The truth about Global Warming that the EPA is trying to suppress

Al McGartland, Office Director of EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE) has suppressed the release of a study that directly contradicts the justification for Cap and Trade legislation and the entire hypothesis of Global Warming.

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.

If you would like to support the Competitive Enterprise Institute follow this link:
http://cei.org/support

Cap and Trade

A vote will be held on 6/26/09 to discharge the “Cap and Trade” legislation from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and will send this bill to the House floor for a vote. This bill would enact the largest tax increase in the history of the US. Estimates of the taxes and mandated costs range from $800 billion to $2 trillion dollars over the life of the bill. The official title of this bill is H.R. 2454, American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. This bill is also known as the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.

Raising taxes may be the least damaging aspect of this bill. This law will give the Federal Government the authority to set the level of production across all industries. Socialists have always wanted to set the level of wages and production to control the economy. The bill to repeal union certification elections will allow the government to set wages. Now the cap and trade legislation will provide the means to set production. The USA will finally become a “workers’ paradise”.

This bill also provides a provision which imposes stiff tariffs on our trading partners if they don't adopt aggressive carbon restrictions of their own. Thus solving one of the great dilemmas suffered by organized labor, “how do we eliminate foreign competition?” This is the 21st century equivalent to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The Waxman-Markey will by itself recreate 2 of the 3 policies of the 1930’s that caused the great depression, 1 - raise taxes and 2 - start a trade war. Brilliant!

The following is an enlightening discussion:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10313

The complete wording of the bill is at the following link:

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h2454ih.txt.pdf

See the cost estimate for this legislation at the Congressional Budget Office website:

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/102xx/doc10262/hr2454.pdf

Take action against this bill:

http://ga1.org/campaign/0906capandtradetaxhike

"cash for clunkers"

A new government program to promote fraud:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124545300084032817.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

• Owners of vehicles that get less than 18 miles per gallon will receive a voucher worth up to $4,500 if they scrap their car and buy a new, higher-mileage one. The program is modeled on similar efforts that have boosted sales in Europe and is aimed at raising the overall efficiency of the nation's vehicles.

My advice is to purchase a $500.00 used pickup truck and then trade it in on a new car and collect the $4,500.00 voucher.

"not take a dime"

President Obama has promised to “not take a dime” from lobbyists or political action committees. His recent fundraiser in Washington, DC at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on Thursday, 6/18/09 is a good example of how our president keeps his promises:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/19/us/politics/19obama.html?em

This activity brings a new level of hypocrisy to our capital. The following quotes from the above article describe the current fundraising process:

• But at the same downtown hotel on Friday morning, registered lobbyists have not only been invited to attend an issues conference with Democratic leaders, but they have also been asked to come with a $5,000 check in hand if they want to stay in good favor with the party’s House and Senate re-election committees.

• A ticket went for $5,000 on Thursday night, but most people contributed far more. The top tier for contributors was $100,000, known as the United Committee, which was assigned to those who donated their own money and helped raise even more. Most people gave $30,400 per couple, which included a photograph with the president.

• The familiar faces of Democratic donors, like Maurice Sonnenberg, a New York financier, and Wade Randlett, a San Francisco technology executive...

The following website provides campaign contribution data:

http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/campaigns/barack-obama.asp?cycle=08#MoneySummary

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page in the above link there is a list of the top 150 individual Obama donors during the 2008 presidential election cycle.

It’s easy to spend other people’s money

Mayor Richard Daley has made a gigantic financial commitment on behalf of the City of Chicago. Unfortunately he made this commitment using taxpayer money not his own. See the following story:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-olympics-host-city-18-jun18,0,6793037.story

Consider the following paragraphs:

• In a worst-case situation, such as severe cost-overruns or a catastrophic event, the agreement could leave taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars or even more, a scenario Chicago's bid team acknowledges but insists is far-fetched.
  
• The move surprised Chicago aldermen, who wondered why Daley had made a sweeping financial promise without bringing it to the City Council.

In this case the Chicago aldermen are witnesses to the current status of government. Local, state and federal leaders are crafting polices, regulations and laws without any regard for their constitutional authority. This is most evident at the federal level where each new “crisis” is solved by unconstitutional expansion of federal power. The Chicago alderman would be justified in nullifying the Olympic agreement that the Mayor has signed but they are not willing to risk the wrath of Daley. This is the “Chicago Way”.

California leading the Nation

California has a history of “firsts”, first to regulate auto emissions, first to ban smoking in public spaces, etc. We are now about to witness another first, the first state to be forced to rationalize the role of government due to debt market restrictions. The following article describes California’s financial condition:

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE55F5VK20090617?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

The White House press secretary had this to say:

• "We'll continue to monitor the challenges that they have, but this budgetary problem unfortunately is one that they're going to have to solve," Gibbs said.

This response is very interesting as up until now the Obama Administration has been ecstatic about loaning money and taking control of private enterprise. Why the sudden change of tactics? Why doesn’t the Obama Administration want to control California?

I think that some of the answers are contained in the above article, consider this quote:

• 
  Washington's view toward California is one more reason to not hold the state's debt, said Tom Tarabicos, a financial adviser at Wells Fargo Financial Advisors Network in Roswell, Georgia. "We're selling every California bond we can," Tarabicos said. "We don't like them."
  "Sometime next year you'll be able to buy California GOs somewhere around 7 percent or 8 percent," Tarabicos said, referring to general obligation bonds.”

Bond traders have had a prominent role in government policy since the founding of the nation. Consider this famous quote:

• 
  “You mean to tell me that the success of my program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of f***ing bond traders?”
• 
  That’s how Bill Clinton responded in 1993, according to an account in Bob Woodward’s The Agenda, after his advisors told him that his ambitious economic plan had to be put on hold because of deficit jitters in the equities markets.

Two other examples: In 1896 presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, for instance, railed against Wall Street’s “cross of gold” and decades later FDR threatened “to drive the money changers out of the temple.”

In my opinion the Obama Administration has recently realized that they have squandered their ability to borrow. There have been stern warnings from the markets but probably more importantly blunt words from primary lenders such as China.

The inability to sell more massive amounts of debt has forced the Obama Administration to talk about how it is going to pay for new programs. An example of this new “pay as you go” strategy is the current hoax being promoted about Medicare savings being used to pay for the single payer health care plan.

The inability of the Federal Government to raise the necessary capital to bail out California will now force that state to reduce government spending. This trend could sweep across the nation as other states fall deeper into budget deficits.

Will this trend materialize at the federal government level? The federal government seems to have run out of borrowing power, but they have the one capability that states do not, they can print money.

At some point the Federal Government will find itself in the same position as California. Additional borrowing will be prohibitively expensive. The options then will be to reduce government spending at the federal level or flood the world markets with US dollars.

Green Banking

“Green Banking”: providing a new opportunity to fleece the banking system:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-tue-green-banking-jun16,0,6719434.story

Consider these policies:

• The banks are marketing Earth-friendly policies such as lower interest rates on loans to green builders and borrowers who buy fuel-efficient cars, as well as incentives to depositors who opt out of paper statements.

• Redstone Bank, which was renamed Green Bank in 2007, emphasizes home-efficiency projects. For example, a green home-improvement loan with a principal of at least $200,000 will receive annual rewards of $500. The bank's Web site outlines required improvements, including water-saving dual-flush toilets.

What happened to the concept of making loans based on the ability to repay? "Green Banking" will make the “liar loans” of the last debacle seem reasonable.

The Decline and Fall of the US Dollar

During an economic summit in Russia world leaders expressed their lack of confidence in the Obama Administration:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_RUSSIA_SUMMIT_TALKS?SITE=OHWIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

The following quotes express the concern over US economic policy:

• At the same time, Medvedev pushed against U.S. domination of financial
  markets by calling for new global reserve currencies to complement the
  dollar.
  
  Medvedev said new currencies will take a long time to emerge, but emphasized that the world will feel the growing need to hedge financial risks. "The main reserve currency, the dollar, has failed to serve its purpose," he said.
• 
  He added, however, that the creation of new reserve currencies should help distribute global wealth more fairly and also encourage economic leaders to pursue a more balanced economic policy.
• 
  The talk about global reserve currencies has been prompted by concerns in China and Russia that soaring U.S. budget deficits could spur inflation and weaken the dollar, debasing the value of their holdings.

We all know how important it is to President Obama to be loved by overseas society. It will be very difficult for him to win the hearts and minds of foreigners if they distrust his economic policies.

You’re Fired!

One of my friends brought this story to my attention. President Obama has fired an Inspector General who had oversight of AmeriCorps. The following link reveals all of the details:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Gerald-Walpin-speaks-the-inside-story-of-the-AmeriCorps-firing-48030697.html

This quote contains a message that will be repeated to many people in government that question the policies of the current administration:

Walpin learned his fate Wednesday night. He was driving to an event in upstate New York when he received a call from Norman Eisen, the Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform. "He said, 'Mr. Walpin, the president wants me to tell you that he really appreciates your service, but it's time to move on,'" Walpin recalls. "Eisen said, 'You can either resign, or I'll tell you that we'll have to terminate you.'"

This paragraph sums up the issue:

Eisen's phone call came after months of increasing conflict inside the Corporation for National and Community Service. "We issued two reports that the management of the Corporation and the board of directors didn’t like, because they criticized what the board was doing," Walpin recalls. There is no question that Walpin discovered misuse of federal money in Kevin Johnson's program, known as St. HOPE, and at City University of New York. But as a result of those investigations, relations between Walpin and top executives became frosty, and he says they cut him out of Corporation business that should normally include the inspector general.

Gerald Walpin was fired for doing his job, exposing waste and fraud in government spending. That is the "Chicago Way".