Suppressing the inconvenient facts about climate change

Two examples of censorship in the climate debate, as reported in The Australian. You would have thought the case for AGW was so strong, so impenetrable, that any dissenting view could be heard, reviewed and easily rejected. Not the case. Dissenting views have to be banned, for fear that they may derail the global warming gravy train.

Firstly, the US Environmental Protection Agency suppresses 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.

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, [report author Alan] Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research.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."

And then a noted polar bear expert was excluded from the Polar Bear Specialist Group, despite having researched polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic circle for 30 years.

The (PBSG) chairman, Andy Derocher explained in an email that (Mitchell's) rejection had nothing to do with his expertise on polar bears: "It was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition." Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration -- a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents -- was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

Funny that. Censorship is usually associated with oppressive regimes (think China, North Korea, Iran etc). Isn't it curious that the global warming alarmist fraternity practise it as well?

Read it here.