"restore science to its rightful place"

FROM-IBD

Carbongate (Cont'd)

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."

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Carlin's report said the EPA, by adopting a 2007 U.N. report, is relying on research "which is at best three years out-of-date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings.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."

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