Carbongate (Cont'd)
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, August 27, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Junk Science:
The EPA may be considering closing the watchdog office that exposed the
flimsy evidence of man-caused warming. So much for the administration's
promise to "restore science to its rightful place."
Read More: Global Warming
Recently we commented on the plight of Dr. Allen Carlin, the EPA
senior research analyst at the National Center for Environmental
Economics who dared to say, in essence, that emperor Al Gore and his
environmental sycophants at the Environmental Protection Agency wore no
clothes.
The EPA had been working on an "endangerment finding" that would say
carbon dioxide, rather than being the basis for all life on earth, was
a dangerous pollutant and allowing the EPA to regulate it and five
other gases down to your lawn mower.
Along came Carlin, who decided to do something unheard of and
actually check the empirical data. After examining numerous global
warming studies, Carlin — who holds a doctorate in economics with an
undergraduate degree in physics — said his research showed that
"available observable data . . . invalidate the hypothesis" that humans
cause dangerous global warming. The EPA has "tended to accept the
findings reached by outside groups . . . as being correct without a
careful and critical examination."
With the Democrats about to push the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade
legislation, it didn't help for Carlin to report, for example, that
ocean cycles, rather than anthropogenic carbon dioxide, appeared to be
the single best explanation of temperature variations.
Carlin's report said the EPA, by adopting a 2007 U.N. report, is
relying on research "which is at best three years out-of-date in a
rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings.
One of Gore's favorite grim fairy tales is the melting of the
Greenland ice sheet and glaciers the size of Tennessee roaming the
North Atlantic. "The idea that warming temperatures will cause
Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new
results indicating little evidence for operations of such processes,"
Carlin observed.
This did not sit well with his superiors, who essentially told him
to go to his room and shut up. On March 12, Carlin's director, Al
McGartland, forbade him from having "any direct communication" with
anyone outside his office about his study.
When Carlin persisted, requesting that his study be forwarded to the
EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, which directs the EPA's climate
change program, McGartland replied in an e-mail:
"The administrator and the (Obama) administration has decided to
move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal
or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of
your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a
very negative impact on our office."
The Competitive Enterprise Institute, which in June unearthed the
Carlin story and the e-mails that documented the EPA cover-up, now
reports that rather than shoot the messenger, the Obama administration
and the EPA want to close the office he works at.
What we dubbed "carbongate" continues. The administration that
promised transparency becomes increasingly opaque as its media
co-conspirators say nothing about this "chilling effect."