Earth Equity News

EPA Denies Muzzling In-House Climate Skeptic. By James Brody, NYTimes, September 25, 2009. "Alan Carlin, a 72-year-old analyst and economist, had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration. In June, however, he became a sudden celebrity with the surfacing of a few e-mail messages that seemed to show that his contrarian views on global warming had been suppressed by his superiors because they were inconvenient to the Obama administration's climate change policy. Conservative commentators and Congressional Republicans said he had been muzzled because he did not toe the liberal line... But a closer look at his case and a broader set of internal E.P.A. documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act... show that Dr. Carlin's highly skeptical views on global warming, which have been known for more than a decade within the small unit where he works, have been repeatedly challenged by scientists inside and outside the E.P.A.; that he holds a doctorate in economics, not in atmospheric science or climatology; that he has never been assigned to work on climate change; and that his comments on the endangerment finding were a product of rushed and at times shoddy scholarship... Adora Andy, the agency's chief spokeswoman, called the accusation that Dr. Carlin had been muzzled for political reasons 'ridiculous'... There was no predetermined position on endangerment, and Dr. Carlin's work was not suppressed,' Ms. Andy said in an e-mail response to questions. 'This administration has always welcomed varying scientific points of view, and we received much of it over this process.' Dr. Carlin said he was concerned less about how he had been treated than about what he described as the agency's unwillingness to hear the arguments of climate change skeptics. He said there was an obvious 'imbalance' between the billions of dollars the government had spent building a case for dangerous climate change and the lack of attention to a handful of skeptics like him."