EPA: ‘We believe in Global Warming; naysayers shut-up!’
How strange the world has become, when the top Google hits on a story about media lies and Leftist fear-mongering go to… CBS! I saw the story on Fox, but CBS appears to have the ‘scoop’ about the EPA scientist of 30 years, Alan Carlin, being told to keep his report to himself, as it explained in policy wonk-speak that Global Warming is a myth. I will get to what CBS reported, but a quick aside: newspapers have tremendous power to shape opinion in part by choosing what NOT to wrote, what TO write, and HOW to write it. The power extends even further though– when printing a story from the wire services, newspapers can use whatever headline best fits the ‘facts’ they want others to learn. So while most independent media use the headline, ‘EPA suppresses own scientists for raising doubts about global warming’, or ‘EPA covers up science skeptical of global warming’, the New York Times writes ‘Two EPA Staffers Question Science Behind Climate ‘Endangerment’ Proposal,’ and releases the story mid-day on a Friday, when nobody is likely to see it. What a surprise.
You can read the report by Carlin for yourself, at least the draft report— don’t expect the EPA to spend time using the good fonts with this story! The news is not new to those who truly follow the science– that global temps have decreased for 11 years now, and that arctic ice is growing, not shrinking– even as China adds billions of vehicles to their roads. Per CBS:
After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. “My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide),” he said. “There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They’re not going up, and if anything they’re going down.”
Carlin’s report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there’s “little evidence” that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth’s temperature.
(Note– the solar radiation effect was the topic of a National Geographic article mentioned in an earlier post).
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency — and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.
Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBS News.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. “It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else,” Carlin said. “That was obviously coming from higher levels.”
E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to “have any direct communication” with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.
“I was told for probably the first time in I don’t know how many years exactly what I was to work on,” said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. “And it was not to work on climate change.” One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.
Wow. Don’t you love the ‘openness’ of the Obama administration?
