Tag: News

By Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner
Alan Carlin, the senior EPA research analyst who authored a study critical of global warming that was suppressed by agency officials, has broken his silence and spoken on Fox News about his situation. Carlin told “Fox & Friends” Steve Ducy and Gretchen Carlson that his most important conclusion in the study was that the U.S. should not rely upon recommendations of the UN in making policy decisions regarding global warming. “The most important conclusion, in my view, was that EPA needed to look at the science behind global warming and not depend upon reports issued by the United Nations, which is what they were thinking of doing and in fact have done,” Carlin said. Asked what happened to his study once it was completed, Carlin said “my supervisors decided not to forward it to the group within EPA who had the responsibility for preparing an overall report which would guide EPA on whether to find that the emission of global warming gases would be something that EPA should regulate.” You can watch entire interview with Carlin here. Carlin has been at EPA for 38 years and until the Fox interview was telling reporters seeking interviews that he was instructed by EPA officials not to speak with them. He almost certainly risks retalitation by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and other Obama appointees within the agency. There are federal laws designed to protect whistle blowers like Carlin from political retaliation. It will be fascinating to watch how an administration of the Left deals with a whistleblower who for whatever reason opposes their political agenda. Will they persecute him or protect him? I’ve had occasion to deal with quite a few whistle blowers over the years and they generally fall into two categories: First are the sincere employees who see something they believe to be wrong, are rejected when they go through channels seeking change, and are then subjected to reprisals, big and small, which ultimately exact an incredibly high emotional, professional and financial toll. It is not uncommon for these folks to become obsessed with seeking vindication, to suffer nervous breakdowns or end up divorced. Then there are the others who somehow manage to maintain an emotional and professional balance while maintaining the rightness of their cause and pursuing it to a conclusion. It often takes years, but eventually they sometimes win vindication, though by that time the original controversy is usually long past and the wrong they exposed has either been forgotten, papered over or, occasionally, addressed and remedied. A great example of this second kind of whistle blower is William Clinkscales, a man I greatly admire who exposed hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud at the General Services Administration (GSA) during the Carter years, and was put through hell as his reward. He was vindicated by President Reagan who honored his service and recognized the importance of what he had done. Bill once told me of his being reassigned to a do-nothing job as his boss in effect saying to him: “Now Bill, in this extremely important new job I am giving you, your task is to watch that flagpole out in front of the GSA headquarters and if it moves, you come tell me immediately.” I still chuckle when I think of Bill telling me that, but it was indicative of the lot that too often greets whistle blowers like Alan Carlin. Carlin told Fox that “things are a little tense, but as of last night, I still had a job.” Sounds like he is expecting the worst. My prediction in this case is that Carlin will be stripped of duties, given an office that was previously used as a broom closet and transferred to a duty location as far from EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. as possible. Or he will soon opt for retirement, which will then free him to write and speak as he pleases, secure in his receipt of a pension from the federal government’s old Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) broke the story about Carlin’s study being suppressed last week and has posted extensive information about the situation. It appears the story has generated so much interest that CEI’s web site is overwhelmed with traffic, as it is taking a loooonnnnnggggg time to load. UPDATE: CEI demands EPA hear public comments on suppressed study The good folks at CEI have issued a statement today demanding that EPA reopen the comment period on the proposed rule on the agency’s plans to regulate global warming emissions – CO2, the same thing every human being breathes out during the normal course of living – and to which the Carlin study was addressed.

By Judson Berger, Fox News
A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency’s alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming. The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin’s report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.”He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he’s ordered an investigation. “We’re going to expose it.” The controversy comes after the House of Representatives passed a landmark bill to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, one that Inhofe said will be “dead on arrival” in the Senate despite President Obama’s energy adviser voicing confidence in the measure. According to internal e-mails that have been made public by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Carlin’s boss told him in March that his material would not be incorporated into a broader EPA finding and ordered Carlin to stop working on the climate change issue. The draft EPA finding released in April lists six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, that the EPA says threaten public health and welfare.An EPA official told FOXNews.com on Monday that Carlin, who is an economist — not a scientist — included “no original research” in his report. The official said that Carlin “has not been muzzled in the agency at all,” but stressed that his report was entirely “unsolicited.” “It was something that he did on his own,” the official said. “Though he was not qualified, his manager indulged him and allowed him on agency time to draft up … a set of comments.” Despite the EPA official’s remarks, Carlin told FOXNews.com on Monday that his boss, National Center for Environmental Economics Director Al McGartland, appeared to be pressured into reassigning him. Carlin said he doesn’t know whether the White House intervened to suppress his report but claimed it’s clear “they would not be happy about it if they knew about it,” and that McGartland seemed to be feeling pressure from somewhere up the chain of command. Carlin said McGartland told him he had to pull him off the climate change issue. “It was reassigning you or losing my job, and I didn’t want to lose my job,” Carlin said, paraphrasing what he claimed were McGartland’s comments to him. “My inference (was) that he was receiving some sort of higher-level pressure.” Carlin said he personally does not think there is a need to regulate carbon dioxide, since “global temperatures are going down.” He said his report expressed a “good bit of doubt” on the connection between the two. Specifically, the report noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend over the past 11 years, that scientists do not necessarily believe that storms will become more frequent or more intense due to global warming, and that the theory that temperatures will cause Greenland ice to rapidly melt has been “greatly diminished.” Carlin, in a March 16 e-mail, argued that his comments are “valid, significant” and would be critical to the EPA finding. McGartland, though, wrote back the next day saying he had decided not to forward his comments. “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” he wrote, according to the e-mails released by CEI. “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.” He later wrote an e-mail urging Carlin to “move on to other issues and subjects.” “I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc., at least until we see what EPA is going to do with climate,” McGartland wrote. 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.” The e-mail exchanges and suggestions of political interference sparked a backlash from Republicans in Congress. Reps. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Darrell Issa, R-Calif., also wrote a letter last week to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson urging the agency to reopen its comment period on the finding. The EPA has since denied the request. Citing the internal e-mails, the Republican congressmen wrote that the EPA was exhibiting an “agency culture set in a predetermined course.” “It documents at least one instance in which the public was denied access to significant scientific literature and raises substantial questions about what additional evidence may have been suppressed,” they wrote. In a written statement, Issa said the administration is “actively seeking to withhold new data in order to justify a political conclusion.” “I’m sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach,” Sensenbrenner said in a statement, adding that the “repression” of Carlin’s report casts doubt on the entire finding. Carlin said he’s concerned that he’s seeing “science being decided at the presidential level.” “Now Mr. Obama is in effect directly or indirectly saying that CO2 causes global temperatures to rise and that we have to do something about it. … That’s normally a scientific judgment and he’s in effect judging what the science says,” he said. “We need to look at it harder.” The controversy is similar to one under the Bush administration — only the administration was taking the opposite stance. In that case, scientist James Hansen claimed the administration was trying to keep him from speaking out and calling for reductions in greenhouse gases. FOX News’ Major Garrett contributed to this report.

By Rob Taylor @ Red-Alert

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I went to a farmer’s market that was, I’m ashamed to admit, in the parking lot of a local Whole Foods. As you would expect it was filled with people who arrived in hybrids festooned with bumper stickers promoting “localism” and the fight against global warming. Although the area of South Carolina my wife and I have moved to is within easy driving distance of many small farms (and I live within walking distance of two) it didn’t surprise me that the few stands there offered an extremely limited and expensive selection of produce and some meats that could not serve to feed the population of the greater metro area. When I lived in New York my wife and I would often go to farmer’s markets and they were much the same. Though they were good for the few small farms in the area, urban farmer’s markets are pretensions that give the illusion of an area’s ability to sustain itself when in fact that area can only sustain its population through large scale industry providing citizens with cheap, readily available goods. The New York tri-state area would experience a famine of biblical proportions if the residents were forced to only buy food from local sources which farmed using practices recommended by environmentalists.The bitter irony is that the environmental movement is largely populated and driven by these same urban residents who have, for generations, been cut off from nature and the simple truths of the food chain. That is about to change with cap-and trade and all the other radical environmentalist legislation that the left in this country is pushing. Make no mistake. The cap-and-trade (which is the first salvo in a green agenda onslaught about to be unleashed on Americans) will adversely affect the industries urban environmentalist rely on to live. All those hippies in Berkeley, all those hipsters in NYC and every Che T-shirt wearing house frau who haunts the Whole Foods produce section while sipping their Starbucks are completely unable to survive without an intricate network of businesses whose sole purpose is to ensure that people who have no idea how to produce food themselves don’t starve to death. Large scale industrial farms burn millions of gallons of fuel to grow vegetables for people who don’t realize it’s unnatural for most of the country to even have access to fresh vegetables in the winter. Billions more gallons of fuel are burned by trucking companies who bring food into the cities where residents are blissfully unaware of the fact that should these trucks stop running grocery stores would be empty within 3-5 days. Stores spend millions of dollars a year on refrigeration to unnaturally extend the life of food, and the carbon footprint of the factories that process the canned, preserved and pre-packaged foods city dwellers rely on must surely make those urban environmentalists cringe. Cap-and-trade is just the first attack on that system, which has functioned so smoothly and flawlessly that these same people attacking it have no idea how dependent they are on it to live. American vegan and vegetarian diets are only possible because of industrialized agriculture, especially in places like the northeast where harsh winters ensured for millenia that people needed to hunt for meat to survive. Healthy veganism and vegetarianism are only possible through the vitamin and supplement industry. Few environmentalists in fact are promoting any real sustainable lifestyle, but are instead promoting a moral philosophy based largely on secularized New Age clap trap. It seems to have escaped our urbane friends in the Green movement that putting legislation in place that will effectively eliminate most of the activities that make megalopolis living feasible by a certain point in time will effectively eliminate not only those areas we would refer to as megalopolises (and in fact any large metro area) but will also eliminate those who live within them. With ethanol mandates already starving out poor people in third world countries, the Greens are now pushing to make farming yield even less by making it less efficient. They are destroying the ability of farmers to transport their goods to city dwellers without having a working alternative to the trucks they so despise. They are hampering the ability of grocery stores to make a profit by making their expenses go up, and those stores will attempt to recoup those losses by raising prices. There are rosy scenarios being floated around on the right where businesses pick up and leave America causing massive unemployment and a spike in prices. These scenarios are rosy because they presume that we will still have food on the shelves, albeit more expensive than ever. But the Green agenda which is pushing cap-and-trade, just as it pushed the disastrous ethanol mandates, is setting up a system where less people will produce less food for more people. Small farms, already shrinking at a rate that makes food shortages inevitable, will disappear even faster. Trucking companies will make less runs into the cities. Less food and livestock will be available as farmers cash in on government sponsored demand for bio-fuels and then we will see the end result of the Green agenda: food shortages. The average “Green” is used to a life of leisure. He or she has not competed for resources, has not relied on a day’s catch to feed his or her family. They have not known hunger or want. They will be thrust into a world where people fight over the last loaf of bread.They will suddenly, ironically, come face to face with real nature as they struggle to survive in a world where their own agenda has made it impossible to live in a New York, where hungry masses fight over the limited resources that occur naturally. The fewer deliveries of food from all across the country, and the world, will literally translate into starvation and collapse for the 9 million or so people in New York City. I grew up in the 70s when my family kept large gardens, and fished for vacations. We kept the fish we caught in a deep freezer, we stored our tomatoes and cucumbers to eat. We stretched every dollar until it screamed, and pinched pennies so hard we left dents. I am not a great fisherman and the tomatillos I grew this year leave much to be desired, but my wife and I are prepared (or preparing really) to rely less on grocery stores. We will never live within a large city again and practice walking the 3 miles to the nearest large grocery chain for the inevitable time when gas becomes so expensive that we only drive in emergencies.We know what it is like to live simply, and perhaps violently, and though we don’t like it can get by when that time comes. But what of those Birkenstock clad women in their paisley summer dresses shrewfully wagging their fingers at the world while their husbands pay for their “fair trade” papayas on their American Express? When food riots in New York inevitably move into their expensive suburbs as the poor, priced into starvation by the Green agenda, explode into violence how will they survive? When shelves are empty what will they eat? When the park system is emptied of its wild edibles (and Van Cortlandt park is the best place to forage for wild greens by the way) what then the family of four who never realized they would need to find a way to feed themselves that didn’t include a cashier? The Green agenda seeks to push America into a more agrarian 18th century style country. They seek a 21st century world where 20th century technology is banished and cities take on the characteristics of Walnut Grove. But these are no Ingalls family, able or willing to live a life of self-sufficiency. These are people completely reliant on post-industrial society, hooked to the slow and steady intravenous drip of industrialized food production and oil based delivery systems. In their stupor they seek to tear that line out of their own arm, even though it will likely kill them. And they will take many of the rest of us with them.

Wall Street Journal

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven’t heard of this politician, it’s because he’s a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country’s carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

Credit for Australia’s own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published “Heaven and Earth,” a damning critique of the “evidence” underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist — and ardent global warming believer — in April humbly pronounced it “an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence.” Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia’s House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.

Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute’s annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama’s special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn’t.

This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on “unconvincing green science.” The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.

Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That’s made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won’t be alone.