I was going to call this NASA vs. NOAA, but that theme ran out pretty quickly. Not much of value here, other than Washington mad with Pete Worden for holding the 2006 meeting. These people don't seem to do much more than send each other e-mails. I should work for the government. Then I could get paid for doing this. The EPA presentation is somewhat more illuminating. It was not authored by Science Advisor Holdren, a slip up by the obviously overworked Jenny Small http://www.judicialwatch.org/user/jsmall/track who also got the government to waive the $274 FOIA fee. When Judicial Watch has to plead poverty to the feds, you know things are bad.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/files/documents/2009/JW_NASA_geo.pdf http://www.judicialwatch.org/files/documents/2009/JW_EPA_geo.pdf http://www.judicialwatch.org/foiablog/2009/dec/climategate-and-geoengineering Climategate and Geoengineering Last Updated: Thu, 12/10/2009 - 12:59pm During December 6-18, world leaders are meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark to discuss climate change and the efforts they can contribute to mitigate the looming disaster. But is the disaster even real? The recent climategate scandal has shaken the very core of this debate, questioning the data used by leading climate study institutions (including the EPA). Documents uncovered by a computer hacker reveal that researchers studying climate change may have manipulated their data. In the midst of this scandal, the Copenhagen summit forges ahead with many individuals and nations hoping for a change from the Bush Administration’s lack of support for the Kyoto Treaty. One potential “remedy” that U.S. policy makers are considering for this supposed problem is geoengineering. As we reported in A Few of Obama’s Favorite Things: Climate Geoengineering, President Obama’s science czar, John Holdren, has openly discussed climate geoengineering with the White House as a potential “solution” to global warming. Geoengineering, however, is a highly dangerous remedy in which the side-effects may be worse than the original malady. One of the notorious ideas is to shoot particles into the clouds to alter the temperature. This notion of cloud dispersion could potentially alter the climate to the point of causing devastating consequences. Cloud dispersion has become Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's preferred method of preventing snowfall. While academics have discussed geoengineeering since the 1970s, the discussion has only recently taken root within the federal government. If geoengineering at any point were to become part of a climate solution, the agencies involved would be: (on the science side) The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the Department of Energy (and on the policy side) the Office of Science and Technology Policy the Department of State Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Judicial Watch asked each of these scientific agencies for their records on geoenegineering and to date has received responses showing that geoengineering is not just science czar John Holdren's quiet thoughts, but rather is a strategy part of a larger discussion and perhaps a motive for climate data tampering. Government agencies are well informed on the academic proposals concerning geoengineering. For example, Judicial Watch obtained through FOIA an EPA PowerPoint presentation authored by John Holdren, titled, “Should There Be a Role for Geoengineering in the Mitigation of Climate Warming?” The presentation includes a summary of various strategies including “floating styrofoam disks in mid-ocean gyres” and “phytoplankton fertilization [which] must be carefully managed to avoid damaging ocean ecosystems.” Not surprisingly, much of the data used in the EPA’s presentation of its climate analysis is the tainted data originating from the UK’s University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and duplicated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Climate Assessment Reports. In order for geoengineering to be justifiable, man-made climate change would have to be so egregious that simply reducing the use of carbon dioxide emitting products would not be sufficient and drastic action would be absolutely necessary. To posit this theory, the EPA slideshow contains the IPCC’s Atmosphere Mix Log Scale. The scale shows carbon dioxide, which is widely believed to largely derive from human consumption of fossil fuels, to be the most abundant green house gas. This premise’s correlation is often used as causation indicating that global warming is a man-made event. The EPA further uses IPCC data to project global average surface temperature changes. In fact, the entire presentation is based on the assumption that IPCC data is accurate and that global warming is impending and therefore the United States must at least consider these “last resorts” as potential “solutions.” NASA will certainly have a role in any geoengineering strategy. NASA is a global leader in studying climate variability and is a technological heavyweight with the satellites to monitor the climate data. To date, however, NASA is inhibited from taking the lead on any strategy and instead has remained on the fringes of the geoengineering debate. Internal correspondence notes that “it seems likely that geoengineering could well become one of the ‘scenarios’…[but] that [they] don’t want to be ‘out front’ on this.” Part of their concern seems proprietary in that they fear “spending a lot of up-front time providing scientific-justification for geoengineering ideas, and developing a (good and creative) science program to go along with an initiative…[and then] NOAA appropriating the whole thing.” Another prohibiting factor to geoengineering is the cost. While academics have proposed that a wealthy individual could potentially afford his or her own geoengineering solution, individuals within NASA find it “challenging to provide a convincing case that spending zillions of dollars in geoengineering will have a specific positive impact.” Despite little action on geoengineering, the strategy is circulating around the federal government. NASA’s emails note that “DOE, because of their CCTP [Climate Change Technology Program] focus, have been thinking grand thoughts in this area” even though DOE claims to have no records on the subject. Geoengineering is in its preliminary stage, with the government currently assessing the strategy from a financial and managerial view. The financial dimension is certainly significant, but the larger concerns should be the potentially irreversible ramifications as well as the actual necessity. Just as the United States intended to hit the reset button with Russia on diplomatic relations, the climategate scandal necessitates the need to pause and reset our notion of climate change. Dissenting views in climate science need to stop being suppressed so that the data showing cyclical variations over hundreds of years can be evaluated alongside the “crisis” data of just the past 60 years. In addition, agencies need to be responsible for producing accurate data, and geoengineering ideas of space mirrors need to remain science fiction at least for now. Judicial Watch will continue to investigate geoengineering and climategate. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineer...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
