The Obama administration's EPA sees the increasing evidence against global warming as a threat to their agenda and has taken desperate measures. About a week before the House vote on "cap and trade," the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released some EPA e-mails, demonstrating that an internal report by Alan Carlin, a 35-year career EPA analyst, criticizing EPA's position on global warming, had been squelched for political reasons. One of the e-mails is from Dr. Al McGartland, director of the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics reads, "The administrator and administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. ... I can see only one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."
The Competitive Enterprise Institute summarizes Dr. Carlin's report saying, "(T)hat EPA, by adopting the United Nations' 2007 'Fourth Assessment' report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature. "New data also indicate that ocean cycles are probably the most important single factor in explaining temperature fluctuations, though solar cycles may play a role as well, and that reliable satellite data undercut the likelihood of endangerment from greenhouse gases."
Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, currently at Uppsala University in Sweden asks, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" Obviously, 10 years is not enough.
Walter E. Williams
Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of 'Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?' and 'Up from the Projects: An Autobiography.'
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