Story Comments

This comment is below the standard viewing threshold View It »

Neither John Carlin nor John Davidson, the two authors of the draft that never found its way into the published EPA report, are climate scientists but rather economists. I've read their draft, and it regurgitates many of the climate myths that abound on the Internet but have been refuted by data in the climatology and geophysics literature. In contrast, the published EPA report was drafted by a group that include expert climatologists.

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-24-scant-evid...

Wouldn’t it be terrible if the Obama administration turned out to be manipulating science to fit its own ideology? Especially after Obama declared, to much fanfare, that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over”?

Yeah, that would make a helluva story: “Look, the new guy is just like the old guy!”

Well yeah, but it hasn’t happened yet, at least not in the way the Competitive Enterprise Institute claims in a release it sent this morning under the headline “BREAKING: EPA Suppresses Internal Global Warming Study.”

The free-market think tank, which has a history of intellectually hi-larious denialism, says the “Environment (sic) Protection Agency” silenced an internal dissenter in the course of its endangerment finding, a process that concluded in April that greenhouse-gases threaten public health and can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

According to CEI, the dissenter wanted to include “a significant internal critique of the agency’s global warming position” but was stifled because the report didn’t fit the political conclusion the EPA had already reached. The group published four EPA emails as evidence of political maneuvering within the agency.

And what do the emails reveal? That there’s nothing to this story. An EPA economist wanted to give scientific opinion, which wasn’t accepted—most likely because it’s outside his area of expertise and training.

0 Replies