The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has denied 10 petitions challenging its 2009 determination that climate change is real, is occurring due to emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities, and threatens human health and the environment.
The petitions to reconsider EPA's Endangerment Finding claim that climate science cannot be trusted, and assert a conspiracy that invalidates the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. After months of serious consideration of the petitions and of the state of climate change science, EPA finds no evidence to support these claims. In contrast, EPA's review shows that climate science is credible, compelling and growing stronger.
‘Defenders of the status quo will try to slow our efforts to get America running on clean energy,’ says Lisa P. Jackson, EPA administrator. ‘A better solution would be to join the vast majority of the American people who want to see more green jobs, more clean energy innovation and an end to the oil addiction that pollutes our planet and jeopardizes our national security.’
Petitioners say that e-mails disclosed from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate global temperature data. However, the EPA says it reviewed every e-mail and found this was simply a candid discussion of scientists working through issues that arise in compiling and presenting large, complex data sets. Four other independent reviews came to similar conclusions.
Petitioners also say that errors in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report call the entire body of work into question. Of the alleged errors, the EPA confirmed only two in a 3,000-page report. The first pertains to the rate of Himalayan glacier melt and the second to the percentage of the Netherlands below sea level. IPCC issued correction statements for both of these errors.
‘America's Climate Choices,’ a report from the National Academy of Sciences and the most recent assessment of the full body of scientific literature on climate change, along with the recently released ‘State of the Climate’ report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, both fully support the conclusion that climate change is real and poses significant risk to human and natural systems.
SOURCE: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
