Environmental Sustainability Updates

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The folks at Fox News were fuming this week that the EPA apparently suppressed an internal “scientific report” the questioned the rational for listing CO2 as a pollutant under the Clear Air Act.

Sunshine is said to be the best disinfectant, so lets drag this stinky story into the light of day and give it a good airing out.

First of all, the report is hardly secret since it has been helpfully posted on the websites of the Heartland Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and several other cheerleaders for the denial industry. The file is available here and if you are having troubling sleeping, you may find it a useful read.

The person listed as the author of the report, Alan Carlin, is not a scientist all, but an economist who works for National Center for Environmental Economics. But is seems Carlin had some considerable help.

Several years ago Ken Gregory of the Astroturf group Friends of Science compiled an eye-glazing compendium of the mish mash of pseudo science that passes for the climate skeptic brain trust. According to the good folks at Real Climate, it seems the Carlin report simply imports sections of this verbatim. Gregory’s name is also referenced 20 times in the report.

Other notorious sources referenced include Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, and our old friend S. Fred Singer.

But what about un-referenced sources? I took the liberty of randomly plugging in quotes from Carlin’s report into a helpful search engine called Plagiarism Checker.com. Guess what? It turns out that some sections  appear to have been lifted verbatim and unreferenced from the website of Patrick Michaels, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. <!--break-->

Have a look: Page 79 of Carlin's PDF states:

“For instance, despite the overall rise in U.S. and global average temperatures for the past 30 years, U.S. crop yields have increased (Figure 3-1), the population’s sensitivity to extreme heat has decreased (Figure 3-2), and our general air quality has improved (Figure 3-3). Further, there has been no long-term increase in weather-related property damage once changes in inflation, population size, and population wealth are accounted for (an essential step in any temporal comparison). All of these trends are in the opposite sense from those described in the EPA’s Endangerment TSD.”

Small world. It seems that a November 19th op-ed piece on Michael’s website entitled “Why the EPA should find against Endangerment” has exactly the same wording and exactly the same graphs. In fact the entire section 3 of Carlin’s report seems to be a very thin re-write of the anti-EPA piece from last November.

Plagiarism is a serious academic offence, particularly if it involves obviously biased sources. It is therefore strange that Carlin's unsolicited 85 page report, on a subject well outside his area of expertise, is devoted to criticizing the scientific community for their shoddy work.

This week an indignant Senator Inhofe demanded an inquiry into this strange report. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea…I haven’t perused this document in detail but there may be other un-cited sources to be unearthed by Plagiarism Checker.com. Try it out for fun.

Lets also take a moment to follow the funding. Desmog blog readers will recall some recently revealed tax documents showing that Michaels’ consulting firm was paid $242,900 by the Cato Institute since April 2006.

In 2006, the Cato Institute received $612,000 from 26 corporate supporters including ExxonMobil, General Motors and the American Petroleum Institute.

But what does money have to do with anything?

Since neither Carlin nor Gregory are climate scientists, what do active climate researchers think of the “suppressed” report? Dr. Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies provides an amusing evisceration here, pointing out the numerous non-peer reviewed and discredited sources that have loomed into public view yet again.

The blog for Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world also dismissed this report out of hand, calling it “rehash of old, scientifically dubious arguments”.

Hardly a bombshell, but you would never know that watching the hyperbolic media coverage. Have a look at remarkable puff piece from Fox News that interviews the aggrieved Carlin himself.

Perhaps the next time Mr. Carlin is in the presence of the media, someone should ask him why his name is on a report that instead seems to be largely written by well-known members of the denial industry. 

I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions, but it does seem odd that this dubious story based on dubious sources appears in high media rotation just as the Waxman Markey bill moves to the Senate.

You make your own mind up.