American Oil and Gas Reporter - June 2014 - 48

Reviewers Dispute Climate Assessment
By Bill Campbell
"Misleading," "laughable," and "scare
tactic" are among the descriptions of a
climate document released by the Obama
administration in May.
On May 6, the administration released
its third National Climate Assessment,
which a White House release describes
as the "most comprehensive look ever at
climate change in the United States." The
document purports to "assess the science
of climate change and . . . document
related impacts and responses."
Not necessarily so, suggest some reviewers. The Institute for Energy Research
says the Climate Assessment is "just another attempt to justify more government
intervention in Americans' lives and more
attacks on affordable energy and economic
growth," calling it "intentionally confusing
and misleading."
Adds the Heartland Institute, "This
laughably misleading report is the predictable result when hard-core environmental activists are chosen to write a climate assessment for, and subject to the
approval and revisions of, the Obama

administration."
The Heartland Institute goes on, "Leading authors of this report include staffers
for activist groups such as the Union of
Concerned Scientists, Planet Forward,
The Nature Conservancy and Second Nature. Few objective climate experts will
take this report seriously. Even those scientists who are not overtly affiliated with
environmental activist groups were almost
uniformly on the record as global warming
alarmists before being chosen to write
this report."
The Heartland Institute accuses the
report writers of gross exaggerations and
unsubstantiated claims, saying, "The
report falsely asserts that global warming
is causing more extreme weather events,
more droughts, more record-high temperatures, more wildfires, warmer winters,
etc., when each and every one of these
false assertions is contradicted by objective,
verifiable evidence."
Adds the Institute for Energy Research, "The president's agenda is not
about global warming at all. This is (the
administration's) project to put Washington in charge of our energy supplies

and our economy. This document is less
a look into the climate than it is a scare
tactic designed to excuse the president's
agenda of centralizing power and making
energy more expensive and jobs harder
to find."
Scientists Respond
A couple individual climatologists
take similar views. Judith A. Curry, who
chairs the School of Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and hosts the blog, Climate Etc.,
writes, "The phrase 'climate change' is
now officially meaningless. The (Climate
Assessment) effectively implies that there
is no climate change other than what is
caused by humans, and that extreme
weather events are equivalent to climate
change. Any increase in adverse impacts
from extreme weather events or sea level
rise is caused by humans. Possible scenarios of future climate change depend
only on emission scenarios that are translated into warming by climate models
that produce far more warming than has
been observed.
"The failure to imagine future extreme

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48 THE AMERICAN OIL & GAS REPORTER
American Oil and Gas Reporter - June 2014

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