The Chickahominy Report

Vir­ginia Attor­ney Gen­eral Ken Cuc­cinelli speaks at the annual Jew­ish Advo­cacy Day lun­cheon in Febu­rary. (Office of the Attor­ney General)

MECHANICSVILLE, Va. — Last year, Vir­ginia Attor­ney Gen­eral Ken Cuc­cinelli made him­self a hero to cli­mate change scep­tics world­wide by call­ing into ques­tion the sci­ence of cli­mate change.

One of his first shots against cli­mate change occurred in Decem­ber 2009 before he took office. In his newslet­ter, Cuc­cinelli Com­pass, he claimed that sea­sonal win­ter weather—snowstorms—was incon­ve­nient for those who believe in anthro­pogenic (man-made) global warm­ing (AGW).

Shortly after he assumed office, he launched two high-profile legal cases. The first was launched in Feb­ru­ary 2010 when he filed two peti­tions: one ask­ing ask­ing the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency to recon­sider its endan­ger­ment find­ing that increas­ing green­house gas emis­sions  posed a threat to the health and wel­fare of cur­rent and future gen­er­a­tions; another ask­ing the fed­eral courts to review EPA’s endan­ger­ment finding.

In April, Cuc­cinelli filed a joint motion (with the attor­ney gen­eral of Alabama) to com­pel the EPA to con­sider “evi­dence” that the cli­mate data on which EPA based its find­ing were faulty.

His sec­ond offi­cial action was revealed in April. Cuc­cinelli began an inves­ti­ga­tion into what the attor­ney gen­eral alleges are fraud­u­lent claims in grant appli­ca­tions by a for­mer Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia (UVa) pro­fes­sor, Michael Mann, whose research sup­ports the the­ory that humans are chang­ing Earth’s cli­mate. Cuccinelli’s office sent a civil inves­tiga­tive demand (CID) to the uni­ver­sity to com­pel it to hand over doc­u­ments related to Mann’s research.

UVa chal­lenged the ini­tial CID in Alber­marle Cir­cuit Court. In August, Judge Paul Peatross Jr. ruled in favor of the uni­ver­sity in August. Cuc­cinelli revised and resub­mit­ted his CID in Sep­tem­ber. (UVa has again chal­lenged the CID.) In Decem­ber, Cuc­cinelli appealed the Peatross deci­sion to the state supreme court. The state supreme court announced this month that it will hear Cuccinelli’s appeal.

Whew! It’s enough to make TCR seek the san­ity and logic of a day­time soap opera.

TCR first took notice of Cuccinelli’s actions in Feb­ru­ary 2010, when the attor­ney gen­eral held a press con­fer­ence announc­ing his chal­lenge to USEPA’s endan­ger­ment find­ing. Cuc­cinelli invoked a scan­dal called Climate-gate—in which emails from the Cli­mate Research Unit at the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia were stolen and pub­lished on the Web—to jus­tify his request. (TCR feels com­pelled to point out that two of his e-mails were among those released in Climate-gate: Look for posts by “David M. Lawrence” here and here. TCR regrets that his hacked mes­sages were unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally temperate.)

In his Feb. 17, 2010, press con­fer­ence, Cuc­cinelli argued the cli­mate data had been inten­tion­ally manip­u­lated as part of some envi­ron­men­tal conspiracy.

“We’re ask­ing the EPA to re-open its pub­lic hear­ings about this issue so we can add to the record infor­ma­tion that has emerged in the cli­mate change scan­dal called Climate-gate from recent months,” Cuc­cinelli said. “The EPA’s deci­sion to reg­u­late car­bon diox­ide was based on what we now know was bad tem­per­a­ture data that was inten­tion­ally manip­u­lated to sell the world on the idea that car­bon diox­ide emit­ted as a result of human activ­ity was caus­ing global warming.”

Cuc­cinelli had more heat to shed on this theme:

“Britain’s Daily Mail even quoted the head cli­ma­tol­o­gist at the cen­ter of the Climate-gate con­tro­versy say­ing he couldn’t repro­duce the tem­per­a­ture data that he and his col­leagues used to con­vince the world, includ­ing the EPA, of impend­ing global warm­ing. And it’s gen­er­ally admit­ted at this point that while the cli­mate mod­els used to be argued to pre­dict con­stant warm­ing here on Earth, that the Earth in fact hasn’t warmed in the last 15 years.

“As some­one who has an engi­neer­ing back­ground, look, I can tell you that for sci­en­tific research to be cred­i­ble, the data has [sic] to be ver­i­fi­able, it has [sic] to be repeat­able. And the data the EPA relied on is nei­ther of those things, nei­ther ver­i­fi­able or [sic] repeat­able. And it even looks like some cli­ma­tol­o­gists have admit­ted that much of the data was made up, or at least the con­clu­sions from the data were made up. And that’s what the EPA has been rely­ing on.”

TCR agrees that data have to be ver­i­fi­able, and that they have to be repeat­able. TCR would like to take Cuccinelli’s argu­ment a bit fur­ther. When invok­ing what he later calls “good sci­ence” to advance one or another pub­lic pol­icy, pol­i­cy­mak­ers and the sci­en­tists advis­ing them should con­sider all rel­e­vant data. They should be hon­est about uncer­tain­ties in the data and the­o­ries under­pin­ning a par­tic­u­lar pol­icy posi­tion, and that they should not mis­rep­re­sent what is cur­rently under­stood. (As a col­lege instruc­tor of sub­jects such as biol­ogy, geog­ra­phy, mete­o­rol­ogy, and oceanog­ra­phy, TCR would also appre­ci­ate it if peo­ple cite proper sources—the Daily Mail arti­cle Cuc­cinelli cited in one of the quotes above was actu­ally a rewrite of a story that orig­i­nally appeared on the BBC’s Web site.)

Some months ago, TCR sent Cuc­cinelli a set of ques­tions based upon the claims the attor­ney gen­eral made in his press con­fer­ence. The goal was to asses the attor­ney general’s under­stand­ing of the sci­ence he crit­i­cizes. Below is the text of TCR’s email to Cuc­cinelli spokesman Charles E. James:

Dear Mr. James:

Thank you for send­ing me infor­ma­tion about the chal­lenge to the EPA find­ing on cli­mate change yes­ter­day. I am prepar­ing a follow-up story on the announce­ment for pub­li­ca­tion. Below are some ques­tions I have for the attor­ney gen­eral or one of your staff.

1) What will the com­mon­wealth have to prove in order to pre­vail in the courts and with the EPA?

2) Has the attor­ney gen­eral eval­u­ated the prob­a­bil­ity of achiev­ing these objectives?

3) If so, what are the odds that the com­mon­wealth with succeed?

4) Does the attor­ney gen­eral have an esti­mated bud­get for the total cost of these chal­lenges? If so, I would like to have a copy of the esti­mated costs.

5) How much money has been spent so far — in terms of fil­ing fees, research and prepa­ra­tion time, etc.?

6) Does the attor­ney gen­eral agree or dis­agree with this statement:

Green­house gases trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.

7) What cred­i­ble evi­dence do you have that “much” — the AG’s word — of the data used to argue that cli­mate change is occur­ring is made up?

8) What spe­cific data does the attor­ney gen­eral claim has been falsified?

9) How does ques­tions about one tem­per­a­ture dataset (the CRU data high­lighted in the Cli­mate­gate con­tro­versy) under­mine sim­i­lar find­ings by at least two other tem­per­a­ture datasets com­piled by two other inde­pen­dent research teams? Can the attor­ney gen­eral name the groups that com­piled the other global datasets that show a sim­i­lar trend?

10) Can the attor­ney gen­eral name a sin­gle cli­mate model that pre­dicts or pre­dicted “con­stant warm­ing” on Earth — with no sea­sonal or annual vari­a­tion in temperature?

11) In refer­ring to Phil Jones’s state­ment that there has been no sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant (at the 95 per­cent con­fi­dence level) warm­ing since 1995, does the attor­ney gen­eral take issue with Jones’s expla­na­tion of the dif­fi­culty of obtain­ing sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant results in small data sets? Here is what Jones said — to the BBC, not the Daily Mail:

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

PJ: Yes, but only just. I also cal­cu­lated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is pos­i­tive, but not sig­nif­i­cant at the 95% sig­nif­i­cance level. The pos­i­tive trend is quite close to the sig­nif­i­cance level. Achiev­ing sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance in sci­en­tific terms is much more likely for longer peri­ods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

12) The data pre­sented in the BBC Q&A (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm) show a sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant warm­ing from 1975 to 2009. How, then, is that incon­sis­tent with the EPA’s finding?

Thank you very much for your time. …

Cuccinelli’s direc­tor of com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Brian Gottstein, did respond to some of the cost ques­tions. Back in May, Gottstein claimed that the office had spent only $455 on the fil­ing fee of its suit to com­pel EPA to hear addi­tional evi­dence. As a for­mer employee of the Vir­ginia Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­ity, TCR knows the answer was not credible—staff time and office expen­di­tures such as paper count as costs. But Gottstein said the attor­ney general’s office does not keep track of staff time spent on indi­vid­ual cases.

David Mills, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Demo­c­ra­tic Party of Vir­ginia, said that in this mat­ter, the attor­ney general’s office fol­lows a long­stand­ing pattern.

“The attor­ney gen­eral does not bill hours like a law firm,” Mills told TCR in a tele­phone inter­view last May. “I’ve asked Demo­c­ra­tic attor­ney gen­er­als [sic], I’ve asked for­mer Repub­li­can attor­ney gen­er­als [sic] and peo­ple who worked in their offices. Gen­uinely, they just don’t keep track of the hours they spend work­ing on a case the way you work for a law firm because they don’t bill by the hour. They’re all salaried state employees.”

The attor­ney general’s office declined to address any of the sci­en­tific ques­tions TCR raised. Let the record show, how­ever, that the Cli­matic Research Unit—the group at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal—did not make any­thing up. The alle­ga­tions that the emails prove some green con­spir­acy have been debunked in a series of inves­ti­ga­tions and by non-partisan groups such as FactCheck.org. The Guardian (U.K.) has had some excel­lent cov­er­age of the scan­dal. (See its Q&A for a brief overview of the Climate-gate scan­dal and its aftermath.)

TCR sug­gests an incon­ve­nient truth for cli­ma­to­log­i­cal con­spir­acy the­o­rists: Over the course of the more than two decades since assem­bling their con­tro­ver­sial data set, CRU staff moved offices, cleaned offices, mis­placed doc­u­ments, lended things to stu­dents, worked on some­thing else, grew older, etc.; then when chal­lenged to recon­struct what they had done in the 1980s, they found it dif­fi­cult to doc­u­ment or remem­ber all the steps. CRU direc­tor Phil Jones has admit­ted to being orga­ni­za­tion­ally chal­lenged, but that is nowhere near the same as being guilty of fal­si­fy­ing data. (TCR, whose edi­tor and pub­lisher peri­od­i­cally receives inquiries for doc­u­ments he pro­duced on while a con­sul­tant for EPA in the 1980s—and who can­not, along with the EPA who rec­om­mends that he be con­tacted in such mat­ters, pro­duce said documents—does not find the loss of decades-old mate­r­ial at CRU evi­dence of a conspiracy.)

While the attor­ney gen­eral and his staff declined to answer TCR’s science-related ques­tions, a sci­en­tist did not. Vir­ginia– and North Carolina-based read­ers of this Blog may have heard of Mal­colm Cleave­land, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of geog­ra­phy at the Uni­ver­sity of Arkansas. Cleave­land was a mem­ber of the research team that found evi­dence for severe droughts that may have helped destroy the Roanoke’s Lost Colony and which nearly destroyed the Jamestown Colony. He is a den­drochro­nol­o­gist (tree-ring sci­en­tist) who has spent most of his career doing cli­mate recon­struc­tion research of the type that has helped fuel sci­en­tific con­cern over AGW.

Cleave­land said it is highly unlikely that evi­dence for cli­mate change has been fal­si­fied is highly unlikely “because the data comes in many forms from many insti­tu­tions and indi­vid­ual inves­ti­ga­tors.” Cleave­land also shot down Cuccinelli’s reliance upon poten­tial prob­lems with the CRU tem­per­a­ture data in an effort to refute AGW the­ory. He named a num­ber of lines of evi­dence that sup­port the notion that humans can and are chang­ing climate:

1. his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments and records
2. the instru­men­tal (ther­mome­ters and such) record
3. tree-ring recon­struc­tions of past cli­mate con­di­tions (like those Cleave­land has worked on)
4. tem­per­a­ture data derived from iso­tope ratios in things like the gas bub­bles trapped in ice cores
5. loss of alpine ice and snow
6. loss of ice in the Antarc­tic and Green­land ice caps
7. thin­ning of Arc­tic sea ice
8. warm­ing of ocean waters
9. chang­ing geo­graphic dis­tri­b­u­tions of plants and ani­mals; and
10. multi-proxy (com­bi­na­tions of things like tree-rings, iso­tope ratios, growth bands in shells, etc.) recon­struc­tions of past cli­mate conditions.

The essay, Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, reviewed the evi­dence for global warming.

In his dis­cus­sion of these lines of evi­dence, Cleave­land cited close to 80 peer-reviewed sci­en­tific references—in a 3-page-long dis­cus­sion! (Cleave­land attached a 23-page-long bib­li­og­ra­phy on cli­mate change as well.)

Cuc­cinelli, in his joint motion to com­pel EPA to con­sider new evi­dence, cited news reports from the Guardian (four arti­cles), USA Today (one arti­cle) , the Daily Mail (one arti­cle), Inter­na­tional Busi­ness Times (one arti­cle), RIA Novosti (one arti­cle), the Tele­graph (one arti­cle), The New Zealand Her­ald (one arti­cle), the National Post (one arti­cle), the Times (U.K.; two arti­cles), NRC Han­dels­blad (one arti­cle). He cites the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change (IPCC) twice—the Fourth Assess­ment Report is cited once a sup­ple­men­tal report on Indian glac­i­ers is cited once. Almost all of the ref­er­ences Cuc­cinelli cites refer to Climate-gate or a hand­ful of errors in the IPCC’s Fourth Assess­ment Report. TCR won­ders whether some­one who truly believes in “good science”—as Cuc­cinelli claims—could hon­estly call such a one-sided (and sci­en­tif­i­cally sparse) lit­er­a­ture review sufficient.

TCR sub­mits that the the­ory behind AGW is not new, is not based on “fal­si­fied” data, and does not orig­i­nate in faulty com­puter mod­els. TCR reviewed the state of cli­mate sci­ence in an essay on Michael Crichton’s turgid anti-global warm­ing tirade, State of Fear, in 2008. The fact is that the the­ory of green­house warm­ing is nearly 200 years old, dat­ing back to the work of the French math­e­mati­cian, Jean Bap­tiste Joseph Fourier, who first described the so-called green­house effect in the 1824. (TCR admits to miss­ing the 1824 paper—he cited an 1827 paper in the State of Fear essay.)

Fourier’s early insights were tested by schol­ars such as John Tyn­dall, who in 1861 demon­strated that trace gases in the atmosphere—such as car­bon dioxide—can absorb heat in the atmos­phere and, as a result, affect the global cli­mate. Svante August Arrhe­nius began to model how Earth sur­face tem­per­a­tures would be affected by changes in the con­cen­tra­tion of car­bon diox­ide (which he called car­bonic acid) in the atmos­phere. The first of sev­eral papers he wrote on the topic was pub­lished in 1896. (Those inter­ested in the his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment of cli­mate change the­ory should check out James Fleming’s online col­lec­tion, “Cli­mate Change and Anthro­pogenic Green­house Warm­ing: A Selec­tion of Key Arti­cles, 1824–1995, with Inter­pre­tive Essays.”)

Given the length of Cleaveland’s bib­li­og­ra­phy, it is clear that quite a bit more research into cli­mate change has been pub­lished since 1896, so Cuccinelli’s focus on the ques­tions about alleged flaws in one data set seems rather myopic.

TCR has one final sci­en­tific point to address: Cuccinelli’s asser­tion that cli­mate mod­els pre­dict a “con­stant warm­ing” from AGW. TCR sug­gests a one-word reply: bunk. No one who has read Edward Lorenz’s 1963 paper, “Deter­min­is­tic non­pe­ri­odic flow,” would expect such a sim­ple response. In that paper Lorenz described the “but­ter­fly effect” — in which tiny changes in ini­tial con­di­tions could pro­duce dras­tic changes in out­comes — and helped found chaos theory.

Many fac­tors affect Earth sur­face tem­per­a­tures: inten­sity of incom­ing solar radi­a­tion, albedo (reflectance) of the atmos­phere and sur­face, ele­va­tion of the sur­face, time of year and day (which affect solar angle), shad­ing effects, par­tic­u­lates (such as vol­canic dust), absorp­tion and emis­sion of heat by the ground sur­face, and much, much more. Changes in any one of these can affect the long-term trend in Earth sur­face tem­per­a­tures. (For those of you who wish to exper­i­ment with some of those fac­tors and see how they affect tem­per­a­ture, check out the solar radi­a­tion model TCR has been tin­ker­ing with for nearly 20 years now. It pre­dicts aver­age daily tem­per­a­ture for a site based on lat­i­tude, ele­va­tion, time of year, slope con­fig­u­ra­tion, and cool­ing effects from evap­o­tran­spi­ra­tion. TCR admits the model could use bet­ter documentation.)

Given the dearth of sci­en­tific basis for Cuccinelli’s claims, TCR won­ders what has moti­vated him to fight the EPA’s green­house gas reg­u­la­tions and to inves­ti­gate Michael Mann. Sig­nif­i­cant clues are given in the audio from his Feb. 17, 2010, press conference:

“The deci­sion by the EPA to reg­u­late car­bon diox­ide as a dan­ger­ous pol­lu­tant is going to have a severe impact on the peo­ple of Vir­ginia and on Virginia’s econ­omy. This is a very seri­ous con­cern to me. The pres­i­dent has already indi­cated that he wants to force the coal indus­try out of busi­ness because of the car­bon diox­ide emit­ted when coal is burned to cre­ate elec­tric­ity. Coal, as you know, is the eco­nomic engine of the south­west­ern part of Vir­ginia and is one of the main job providers down there. Not to men­tion over half of America’s elec­tric­ity comes from coal.

“Addi­tion­ally, coal pro­vides one of the cheap­est sources of elec­tric­ity for every Vir­gin­ian and for most Amer­i­cans. Get­ting rid of coal as a pri­mary source for Amer­i­can elec­tric­ity means that energy prices are going to sky­rocket, essen­tially gut­ting Amer­i­cans’ wal­lets at a time when we can least afford it. This becomes a back-door tax for every Amer­i­can, every Vir­gin­ian at a time when our econ­omy is already reeling.”

TCR believes that Cuc­cinelli revealed his true motive in these last two state­ments. The attor­ney gen­eral is not con­cerned with sound sci­ence, he ignores too much of it to be taken seri­ously on that point. His prime motive is to pro­tect the prof­itabil­ity of the coal indus­try despite the well doc­u­mented envi­ron­men­tal dam­age it causes.

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