Climate Action Report 2002(NYT's Bush's U-Turn report)

US. EPA Global Warming ^ | May 2002 | Various EPA studies

[JerseyHighlander]

The United States of America's Third National
Communication Under the United Nations 
Framework Convention on Climate Change

FINAL VERSION
Hard copies of this report will not be published for several months. Ordering information will be available on this page once copies are available.

(Per Federal Register Notice)

(Public Comments Submitted)

All files listed in the Table of Contents are available for viewing or download in Adobe Acrobat 5.0 format. The Acrobat Reader is available at no cost from Adobe Systems.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Zip file of pdf containing entire document (5.7M)

Upfront (247k pdf)  – Cover page and table of contents.

Chapter 1.  Introduction and Overview (197k pdf) – Summarizes the main elements of the report.

Chapter 2.  National Circumstances (450k pdf) – Presents a snapshot of the national characteristics of the United States that play a role in climate change, including the country's climate, geography, economy, demographic trends, energy production and consumption, and natural resources.

Chapter 3.  Greenhouse Gas Inventory (442k pdf) – Provides a broad overview of all U.S. greenhouse gas emission sources and sinks, introduces key concepts, and discusses the primary drivers for the growth in emissions.  All material in the chapter is drawn from the U.S. Inventory of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks:  1990–1999. 

Chapter 4.  Policies and Measures (320k pdf) – Reviews national policies to limit emissions and enhance sinks of greenhouse gases undertaken since 1990.

Chapter 5.  Projections (322k pdf) – Quantifies the aggregate effects on greenhouse gas emissions of policies and measures implemented or planned from 1990 to 2020.

Chapter 6.  Vulnerability (1.5M pdf) – Addresses U.S. vulnerabilities to the adverse consequences of climate change and identifies the most promising adaptation measures being explored.

Chapter 7.  Financial Resources (426k pdf) – Reviews U.S. efforts with other countries to assist with mitigation and sequestration strategies, build human and institutional capacity to address climate change, and facilitate the commercial transfer of technology.

Chapter 8.  Research and Observation (296k pdf) – Discusses research efforts involving prediction of climate change, impacts and adaptation, and mitigation and new technologies.  This chapter also provides an overview of U.S. work on Global Climate Observing Systems.

Chapter 9.  Education, Training, and Awareness (269k pdf) – Addresses programs to educate and train students and citizens in areas related to climate change and reviews U.S. outreach activities to disseminate information about global climate change.

Appendix A:  Emission Trends. (1.9M pdf)

Appendix B:  Policies and Measures. (1.5M pdf)

Appendix C:  Selected Technology Transfer Activities and U.S. Direct Financial Contributions and Commercial Sales Related to Implementation of the UNFCCC. (4.4M pdf)

Appendix D:  Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions. (264k pdf)

Appendix E:  Bibliography. (197k pdf)

http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/nwinsite.html
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/actions/national/index.html
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/publications/index.html

[NittanyLion]

It would appear the State Dept. has continued on the course set by the Clinton Admin. Perhaps it's time to clean house - no doubt a midlevel bureaucrat slipped this through to embarrass the administration.

[NittanyLion]

The policy of the bush administration is that human induced global warming is a fact.

I'd be curious to know whether the White House ever signed off on this report. I suspect someone in the State Department slipped this one out the back door.

[Valin]

Bump and bookmark for a later read.

Some say the world will end in ice,
and others say by fire.But what I've tasted of desire,
I think I'd rather fire.

[Nick Danger]

I wasn't aware he'd taken to lying.

Drudge got used here, and he probably knows it by now. Somebody slipped him a few quotes from Andrew Revkin's piece in Monday's New York Times, and he ran with it like it was some big scoop. In fact the report has been sitting on the EPA web site for a week, where anybody could have read the whole thing.

The "breaking news," if there is any, is that the liberal activists who pose as the journalists in this country have finally gotten around to reading the damned thing, and have discovered that passages in it can be used to toot the horn for Global Warming, and attack a Republican administration at the same time. Being liberals, they will now do just that.

So the American public will now endure a few days of having every environmentalist wacko in the liberals' Rolodex trotted out, and handed ten minutes of fame with which to bash the Bush Administration.

I see the whole brouhahah as symptomatic of a media establishment that views its role as the promotion of an enlightented (i.e. their own) political agenda, rather than the reporting and dissemination of fact with which the American people might govern themselves.

Revkin's article in the Times is a perfect example of what happens when an ideological liberal grabs hold of a document that he can spin into an attack on a Republican President. Any equally-talented conservative writer could as easily spin the report into an attack on the Kyoto treaty. But there are no conservative writers in our news delivery system; everything in our major media is seen and reported from a liberal's perspective. This is what makes the news-and-information systems in this country so dangerous.

In time, the conservatives who do populate the op-ed space will get around to explaining what this report actually says, but by then all the good sound bites will belong to the liberals, and the public will have moved on. The liberal propaganda machine that poses as this country's journalism establishment will have scored another hit.

It's too bad that Drudge got sucked into helping them.

[Lazamataz]

Drudge got used here, and he probably knows it by now.

Don't underestimate the lure of posting a hyperventilating, breathless headline just before his (kinda teetering) radio show.

Whichever case it is: Drudge being used or Drudge lying, it makes me a lot more circumspect about Drudge headline articles. From now on, when I post from him, I will be appending a lot of disclaimers.

[RAT Patrol]

We're Bush bots, not Bush Worshipers. :-p LOL! Thanks for setting me straight, rintense.

[NMC EXP]

I'd be curious to know whether the White House ever signed off on this report. I suspect someone in the State Department slipped this one out the back door.

At the end of the day, when US energy consumption is limited to UN mandated levels by increased fedgov energy/pollution taxes, will it matter to the average citizen if this was accomplished with the explicit or with the tacit approval of bush?

Regards

J.R.

[Right Wing Professor]

I decided to getaway from the 'Bush sucks' 'No, Bush rules, you suck' , and actually read the content of the report. My first impresion is that it's sloppy, poorly written, and poorly thought out.

Just starting with the Intro.

• (p3)... President Bush recently announced a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas intensity in the United States by 18 percent over the next decade through a combination of voluntary, incentive-based, and existing mandatory measures. This represents a 4.5 percent reduction from forecast emissions in 2012..
  Scientifically, this is utterly meaningless. As a working scientist, I have no idea what a 'greenhouse gas intensity' is; we don't use intensity as a measure of a quantity or rate of change of a quantity. When you say 18% of something without properly defining what that something is, you say nothing.
• (p5)Several classes of halogenated substances that contain fluorine, chlorine, or bromine are also greenhouse gases, but for the most part, they are solely a product of industrial activities.
  For the most part, they are solely...? What the heck does that mean? FWIW, most halogenated organics in the environment are produced by bacteria and marine algae.

And so on.

This reports seems largely an attempt to cast Bush's program in the language of the environmentalists. As such, I think it's misguided, though not a betrayal. Some good will certainly come from the research he proposes, but the left will be able to pitch it as 'Bush fiddles while the world burns'. Much of the science is sloppily described - whether that's becuse the EPA is staffed by scientifically illiterate biologists (it is) or whether the report was worked over by political types after it was written is anyone's guess. But the report, in that it doesn't question the central premises behind Kyoto and the like, will fail it its aim.

What I would have released is something that says

• Climate change is one thing about climate we can be sure of, no matter what we do.For example, entirely without human intervention, the Northern Great Plains in the last 10 million years (an instant of geologic time) have several times gone from a savannah supporting camels and rhinos, to a million square mile glacier, and back.
• Anthropogenic effects are probably warming the climate, althoug even worst case predictions for the next century involve far smaller changes than have occured in the last million years. We don't know if, on balance, warming will be bad or good for us and for the world, but the balance of evidence suggests that the earth is on average rather colder now than it has been for most of its history, and a little warming may be a good thing.
• In any case, the Kyoto cure is far, far worse than the disease. We don't know how significant global warming is likely to be, we certainly don't know if it should be feared or welcomed, so adopting a drastic change in the way the world's people live their lives is crazy at this stage. The money spent implementing Kyoto, as the 'Skeptical Environmentalist' points out, would be far better spent doing other things.
• Where there are clear unfavorable consequences of climate change, we should work on a case-by-case basis to ameliorate those consequences. However, it's a sign of how insubstantial the evidence of climate change really is, that we have no good evidence yet of any consequences.

You can't win an argument if you let the other side define the premises.

[wingnuts'nbolts]

A lie becomes truth if it is said enough times and the listener has no other opposing input, which is usuall the case. The liberal socalist democrats are well aware of this and it is one of the things they do best. Hillary is a Master! So is 'ole Bill and his clone McAuliff.

[Nick Danger]

I suspect someone in the State Department slipped this one out the back door.

I though so too, until I looked at it. No, this is definitely a Bush Administration document. What's going on here is not that Bush has embraced Al Gore's environmentalism, but that the liberal media are having an orgy pulling quotations from the report with which to promote the usual Global Warming song-and-dance.

If you start reading the report though, you'll very quickly see that this is not the Bush Administration's cave-in to environmental wackoism. But that is not what you'll ever read in the New York Times, and I'm sure it isn't what we'll hear from the liberal activists who populate television news. From them we'll hear that the report "admits" that Global Warming is real, that "sensitive wetlands will be destroyed," and that cute little bunny rabbits are all going to die because Bush is a heartless tool of the oil companies.

It's too bad that one-sided political ax-grinding is what passes for "news" in this country, but for the time being there is little we can do about it. Perhaps as alternatives to all-liberal-all-the-time media (like Fox News, the Washington Times, and most of the Internet) grow in significance, the ability of liberal ideologues to manipulate the public this way will decline.

I'd like to think that the growing shrillness of the attacks, and the blatant use of Clinton campaign operatives as television "journalists," are symptomatic of a certain desperation on their part as they realize that they are losing their hold on the American people. We can hope.

In the meantime, be wary of accepting the liberals' characterization of what this report says. It is a primarily a scientific document, and in that role it is very careful to say that some things are known, many things aren't, we don't have the monitoring technology to really say what's going on, and for sure any predictions we make will be tentative and probably wrong. You won't hear that part in the New York Times, and Katie Couric won't mention it either.

As for what policies we should adopt in light of all this, the document is definitely the work of the Bush Administration. That's why the liberals are howling so loudly about it... there are no provisions in there to seize our SUV's and replace them with solar-powered wind bicycles. In fact the Administration does not seem to view the current state of the science as justification for meddling at all in people's private lives, or for turning the economy upside-down, which of course drives the liberals nuts.

[rintense]

...but that the liberal media are having an orgy pulling quotations

Great. Another gruesomely vivd image. Ick ick ick.

[Nick Danger]

This reports seems largely an attempt to cast Bush's program in the language of the environmentalists.

That's my take, too. You say it's misguided, I'm more the marketing type and I think it's brilliant.

[Sabertooth]

Now what does this report create in term of precedence, or what would this report mean this election cycle if the media didn't stir it up at this point? Or what will this report and follow up reports do to solidify scientifically shaky climate change projection techniques during the next Democratic administration, 6, 10, or 14 years from now?

If this report had slid under the radar, a few thousand scientists in the climate change community/industry would have known of its existence. With this wide open airing (curteous NYT), it becomes a great foil to sow doubt in Bush's base as the the president's commitments on politically charged issues.

First, I'm glad that the actual report isn't as the NYT represented it.

Second, the way to deal with it is to go on the offensive, take the initiative in the media. Bush and Whitman and other Administration spokesmen (get some sound, sane-speaking scientists, for Pete's sake) need to blow the hell out of the Global Warming boogeyman. Network news and the daily papers are all seeing declining audience share as the internet and talk radio wax in influence. We need to kick the Leftist media and their Democrat allies in the teeth over and over again with the straight facts, and stay on message.

Until the GOP steels itself and learns to wage political war to the death of every adversary in every theater, we have no one to blame but ourselves for getting jerked around by the paper tigers of the so-called "major media."

[Howlin]

Don't underestimate the lure of posting a hyperventilating, breathless headline just before his (kinda teetering) radio show.

Precisely. And if his headline makes conservatives mad, all the better, right, they'll listen in to hear what Drudge has to say.

It's very fashionable lately to pick and choose words that either Bush says or are leaked/released from this administration and go on a rampage and try to smear Bush; unfortunately, a great majority of it is coming from the people we use to respect, Drudge among them.

Since we all got burned with this one, I caution everybody to listen to Clint van Sant (sp?), the former FBI agent who is on Fox and sometimes MSNBC; he says Robert Wright is up to no good.

[Lazamataz]

It's very fashionable lately to pick and choose words that either Bush says or are leaked/released from this administration and go on a rampage and try to smear Bush; unfortunately, a great majority of it is coming from the people we use to respect, Drudge among them.

I got sucked in.

Since we all got burned with this one, I caution everybody to listen to Clint van Sant (sp?), the former FBI agent who is on Fox and sometimes MSNBC; he says Robert Wright is up to no good.

What's a Robert Wright?

[Howlin]

IMO, Bush and his people need to blow the hell out of a LOT of things; it's time for a town meeting. Way past time.

[Lazamataz]

If you start reading the report though, you'll very quickly see that this is not the Bush Administration's cave-in to environmental wackoism. But that is not what you'll ever read in the New York Times,

The New York Times has taken to lying outright for the last decade, at least.

[finnman69]

From the summary : "Greeen house gasses are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activity, causing global mean surface temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise.While the changes over the last several decades are likely due mostly to human activities, we cannot rule out that a significant part is also a reflection of natural variability"

[rintense]

I agree. It's time to start kicking butt and taking names. I'm reminded of the one press conference not too long ago where GWB pretty much b!tch-slapped all the reporters. He needs to do that on a more regular basis.

[Sabertooth]

sheesh, the only people who don't think CO2 has a big role now are the auto & gas companies...

Not really true.

We're only just beginning to understand mesoscale global weather patterns, which fluctuate on a millenial scale. To presume that a limited database of 19th Century meteorolgy is a sufficient baseline to ascertain whether human CO2 emmissions are causing some sort of global warming is not exactly sound science.

And guess what else we don't undestand very well... Mesoscale Solar weather patterns.

Think that fluctations in the Sun's weather might have an effect on Earth's weather?

We don't even know why the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago, but we know that global warming was involved.

Any evidence of 12,000 year-old smokestacks anywhere?