State suing for responsible scientific conclusions

Houston Chronicle

Attorney General Greg Abbott

The Environmental Protection Agency recently concluded that man-made greenhouse gas emissions — including carbon dioxide — are harmful pollutants and must be regulated. The lawsuit I filed challenging that finding does not address the disputed science surrounding global warming. Instead, it focuses on the indisputable fact that the EPA relied on information that has been discredited, manipulated, lost or destroyed, and sometimes evaded peer review. The lawsuit does not attempt to show that the globe is not warming. It does, however, show that the process used by the EPA in deciding to regulate greenhouse gases is riddled with errors that render its conclusion untrustworthy.

Before regulating man-made greenhouse gas emissions, the EPA was required to conduct a scientific assessment. Rather than conduct its own assessment, the EPA relied on reports by third parties. The EPA’s conclusions rest primarily on information gathered by a creation of the United Nations called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC — an organization that has become mired in scandal because the reliability, objectivity and scientific validity of its work has come under fire.

For example, the IPCC reported that glaciers in the Himalayas were rapidly melting and would disappear by 2035. However, after the EPA reached its conclusion, the IPCC had to reverse itself and acknowledge that the Himalayan glaciers claim was false. The IPCC’s chairman was informed of the problem months before the erroneous report was published, but he did nothing to correct the report. Why? Perhaps because the research institute the chairman runs was seeking millions in grant funding to study those very same not so rapidly declining Himalayan glaciers.