Watson, HL

Global-warming alarmists continually refer to a “scientific consensus” to support drastic policy proposals. They insist on peer-reviewed publications as the standard for debate, while ignoring that standard when the standard will not support their hysterical claims. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report had notable examples, such as Amazongate (where rain-forest sensitivity to small changes in rainfall were well publicized, but were based on a blog post from an activist website); and the widely hyped, but wildly unscientific, claims of the imminent demise of Himalayan glaciers. The federal government also publishes a climate assessment report. Patrick Michaels of Cato and Harold Doiron of the Right Climate Stuff team have analyzed the draft of the most recent National Climate Assessment and found its scientific rigor to be wanting. http://www.heritage.org/events/2013/05/national-climate

pooley:

A document showing a similar pattern of changes is the 2003 "Strategic Plan for the United States Climate Change Science Program," a thick report describing the reorganization of government climate research that was requested by Mr. Bush in his first speech on the issue, in June 2001. The document was reviewed by an expert panel assembled in 2003 by the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists largely endorsed the administration's research plan, but they warned that the administration's procedures for vetting reports on climate could result in excessive political interference with science.

Another political appointee who has played an influential role in adjusting language in government reports on climate science is Dr. Harlan L. Watson, the chief climate negotiator for the State Department, who has a doctorate in solid-state physics but has not done climate research.

In an Oct. 4, 2002 memo to James R. Mahoney, the head of the United States Climate Change Science Program and an appointee of Mr. Bush, Mr. Watson "strongly" recommended cutting boxes of text referring to the findings of a National Academy of Sciences panel on climate and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that periodically reviews research on human-caused climate change.

The boxes, he wrote, "do not include an appropriate recognition of the underlying uncertainties and the tentative nature of a number of the assertions."

While those changes were made nearly two years ago, recent statements by Dr. Watson indicate that the admnistration's position has not changed.

"We are still not convinced of the need to move forward quite so quickly," he told the BBC in London last month. "There is general agreement that there is a lot known, but also there is a lot to be known."

romm

Blame themselves? You’re getting colder.? You’re getting (globally) warmer….

Below is another dispatch from the climate talks in Poland by CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light, first printed in WonkRoom.

In one of the more surreal moments of this year’s UN climate change talks, Bush’s chief environmental adviser blamed Russiafor the Bush administration’s climate change obstructionism.

The US negotiating team featuring James Connaughton, Paula Dobriansky, and Harlan Watson appeared Thursday evening for a press conference where they largely dodged a series of questions about the last eight years of inaction, obfuscation, and general mayhem. When asked by Fioney Harvey of The Financial Times: “If you look back over the course of the last few years, is there anything you would have done differently or is there anything you wished had happened but didn’t happen?” Connaughton, Bush’s chief environmental adviser, devised a mindbending response:

I wish first that Russia had made its mind up sooner as to whether it was going to join Kyoto or not. I think we lost a couple of years of work while that decision was being made. It almost didn’t matter which way they came out but we lost a couple years until it was decided whether Kyoto would go forward or not. As soon as it was decided that Kyoto would go forward then countries began to face up to the reality of what they needed to do at the national level to work toward meeting those commitments.

Except, of course, Bush didn’t “face up” to any such thing, instead waiting until this year to propose a global warming plan sufficient only in Bizarro World.

The packed crowd outside the press briefing room watching on monitors erupted in hoots and shouts audible inside. Connaughton soldiered on, continuing for over five minutes, in an excursus on eliminating tariffs for technology transfer, getting a common measure on carbon reduction, and other issues that any climate wonk would love. The high point was midway through in a plea for more cooperation:

Everyone has to come together on these things. It would have been nice. I’m just pleased we are where we are today in fact with a work program not just of negotiation but a work program of cooperative action. And I think that could be more aggressive and move faster.

Watson, who also has claimed to “understand the real world,” gave a much shorter, more existential, even zenlike answer: “I take the world as it is. My only regret is that I’m not twenty years younger, maybe a lot taller, and a lot more handsome.”

Indeed. Who wouldn’t have wanted that?

*I have the same exact regret -- that Watson isn't 20 years younger, since then President Bush would not have named the global warming denier/delayer and long-time conservative stooge (that's the nicest word I could think of) as [Special Envoy to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the U.S. Department of State, a position that holds the rank of ambassador!*]