Climate continued...

I've just read an addition to the continuing and growing climate change debate which has shown it is really a showdown between observational science vs. consensus science. Under President Bush there was an outcry by libs and greens that he was censoring those in his administration who spoke out in favor of man-made global warming. This came mainly from Jim Hanson, a NASA scientist, who while being "censored" by President Bush, managed to give several hundred speeches on the topic. It became such a hot topic that when Obama was elected he vowed that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." His new EPA director picked up the mantra and promised to base policies on science and provide overwhelming transparency.

Enter Alan Carlin. Mr. Carlin works in the EPA's Environmental Economics division and wrote an analysis questioning the EPA's science of man-made global warming in response to the Obama attempt to circumvent congress on the issue by declaring carbon (that element which is the scientific definition of whether something is "organic") a pollutant thereby giving the EPA the power to regulate it. The response to Mr. Carlin's report was what could best be described as a gag order by is superiors. The plight of Mr. Carlin has been picked up by Republicans who want an investigation. The EPA has now switched its efforts to discrediting Mr. Carlin as a "denier" and "only an economist" (though he does hold a degree in physics from a little place called CalTech!).

I can see all this playing out in some sci-fi movie where we all have to pay fines for being polluters because we exhale too much CO2 or perhaps some justification for Chinese-esk population control to protect the "mother earth" from all of us "unnatural beings."