The study at the center of this controversy was authored by Dr. Alan Carlin, Senior Operations Research Analyst at NCEE. Dr. Carlin’s education and employment resume are as follows:
Education
Ph.D., Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
B.S., Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
Employment
Senior Economist, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, 1971 to present
Economist, The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 1963-71.
Note that Dr. Carlin has been employed at the EPA since 1971.
The study can be found at the following:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/endangermentcommentsv7b1.pdf
I strongly urge you to read the Executive Summary beginning on page 6 (page v as printed) of this study. All of the Executive Summary is of significance but the following sections are of major importance:
"As of the best information I currently have, the GHG/CO2 hypothesis as to the cause of global warming, which this Draft TSD supports, is currently an invalid hypothesis from a scientific viewpoint because it fails a number of critical comparisons with available observable data. Any one of these failings should be enough to invalidate the hypothesis; the breadth of these failings leaves no other possible conclusion based on current data....The failings are listed below in decreasing order of importance in my view:"
1. Lack of observed upper tropospheric heating in the tropics (see Section 2.9 for a detailed discussion).
2. Lack of observed constant humidity levels, a very important assumption of all the IPCC models, as CO2levels have risen (see Section 1.7).
3. The most reliable sets of global temperature data we have, using satellite microwave sounding units, show no appreciable temperature increases during the critical period 1978-1997, just when the surface station data show a pronounced rise (see Section 2.4). Satellite data after 1998 is also inconsistent with the GHG/CO2/AGW hypothesis.
4. The models used by the IPCC do not take into account or show the most important ocean oscillations which clearly do affect global temperatures, namely, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and the ENSO (Section 2.4). Leaving out any major potential causes for global warming from the analysis results in the likely misattribution of the effects of these oscillations to the GHGs/CO2 and hence is likely to overstate their importance as a cause for climate change.
5. The models and the IPCC ignored the possibility of indirect solar variability (Section 2.5), which if important would again be likely to have the effect of overstating the importance of GHGs/CO2.
6. The models and the IPCC ignored the possibility that there may be other significant natural effects on global temperatures that we do not yet understand (Section 2.4). This possibility invalidates their statements that one must assume anthropogenic sources in order to duplicate the temperature record. The 1998 spike in global temperatures is very difficult to explain in any other way (see Section 2.4).
7. Surface global temperature data may have been hopelessly corrupted by the urban heat island effect and other problems which may explain some portion of the warming that would otherwise be attributed to GHGs/CO2. In fact, the Draft TSD refers almost exclusively in Section 5 to surface rather than satellite data.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has filed comments with the EPA. Those comments contain the complete text of emails from McGartland to Dr. Carlin. The comments can be reviewed at this link:
http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/Endangerment%20Comments%206-23-09.pdf
The highlights of these emails are as follows:
1) a March 12 email from Al McGartland, Office Director of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE), to Alan Carlin, Senior Operations Research Analyst at NCEE,forbidding him from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues;
2) a March 16 email from Mr. Carlin to another NCEE economist, with a cc to Mr. McGartland and two other NCEE staffers, requesting that his study be forwarded to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which directs EPA’s climate change program. The email notes the quantity of peer-reviewed references in the study, and defends its inclusion of new research as well. It states Mr. Carlin’s view that “the critical attribute of good science is its correspondence to observable data rather than where it appears in the technical literature.” It goes on to point out that the new studies “explain much of the observational data that have been collected which cannot be explained by the IPCC models.”
3) a March 17 email from Mr. McGartland to Mr. Carlin, stating that he will not forward Mr. Carlin’s study. “The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. 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.
…. 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.” (Emphasis added);
4) a second March 17 email from Mr. McGartland to Mr. Carlin, dated eight minutes later, stating “ I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change.”
The Heritage Foundation has published an interview with Dr. Carlin tilted “An Inconvenient Voice”. This interview can be found here:
http://blog.heritage.org/2009/06/29/an-inconvenient-voice-dr-alan-carlin/
The following are quotes from the Heritage Foundation interview:
- EPA responded by burying the report. As for Dr. Carlin himself, he was put under a strict gag order by superiors. They forbade him from writing, speaking or e-mailing about global warming to anyone outside his group at EPA.
We spoke to an embattled Dr. Carlin on the phone today, and, though he does fear losing his job because of his opinion, he has the strength of his beliefs. He told us that in 40 years of working for the government, he can’t remember any other time such pressure has been put on him.
“I’ve been involved in public policy since 1966 or 1967,” he said. “There’s never been anything exactly like this. I am now under a gag order.”
As for travel, “it’s been made abundantly clear that I was not to attend anything to do with climate change.” When he did attend a conference in Washington that was open to the public, he was reprimanded by a superior who told Dr. Carlin that he had “shown poor judgment” in daring to ask a question.
Dr. Carlin’s problems are far from unique. He is one of many who pay the price of Al Gore’s insistence that “the science is settled” on climate change, that we should no longer debate the issue. The media has happily gone along with this suppression. News reports present the questionable relationship between carbon dioxide and climate change as absolute fact. Skeptics are derided as “deniers” and are treated in the same way Galileo was by the Inquisition for suggesting the Earth revolved around the Sun. Today in President Obama’s America, a modern day Galileo has been told to shut up and go away.
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