Who Is and Isn’t Qualified to Speak on Global Warming

Mere days before Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry are scheduled to introduce their version of controversial global warming “cap-and-trade” legislation — if several months after EPA whistle-blower Dr. Alan Carlin drew attention to the fact that the recent published scientific literature presents a decided tilt against prevailing “global warming” scientific wisdom — the New York Times has run a piece diminishing Dr. Carlin’s stature and findings.

This meme is picked up by those running with the Times’ “news”. For example, today’s trade press outlet “E&E Daily” styles their #2 story this way: “Employee lacked credentials for endangerment views”.

That’s odd.

Carlin has been with EPA since its inception in the early 1970s, having earned a degree in physics from CalTech. His lack of the same qualifications implicitly possessed by our law-givers comes from his having gone on to attain a PhD in economics from MIT.

This is different than the Times’ (and others’) treatment of and lack of interest in the academic training of the individual regularly cited without such “just an economist” commentary as a leading and essentially unimpeachable authority, the economist and former railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri. The Times has even hailed Pachauri in the past as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s chief “climatologist”. Climatology is a specialty field if ever there was one but a qualification which Pachauri, for all of his other virtues toiling for years in the UN vineyards, attained by virtue of being appointed to head the IPCC. This is unfairly disparate treatment.

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