Paper skeptical of global warming suppressed by EPA

..the June 29 FoxNews.com article about the controversy stated that "[a]n EPA official told FOXNews.com on Monday [June 29] that Carlin, who is an economist -- not a scientist -- included 'no original research' in his report." The article also quoted an official statement from the EPA that included a similar claim about Carlin:

The EPA said in a written statement that Carlin's opinions were in fact considered, and that he was not even part of the working group dealing with climate change in the first place.


"Claims that this individual's opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This administration and this EPA administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency and science-based decision making," the statement said. "The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding."

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Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote in a June 26 RealClimate.org post that in reading the internal EPA document that Carlin co-authored, "[o]ne can see a number of basic flaws [in its main points]; the complete lack of appreciation of the importance of natural variability on short time scales, the common but erroneous belief that any attribution of past climate change to solar or other forcing means that CO2 has no radiative effect, and a hopeless lack of familiarity of the basic science of detection and attribution."

In a June 26 CBSNews.com article reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency "may have suppressed" an internal report on climate change, senior correspondent Declan McCullagh uncritically reported the document's false claim that, in the article's words, "global temperatures have declined for 11 years." McCullagh identified that claim as one of "a number of recent developments [one of the document's authors, EPA researcher Alan Carlin] said the EPA did not consider" before it submitted a key finding that could lead to EPA regulation of carbon dioxide. In fact, the claim that "global temperatures have declined for 11 years" is simply not true. Annual global average temperatures have both risen and fallen over the past 11 years, and while there have been some relatively cooler years during that period -- including a decline in each of the past three relative to the year before -- climate scientists reject the idea that those temperatures are any indication that global warming is slowing or does not exist. Scientists have identified a long-term warming trend spanning several decades that is independent from the normal climate variability -- which includes relatively short-term changes in climate due to events like El Niño and La Niña -- to which they attribute the recent relatively cooler temperatures.

As for cap and trade ... just looks like a way of saying we're addressing the theoretical problem without actually doing anything more than creating a new marketplace.