This story is a joint effort between the San Francisco Examiner Environmental Policy blogger Thomas Fuller and WUWT.
Here is what started it all. An email as part of a package of emails posted as public comment in the EPA endangerment finding by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) who caught EPA administration red-handed in concealment of internal dissent as well as apparently proceeding with plans in advance of public comment.
From this PDF circulated by CEI, here is the most pertinent email:
Yesterday, Thomas Fuller, who writes for the Examiner in San Francisco, noted as many other WUWT readers did, a comment from “anonymous” posted on the WUWT thread “The EPA suppresses dissent and opinion, and apparently decides issues in advance of public comment”
“anonymous” wrote:
anonymous
Folks, I work at EPA and am unfortunate enough to actually know exactly what happened. Alan Carlin knows more about climate change science than most of the people on the EPA work group that wrote the endangerment proposal. The claim that he is simply an economist is a deep disservice to Alan and is patently false. Further, the work group refused to consider his arguments because they “don’t know how to weigh them against the IPCC report” – suggesting they won’t be able to evaluate the public comments either. Notably, others at EPA agree with Alan’s analysis which EPA will make public (so they say). If they actually release the report Alan sent forward, and don’t take his extremely critical statements out, it will embarrass the Agency badly. That will be a shame, but it is what the Agency has earned for itself.
I would like to give my name, but I don’t wish to be punished in the same manner as Alan.
This is a deeply sad set of events for EPA and for the nation.
REPLY: Doing a quick Google Search on the email he provided, I can vouch for the claim of this poster working with the EPA – Anthony
After I confirmed the email, one of our moderators, Charles, confirmed the originating IP address. Discussion ensued, and Mr. Fuller reported in comments:
I contacted the EPA this morning and received an email response from them that seemed relevant–and open. I contacted the CEI and received nothing.
…
I’m a liberal Democrat who happens to lean towards the skeptic arguments regarding AGW. It will never be a completely comfortable fit for me amongst many of you. But I am trying to be an honest commentator on the facts. I’m a big boy and can handle criticism, but read some of what I’ve written first.
Mr. Fuller was skeptical of the claims made by “anonymous” which I fully understand and appreciate, he wrote:
…
I linked to Anthony’s article here because I trust him and this site. I still do. The Competitive Enterprise Institute did create an impression of Alan as a skeptic who could not get his opinion heard within the EPA. I’ve seen pretty convincing evidence that he not only got his opinion heard, he got some of it into the Endangerment report. It also became quickly evident that he is not a skeptic at all.
However, “anonymous” was concerned about retaliation within EPA, and both his email and IP addresses checked out.
“anonymous” replied to Mr. Fuller, and Charles offered some facilitating help:
anonymous
Re: Tom Fuller (18:08:13) :
I respect Tom’s willingness to listen to both sides in this matter. He simply is not privy to the facts. Alan was muzzled. Others who tried to get the work group to evaluate his arguments ran into a brick wall. It is not that Alan’s comments were flawed. It is that the people who were in charge wanted him taken out of the process and his report “disappeared”. This was “politics” pure and simple. The arguments were ignored for lack of expertise in climate science. Indeed, when an investigation was done to determine how many full time equivalents (bureaucratise for “people”) EPA has with actual first hand knowledge on how to use the kind of GCMs upon which the IPCC relied, the answer was half a person (a person half time). I’m not sure, but I don’t think that person was actually on the work group. I don’t recall seeing his name on it, in any case.
Tom, there are going to be a lot of questions about this transaction. I am not permitted to give details, but I expect Congressional inquiries will force most of the facts out. If they don’t, then I don’t really know what to say.
I’m prepared to go on background on this if you are serious about finding out the facts.
Reply: May I forward your email to Tom Fuller? ~ charles the moderator.
To which the reply was:
anonymous
Re: May I forward your email to Tom Fuller? ~ charles the moderator.
Only after Tom publically promises anonymity.
Reply: Ok ~ ctm
Mr. Fuller responded with:
Hi all,
Anonymous, if you do agree to speak with me, I promise I will keep your identity anonymous. That is without conditions.
Thanks for performing a public service.
Tom Fuller
San Francisco Environmental Policy Examiner,
Examiner.com
Reply: IP addresses and unpublished email confirmed. I believe anonymous has retired for the evening, but I will forward information ~ ctm.
I discussed the idea with Charles, and emails were exchanged, and we stood back and waited for the results.
The results were a surprise to Mr. Fuller, and he responded with this excellent article below, for which I’ve posted a link and a couple of excerpts to.
Please visit Mr. Fuller’s blog to give him some traffic and some kudos for excellence in journalism. I was pleased that team WUWT was able to assist, and it goes to demonstrate that reasonable people on opposite sides of an issue can work together to find truth. Also, let’s all give major props to WUWT’s “Charles the moderator” for his role as facilitator. – Anthony
The EPA’s internal nightmare over global warming: Part 1
A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2.
The source, who chooses not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said that Carlin was rebuffed in his attempt to introduce scientific evidence that does not accord with the EPA’s view of global warming, which largely relies on IPCC reports. The source also saw Carlin’s report and said that it was ‘based on 8 points of peer-reviewed, recent and relevant scientific publications’ that cast doubt on the wisdom of regulating CO2 as a pollutant.
The EPA’s draft Endangerment Finding was initially written over a year ago during the Bush administration, and Lisa Jackson (the new head of the EPA) and her team wanted to get the Finding out on or near Earth Day, according to a schedule that was made public about a week before formal publication of the proposal. The draft was submitted to agency workgroups with only one week for review and comment, which is unprecedented, and received only light comments–except for Carlin’s.
…
Read the entire story here at the SF Environmental Examiner
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anybody else getting the following error when trying to reach the link to the full article?
There has been a site error or the web application you are requesting is down for maintenance.
Fuller’s blog has been taken down!
Good work all round.
The truth will out.
There is an old saying “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.
The EPA has changed that to, “When all you have is a hammer, deny the relevance of anything that doesn’t look like a nail”.
Big Brother is probably watching and doesn’t want this info out before the Climate Bill vote.
Several things.
1. You must remember who is in charge. Obama Carol Browner Al Gore and a radical democrat congress.
2. This is totally political and has nothing to do with science. Remembering who is in charge.
3. In light of 1. and 2. how could any reasonable individual expect anything different?
4. Anonymous had better be very afraid if there is a public outcry.
5. This will go unreported by the mainstream media since Michael Jackson has croaked.
Great work, everybody, Anthony, Fuller, and anonymous. Can we get links to the papers Carlin cited posted?
Tried to go to the examiner site but they seem to be having problems. CEI broke the story but leave it to the hard work at WUWT to develop it. Should be interesting to see how this all develops. Dropped a line to Drudge – wonder if they’ll finally pick up on this developing story.
It makes sense that insiders to the Great Fraud will come out only when a significant critical milestone is reached or imminent. They are under tremendous pressure over job security and damaged personal relationships with colleagues.
I suppose it’s like quantum mechanics in a sense.
It would be interesting to see someone in the data “gathering” community come out, but I suppose there is no similar leaping event to drive them.
I think the SF Examiner is suffering a big spike in traffic and can’t cope. Anyone put this on Slashdot or Digg?
What article? There never was any such article.
Bureau of Truth
So it would appear.
Interesting that an article also appeared in the local a.m. paper about the EPA’s evaluation of the “Cancer danger” in two towns close to here because of “toxic air.”
One of them is home to one of the steel industry’s last coke batteries, US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works.
Coincidence? I THINK NOT.
Interesting this was being planned last year… Fuller mentions in his article that the EPA doesn’t really want to do this since it will create a headache for them monitoring the small players… But obviously for Lisa Jackson et al, they REALLY DO want to do this. Why else would they have been planning it since the last administration? And it follows they intended to find for endangerment at that time.
Should be “suppressed” but that’s OK we know what you mean.
The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment.
Who knows? Maybe this will be Obama’s watergate.
I clicked the link and I am reading the Thomas Fuller article now.
It is reassuring to see that some non-activist scientists, at great personal cost, are willing to stand up for the truth. I had begun to think science would soon be completely replaced by green scams.
Just tried to read Mr. Fuller’s article via the link and received this lovely little gem:
Let’s hope that it’s actually a server meltdown from traffic hits and not a DOS attack.
It’s really refreshing to see that there is at least one Left-leaning journalist out there who is willing to actually look into the corruption and malfeasance in the AGW crowd that’s been blatantly apparent to a lot of people for a long time. It also says a lot about Anthony and his team that Mr. Fuller trusted them enough to act as go-betweens on such a momentous story.
cbullitt (17:19:35) :
It looks like anything with the word “Coke” in it is indeed doomed to be targeted by this “ACES” GHG bill.
I also wish to give major props to WUWT’s “Charles the moderator” as Anthony suggested, but this is all I could come up with:
http://www.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/windfarm.jpg
Seriously though, I do wish to give a big thumbs up to “ctm.”
This episode raises a point I have long thought important.
Let me tell you about an obscure piece of the English Law of Evidence. In a case called R v Silverlock in 1894 someone who had studied handwriting for about ten years was allowed to give evidence on an issue of disputed handwriting, the court treated him as an expert by reason of his own, private, studies even though he had no formal teaching or qualifications on the subject. You don’t have to have a certificate to be an expert, what you need is expertise.
Dr Carlin would appear to have expertise in the scientific issues he addressed because he has studied them. That he is described as an economist and a physicist suggests he has no directly relevant formal qualifications. Of course he is not alone in that, many of those who argue most strongly on each side of the AGW debate have no directly relevant formal qualifications. Some have genuine expertise, others (like my plump and humble self) use only our BS meter (highly tuned, one likes to think).
On the face of it, Dr Carlin’s observations cannot properly be dismissed as “non-expert”, so their rejection can only be based on other grounds.
The question when asking whether someone is an “expert” is not whether he is right or wrong in what he asserts (very often there is simply no right and wrong there are just shades of opinion based on inferences from relatively few primary facts), it is whether he has sufficient learning in the subject to be worthy of being heard. This is one of the great limitations on the status of peer-reviewed papers. An opinion or inference is not “right” because it is supported by reviewers who also have expertise, nor is it “wrong” because such people do not support it. Whether it is right of wrong can only be determined by facts whereas reviewers can only give opinions.
This, in my view, explains not only why peer review can never be a necessary condition of an opinion being correct but also why minds should always be open to arguments that are well-formulated and supported by evidence. If they are to be rejected it can only properly be on substantive grounds.
And therein lies the problem with the reason given for the ERA’s rejection of Dr Carlin’s submission, it was rejected on administrative (or, if you prefer, political) grounds without their substance being considered. That is no way to conduct a debate on any important issue.
I had no trouble getting through. Let’s hope part 2 of the story includes the WUWT part of the story!
I didn’t have any trouble getting to Fuller’s home page. Must have been a temp glitch. I think I’ll be watching CSPAN tomorrow to see how the vote goes.
A lot of thanks for all involved.
I really hope this will result in some positive effects.
We need it.
Remember Watergate the more they struggle the more trouble they get in.
World Net Daily covered the cover up at EPA this morning, so it is being carried. After the vote, since CO2 is so poisonous, will the esteemed members of Congress forgo the carbonated water with their beverages?