‘On July 9, 1970, citing rising concerns over environmental protection and conservation, President Richard Nixon transmitted Reorganization Plan No. 3 to the United States Congress by executive order, creating the EPA as a single, independent agency from a number of smaller arms of different federal agencies. Prior to the establishment of the EPA, the federal government was not structured to comprehensively regulate environmental pollutants.’

One of the first tasks was to extend the Clean Air Act of 1963 and Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977.

Air Pollution Control Acts were introduced elsewhere at about the same time. Regulations in Canada, the UK and Europe were instrumental in reducing the extent and number of serious smog events in the Northern Hemisphere in the 1980s-90s. At about the same time, New Zealand promulgated similar air pollution controls and enforcement and Australia followed suit in 1994.

By the 1990s, a more sinister air pollution source emerged that would negatively impact North American airsheds, as global consumerism fueled economic growth in Asia: transboundary aerosol transport to the Western US and Canada.

China has emerged as the number one importer of coal, and Australia the number one exporter. China and India, as consumers of coal from the Southern Hemisphere, are effectively moving pollution risk to the North, where it will have the most impact through icecap and glacier ablation.

You are absolutely certain that no one else should be certain? Or is it that people can be certain of what you think is true but for anything else, they can’t be?

Fran Manns, please refer to my policy on the use of my blog as a platform for nefarious activities: http://tinyurl.com/26esl3w You have been warned.

John Ehrlichman was from the Seattle area.

I am absolutely certain of one thing. People in positions of trust have violated the principles of the scientific method. The minute you believe your own hypothesis, you are a dead duck as a scientist.

â??What is the current scientific consensus on the conclusions reached by Drs. Mann, Bradley and Hughes? [Referring to the hockey stick propagated in UN IPCC 2001 by Michael Mann and debunked by McIntyre and McKitrick in 2003.]

Ans: Based on the literature we have reviewed, there is no overarching consensus on MBH98/99. As analyzed in our social network, there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.�

AD HOC COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE â??HOCKEY STICKâ?? GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION, also known as The Wegman report was authored by Edward J. Wegman, George Mason University, David W. Scott, Rice University, and Yasmin H. Said, The Johns Hopkins University with the contributions of John T. Rigsby, III, Naval Surface Warfare Center, and Denise M. Reeves, MITRE Corporation.

And my points about the really important things to teach people about science are still valid, and made in the context of a report from Oz that there are fundamentalists teaching in Australian Schools that people co-existed with dinosaurs without scrutiny from School administrators because religious education is taught by volunteers.

Anyway, I would not expect the numbers to be even close, given that these are coming from a guy who thinks maybe (and he may have been correct) that there are two “monitoring stations”) The memo does not say a 10 foot rise in sea level by 2000 nor does it link 20% increase in CO2 with a high sea level rise, but rather a rise in CO2 which he got almost exactly right (we’re at 20 in 2010) leading to warming which he got way wrong, the kind of error one would expect if someone used the wrong number. But actually, I’m pretty sure the Co2->T formula we all use today did not exist in its present form yet) and THEN the sea levels rise.

Of course, the 10 foot number is pulled out of his butt.

The reference to Seattle is strange.

Mike, the Swedish chemist was probably Svante Arrhenius (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius), who calculated a possible temperature change from a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 1896.

There is something very interesting about the interaction between such informal assertions and public expectations, as there is about the public expectations about the veracities of theories and the possibility of absolute truth of hypotheses derived from them. The issues about the failures of public education in science are more complex than a recent survey in Oz revealed. It is less important that students are ignorant of advanced mathematics or the “facts” of advanced physics, as that they are ignorant about the process of science and how they should react to scientific uncertainties.