Replies

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.