[TheMercenary]

Alan Carlin is the economist and 38 year veteran at the Environmental Protection Agency whose report was stonewalled internally and so was not considered (or so he was told) in their decision to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. I spoke with him for an hour this evening. (A background interview with an anonymous source in the EPA that corroborates what Carlin says below can be found here.)

At the end of the hour, the last question I asked him was what had motivated him to come forward with an almost 100-page report written in 4 days detailing the problems with the scientific claims for global warming as given by the IPCC (an early draft can be found at http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/DOC062509-004.pdf). The report was not transmitted internally, and the emails released by CEI on Tuesday suggest to me that this may have been because the report did not support the previously determined conclusions desired by the new Administration.

In Carlin's personal view "The bottom line is whether or not the IPCC is wrong or right about the significance of increasing levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in increasing global temperatures--it is amazing how few people have asked that question. What's happening in Australia (where a Senator Fielding is holding a 'mini-debate' with skeptical scientists and administration advocates of an Australian cap and trade policy) is fantastic--why can't we do that here? Models, good or bad, don't prove or disprove a scientific hypothesis about the real world. I'm dreadfully concerned that we may be taking an ineffective and extremely costly action, and after six years of working on climate change I might be able to help--but I'm not allowed to."

Carlin got his first degree in physics, before he turned to economics and remembers lunching occasionally with the celebrated physicist Richard Feynman while at Caltech, who told him that if you attempt to compare observations with a hypothesis and the observations don't fit, you can either change the hypothesis or ascertain if the observations are wrong. Carlin is convinced that observations of climate do not match the hypothesis that human-generated greenhouse gases are producing significant global warming in the real world. He adds ruefully that if the NIPCC report recently released by the Heartland Institute had been available in March, when he wrote his report, it might have saved him a lot of time assuming that it covers many of the same points.

Carlin's main concern seems to be that the Endangerment Finding (an official declaration by the EPA that CO2 is a danger to public health and welfare) may actually turn out to be a time bomb that may explode in the EPA, echoing the reasoning of our anonymous source as reported earlier today. As I wrote then, the EPA does not want to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air act without legislation limiting their regulation to the largest emitters. If the proposed new cap and trade legislation (which removes EPA's ability to use the Clean Air Act to regulate global warming gases) is not forthcoming, Carlin worries that it may well be very difficult for the EPA to carry out its mandate. His report was an attempt to have the EPA reconsider the science (which Carlin considers bad science), as despite the respectable trappings that cloak the IPCC and their reports, their hypotheses fail many observational tests in his view.

Carlin has been transferred off all climate-related work, but is not at all bitter. He says that from a civil service point of view, his boss 'absolutely has the right' to give him new work assignments. "I still have a phone, I can still talk to people in my office," he says.

Carlin hastens to add that he did not turn over to the Competitive Enterprise Institute the emails that were published. "But when a reporter called Tuesday and asked me to verify them it became evident that CEI had them."

Carlin also assisted in the organization of a series of seminars with notable scientists in the field of climate science, including some notable skeptics as well as ardent "warmists." They were attended by an average of maybe 30 or 40 employees--but those employees only rarely included members of the workgroup that eventually would be charged with writing the proposed endangerment document.

Later we will discuss the science that Carlin wanted to present to the EPA. For now, he's another whistleblower who actually wanted to help the organisation that shut him out and moved him off the case.

Is this really how we want to run things?

http://www.examiner.com/x-9111-SF-En...ng-and-trouble