{"id":12687,"date":"2016-03-04T16:03:46","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T21:03:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/?p=12687"},"modified":"2016-03-04T16:03:46","modified_gmt":"2016-03-04T21:03:46","slug":"climate-denial-has-no-place-in-the-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.edf.org\/climate411\/2016\/03\/04\/climate-denial-has-no-place-in-the-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate denial has no place in the court"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This post was co-written by EDF\u2019s Martha Roberts and Ilissa Ocko<\/em>)<\/p>\n

As federal courts consider the legal merits of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s (EPA) Clean Power Plan<\/a> — America\u2019s first-ever national limits on carbon pollution from power plants \u2013 we find ourselves in a situation that might have felt familiar to Galileo, who was hauled before authorities for having the temerity to make conclusions based on science.<\/p>\n

Three hundred seventy-four years after Galileo, flat-earth Clean Power Plan opponents are using the court\u2019s time to challenge EPA\u2019s rock solid conclusions about\u00a0the scientific realities of climate change. They\u2019re using misinformation and misrepresentation in an attempt to block EPA\u2019s flexible and efficient approach to reducing the carbon pollution that is causing so much costly damage to our society.<\/p>\n

Yes, they\u2019re still doing that in 2016.<\/p>\n

The Usual Suspects<\/strong><\/p>\n

The latest assault takes the form of an amicus<\/a>, or \u201cfriend of the court,\u201d brief that was submitted last week to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. It deploys selective reasoning and misleading arguments in an attempt to discredit evidence of climate change.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s numbingly familiar, but not surprising, to see Fred Singer<\/a>\u2019s name on the brief. A former tobacco industry mouthpiece, he\u2019s been a mainstay for years in what\u2019s been called the \u201cparallel universe\u201d of climate denial conferences.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also no surprise that Peabody Energy \u2014 the world\u2019s largest privately owned coal company \u2014 contested EPA\u2019s rock solid climate science in an earlier submission<\/a> to the court, given the company\u2019s history<\/a> of obfuscating the impacts of climate change in order to protect its profits.<\/p>\n

The Real Motivation<\/strong><\/p>\n

This effort isn\u2019t about debating science. It\u2019s about using misinformation to\u00a0obstruct climate progress. This attack is part of a longstanding effort to undermine EPA\u2019s\u00a0common sense solutions to limit\u00a0harmful greenhouse gas pollution at all \u2013 despite that fact that the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the Clean Air Act requires<\/em> EPA to\u00a0address climate pollution. Coal companies and their hired allies have relentlessly attacked EPA\u2019s safeguards to protect human health and the environment from climate pollution.<\/p>\n

Junk Science Amicus Brief<\/strong><\/p>\n

This junk science submission, authored by Singer and others, claims to be based on \u201creal world empirical temperature data\u201d (amicus brief, page 15<\/em><\/a>) \u2013 but in truth it\u2019s deceptively unscientific, cherry-picking dates and locations in an effort to rebut overwhelming evidence of rising surface temperatures.<\/p>\n

Two obvious flaws demonstrate the problematic reasoning employed by the brief.<\/p>\n

First, the authors contend that globally averaged surface temperature has not increased because:<\/p>\n

The decade of the 1930s still has the most currently held high-temperature records for States within the United States. (amicus brief, page 31<\/em><\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This point suffers from cherry picking data that seems to support their phony argument. Drawing a comparison between a long term globally averaged<\/em> temperature trend (i.e., as related to anthropogenic climate change) and summertime regional temperature spikes in a select portion of the U.S. is inherently misleading (see Figure 1 below). The U.S. covers only two percent<\/em> of the global surface area, and the Great Plains far less.\u00a0Arguing that\u00a0a small regional temperature anomaly undermines\u00a0for the global temperature trend is scientifically untenable.<\/p>\n

Figure 1: How Cherry-Picked Data Misrepresents the Larger Picture<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Source:
Source: The U.S. Global Historical Climatology Network Dataset<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The second flaw is an egregious error with respect to defining a linear trend. The authors break the temperature time series in half and display two distinct trend lines separated by a large step increase, as opposed to the scientifically appropriate approach of employing the entire time series to define a trend.<\/p>\n

Figure 2. The Amicus Brief\u2019s Broken Time Trend<\/strong>\u00a0\"Global<\/p>\n

(<\/em>amicus brief<\/em><\/a>, page 7)<\/em><\/p>\n

They do this to hide the trend. It\u2019s a classic strategy used by the climate denial community to deny trends, known as the \u201cescalator\u201d (see Figure 3 below).<\/p>\n

The authors argue that the absence of a trend in the latter portion of the record indicates a lack of evidence for an anthropogenic climate change signal during this time. However, their starting point for the latter half is during the 1997-1998 El Nino, one of the strongest such events on record. Given that El Nino has a significant warming influence on a given year\u2019s<\/em> global temperature, starting at this point in the record introduces a strong temperature bias — i.e. the authors purposely choose a starting point with an extremely high temperature in order to create the appearance of a plateau in the years that follow.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bit like beginning a chart of Barry Bonds\u2019 home runs per season in 2001, when he hit 73. The authors fail to disclose that the globally averaged temperature exceeded the 1990\u2019s average in every year of the first decade of the 21st<\/sup> century and that both 2014 and 2015\u00a0broke records as\u00a0the hottest years ever recorded \u2014 further confirming their selection bias.<\/p>\n

Figure 3: The Escalator — An Example of How One Can Manipulate a Trendline to Pretend That There Is No Trend<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\"escalator<\/p>\n

Source: skepticalscience.com<\/em><\/p>\n

The brief also attempts to reject EPA\u2019s conclusion that the atmosphere in the tropics warms faster than the surface as a response to rising carbon dioxide levels.<\/p>\n

The brief presents data from only a single location in an attempt to rebut this conclusion — the tropical central and eastern Pacific Ocean, an area home to the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the largest mode of natural interannual climate variability on the planet.<\/p>\n

Using only one region (and in this case a single idiosyncratic point) to represent the entire global tropics is highly misleading and scientifically inappropriate. The data manifestly suffer from selection bias and are not representative of the full population of tropical climate data.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the temperature time series shown in their analysis correlate extremely well with recently observed El Nino and La Nina events \u2014 suggesting that their index is simply a proxy for the El Nino\/La Nina signal. Extracting a trend from an area with extremely large natural variability is inherently tenuous, because the large background variability swamps our ability to observe any other data trends.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this is not the first time opponents have inaccurately distorted climate data in this case.<\/p>\n

Earlier in this same crucial case, Peabody represented<\/a> to the court that EPA\u2019s claims of climate harms “substantially outrun the available evidence.” (brief, page 7 footnotes<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

Peabody\u2019s efforts to justify these misleading allegations misrepresent scientific understanding of climate science in several major respects. Two core inconsistencies, among several, include:<\/p>\n