Carlin's report isn't science.

The August 3 issue of THE NEW AMERICAN claimed that a report, purporting to show that the Earth is not warming because of C[O.sub.2], by EPA research analyst Alan Carlin was suppressed. I am very surprised people think the Carlin report was "suppressed." I favor holding career government employees to standards. On several other websites, people have documented that Alan Carlin's "report" was lifted, in many cases without attribution, from other blogs. He does not rely on peer-reviewed, scientific literature--something that the Bush OMB (more specifically, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under John Graham) codified in guidance to all agencies and still remains in effect today. (See OMB circular A-4 and its guidance on peer review.) Indeed, the Sensenbrenner Science Committee also issued a report in 1992 that argued that regulatory agencies need to rely on peer-reviewed science.

So when an economist writes (or should I say lifts) a report from nonpeer-reviewed sources, the EPA manager should just let it go forward? Government agencies shouldn't have any scientific standards? Any career government employee should be permitted to write whatever they want and force other agency scientists to spend time (and our tax dollars) responding? You do not think career employees should be held to standards? I am quite certain that any agency analyst can always find something on a blog somewhere that supports their point of view. Some comments on the online version of the article imply that federal employees should be free to lift that blog material, put their office's imprimatur on it, and then forward it to the work-group that is responsible for the regulation (or is that just for employees who don't think climate change is a problem?). That of course would take valuable work time of other federal employees to respond. Maybe you missed the recent release by the Department of Commerce's NOAA, but the combined ocean and land temp for this past month is the second hottest on record (since 1880). Ocean temps have never been. higher. See http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stoties2009/20090717_juneglobalstats.html.

TOM WALLS

submitted via e-mail

The reader might find it very informative to actually read the well-referenced report. http://www.carlineconomics.com/files/pdf/ end_comments_7b1.pdf He would see that Carlin's purpose was not to prove what did or did not cause the Earth to warm in the 1990s; it was to warn the EPA of the gross errors in IPCC pronouncements and to show that C[O.sub.2] lagged in third place as a possible climate-forcing agent behind ocean current oscillations and solar irradiance. If the reader doesn't think the report was suppressed, he might explain an e-mail from Carlin's superiors: "The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round." In other words, let us blindly follow the Gore and Hartsen strategy of decrying that "the debate is over." And by the way, Ph.D. economist (MIT) Carlin also has a degree in physics from arguably the toughest undergraduate school in the nation, Cal Tech.

Also, the reader is trying to refute evidence of global cooling using temperatures taken only from the month of June. June was indeed hot. The Weather Service in Little Rock reported it 2.80[degrees]F above normal. July, however, was 4.00[degrees]F below normal. The real question is not temperature anomalies such as that measured in June. Nor even the fact that a network of 3,175 bathythermograph buoys have found that the heat content of the ocean has been dropping for the last five years. The question is, "What is' causing the fluctuation in global temperatures?" And more specifically, why are atmospheric and surface temperatures going down when C[O.sub.2] is increasing at a higher-than-expected rate?--Ed.