[Update 07/29/10: The EPA has announced its decision to deny all the petitions asking it to reconsider its Endangerment Finding, claiming that it could find no evidence in the Climategate emails indicating that climate change science could not be trusted. Read on to see if you think this decision is justified.]

While the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency would surely love to use the findings of the Independent Climate Change Email Inquiry (aka the Muir Russell report) to brush aside the many challenges mounted, in response to the Climategate email scandal, to the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public’s health and welfare (a finding which enables the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions), they’ll find little in the Muir Russell report to help in their defense.

Well, I should qualify that.…

Last week, an advance copy of a paper to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) was released which reported that a collection of “experts” suggests that climate tipping points (codename for something bad but we don’t know exactly what) would be knocked over by 2200 if we stay on our current greenhouse gas emissions pathway (for about the next 200 years). Underlying these views is the experts’ opinions as to what the earth’s equilibrium climate sensitivity—the rise in global temperatures resulting from a doubling of the earth carbon dioxide concentration—likely is.

But do the experts opinions actually reflect the scientific knowledge on these subjects?

The answer is no.

In fact, the experts’ opinions tended towards the extreme, despite recent science which should have reeled them in.…

[Editor note: David (P. D.) Henderson, formerly head of the Economics and Statistics Department of the OECD, is currently Chairman of the Academic Advisory Council of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is headed by Nigel (Lord) Lawson). This is his first post at MasterResource.]

Over the past 22 years, governments everywhere and a great many outside observers have put their trust in the official expert advisory process as a whole and the IPCC process in particular.

I have come to believe that this widespread trust is unwarranted. But it is not just the IPCC process that is in question here. The basic problem of unwarranted trust goes further: it extends to the chronically biased treatment of climate change issues by responsible departments and agencies which the Panel reports to, and in nationally-based organizations which they finance.…

On June 10, the U.S. Senate will debate and vote on a resolution of disapproval (S.J.Res.26), sponsored by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to stop the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from ‘enacting’ controversial global warming policies through the regulatory back door.

S.J.Res.26 would overturn the EPA’s endangerment finding, a December 2009 rulemaking in which the agency concluded that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The endangerment finding is both trigger and precedent for sweeping policy changes Congress never approved. America could end up with a bundle of greenhouse gas regulations more costly and intrusive than any climate bill or treaty the Senate has declined to pass or ratify, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.

At a minimum, as former Virginia Gov. George Allen and I explain elsewhere, unless stopped, the EPA will be in a position to determine the stringency of fuel economy standards for the auto industry, set climate policy for the nation, and even amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to the agency by Congress.…