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This is one of my US senators, James Inhofe.

Inhofe is an outspoken skeptic of global warming and has said that the Waxman-Markey bill will be "dead on arrival" when it comes to the Senate. Now he's ordered an inquiry into a "suppressed" EPA report that questions the science behind climate change:

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The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

"He came out with the truth. They don't want the truth at the EPA," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he's ordered an investigation. "We're going to expose it."

But even the FOX article notes Carlin isn't a scientist. Over on his Web site, Carlin lists his doctorate as being in economics and his profession as economist. Looking over his publications, you can quickly determine that his views on environmental protection are those of a right-wing free marketer more concerned with crunching numbers than saving lives and preserving the planet.

He wrote a piece defending cost-benefit analysis in replacing regulation. Basically, conservatives tout CBA as a totally neutral way to balance the cost of regulation against the benefits regulations bring. In other words, it places a monetary valuation on human life, our health and Mother Nature.

Of course, this is intrinsically flawed, as pointed out by the Center for Progressive Reform:

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Efforts to value life illustrate the basic problems. Cost-benefit analysis implicitly equates the risk of death with death itself, when in fact they are quite different and should be accounted for separately in considering the benefits of regulatory actions. Cost-benefit analysis also ignores the fact that citizens are concerned about risks to their families and others as well as themselves, ignores the fact that market decisions are often very different from political decisions, and ignores the incomparability of many different types of risks to human life. The same kinds of problems arise in attempting to define in monetary terms the benefits of protecting human health and the environment.

Second, the use of discounting systematically and improperly downgrades the importance of environmental regulation. While discounting makes sense in comparing alternative financial investments, it cannot reasonably be used to make a choice between preventing harms to present generations and preventing similar harms to future generations. Nor can discounting reasonably be used even to make a choice between harms to the current generation; choosing between preventing an automobile fatality and a cancer death does not turn on prevailing rates of return on financial investments. In addition, discounting tends to trivialize long-term environmental risks, minimizing the very real threat our society faces from potential catastrophes and irreversible environmental harms, such as those posed by global warming and nuclear waste. Significantly, all of the studies suggesting that regulation kills people because it is so expensive employed discounting, which caused regulatory benefits to appear to shrink and regulatory costs to grow.

Third, cost-benefit analysis ignores the question of who suffers as a result of environmental problems and, therefore, threatens to reinforce existing patterns of economic and social inequality. Cost-benefit analysis treats questions about equity as, at best, side issues, contradicting the widely shared view that equity should count in public policy. In fact, poor countries, communities, and individuals are likely to express less "willingness to pay" to avoid environmental harms, simply because they have fewer resources. Therefore, cost-benefit analysis would justify imposing greater environmental burdens on them than on their wealthier counterparts. With this kind of analysis, the poor get poorer.

Finally, cost-benefit analysis fails to produce the greater objectivity and transparency promised by its proponents. Cost-benefit analysis rests on a series of assumptions and value judgments that cannot remotely be described as objective. Moreover, the highly complex, resource-intensive, and expert-driven nature of this method makes it extremely difficult for the public to understand and participate in the process. Thus, in practice, cost-benefit analysis is anything but transparent.

In this article on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he shits on the idea that governments can really do anything through regulation, and suggests instead that we engage in some geoengineering. Essentially, we would inject aerosol into the stratosphere (with military jets or balloons; I'm not making this up) and then let the aerosol combine with other molecules to form sulfuric acid. Bound to water, the aerosol droplets would absorb and reflect back into to space 1 to 3 percent of the sun's rays.

The problem with this proposal is that it's incredibly dangerous and as yet unproven. Alan Robock, a Rutgers University climate scientist, wrote a really good article listing 20 reasons why geoengineering isn't such a hot idea. These reasons include: making the ocean more acidic, depleting the ozone, damaging plants due to their dependence on sunligh, whitening of the sky, and a whole host of unexpected consequences geoengineering could have. Essentially, Carlin and other advocates of geoengineering suggest we should play God with the elements rather than engage in the outrageous concept that we reduce our energy-consumption habits.

Well, who knows if Carlin even still argues for geoengineering these days. He's skeptical that global warming is even happening. So what does he argue in this "suppressed" report, covered up by the evil "warmists"? The folks over at Real Climate sum it up quite nicely, and touch on his past promotion of geoengineering as well:

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Their main points are nicely summarised thus: a) the science is so rapidly evolving that IPCC (2007) and CCSP (2009) reports are already out of date, b) the globe is cooling!, c) the consensus on hurricane/global warming connections has moved from uncertain to ambiguous, d) Greenland is not losing mass, no sirree…, e) the recession will save us!, f) water vapour feedback is negative!, and g) Scafetta and West's statistical fit of temperature to an obsolete solar forcing curve means that all other detection and attribution work is wrong. From this "evidence", they then claim that all variations in climate are internal variability, except for the warming trend which is caused by the sun, oh and by the way the globe is cooling.

Devastating eh?

One can see a number of basic flaws here; the complete lack of appreciation of the importance of natural variability on short time scales, the common but erroneous belief that any attribution of past climate change to solar or other forcing means that CO2 has no radiative effect, and a hopeless lack of familiarity of the basic science of detection and attribution.

But it gets worse, what solid peer reviewed science do they cite for support? A heavily-criticised blog posting showing that there are bi-decadal periods in climate data and that this proves it was the sun wot done it. The work of an award-winning astrologer (one Theodor Landscheidt, who also thought that the rise of Hitler and Stalin were due to cosmic cycles), a classic Courtillot paper we've discussed before, the aforementioned FoS web page, another web page run by Doug Hoyt, a paper by Garth Paltridge reporting on artifacts in the NCEP reanalysis of water vapour that are in contradiction to every other reanalysis, direct observations and satellite data, a complete reprint of another un-peer reviewed paper by William Gray, a nonsense paper by Miskolczi etc. etc. I'm not quite sure how this is supposed to compete with the four rounds of international scientific and governmental review of the IPCC or the rounds of review of the CCSP reports….

Finally, they end up with the oddest claim in the submission: That because human welfare has increased over the twentieth century at a time when CO2 was increasing, this somehow implies that no amount of CO2 increases can ever cause a danger to human society. This is just boneheadly stupid.

Sorry for not parsing the above quotes more, but all of it is pretty necessary reading. It's just too bad that climate change deniers like my senator, who is entrusted with the responsibility of making laws in the interests of his citizens, are more interested in advancing bogus reports based on dubious evidence than finally taking meaningful action against climate change. ]]>