo almost six years of allowing the administration to suppress the National Assessment process, and almost six years of allowing the first National Assessment to be slandered by the global warming denial machine without a principled defense by the leadership of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.
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Conservation groups file suit against Bush administration to compel second National Assessment
Posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006
The Center for Biological Diversity, along with other conservation groups, filed suit November 14 in federal district court for the Northern District of California against the Bush administration for refusing to conduct a second U.S. National Climate Change Impacts Assessment. The suit contends that such an integrated scientific assessment, due in November of 2004, is required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The suit names Dr. William Brennan, acting director of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, and Dr. John Marburger, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as defendants. We have repeatedly and strongly criticized the Bush administration for officially suppressing the National Assessment process, and the leadership of the Climate Change Science Program for their silence on this central climate science scandal of the administration.
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State Dept. petitioned to issue missing and overdue Climate Action Report required by climate treaty
Posted on Thursday, November 02, 2006
The Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace petitioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on November 2 to issue the overdue U.S. Climate Action Report as required by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The deadline for the fourth U.S. Climate Action Report passed on January 1, 2006, 10 months ago. Now the 12th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC will take place in Nairobi, Kenya from November 6-17 without required information from the U.S. See our September 18 entry, in which we called on the administration to release the report for public review and discussed the administration’s political sensitivities about the Impacts and Adaptation chapter of the report. [Editor’s Note: See also the 30 July 2007 posting, Bush Administration submits evasive Climate Action Report to the UN.]
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A look at EPA’s new climate change Web site, unveiled after 4 years of suppression
Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006
On October 19, EPA announced the activation of the agency’s revamped climate change Web site, which (although the EPA news release doesn’t mention this) had been essentially moribund for the past four years. Political pressure silenced the EPA Web site in 2002. A look at the new site reveals limitations that point to continuing political interference with climate change communication at EPA.
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Briefly Noted—Climate science and government accountability
Posted on Monday, October 09, 2006
“Heed This Warning” (Washington Post, September 28, 2006)
“Beneath its dry scientific lingo, a new analysis of global climate change by a group of NASA scientists is terrifying....Most of all, it will require an end to denial...”
“Land’s End Founder Comer Dies at 78” (AP, Oct. 5, 2006)
”Gary Comer Profile: An Entrepreneur Does Climate Science” (Science, Feb. 24, 2006, subscription; see Details)
“Accountability determined to strike in U.S.” (Tom Toles, Washington Post, Oct. 9, 2006)
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The “Vanishing” National Climate Change Assessment, Part 1: The Administration
Posted on Sunday, October 08, 2006
An October 3 story in Greenwire on the continuing controversy over the administration’s actions to bury the first National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change quotes Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute as saying: “To the extent that it has vanished, we have succeeded.” Here we clarify a few points about the actions of the administration to make the National Assessment “vanish”.
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The unfinished business of the National Climate Change Assessment scandal
Posted on Wednesday, October 04, 2006
On October 3, the Greenwire daily news report on environmental and energy policy featured in its #1 position a story on the continuing controversy over the administration’s decision to kill the National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts process and suppress official use of the first National Assessment reports issued in 2000-2001. The article quotes Climate Science Watch Director Rick Piltz as calling this “the central climate science scandal of the Bush administration.”
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Why the administration buried a NOAA scientists’ statement on hurricanes and climate
Posted on Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Officials at the Department of Commerce have been blocking the release of a new statement by federal climate scientists at NOAA on Atlantic hurricanes and climate. On September 27 a leaked copy of the statement was posted on the web (see “Details” for the text). We believe they decided to bury the statement because, albeit in a low-profile way, it acknowledges that global warming can increase hurricane intensity, and also the possibility that, because of global warming, the current active hurricane period could persist. That is a linkage the administration has taken pains to keep the public from making, for reasons having to do with the political fallout from Hurricane Katrina and the administration’s desire to fend off public pressure for a stronger global warming mitigation policy.
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New Hansen et al. study: Earth’s temperature within 1 degree C of highest in past million years
Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006
A new study, led by James Hansen of NASA and published on-line today (September 25) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that, because of a rapid global warming trend over the past 30 years, Earth is now reaching and passing through its warmest level in nearly 12,000 years—since the end of the last ice age. The most important result found by the study is that the warming in recent decades has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius (1.8 F) of the maximum temperature of the past million years. According to Hansen, “That means that further global warming of 1 degree Celsius defines a critical level.”
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Where is the U.S. Climate Action Report required under the climate treaty?
Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006
The fourth U.S. Climate Action Report, required to fulfill a climate treaty commitment, was due no later than January 1, 2006. A public review draft of the report announced by the State Department as upcoming in the summer of 2005 is now more than a year overdue. What has happened to this missing-in-action report? Has it been held up at the political level of the Administration? Climate Science Watch calls for the fourth Climate Action Report to be submitted expeditiously for public review. We call on the Administration and the leadership of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program to ensure that the report contains an honest discussion of U.S. vulnerability to climate change impacts. [Editor’s Note: See also the 30 July 2007 posting, Bush Administration submits evasive Climate Action Report to the UN.]
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Jim Hansen on “The Threat to the Planet”
Posted on Monday, September 11, 2006
Jim Hansen’s presentation (6.6 MB) this summer at the SOLAR 2006 Conference on Renewable Energy in Denver, which he has made available on his Columbia University Web site, integrates a wide range of scientific findings on global climate change with forthright and striking statements about their implications. Government officials should pay attention to this assessment.
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Gore as Science Educator: Climate Scientist Michael MacCracken’s Assessment
Posted on Saturday, July 15, 2006
The Associated Press reported (archived) on June 27 that all 19 climate scientists who had seen “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, and answered questions from the AP, had concluded that Gore had mostly explained the science correctly. The most illuminating assessment of Gore’s science education effort that we have seen is in the thoughtful response to the AP questions by Dr. Michael MacCracken of the Climate Institute in Washington, DC—posted here.
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Jim Hansen on the global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”
Posted on Saturday, July 15, 2006
The current (July 13) issue of the New York Review of Books carries a review article on climate change by Jim Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in which he praises An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary and book on global warming, as a “scientifically accurate” and “coherent account of a complex topic that Americans desperately need to understand.”
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