MILITARY: Coastlines plumbed for ancient data in Pentagon climate study

Possibly the Pentagon’s advice on this matter will find favor in the White House.

The hook for the $5.5 million boondoggle is “how rising seas and strengthening storms could affect coastal bases, perhaps causing facilities to be abandoned or moved over the next century.” Of course, the idea of shrieking press releases (and headlines soon thereafter) of a “Pentagon study predicts inundation” never entered anyone’s mind and are nothing we should look forward to, if history is any guide.

Yet, outside of certain hysterical quarters, sea level rise is not that great a mystery: it rises between coolings, particularly glaciations (ice ages) which we fortunately find ourselves in between. It does so at a fairly constant rate of about 8 inches per century. That remained true following the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid 19^th century until today, with no statistical change in the pace since then (unless you count the most recent years; read on). Then it falls. When things cool, as has been the case in recent years, sea level rise plateaus and even reverses depending on how great the cooling. Indeed, the satellites we already pay so much for – and which, like those measuring the (cooling) atmospheric temperatures, are being ignored – tell us that sea level rise peaked in 2005 (wow, this guy works fast!).

The point is, just as in the ongoing battle over redirecting the CIA to study “global warming”, it isn’t just that all sorts of government agencies are getting into areas that seem a tad silly, but that our government seems to have almost entirely lost focus in the process of rapidly expanding its size and scope.

Also along those lines, you read last week about the Obama administration siccing a taxpayer-funded agency to assail the work (and the person) of foreign academics who studied the performance of a foreign government’s policies, for the apparent reason that in doing so these academics embarrassed the Obama administration which touted the policies as a success and therefore their model for America. Falsely, it turned out. 

Well, yesterday I sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the Department of Energy headquarters seeking documents from the relevant headquarters office, which by chance is headed by Catherine Zoi, who was until recently a senior staffer for one of Al Gore’s “global warming” outfits. I also FOIA’d the agency that DoE HQ apparently sicced on the Spaniards (at whose orders we are going to find out), which is the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, both in DC and its field office in Golden, Colorado. One reason for FOIA-ing them all is that NREL and DoE are both on record swearing it was all the other guy’s idea. Hmm.

You will be kept apprised of the results, but I note one hitch uncovered in preparing these documents. It does seem that this most transparent government in history is cleverly trying to shield certain sensitive and priority developments from our transparency laws, such as FOIA. On DoE’s website we see such an attempt.

Types of Information

Q What types of information does the FOIA apply to?

The FOIA only applies to “agency records,” information in the possession and control of the government. Information contained in the files of Golden’s contractors, including the contractor that manages and operates DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is releasable under the FOIA only if the contract states that specific documents relating to work under the contract will be the property of the government. In such cases, the documents are contractually treated as government documents and are subject to a FOIA. The NREL contract does specify that some records are the property of the contractor and some are the property of the government. (emphases added)

In this case, NREL was outsourced at an estimated cost of $1.1 billion to something called the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, a group that is surely objective to the core about the costs and benefits of “renewable energy”. This transfer took place beginning in July of this year which, if my math is right, could be about the time the decision was made to go after the offending foreign academics. More later.

In response, Obama’s administration provided a lesson in how Big Government can be abused when its officials are angered and embarrassed, turning its institutions on a private individual, even a foreign academic whose offense was to produce scholarly research about his own nation’s policy failures.

Here is what happened. The Spanish “green jobs” study received substantial play in the U.S. media and gained favorable attention in the Wall Street Journal’s U.S., Europe and Asia editions, among other outlets. It came up in a White House press conference, embarrassing spokesman Robert Gibbs who boasted how he disagreed with the study and its conclusions while admitting he had not read it.

The rest of administration’s three-fold response was in sum highly troubling. The benign second step was to substitute, without missing a beat, Denmark for Spain in Obama’s ritual “look at what’s happening in…” litany of our environmental superiors (though that experiment, too, has been defrocked). Then things got ugly.

Someone in the administration actually dispatched a taxpayer-funded agency, the Department of Energy through its National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL), to produce a white paper slamming the study, providing the organized Left a risible tool to wave away the inconvenient. But the two young activists who wrote the paper merely further embarrassed the administration with their flailing complaints: the Spanish team failed to speculate in the absence of official data, and eschewed an economic model designed some time ago far to our east for central planners in favor of a real-world “opportunity cost” model used by people who invest their own money. Thus, spaketh our government, the study employs “non-traditional methodology” and is unworthy of consideration. Ahem.

Professor Dr. Gabriel Calzada, who led the research, visited Washington again this past week, issuing invitations in advance to all relevant federal offices to publicly debate or privately discuss the issue of Spain’s experience to which, we were serially lectured, we are to look for guidance. He was never given the courtesy of a response, let alone the satisfaction of a public contest of respective views.

Now consider two of the Spanish government’s three responses to this study which caused so much heartburn for the Obama administration: rhetorically, they slammed it (and the authors personally), while at the same time officially affirming it. In its April 30 Royal Decree, responding to the analyzed disaster, the Spanish government stated its electricity “rate deficit”, mainly caused by its scheme to push windmills and solar panels, “is deeply harming the system and puts at risk not only the financial situation of the electric sector companies´ but also sustainability of the system itself. This disadjustment turns out to be unsustainable and has grave consequences since it deteriorates the security and financial capacity of the investments necessary for providing electricity at the levels of quality and security the Spanish society demands.”

Translated, that means: yeah, what he said. Just so you fully grasp: the White House engaged a federal agency to (lamely) slam a study by foreign academics about a foreign government’s policies.

This brings us to today, reading that the International Energy Agency, a purportedly non-activist, non-partisan clearing house to which we are to turn for objective advice, has inexplicably published a rather odd praise for Spain’s glorious ‘green’ achievements. Spain, by the way, has increased its CO2 emissions 50% over Kyoto’s 1990 baseline from which they were to reduce said emissions. Can’t afford much more progress, guys.

The Spanish government’s third response – as reported this weekend in El Confidencial, though Prof. Calzada had told me about the numerous overtures as they were occurring – was to demand through its Education Minister that the university rescind the study that was embarrassing so many officials. This sleaze was a private affair, too unseemly even for the Socialist Zapatero government to try publicly, despite its radical green base openly decrying the academics’ “treason” for embarrassing Spain after its wonders were touted by El Uno.

The university has refused, as the paper meets all relevant requirements for an academic paper (unlike the U.S. government’s response, incidentally), and has been favorably received in the academic community, of all places.

Not that Spain’s behavior has been exemplary, but we should expect far better here. Team Obama are presumably done coming after the study and its authors, whose saving grace appears to be that they are not American citizens in these curious times. And I have no words to describe the feelings engendered when typing that sentence.