Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Air Act requiring the regulation of greenhouse gases as pollutants.
8
Jackson was, in essence, picking
up where Christine Todd Whitman had left off nearly a decade earlier, before Myron Ebell and the
Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blunted her efforts.
Following a period of open comment, review, and response, the EPA issued, on December 7,
2009, its final, official finding that human-caused increases in greenhouse gas concentrations
though, was what had transpired during the intervening eight months. The EPA had held a sixty-day
public comment period on the initial proposed endangerment finding, and it was flooded with nearly
four hundred thousand comments. It was also challenged by ten different petitions from a group of
organizations that reads like a who's who of organized climate change denial, including the U.S.
petitions challenged the validity of the underlying science of climate change. Prominent among the
claims promoted in the various petitions were that the initial EPA finding was based on the hockey
stick and that the hockey stick had been discredited. In response, the EPA pointed out that its findings
had not relied upon any particular study, but instead were based on consensus lines of scientific
evidence, among which paleoclimate reconstructions were only one—and not even the most
important.
11
Months earlier, in June 2009, the CEI—with help from James Inhofe—had been promoting a
report by a supposed “whistleblower” within the EPA named Alan Carlin. The CEI claimed the
report was “suppressed” by EPA higher-ups who feared it “cast doubt” on the reality of climate
change, the primary reason for regulating carbon emissions. Inhofe called for a congressional
investigation of the matter. The reality, as reported by the
New York Times
based on internal EPA
documents it had acquired, was quite different:
It is true that Dr. Carlin's supervisor refused to accept his comments…. But the newly
obtained documents show that Dr. Carlin's highly skeptical views on global warming,
which have been known for more than a decade within the small unit where he works, have
been repeatedly challenged by scientists inside and outside the E.P.A.; that he holds a
doctorate in economics, not in atmospheric science or climatology; that he has never been
assigned to work on climate change; and that his comments on the endangerment finding
were a product of rushed and at times shoddy scholarship, as he acknowledged Thursday in
an interview.
12
Carlin, CEI, and Inhofe nonetheless milked the manufactured scandal for all they could. Carlin
appeared on the Glenn Beck show to attack the IPCC and promote the worn-out “Earth has been
Journal
, and mainstream venues such as CBS News. Even the progressive Huffington Post blog
reported the story. Already evident at this early stage was a subtle but undeniable shift in the tone of
the public discourse. Viewpoints that had previously been relegated to the denialist fringe of the
Internet were now being expressed in mainstream media venues.
