Public comments on the draft fourth “National Assessment” of present and future climate change impacts on the U.S. are due at 11:59 PM tonight and will be embargoed from public release until after then. As soon as it is made public, we’ll link to our comments. Until then, just think about the previous three Assessments.

Reviewing the first one in 2000, myself and Chip Knappenberger discovered that the science team just happened to choose the two most extreme models (for temperature and precipitation) out of the 14 they considered. And then we discovered that they were worse than bad: when applied to a really simple record of temperature, they performed worse than a table of random numbers. Really, it was the same situation as if you took a multiple choice test with four possible answers, and somehow managed to get less than 25% right. That’s the highly sought after “negative knowledge,” something you might think impossible!

The second one (2009) was so bad that we covered it with a 211-page palimpsest, a document that looked exactly like the federal original in both design and content. Except that it contained all the missing science as well as correcting as many half-truths and incomplete statements as we could find. Like we said, that took 211 pages of beautiful typeset and illustrated prose.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was instrumental in producing the third (2014) Assessment, and in their press release at its debut, gushed that “it is a key deliverable in President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.” That has been recently undelivered.

So what did we say in our review of the upcoming fourth one? Well, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. 

UPDATE: comments by Ryan Maue and myself are now available on the Cato website.