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EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming
theodp writes "CNET reports that less than two weeks before the EPA formally submitted its pro-carbon dioxide 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.' In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: '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 employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic. In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.' BTW, the official who chastised Carlin also found himself caught up in a 2005 brouhaha over mercury emissions after top EPA officials ordered the findings of a Harvard University study stripped from public records."
If you read through the entire article, you can find some interesting information on what it was he wanted us to do. Instead of regulating CO2 emissions, he states that it is more economical to reduce the amount of radiation from the sun that reaches the earth. I don't really understand his position. In effect, he's saying, "I don't believe in global warming. However, even if I did, there's no reason to regulate CO2 emissions." He seems bent against regulation of CO2 at any cost.
Secondly, he also states that global temperatures have fallen for the last 11 years. I really would like to see his work. This article (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/83), reported in the September 26 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows global temperatures rising for the last 30 years.
This man strikes me as being very much against any type of environmental regulation, and I'm not surprised that the EPA is trying to silence him.
They said he's not a climate scientist, but he has an undergrad physics degree and a PhD in economics and he's seems to have spent most of his career writing position papers for economics think tanks! Heck, that should be enough to qualify him as a client scientist...oh wait. What I mean is, with those credentials he should be able to practice dentistry and set policy on...no, that's not it.
He's a...race car driver? No, that's not it either.
Let me think.
I know! He's an economist.
So now all I have to do is prove that climate science is a subset of economics and the "how dare they say he isn't a climate scientist" outrage will be justified.
--MarkusQ
P.S. From what I can gather, the "suppressed opinion" was just that--an opinion. It isn't like the guy had gone out and done any original research.
The point still stands though. There's a lot of people who just don't understand the value of limited government. This is a huge piece of the value: What if they're all stupid and evil in the government? If they don't have any power, it really doesn't matter.
Once you give them power, you better be certain they're all infallible. If you can't be certain of that, then don't give them power.
Unbelievably, despite the fact that I am working on a deliverable for this coming week, I took the time to a) RTFM on CNET, and b) download the PDF of the author's report.
I read through the table of contents, and thought it was worth scanning through portions of the document.
Ironic Item One
In the executive summary, the author chides the EPA as an organization for relying on decades of work by the IPCC, and thousands of person-hours involved in climate science that were brought to bear on the IPCC reports over the last several years. The author points out that the IPCC reports did not include the most recent findings regarding, among several phenomena, solar sunspot cycles, cosmic rays, and the melting of Greenland's ice sheet. The author supports his contention that sunspot cycles and cosmic rays affect Earth's climate by citing one or two, non-peer-reviewed postings to web sites.
Interestingly the most recent peer-reviewed findings regarding all of these items indicate that a) sunspot cycles have nothing to do with global mean temperatures; b) cosmic rays have nothing to do with global mean temperatures; c) Greenland's ice sheet continues to melt at a fairly good clip.
Ironic, and damaging, Item Two
Scanning through the report, the reader comes to page 64 of the report, 79 of the PDF, and finds this heading:
The author then goes on to point out how the following aspects of life in the US have improved over the last century or so, despite rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations:
Then, the kicker comes on page 66; I quote:
While the author does cite a number of actual scientific reports, the text quoted here and the failure to consider the entire constellation of improvements wrought by technology over the last century render his entire report ridiculous.
If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law;
This may be true, but Government control of medicine is actually worse. I live in Britain...
Congratulations, you live with one of the worst implemented of socialized medicine.
Still, many of us choose to buy private health insurance as well, paying twice simply because the quality of NHS care is so poor. It is poor because it is inefficient, and it is inefficient because it is run by a Government monopoly staffed by more bureaucrats than doctors.
I'm sure it's terrible, but statistically, you still pay less than the average US citizen with much, much better results. It may seem bad to you over there, but the grass is definitely browner over here. The rates of people going blind from preventable causes, is absurdly higher here, for example. The correlation between wealth and lifespan is much more drastic. The overall lifespan is shorter.
. An American may lose his house to pay for an operation, but at least he gets the operation...
Fewer and fewer have houses to lose, in no small part because of health care costs and trying to get a loan so you can get medical treatment is not going to happen. It's a bad bet. I have a friend who is naturally skinny and tall. He can't get insurance at all because he is clinically underweight. I know a girl who is short. Clinically overweight, no insurance for her. Most doctors won't even treat them even if they have cash. They don't go to the hospital when they get very ill, because they simply can't afford it. One had something stuck in their eye, but decided to wait it out and hope they would not lose vision in that eye, because the alternative was losing everything she owned. The other spent a week in massive pain because of a serious infection of the inner ear. Again, no option other than begging people he knew with money in the hopes someone would help. You assert that Americans get the operation but a huge number of us certainly don't. In the UK they prioritize by severity of condition but here if you don't have the money you just suffer in pain or even die. I have other friends stuck in jobs that provide health insurance. The job is terrible but they can't ever quit because it's the only way they can get healthcare. Oh, and what about me. I'm physically fit, not too old and have no serious medical conditions. I will never, ever be able to buy medical insurance again because I had an inexplicable illness once and they never figured out what it was, so I'm a poor investment for insurance companies too.
Sorry, but the US has every other first world nation pretty well beat for worst health care and there are plenty of numbers to back that up.
Climatologists have already reached a very solid consensus that CO2 emissions *must* be reduced at *any* cost.
That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists. The consensus is that CO2 is increasing, that CO2 is highly correlated with historical temperature changes, and that the last century of climate change is caused primarily by humans. There is far less consensus over the exact changes that will occur, that they will all necessarily all be bad, or that we must reduce them at all costs.
Not a typewriter
I find it interesting that mentioning Obama's middle name is considered "taboo". Now, why is that? Hmmmm???
It's not a taboo, it's just doing that makes you look stupid. After all, people don't usually write "George Walker Bush" or "Franklin Delano Roosevelt" in full, either. Same goes for Obama - only context when his middle name is spelt out is generally when someone is trying to hint at his "un-American" ancestry.
> Why don't we examine the content of his report before disregarding it based on his non-qualifications.
Because people hired to make noise must be disregarded eventually. But since the noise-making apparently succeded enough to get a slashdot post, I can at least link to an examination at
deep climate.
Short version: He cut and pasted from various contrarian blogs and astroturf organisations - the ones that are now shouting censorhip - rewriting it slightly to remove too obvious editorialising. The actual content is standard issue denialist fare: misrepresenting papers (and ignoring the protests when the author complains), along with some long discredited talking points (global warming stopped in 1998, and anyway it was the sun and cosmic rays that did it)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
"I have yet to see *one* criticism of something in the Carlin paper [snip] if you actually looked at the linked comments paper, it attempts to raise questions. Points to new studies, revised data, etc."
Can you point to *one* paragraph, "new study" or "data revision" in the report that you think is worthwhile debating? - All I can see are the same old arguments and misinformation put out out by the anti-science lobbyists at CEI and other FF think tanks that have been debunked a million times over. Here are a few specific critisisims...
1. He claims that tempratures have been trending downwards for the past 11yrs - this can be debunked by a simple google search and is laughable to anyone who has looked at the temprate records.
2. He blathers on about sunspots and cosmic rays - a theory born from a book by a self-agrandising author and completely unsupported in the litrature, debunked in detail by yours trully here.
3. He complains the last IPCC report is 3 years old and thus out of date. - Fucking nonsense.
4. He claims that the 1998 temprature spike cannot be explained - maybe it's a mystery to him but yet another simple google search shows it's well known that the 1998 spike was due to El Nino.
I stopped there because my head was about to explode. Suffice to say that after skimming what I was sure would be 98 pages of anti-science drivel I no longer think he should be sacked, I think he should be prosecuted for collusion and conspiricy.
"all the more reason to not rush through it to satisfy political whims of the day!"
I'm sorry to say, and mean no disrespect, this is exacly what the psuedo-skeptical slimeballs at CEI want you to think. They lost the technical debate over a decade ago and have been promoting "debate" as a delay tactic ever since. These are the same people who promoted "tabacco scientists" in the eighties and are still recieving funding from Phillip Morris. They are the scum of the earth and I don't find it the least bit "bizzare" that the "slashdot crowd" are calling bullshit on this particular example of Machevelian politics.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Have you ever seen an atom? How many scientists have actually reproduced the Rutherford scattering experiment? Well, most scientists have not, so everybody is following the consensus that atoms are built in a certain way. Damn, most people rely on the consensus about the world being round instead of flat—there is not that much space in the ISS.
I work with methanol, and I never ran spectroscopy to ascertain that methanol actually is CH3OH. I never checked out that the gas it reacts into actually is CO2. I never checked out the circuits in the mass-flow controllers to check they are measuring the right flow, and even then I would have to check that Maxwell's laws are actually true.
Everybody, and this goes for scientists too, make a huge number of reasonable assumptions. That's the consensus, and it is a consensus because it works.
Strawman. Who would those be? Einstein changed the view more than any other, and the only reason certain people frowned upon him was unrelated to his science—he was a Jew. Galileo was surely frowned upon, but certainly not by scientists; and what about the discovery of DNA, the proof of Poincaré's conjecture, nuclear physics—were all those scientists doing ground-breaking work being "frowned upon"?
In fact, making bold new claims is all there is to a scientist's life. You need to publish new stuff, which needs to pass anonymous peer review. It's not just a formality, and when I was called for some reviews I have actually sunk a couple of papers which made fundamental mistakes. The problem you have is, you cannot just make absurd claims without any proof on the only basis of faith or personal political bias.
... and that is misleading, bordering on falsehood. It has never happened this fast in nature, which leaves human activity as the most likely cause. If you make this kind of extraordinary claims you should follow it up with extraordinary proof.
Oh my god, gas-guzzling climate-change deniers have interbred with the evolution-denying fundies! Let's hope they do not meet the flat-earthers too...
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