This is science?

Certainly a stark reminder that it is politics and not science that driving so much of the climate change debate.

Suppressing the inconvenient facts about climate change

June 29, 2009

Article from: The Australian

Declan McCullagh of CBS reveals that the US environmental agency quashed an inconveniently sceptical report

THE Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was sceptical of claims about global warming. Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA centre director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty "decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data". The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: "The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward ... and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision." The email correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency. Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. "It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else," Carlin said. "That was obviously coming from higher levels." After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. "Global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They're not going up, and if anything they're going down."

[The censored report is here.]

Christopher Booker in Britain's The Sunday Telegraph on how to deal with an inconvenient expert:

TOP of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting. Mitchell Taylor has been researching polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as an academic and a government employee. The (PBSG) chairman, Andy Derocher explained in an email that (Mitchell's) rejection had nothing to do with his expertise on polar bears: "It was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition." Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration -- a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents -- was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

Politicians and policy makers had jumped on the bandwagon and nailed their colours to the mast, (er, I think that's a mixed metaphor, but I rather like it), and now have too much invested in terms of credibility and "face" to easily say they might have been wrong.

In the case of Al Gore the investment is quite literal and he stands to become the first climate change billionaire if he can convince the American congress to introduce some form of cap and trade scheme. Lehmann Brothers, before its collapse, saw such schemes as the next boondoggle from which it would rake billions of dollars out of the system, as does the reinsurer Munich Re.

But even those who should have known better are guilty of suppressing science and pursuing the fashionable over the true.

It is bad enough that Scientific American and New Scientist have sold out to become unabashed campaigners for the hysterical view, but even reputable scientific journals such as Science and Nature have done so.

A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

What ever happened to openness in scientific matters? Even if you thought these people to be wrong, you would not have tried to silence them.

But that is "science" these days.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous