The Australian

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US environmental agency quashed an inconveniently sceptical report
The Australian

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was sceptical of claims about global warming. Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA centre director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty « decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data ».

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: « The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward … and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. » The email correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBS News in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. « It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else, » Carlin said. « That was obviously coming from higher levels. » After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. « Global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They’re not going up, and if anything they’re going down. »