Policy News - November 21, 2003

Lawsuit challenges data in national climate report

The first lawsuit to be filed under the U.S. Data Quality Act (DQA) asks the government to cease dissemination of the U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. An independent government advisory committee composed of industry, university, government, and special interest scientists developed the assessment, which attempts to identify regional effects from possible climate changes. Congress mandated in 1990 that the report be developed; it was published in 2000.

The controversial DQA essentially requires that any scientific document issued by the government include clearly supportable data and any uncertainties related to the topic. It was approved without any congressional hearings as an amendment to an appropriations bill and signed by President Clinton in late 2000. When it was enacted, business representatives vowed to use the bill language as a “weapon” to reign in regulation unsupported by science. Environmentalists criticized its passage and predicted it would be used to stop regulations aimed at protecting public health and the environment (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2002, 36, 443A).

As of October, the government had received 30 DQA petitions seeking changes, such as an attempt to block scientific research related to a regulation or to the minutes of a government advisory board hearing. Many of these petitions have been rejected because the modification being sought didn’t meet the federal standards that outline an appropriate DQA request. The U.S. EPA has received 14 such requests.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a nonprofit policy group dedicated to free enterprise, filed its lawsuit on August 6 and asked the federal court to order the White House Office of Science Technology and Policy to withdraw the assessment. The group claims that the assessment fails to meet the DQA’s scientific standards for objectivity and utility, because two of the models used “are incapable of providing reliable predictions.” These models led to “alarmist” predictions of regional effects and produced junk science, according to CEI lawyer Christopher Horner.

Scientists working to model global climate change agree that it’s difficult to predict climate-induced effects on a small scale, such as a geographic region. Indeed, the uncertainty factor increases as the area being modeled decreases. “That is true for global climate change models in general,” says Benjamin Preston, a senior research fellow at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “This feeds back into the uncertainties we know about climate change and the fact that we need to take these uncertainties into account.” Interestingly, one of the models cited in CEI’s lawsuit as generating alarmist scenarios produces results that are very similar to a model used at the well-respected Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. The Bush Administration has increased funding for this lab as part of its climate change research program.

With that in mind, CEI’s lawsuit may not get very far, Preston and others predict. The assertion by CEI lawyers “that the process was manipulated in order to project a worst-case scenario just doesn’t add up if you know anything about the kind of models that are out there and the kind of projections they make,” Preston says.

This marks the second lawsuit CEI has filed to persuade the government to “unpublish” the assessment, Horner says. In September 2001, the Bush Administration settled the first lawsuit with CEI by stating that the assessment and related documents don’t represent “policy positions” of the U.S. government. —CATHERINE M. COONEY