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Misuse of Scientific Data By the White House
Science data nerds writes "The White House is consistently and persistently claiming that the US is doing better than Europe in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This is false — their claim is purely based on carefully selecting the only subset of the data that supports this conclusion. When all the data are used, it is plain that European emissions have declined substantially and US emissions have grown substantially. The article, and this linked analysis, debunk the White House claims."
You mean the White House lied to the public? I'm shocked, shocked! Well, not that shocked.
The ensuing hot air will contribute [a] little.
For everyone interested in this topic, Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science is required reading.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
are belong to U.S.
The submitter, the analysis, and the relevant claims in the first linked article are from the "Pacific Institute". That's fine and doesn't mean anything about it is incorrect, but probably means there is an agenda at work - surprise, just as there's an "agenda" served by the White House, too - and this is also a factual statement:
Pick any year since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed to in 1997, Mr. Bush should have said, and the U.S. CO2 emission performance is superior to that of all major Kyoto parties, including and most notably Europe (CO2 being the focus of the many pending legislative proposals).
Also, the submission complains that the US metric shown in a positive light - surprising they'd choose something that reflects positively! - is that because only CO2 emissions are considered. Well, CO2 emissions account for nearly three quarters of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Further is the problem with using 2000 as the reference point. In fact, it is perfectly valid to use 2000 as a reference point; it's just as valid as using 1997 or any other time. There is no magical time in terms of statistical length or any point in time that is any more valid than any other. You can argue that the submitter is "cherry picking" his own data. It's laughable to say there is a "right" base year.
Of course, the issue is much, much more complex, and no one wants to take into consideration the very real economic impacts of taking drastic action to reduce emissions, especially when China and India - forget the EU - are not saddled with the same restrictions.
I just watched two movies: Control Room (2004) about the media coverage of the invasion of Iraq and Al Jazeera's role and The revolution will not be televised (2003) about the role of the private media in the coup in Venezuela in 2001. Neither of the two might be called very objective, but I see how difficult it would be to find an audience for more scientific analysis.
The common theme in both is how important the media has become. Now this is not really news, but during the last decade the media reaction has been part of e.g. military operation (embedded journalism) and there is a tremendous effort to control the pictures. Not so much to suppress any reporting, since it has become obvious that this will never work, but to control what is fed to the press. And unfortunately the press is not yet up to speed to get their informations from a wider number of sources.
Now with blogging, youtube, flickr etc. there seems to be a much wider range of possible information sources, even harder to suppress than in the past. But today we face the problem which of these sources to trust, there are just so many. There are attempts like newstrust, which tries to be a sort of slashdot moderation system on top of existing news. But I think we need much more of this. Like greasemonkey allows you to attach things to websites that the authors did not intend to be there, we need the option to attach other sources to any news and have a large body of people vote on which of these sources should be taken into account. I have no clue how to realize this, but this is a typical case: the government using FUD to strengthen their position. People can react and argue with the claims, but there should be a way for these comments to reach the public, not only via sites like slashdot, but by default. With the increase of media sources and media power we have to become better at using and evaluating media as a group, not only as single viewers and readers.
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Take a look at US and UK BMW websites. The UK entry level model gets 40MPG, which is not much worse than our Prius. Living proof that we can double our car fuel efficiency NOW if we just stop being apathetic about it. And this is nothing compared to the impact of living in apartments and having a working Metro.
Why, I'll see your see misuse of scientific data by the right wing with a misuse of scientific data by the left!
a) Including 1990 as a base year for European emissions is wrong for a couple of reasons. First, up until very recently European economic growth has badly lagged that of the USA. When there is less growth, there is less emissions. Even now, European economic growth lags, as a rule. When you have 10% of your people unemployed, as the French do, it does not take them much CO2 to drive to work, as there is no work to drive to. Secondly, Europeans have been furiously gaming emissions in their own right. There's been rampant adjusting of the baseline in order to improve their own greenhouse picture. So, the real question is, are the Europeans actually seriously making their targets, or are they simply patting themselves on the back for the slow growth side effects of the nanny state.
b) The gases described by the convention do not include water vapor, which constitutes the bulk of global warming.
c) All climate conventions these days presuppose that a reduction in manmade emissions will correct the atmospheric balance of gasses, and, that, by doing so, our climate will revert to some imagined ideal state of 1700, which was in the middle of an ice age, and a billion people will easily starve to death because of a shortened growing season. This will be almost as stupid as the wide spread left wing opposition to nuclear power, which essentially doomed us to global warming to begin with. Really, if the USA had gone 100% nuclear, there would be no global warming, and, so really, all of this finger pointing at Republicans over global warming is an elaborate smokescreen to say that you Lefties once again f=== up the planet and want we superior Bush supporters to bail you out.
We told you what the answer was : Build Nukes. Build Hydro. If you don't like it, that's your problem.
I think anyone can see that humanity needs to manage the atmospheric mixture of gases. We manage the acidity of our soils to grow things, we build dams around rivers and levees around the sea. It only stands to reason that we should do battle with mother nature and preserve some happy mix of gases to benefit humanity. So, where is the call to actually build a technology that sequesters excess gases from the atmosphere? Why can't we research and build machines that eat CO2 and turn it into carbon and oxygen? Sure, the energy required to split that up is enormous, but, that's what nukes are for. Do we really seriously build an atmospheric management strategy that a geologically active planet with a radioactive core and a radically diverse ecosystem will not on occasion enter an atmospheric state on its own that we should control? What if we discover some giant CO2 source on the ocean floor that we never considered before?
Let's pursue a strategy of building nuclear plants to reduce our own emissions, and then, while we are at it, build a machine to manage the atmosphere.
This is my sig.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The summary's claim is that the White House is selectively using data points, and to an extent that is true. They base their claims on an index comparison that starts at the year 2000. When you view the data this way, it does appear that the EU's Greenhouse Gas emissions have gone up, while the US's have declined/been neutral. The article prefers on the other hand to index at 1990, which shows that over the last 14 years of data that the US's emissions have increased dramatically compared to the EU.
Now here's my first problem: the accusation assumes that 2000 is not a good index year, which it is. If the Bush Administration wants to make the case that they (The Bush Administration) have been more successful than the EU in reducing emissions, then the logical start point for comparison is about when they took over which would be 2001.
Now, the article points out correctly that Greenhouse emissions tend to drop during economic slowdowns. One can see that easily by looking at the graph at the end of it (the US has a drop in 1991; the EU has a drop from 92-96; the US has another drop from 00-01). If one takes these economic slowdowns into account, then 2000, the peak of the last economy, might very well be a good starting point for the Administration to start their indexing from. Why should they have to take into account the failures of past administrations (Bush I, and Clinton) when touting the success of their administration? If, hypothetically, US emissions had decreased from 1990 to 2000 and increased from 2000 to 2004, would it be fair for the Bush Administration to take the earlier data into account and claim that they had reduced emissions? No, that would be taking credit for progress they did not make. The same principle applies reverse.
The article also brings about a perpetual flaw in any sort of greenhouse gas analysis. It completely ignores economic growth and the effect it has on increasing emissions (which it candidly points out by the way). During much of the mid-90s the US economy was booming, especially compared to the EU, so of course there was going to be an increase in emissions from 1991-2000. Additionally, these indexes fail to take into account the size of the economic growth when making the comparison. If we really want a useful measure, we should be tracking "Volume of Emissions per Unit of GDP Growth." That way we could judge economies based on their environmental efficiency rather just on pure volumetric data.
The sun beams down on a brand new day, No more welfare tax to pay, Unsightly slums gone up in flashing light...
I would suggest that the problem is not with hard facts and statistics, but rather with a populace that is poorly educated in statistics and a media that is unwilling to actually analyze the statistics (and present that analysis) for fear of offending or boring an apathetic and relatively innumerate populace.
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Better put (as my stats professor said):
Torture statistics enough, and it will admit to anything.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
China will probably become the biggest greenhouse gas emitter this year or next, International Energy Agency Chief Economist Fatih Birol said in April. Ma said today this is inevitable and he can't estimate when it will happen.
The country's[China's] greenhouse gas emissions reached 5.6 billion tons in 2004, of which 5.05 billion tons were carbon dioxide, the commission said in the report. U.S. emissions that year reached 7.12 billion tons, according to the Department of Energy.
I stole this Sig
The largest, most successful car company on the planet? Toyota. The leader on going Green through higher fuel economy and smarter technology? Toyota. Coincidence?
Which city in the rust belt has a trade surplus with China and why? Erie PA. Because GE makes the most fuel efficient locomotives on the planet in Erie and even though the Chinese have lower labor costs and environmental protection standards, the GE locmotives, while costing more to purchase, pay-back the extra cost very rapidly in fuel savings. The greenest tech is the most efficient tech and it wins economically.
So, protecting and subsidizing stupidity might protect one particular set of players in an industry (GM & Ford, for instance) but overall it doesn't do the USA any good.
Green is efficient, so Green is smart business.
There's green in going green -- Friedman
Griffin did not dispute the reality of global warming, he's just not sure it is worth doing anything about it. This is strange coming from an engineer since one would think the basic reaction would be "Wow! If we can change the planet with out meaning to, what could we do if we engineered it?" but he seems to have some philosophical hangup about not interfering in how we are interfering with the planet. Here's a summary: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA_Administrat or_Michael_Griffin_Not_Sure_Global_Warming_A_Probl em_999.html.
s -selling-solar.html
More to the point on emissions from various countries, here is a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tabulation of emission trends. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0700609104v1. China appears to be primarily responsible for the acceleration of emissions. With the US reducing it's emissions 1.3% between 2005 and 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18831796/, it look as though China will continue to dominate the acceleration.
While TFA has some valid points, the main thing is that industrialized countries have a better opportunity to slow or reduce emissions since, for them, efficiency improvements can pace growth while for developing nations efficiency cannot help with a growth from zero situation.
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Out pace growth: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Please don't try to make jokes about the scientific abilities of Bush.
The press is clear about it.
Why can't