THE EPA FANTASY: SCIENCE CONQUERS ALL

Now that the Supreme Court has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide from cars, which of these scenarios is most likely? a) The E.P.A.'s scientists will determine the proper level of emissions, and the agency will promptly order carmakers to comply. b) The scientists' recommendations will be ignored by the Bush administration, but promptly adopted by the next president. c) No matter who is elected, no matter what E.P.A.'s scientists recommend, nothing will happen anytime soon.

If history is any guide, the right answer is c. Ordering the E.P.A. to address global warming may be a legal victory for environment groups, but it will probably just slow progress against global warming. The Environmental Procrastination Agency, as I like to call it, has a hard enough time taking action against routine pollutants. It's in even worse position to deal with something as complicated as carbon dioxide, because the agency was founded on a fantasy: that scientific experts can transcend both politics and economics.

This was a convenient fantasy for members of Congress who wanted to duck tough decisions. They grandly ordered the E.P.A. to clean up the environment no matter what the cost. Its experts were to be above politics, and they were even forbidden to consider economic tradeoffs: they were supposed to make a scientific determination of safety and then order everyone to comply. It sounded wonderful - until the experts actually tried ordering anything that was unpopular or expensive. Then they found themselves tied up in endless lawsuits and behind-the-scenes political maneuvering.

It took the agency 15 years to deal with pollution from leaded gasoline, which was a trivially simple problem compared with global warming. It's a lot easier to estimate the health consequences of lead pollution than to scientifically determine a "safe" level of carbon dioxide. Yes, reducing emissions means lower risks from climate change, but climate scientists don't have any special expertise in figuring out how to make reductions. It takes economists to estimate the tradeoffs - and politicians to work out the compromises.

My favorite guide to the E.P.A. is David Schoenbrod, who sued to force the E.P.A. to take lead out of gasoline in the 1970s, when he was a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The environmentalists won in court. But as Mr. Schoenbrod watched the agency dither, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, he became convinced that the lawsuit hadn't really been a victory - that lawmakers at the state and federal levels would have been forced to act sooner if the problem hadn't been delegated to the E.P.A.

In his 2005 book, "Saving Our Environment from Washington," he proposes putting pressure on politicans by turning the E.P.A. from a regulatory agency into one that offers technical guidance to Congress and state legislatures. Mr. Schoenbrod, now a professor at New York Law School, is not celebrating the latest "victory" by environmentalists. "The Supreme Court was correct in deciding that the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to regulate all pollutants, including global warming gases," he says. "What makes no sense is the premise of the Clean Air Act that Congress can solve all pollution problems by handing them over to the EPA. History shows that is wrong."

So what does he expect? Lots of litigation and little action. "Hard choices will have to be made and the agency lacks the legitimacy to make them," he says, "so the tendency will be to delay or make symbolic choices for as long as possible."

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BUSH BOWS TO RULING ON GREENHOUSE GAS, BUT SEEKS TO ATTACH TWO CONDITIONS

President Bush, acknowledging that humans are at least partly responsible for global warming, said Tuesday that he took "very seriously" the Supreme Court's ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles as pollution. However, the president attached two conditions that appeared likely to retard EPA regulation of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat at the Earth's surface: He said that any regulatory program should not slow economic growth, nor should its benefits to the atmosphere be offset by mounting emissions from China, India and other growing economies.

Bush's stance sets up a potential conflict with the Democratic-controlled Congress, which wants stricter regulation of greenhouse gases. "The president still doesn't get it," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled on Monday that the EPA was required by law to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as pollutants. The administration, siding with automakers, had argued that carbon dioxide was not a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act, but the court held that it was merely a different kind of pollutant.

Asked about the decision during a Rose Garden news conference, Bush said, "I have said that it is a serious problem. I recognize that man is contributing greenhouse gases." But solving the problem, he said, must not cut into economic growth. "It's going to require new technologies, which tend to be expensive, and it's easier to afford expensive technologies if you're prosperous," he said. Bush also said China and India must join the international effort to combat global warming. "Unless there is an accord with China," he said, "China will produce greenhouse gases that will offset anything we do in a brief period of time."

Boxer, chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement, jumped on that remark. "I find it offensive that the president is still using China as an excuse to do nothing when the U.S. has always been a leader in environmental protection," she said. Boxer said she would summon EPA officials before her committee in April to explain how they planned to follow the Supreme Court ruling. Her goal, she said, was passage of "the strongest possible global warming legislation."

EPA spokesmen said Tuesday that it was too early to respond to the court decision. Two House committees have also expressed an interest in global warming legislation. A subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee, whose chairman is Rep. John D. Dingell, a Democrat whose Michigan district is home to much of the auto industry, has already held 10 hearings on the subject. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is also interested in the issue, but he has not yet formulated an action plan.

The auto industry, the principal target of the Supreme Court ruling, responded guardedly to the decision and Bush's response to it. Dave McCurdy, chairman and chief executive officer of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said in a statement that "there needs to be a national, federal, economy-wide approach to addressing greenhouse gases. This decision says that the [EPA] will be part of this process." The alliance emphasized the importance of building more fuel-efficient cars because vehicles that use less fuel produce less carbon dioxide.

Source





REPUBLICANS DEMAND INVESTIGATION OF UN CLIMATE-CHANGE AGENCY

Nine House Republicans Wednesday called for a probe of a United Nations agency that monitors climate change, citing reports of mismanagement. Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by the panel's ranking Republican, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Fla.), asked the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) to launch an inquiry into the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). An audit has shown that a WMO official misappropriated $3 million to finance a "money-for-votes scheme" before fleeing.

Noting that the U.S. has given more than $115 million to the agency, the Republican lawmakers say GAO should examine whether any part of the American contribution was among the misappropriated funds. In addition, the GOP lawmakers called on the congressional watchdog to conduct a more thorough investigation of WMO - an audit of the audit, in effect - noting that a U.N. auditor looking into the situation had "reportedly been dismissed," alleging she was prevented from fully examining the agency.

Source





MOTIVATED SKEPTICISM IN THE EVALUATION OF POLITICAL BELIEFS

Psychologists have just discovered that people believe what they want to believe. That certainly explains Warmism. That psychologists themselves do it is however an undoubted truth. Excerpt from the latest paper below:

Abstract

We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias-the seeking out of confirmatory evidence-when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization-the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes-especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.

Introduction:

Physicists do it (Glanz, 2000). Psychologists do it (Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). Even political scientists do it (cites withheld to protect the guilty among us). Research findings confirming a hypothesis are accepted more or less at face value, but when confronted with contrary evidence, we become "motivated skeptics" (Kunda, 1990), mulling over possible reasons for the "failure", picking apart possible flaws in the study, recoding variables, and only when all the counter arguing fails do we rethink our beliefs.

Whether this systematic bias in how we deal with evidence is rational or not is debatable, the philosopher of science (e.g., Popper) saying "no", the good Reverend Bayes saying "yes". One negative consequence of this practice is that bad theories and weak hypotheses, like prejudices, persist longer then they should. But what about ordinary citizens? Politics is contentious (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987; Newman, Just, & Krigler, 1992). In the marketplace of ideas, citizens are confronted daily with arguments designed to either bolster their opinions or challenge their prior beliefs and attitudes (Gamson, 1992). To the extent that ordinary citizens act similarly to scientists the consequences would be similar -- hanging on to one's beliefs and attitudes longer and stronger than warranted.

It would be foolish to push this analogy too hard since scientific practice has such built-in safeguards as peer review and double-blind experiments to prevent bad ideas from driving the good ones out of the marketplace; albeit there certainly are fewer and weaker controls to protect ordinary folks from themselves when they think and reason. Ideally, one's prior beliefs and attitudes - whether scientific or social - should "anchor" the evaluation of new information and then, depending on how credible is some piece of evidence, impressions should be adjusted upward or downward (Anderson, 1981). The "simple" Bayesian updating rule would be to increment the overall evaluation if the evidence is positive, and decrement the original belief or attitude if the evidence is contrary. Assuming one has established an initial belief (attitude or hypothesis), normative models of human decision-making imply or posit a two-step updating process, beginning with the collection of belief-relevant evidence, followed by the integration of new information with the prior to produce an updated judgment. Critically important in such normative models is the requirement that the collection and integration of new information be kept independent of one's prior judgment (for a useful discussion of this normative requirement in Bayesian theory, see Evans & Over, 1996).

All well and good, and normatively right, but empirically off base if demonstrations in psychology (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979) and behavioral decision theory (Baron, 1994) are to be believed. These studies show repeatedly that one's priors unduly influence what evidence is sought out and how new, particularly contrary, evidence is comprehended, evaluated, and weighted. The basic finding across domains, issues, and situations is that people are "motivated skeptics;" they are prone to accept at face value evidence that is congruent with their prior beliefs but apt to denigrate and hyper-critically evaluate evidence contrary to their priors (Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Koehler, 1993). The result is anchoring with insufficient adjustment to contrary information.

In this paper we report the results of two experiments showing that citizens are prone to overly accommodate supportive evidence while dismissing out of hand evidence that challenges their prior attitudes. On reading a balanced set of pro and con arguments about affirmative action or gun control, we find that rather than moderating or simply maintaining their original attitudes, citizens - especially those who feel the strongest about the issue and are the most sophisticated - strengthen their attitudes in ways not warranted by the evidence.

(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here. See also here)





Global warming "could" destroy Great Barrier Reef

Prophecies of doom for Australia's great coral reef were common long before global warming was thought of. Declines used to be blamed on fertilizer runoff from farms. The truth is that, as a huge living system, it undergoes constant change for reasons people can only guess at. It should be noted however that the reef is at its most luxuriant in WARM waters and dies out as it stretches into cooler waters. Clearly, reef-lovers should HOPE for global warming as warmth is one thing that is known to be good for it. You would never guess any of that from the article below, however -- which is just the usual scare story from the usual suspects:



THE world's most spectacular natural wonders, ranging from Australia's Great Barrier Reef to the Amazon River basin, are threatened by the ravages of global warming, the green group WWF said today. It singled out 10 micro-regions across the globe where climate change has already taken a toll, warning that these delicately-balanced ecosystems are, in many cases, in danger of disappearing outright.

"While adaptation to changing climate can save some, only drastic action by governments to reduce emissions" of greenhouse gases can stop the "complete destruction" of others, said WWF scientist Lara Hansen. Up to 60 per cent of the Amazon forest, home to nearly a third of the planet's land species, could become semi-arid savanna if average global temperatures rise 2-3C above 1990 levels, the WWF said. It is very likely that some species will become extinct even before they are identified.

The WWF report comes a day before the world's top climate scientists in Brussels release a large report, the second of three, predicting dire consequences from global warming, especially for poor nations and species diversity. "There is high confidence that climate change will result in extinction of many species and reduction in the diversity of ecosystems," says the 1400-page final draft report, a copy of which was obtained by AFP. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's first report, released in February, forecast temperatures would rise between 1.8-4C by century's end. A final volume, due to be released in early May, will discuss how warming can be mitigated.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef along with other reef ecosystems - which take up only a quarter of a per cent of ocean floor surfaces but sustain 25 per cent of all marine life - are rapidly declining, the WWF warned. The IPCC report says that an increase of only 2C will result in the bleaching of the world's reefs, with catastrophic consequences for species diversity and local economies that depend on them....

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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