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American law has moved in a leftward direction over the last 20 years, steadily restricting use of the death penalty and criminal sentencing, and expanding lawsuits against businesses, thanks largely to the Supreme Court.

But to some left-leaning journalists who write about the Supreme Court, none of this has ever happened, and the Supreme Court, which is responsible for many of these liberal changes, remains a conservative boogeyman.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, America’s most famous Supreme Court reporter, writes today that in the Supreme Court, “big business always prevails, environmentalists are always buried, female and elderly workers go unprotected, death row inmates get the needle, and criminal defendants are shown the door.”

This is breathtakingly inconsistent with reality. Over the last dozen years, the death penalty has been dramatically cut back in cases like Roper v. Simmons (2005), as the Supreme Court has invalidated the death penalty when imposed on the “retarded” (even the mildly retarded) or juveniles (even 16 to 18 year-olds), or when imposed by judges rather than juries (as state laws long provided).

The Supreme Court overturned thousands of sentences given to criminal defendants in cases like U.S. v. Booker (2005), based not on their guilt or innocence, but on the fact that judges, rather than juries, had made findings related to those sentences (the so-called Booker/Apprendi line of cases). The supposedly “right-wing” justices Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas joined in these decisions.

Environmentalists won many cases, including perhaps the most economically-significant decision ever — Massachusetts v. EPA (2003) — which potentially opened the door to EPA regulation of virtually every human activity, on the grounds that virtually all activity (from industrial production to farming to cars) emits carbon dioxide and thus allegedly causes global warming. That decision also created a special rule of standing to allow state attorneys general to bring lawsuits that would otherwise be thrown out as meritless for lack of standing.

The Supreme Court recently allowed businesses to be sued even for products the FDA deems to be safe and effective, in Wyeth v. Levine (2009).

The Supreme Court progressively expanded businesses’ liability for discrimination against female and elderly workers. It continuously expanded the definition of sexual harassment, overturning earlier limits on vicarious liability (in Faragher v. Boca Raton (1998)), allowing institutions to be sued based on the acts of non-employees (in Davis v. Monroe County (1999)), and rejecting longstanding lower-court limits on lawsuits where there is no economic or psychological harm (in Harris v. Forklift Systems (1993)). It also allowed businesses to be sued for discrimination against elderly workers even absent any showing of discriminatory intent or differential treatment (in Smith v. Jackson (2005)). All of these decisions reversed lower court rulings in favor of businesses.

In short, Dahlia Lithwick’s perception of the Supreme Court bears no relation to reality. But it is shared by most of the nation’s leading court reporters, at publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times, who promote a similar caricature of the Supreme Court.

As a result of such reporters ceaselessly peddling this perspective to their readers, it is also the perception of much of the newspaper-reading public, especially in the so-called Blue States, many of whom view the Supreme Court as “too conservative.”

For example, factually inaccurate and dishonest reporting on recent Supreme Court decisions also contributed to recent election results.

A classic example is the Supreme Court’s recent Ledbetter decision, which many reporters wrongly claimed required discrimination plaintiffs to sue within a rigid 180-day deadline — when in fact, most pay discrimination cases could legally be brought for at least 3 years after the discrimination allegedly occurred, under laws unaffected by the Supreme Court’s decision (like the Equal Pay Act), and the 180-day deadline, even when applicable, had lots of common-sense exceptions to keep employers from escaping justice (such as tolling to protect hoodwinked employees)

(Regardless of whether the death penalty is good or bad, it is very clear that it is not unconstitutional).

In today’s New York Times, John Broder strains to belittle Alan Carlin, the “whistle blower” whose skeptical comments on EPA’s proposed endangerment finding the Agency tried to suppress. Most of the piece is larded with innuendo and spin.

Below is the text of Broder’s article and my running commentary in bold italics.

Behind the Furor Over a Climate Change Skeptic
By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — Alan Carlin, a 72-year-old analyst and economist, had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration.

Slant from the get-go. Why not be factual and say Carlin has worked at EPA since 1971, or since shortly after the Agency opened its doors? Why instead associate him with the tainted Nixon Administration? Also, what’s this bit about Carlin “laboring in obscurity”? That raises suspicion that Carlin is a disgruntled employee.

In June, however, he became a sudden celebrity with the surfacing of a few e-mail messages that seemed to show that his contrarian views on global warming had been suppressed by his superiors because they were inconvenient to the Obama administration’s climate change policy.

Broder hints that Carlin may be a ”celebrity” seeker trying to break out of the “obscurity” in which he “labored.” Such cynical innuendo ignores an obvious fact: Carlin would never have come to anyone’s attention outside of EPA had the Agency not traduced its own professed commitment to “overwhelming transparency” in science-based policymaking.     

Conservative commentators and Congressional Republicans said he had been muzzled because he did not toe the liberal line.

Yup, they said that — because it’s true!

But a closer look at his case and a broader set of internal E.P.A. documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act paint a more complicated picture.

Actually, the New York Times set of EPA documents is “broader” by only one document, an email from Dr. Carlin to Dr. Al McGartland dated 03/13/2009 10:17 AM. It does “complicate” the picture somewhat, but in a way that undercuts the contrarian image of Carlin that Broder is trying to paint.

In this email, Carlin says, “I suggest you forward our comments, perhaps removing the name NCEE [National Center for Environmental Economics] from the cover page, to Paul and OAR [Office of Air and Radiation] with a note that at the very least this represents a summary of the principal viewpoints that OAR is likely to encounter to their TSD [Technical Support Document], and therefore would appear to be useful in revising the TSD to try to meet these arguments ahead of time.”

This email raises the distinct possibility that Carlin was attempting to strengthen EPA’s endangerment proceeding. As he goes on to explain: “It is unbelievable that John and I have been able to poke so many holes in the orthodox view in so short a time with so little manpower.”

It is true that Dr. Carlin’s supervisor refused to accept his comments on a proposed E.P.A. finding, since adopted, that greenhouse gases endangered health and the environment, and that he did so in a dismissive way.

Hold on there! Carlin’s superior (Al McGartland) did not merely refuse to “accept his comments,” he forbade Carlin to discuss endangerment with anyone outside their immediate office, refused to transmit Carlin’s comment to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, and forbade Carlin to spend any more time on climate change.

But the newly obtained documents show that Dr. Carlin’s highly skeptical views on global warming, which have been known for more than a decade within the small unit where he works, have been repeatedly challenged by scientists inside and outside the E.P.A.;

There’s a whole lot of misinformation in this sentence fragment.

(1) The newly obtained documents say nothing about Carlin’s views being “repeatedly challenged.”

(2) Even if they did, so what? Most opinions about climate science and climate policy have been “repeatedly challenged” by someone. It is expected that people commenting on proposed agency actions will disagree on many issues big and small. That’s the reason for inviting public comment in the first place!  

(3) Nothing in these documents suggests that Carlin has been a skeptic for “more than a decade.” Carlin’s skepticism appears to be of recent vintage. For example, in a 2007 Penn Law Review article, Carlin argued that the most effective and efficient way to control climate change is with geo-engineering strategies, not emission-control regulations. The article presupposes that anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem.

that he holds a doctorate in economics, not in atmospheric science or climatology;

We needed newly-released “EPA documents” to find out that Carlin’s Ph.D. is in economics, not climate science? Nonsense. The documents say nothing about Carlin’s educational credentials. Besides, Carlin has never pretended to have a Ph.D. in climate science.

Broder overlooks several obvious points here.

(1) Carlin holds a B.S. in physics from Cal Tech. So, even if a science credential were a prerequisite for commenting on endangerment — it manifestly is not, since the vast majority of the 20,000 or so unique comments EPA has received were not submitted by scientists — Carlin meets that standard by virtue of his Cal Tech degree.

(2) Whatever happened to ‘lifelong learning’? Carlin has been analyzing environmental issues at EPA for 38 years. During at least 7 of those years Carlin did research in the physical sciences and supervised the production of reports similar to EPA’s Technical Support Document. Broder has no business suggesting that Carlin is unqualified to offer comment on the endangerment proposal.

(3) Most importantly, Carlin’s job at EPA is to analyze the economics of environmental issues. That means evaluating the costs and benefits of environmental policies. There is no way to evaluate the benefits of an environmental policy without understanding the relevant science.

For example, what are the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by X number of tons over Y number of years? The answer to that question depends on a host of assumptions about various scientific issues (e.g. climate sensitivity). A drone might accept somebody else’s assumptions as “settled science,” but a conscientious analyst with degrees in physics and economics would do exactly what Carlin did — try to provide the Agency with a genuinely independent assessment.

that he has never been assigned to work on climate change;

Actually, Dr. Carlin’s FY2009 performance standards, which were signed by Dr. McGartland, explicitly require work on climate change.

and that his comments on the endangerment finding were a product of rushed and at times shoddy scholarship, as he acknowledged Thursday in an interview.

Yes, of course, the product was rushed, and not ready for publication in an academic journal. Broder makes it sound as if Carlin confessed to an embarrassing fact in the Thursday interview. In fact, Carlin’s comment states that it was written in haste, does not meet normal scholarly standards, and was barely edited. Shame on Broder for suggesting that Carlin kept this hidden until the New York Times dragged it out of him, or that Carlin rather than the ridiculously short deadline (4.5 days) was to blame for the work’s defects.

Dr. Carlin remains on the job and free to talk to the news media, and since the furor his comments on the finding have been posted on the E.P.A.’s Web site. Further, his supervisor, Al McGartland, also a career employee of the agency, received a reprimand in July for the way he had handled Dr. Carlin.

Puh-leaze! Carlin remains free to talk because of the furor over his previous muzzling! EPA posted the comment to appease public and congressional anger at the comment’s being suppressed in the first place. Broder suggests that EPA damage-control efforts mean there was no problem in the first place. Is he a reporter, or a flak-catcher for EPA?

Dr. McGartland, also an economist, declined to comment on the matter. But top officials of the agency said his decision not to forward Dr. Carlin’s comments to the E.P.A. office that would be writing the final report had been his own and not directed by anyone higher up in the agency.

That top officials might be using McGartland as a scapegoat to protect their jobs, avoid a bigger scandal, and keep the endangerment proceeding on track is a possibility Broder never considers. 

Of course, McGartland may well have acted without the knowledge of his higher-ups. But that just raises another question: What is it about the political culture of EPA in the age of Gorethodoxy that prompted McGartland to suppress an analysis relevant to an important Agency action and censor a colleague at the NCEE? Broder does not seem at all curious to find out.

Adora Andy, the agency’s chief spokeswoman, called the accusation that Dr. Carlin had been muzzled for political reasons “ridiculous.”

But Carlin was, in fact, muzzled from March 12 through June 23, and although the reasons have never been made clear, the political points stated in McGartland’s email of 03/17/09 08:12 AM could be the reason: “The administrator and the administration has [sic] decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

“There was no predetermined position on endangerment, and Dr. Carlin’s work was not suppressed,” Ms. Andy said in an e-mail response to questions.

Preposterous. McGartland’s email of 3/12/09 02:40 PM specifically forbade Carlin to discuss endangerment with anyone outside of their office. Since McGartland later declined to submit Carlin’s comment with OAR, he did his best to send it down the memory hole.

“There was no predetermined position on endangerment, and Dr. Carlin’s work was not suppressed,” Ms. Andy said in an e-mail response to questions. “This administration has always welcomed varying scientific points of view, and we received much of it over this process.”

EPA’s proposed endangerment finding is nothing but a “predetermined position on endangerment.” The main point of Carlin’s comment is that EPA’s proposal and associated Technical Support Document do not even acknowledge data and scientific research inconsistent with EPA’s assumptions.  

Dr. Carlin said he was concerned less about how he had been treated than about what he described as the agency’s unwillingness to hear the arguments of climate change skeptics. He said there was an obvious “imbalance” between the billions of dollars the government had spent building a case for dangerous climate change and the lack of attention to a handful of skeptics like him.

Finally, some real reporting. Well, almost. The “handful” of skeptics comment is editorializing, and grossly inaccurate.

The affair began in March as the E.P.A. was rushing to document the scientific justification for its proposed finding that emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment. The finding was largely an updated version of a similar report, prepared last year under the Bush administration, that came to the same conclusion. But the Bush administration never acted on the research or issued an actual finding.

The agency’s officials were acting in March under severe time constraints to prepare the finding for the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, who was planning to issue it in mid-April, fulfilling a presidential campaign pledge by Barack Obama.

Broder neglects to note that these severe time constraints were entirely self-imposed, not ordered by the Supreme Court. Because the Agency was rushing to get its proposal out the door, Carlin had to rush to apprise the Agency of his concerns. So again, why bother mentioning that Carlin’s 93-page comment was in no shape to be published in an academic journal?

The finding set the stage for the government to regulate greenhouse gases for the first time, an initiative that will resonate through the economy for decades.

Dr. Carlin, long known as a skeptic on global warming, was not invited to submit comments on the document. But he was determined that his views be heard.

Two points here. (1) Earlier Broder said Carlin “labored in obscurity.” So how could he be “long known” as a skeptic? Also, as noted above, Carlin’s first published work on climate policy — in 2007 — assumes the seriousness of anthropogenic global warming. (2) According to Dr. Carlin, he attended a meeting where everybody in the room was “invited” to comment on the endangerment proposal.

He rushed out a 93-page report that cited a variety of sources in raising questions about global warming and the usefulness of government action to combat it. In an accompanying e-mail message to superiors, he said the belief in global warming was “more religion than science” and warned that regulating carbon dioxide would be “the worst mistake that E.P.A. has ever made.”

Hear, hear!

Agency officials and outside experts who reviewed his report as a result of the outcry over the episode have said they found it wanting in a number of ways. It included unverified information from blog posts, they found, quoted selectively from journal articles, failed to acknowledge contradictory information and may have borrowed passages verbatim from the blog of a well-known climate change doubter.

This misses the point. EPA shirked its duty, under Sec. 202 of the Clean Air Act, to exercise its “judgment” in deciding endangerment. Instead, the Agency uncritically accepted the judgment of two externally-produced literature reviews — the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and the work of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s explanation of this problem). Carlin’s comment was designed to summarize data and research that EPA’s endangerment proposal and Technical Support Document did not even address. To call it “selective” is thus to take it entirely out of context. The comment was not meant to be a comprehensive overview of climate science but a corrective to EPA’s one-sided assessment.

In the interview Thursday, Dr. Carlin admitted that his report had been poorly sourced and written. He blamed the tight deadline.

“There are numerous problems with it,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of sending it to a journal in its current form. It is totally unacceptable for that type of thing. But it was either do it in four and a half days or don’t do it. I had to take some shortcuts.”

Does Broder dispute that Carlin had 4.5 days to complete his comment? If not, then why bother comparing the comment to a scientific paper prepared for a refereed journal?  

According to e-mail messages that were among the documents obtained this week under the Freedom of Information Act, Dr. McGartland had earlier tried to discourage Dr. Carlin from filing comments on the proposed finding and told him that whatever he submitted was not likely to affect the final report, implying that the decision had already been made. After receiving Dr. Carlin’s comments, Dr. McGartland told him that he would not forward them to the office preparing the final report.

Two things to notice here.

(1) McGartland’s statement implying that EPA’s decision “had already been made” calls into question top officials’ denials that the outcome of EPA’s endangerment proceeding is ”predetermined.” 

(2) McGartland did not merely imply that endangerment was a done deal, he also implied that people upstairs might be upset with comments that “do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round,” he wrote on March 17. “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

Finally a relevant quotation, but Broder offers no analysis.

A few minutes later, he instructed Dr. Carlin to “move on to other issues and subjects.” He also told Dr. Carlin not to discuss climate change with anyone outside his immediate office.

The e-mail messages most embarrassing to the E.P.A. came to light in late June, when someone sympathetic to Dr. Carlin leaked them to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative group that regularly produces studies critical of research that advances a case for climate change and government actions to address it.

For the record, CEI is a free-market or libertarian public policy group. We also do not publish studies critical of climate change but of climate change alarmism.

The institute distributed the material widely, and a number of conservative commentators and Republican lawmakers seized on it as an example of what they called Democratic suppression of science.

Dr. McGartland was “counseled” by his superior “to assure that professional differences are expressed in appropriate and considered ways,” according to one of the newly released documents.

I do not find this statement in the documents linked to Broder’s column.

Dr. Carlin said he and Dr. McGartland had not spoken to each other since June.

The new documents linked to Broder’s column are not newsworthy. They do not advance public understanding of the issues one iota. I can only conclude that Broder published them in order to have a hook to engage in pro-EPA apologetics at the expense of a courageous and learned civil servant.

In today’s New York Times, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman preens about intellectual dishonesty while presenting the most intellectually dishonest case about the cost of climate change policies I have seen this side of Joe Romm.  It moved me to do something I have not done for some time, and Fisk the entire article.  Krugman’s words are in italics.

So, have you enjoyed the debate over health care reform? Have you been impressed by the civility of the discussion and the intellectual honesty of reform opponents?

If so, you’ll love the next big debate: the fight over climate change.

And Mr Krugman is about to demonstrate his level of civility and intellectual honesty in what only can be described as a pre-emptive strike.  Is this the Krugman Doctrine?

The House has already passed a fairly strong cap-and-trade climate bill, the Waxman-Markey act, which if it becomes law would eventually lead to sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Sharp reductions? The Breakthrough Institute, which strongly champions action on global warming, says that the way the bill is structured “U.S. emissions in capped sectors could rise for much–if not all–of the next two decades.” Krugman protects himself against the accusation of outright lies by using the word “eventually,” but without disclosing the ineffectiveness of the bill over the next 20 years, Krugman is already being intellectually dishonest.

But on climate change, as on health care, the sticking point will be the Senate. And the usual suspects are doing their best to prevent action.

Some of them still claim that there’s no such thing as global warming, or at least that the evidence isn’t yet conclusive. But that argument is wearing thin – as thin as the Arctic pack ice, which has now diminished to the point that shipping companies are opening up new routes through the formerly impassable seas north of Siberia.

Krugman condenses a very complex argument over the nature of global warming into one statement and then dismisses it out of hand.  There are very few who deny the heat-trapping properties of greenhouse gases.  There are many who suggest that the influence of these gases on the climate as a whole has been significantly exaggerated.  For instance, I wonder what Mr. Krugman thinks of the recent research of Lindzen and Choi, published in August, which uses actual observations to find that climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases has been overestimated by a factor of six.

As for the Arctic, it has been melting since the end of the Little Ice Age two hundred years ago.  In fact, The Washington Post published a story on a government report that described “a radical change in climatic conditions,” “unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone,” and the melting of ice as long ago as November 2, 1922.  The fact that the North-East Passage, a holy grail for traders for hundreds of years, is now open might also warrant some balancing mention of its benefits.

Even corporations are losing patience with the deniers: earlier this week Pacific Gas and Electric canceled its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the chamber’s “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.

PG&E made an odd member of the Chamber of Commerce to begin with, as its profits come about not by commerce but by government regulation.  PG&E’s profits are “decoupled” from the amount of energy it sells.  There are suggestions, by the way, that companies are coming under pressure in the way of threats of activism directed against them if they continue to support the Chamber’s efforts to protect the interests of its members.

So the main argument against climate action probably won’t be the claim that global warming is a myth. It will, instead, be the argument that doing anything to limit global warming would destroy the economy. As the blog Climate Progress puts it, opponents of climate change legislation “keep raising their estimated cost of the clean energy and global warming pollution reduction programs like some out of control auctioneer.”

If the estimated costs rise, that is because people like the bloggers at Climate Progress keep persuading politicians to go for more ambitious programs, which of course cost more. Auctioneers only respond to bids, and it is the bidders who are out of control.

It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

Here we are getting to the nub.  Having succeeded in chilling the speech of those who are doubtful about the effect of greenhouse gases on the climate, Mr. Krugman now wants to make it unacceptable to say that policies designed to raise the cost of energy will have any detriment to the economy.

How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living – a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Well of course there is waste involved in generating energy.  If there wasn’t so much regulation of energy generation right now, which has the perverse effect of locking in old technology, then we’d actually be a lot more efficient than we are.  However, being more energy efficient does not mean we use less energy.  Mr. Krugman’s own newspaper just recently published an excellent story about the Jevons Paradox, first formulated in 1865, which states, “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”  This really is Energy 101.

Second, the best available economic analyses suggest that even deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would impose only modest costs on the average family. Earlier this month, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the effects of Waxman-Markey, concluding that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family only $160 a year, or 0.2 percent of income. That’s roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.

Once again, Mr. Krugman is being economical with the truth.  The government studies most emphatically did not find that the bill will cost a postage stamp a day in 2020.  They can only arrive at that figure of $160 a year by discounting twice.  They took the nominal cost – the actual out-of-pocket cost – of the increases in energy prices and worked out what that would be in today’s dollars.  Then they discounted back to find the present value of that figure.  In other words, $160 a year is what you’d have to lock away in a bank account with a guaranteed interest rate today in order to pay your bills in 2020.  If you didn’t do that, the figure from the EPA’s study in today’s dollars (ie not accounting for inflation) is above $2700 a year for a family of four.  The CBO study, meanwhile, admits that it did not attempt a comprehensive study of lost income.

Mr. Krugman also ignores polling evidence that finds that only 10 percent of respondents would be willing to pay more than $100 a year to achieve the supposed benefits of the Waxman-Markey bill.  So even if the cost was just a postage stamp a day, people would still find that cost expensive.

By 2050, when the emissions limit would be much tighter, the burden would rise to 1.2 percent of income. But the budget office also predicts that real G.D.P. will be about two-and-a-half times larger in 2050 than it is today, so that G.D.P. per person will rise by about 80 percent. The cost of climate protection would barely make a dent in that growth. And all of this, of course, ignores the benefits of limiting global warming.

The same argument can be made about global warming itself.  Even with all the supposed dramatic effects of global warming, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that people all over the world – even in the poorest countries – will be many times richer than they are today as a result of the economic activity sustained by fossil fuels. This demonstrates that a warmer-but-richer world is better off than a cooler-but-poorer world, and we will in fact be best off in the warmest world.  Krugman’s argument here in fact suggests that we shouldn’t do anything about emissions at all.

So where do the apocalyptic warnings about the cost of climate-change policy come from?

Are the opponents of cap-and-trade relying on different studies that reach fundamentally different conclusions? No, not really. It’s true that last spring the Heritage Foundation put out a report claiming that Waxman-Markey would lead to huge job losses, but the study seems to have been so obviously absurd that I’ve hardly seen anyone cite it.

The Heritage Foundation has updated its report and recently defended its methodology in a panel of other modelers, who did not raise significant objections to it (so much for its obvious absurdity).  If Mr Krugman hasn’t seen it cited it is the same way that Pauline Kael didn’t know anyone who voted for Nixon.  But the Heritage Report is not the only one.  The American Council on Capital Formation found job losses of 1.8 to 2.4 million in 2030.  The research of the left-leaning Brookings Institution has found that “Achieving reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is a costly endeavor.”  Once one strips away the discounting tricks, even the government studies demonstrate the truth of this statement.

Instead, the campaign against saving the planet rests mainly on lies.

Thus, last week Glenn Beck – who seems to be challenging Rush Limbaugh for the role of de facto leader of the G.O.P. – informed his audience of a “buried” Obama administration study showing that Waxman-Markey would actually cost the average family $1,787 per year. Needless to say, no such study exists.

Once again, Mr. Krugman is being economical with the truth.  He is correct only in so far as the recently revealed documents simply summarize the real effects of the other studies that have been disguised using economic trickery.  Here is what the Treasury documents say will be the effect of the President’s policies:

Given the administration’s proposal to auction all emission allowances …a cap-and-trade program could generate federal receipts on the order of $100 to $200 billion annually. … Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1% of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation. …One advantage of auctioning allowances is the potential for generating large revenues (perhaps $300 billion annually). … Domestic policies to address climate change and the related issues of energy security and affordability will involve significant costs and potential revenues, possibly up to several percentage points of annual GDP (i.e., equal in size to the corporate income tax).

These documents are available for viewing here.  The fact that the Treasury initially redacted the most embarrassing sentences suggests strongly that they wanted to hide this.  That sounds like burying the truth to me.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Beck. Similar – and similarly false – claims about the cost of Waxman-Markey have been circulated by many supposed experts.

The claims are the claims of the US Treasury Department, available now for all to see.  We show, while Mr. Krugman tells.

A year ago I would have been shocked by this behavior. But as we’ve already seen in the health care debate, the polarization of our political discourse has forced self-proclaimed “centrists” to choose sides – and many of them have apparently decided that partisan opposition to President Obama trumps any concerns about intellectual honesty.

So here’s the bottom line: The claim that climate legislation will kill the economy deserves the same disdain as the claim that global warming is a hoax. The truth about the economics of climate change is that it’s relatively easy being green.

Mr. Krugman is hoist by his own petard.

Over at the Big Hollywood blog, “Not Evil Just Wrong” co-producer Phelim McAleer shows (on video) how hypersensitive climate alarmist celebrities are when asked about their flying habits. He walked around at the premiere of “The Age of Stupid” — a documentary that claims the human race will be extinct by 2055 because of climate change — with a microphone and camera, and it wasn’t long before he was whisked from the media area (despite having credentials). Director Franny Armstrong, who apparently has jetted around at a good clip to promote the film, claimed that she’d been absolved by the high priest of climate condemnation thanks to the purchase of carbon offset indulges.

Ah, but we knew that already, at least when it comes to global warming stories. Today brings yet another production from the template of the Society of Environmental Journalists, this time delivered by Southeast Asia correspondent Seth Mydans. The scientific researchers: the communist Vietnamese government (press release titled “Climate change scenarios will guide Government’s planners”). Chief danger: sea level rise. Those threatened: virtually the entire country.

At least…they could be…

In a worse-case projection…more than one-third of the (Mekong River) delta…could be submerged if sea levels rise by three feet in the decades to come.

In a more modest projection, it calculates that one-fifth of the delta would be flooded, said Tran Thuc, who leads Vietnam’s National Institute for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Sciences and is the chief author of the report.

Storm surges could periodically raise that level, he said, and experts say an intrusion of salt water and industrial pollution could contaminate much of the remaining delta area.

The risks of climate change for Vietnam go far beyond the Mekong Delta, up into the Central Highlands, where rising temperatures could put the coffee crop at risk, and to the Red River Delta in the north, where large areas could be inundated near the capital, Hanoi….

If the sea level rises by three feet, 11 percent of Vietnam’s population could be displaced, according to a 2007 World Bank working paper.

If it rises by 15 feet, 35 percent of the population and 16 percent of the country’s land area could be affected, the document said….

In addition to rising seas in the Mekong Delta, climatologists predict more frequent, severe and southerly typhoons, heavier floods and stronger storm surges that could ultimately drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

Climate refugees could swell the population of Ho Chi Minh City….

But the city itself is also at risk, says the government study, prepared by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (undoubtedly part of a joint UN-Vietnamese government project). Up to one-fourth of the city’s area would be threatened by rising floodwaters if the sea level rose by three feet.

And so on. Considering possibilities that the New York Times never would, however, it could be that there is no threat from sea level rise, as World Climate Report suggests:

The question for climate change experts is not “Is sea level rising” but rather “Is sea level rise accelerating?” In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected”, while in 2007, IPCC wrote “Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3] mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm per year. Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear.” To say the least, the IPCC has been very cautious on the issue of accelerated sea level rise.

But to the Times, that doesn’t make for very good reading:

But the potential disruptions and the tremendous cost of trying to reduce [sea level rise] impact could slow Vietnam’s drive to emerge from its postwar poverty and impede its ambitions to become one of the region’s economic leaders.

Once again, this nation, which has spent much of its history struggling to free itself from foreign domination, finds itself threatened by an overpowering outside force.

Hey Seth, did it ever occur to you that the slowness with which Vietnam is emerging from poverty has to do with its own communism and Third World corruption? Perhaps, an “overpowering” internal force? And that this particular UN/Vietnam “report” might have something to do with justifying a wealth transfer from developed countries to developing countries in a final global climate treaty?

Just askin’ — maybe in a part two of your report?

In “The Dog Ate Global Warming,” published yesterday in National Review Online, Cato Institute scholar and climatologist Patrick J. Michaels delivers a body blow to the “science is settled” dogma.

There are three core issues in climate change science: detection (Is it warming, and if so by how much); attribution (What’s causing the warming we observe?); and, sensitivity (How much warming will a given increase in greenhouse gas concentrations produce?). As I argue in a previous post, all of these issues remain unsettled, and more so today than at any time in the past decade.  

Although climate sensitivity is the most important issue (because if climate sensitivity is low, then there is no “planetary emergency,” hence no need for “urgent action”), detection is in a sense primary, because without reliable temperature data it is impossible to resolve the other two issues.

The claim that the latter half of the 20th century was warmer than any comparable period during the past 1300 years is largely based on surface temperature records subject to several well-known warming biases. Urbanization generates artificial “heat islands.” Agriculture and irrigation in places like California’s Central Valley also produce local warming effects. Retired meteorologist Anthony Watts has documented that nearly nine out of every 10 U.S. weather stations fail to meet the U.S. Weather Service’s minimum requirement that temperature sensing equipment be placed at least 30 meters (about 100 feet) away from artificial heat sources such as air conditioner exhaust vents, waste water treatment plants, and parking lot pavements.

Michaels now exposes the shocking fact that the data allegedly underpinning the most influential surface temperature record are missing and apparently have been destroyed. The record is known as Jones-Wigley for its authors, Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The IPCC relied exclusively on this record until its 2001 report.

For years, Jones and Wigley declined to share the raw data from which they constructed their record. Recently, however, Jones told University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. that they could not share their data with him, because the data no longer exist:

Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality-controlled and homogenized) data.

 Michaels says the “data storage availability” excuse is “balderdash,” since “All the original data could easily fit on the 9-inch tape drives common in the mid-1980s.”

The bigger point, of course, is that if other scientists cannot examine the raw data, they cannot assess the accuracy and objectivity of the “value-adding” adjustments Jones and Wigley made to produce their global temperature record.

In addition to providing another reason to reject the “science is settled” dogma, disappearance of the Jones-Wigley data is of direct relevance to EPA’s pending endangerment finding. The Jones-Wigley temperature record is part of the evidence on which EPA bases its judgment that “air pollution” from greenhouse gas emissions “endangers public health and welfare.”

Use of the Jones-Wigley temperature record in a rulemaking clearly flouts federal data quality standards. Under OMB guidelines implementing the Federal Data Quality Act, data quality consists of four elements: objectivity, utility to users, integrity of information, and reproducibility in the case of “influential scientific or statistical information.”

Now, if the original Jones-Wigely data have been destroyed, then it is impossible to assure “integrity of information.” For all we know, Jones and Wigley goofed in their calculations or choice of methodologies, or even manipulated the data to produce a pre-determined result. By the same token, it is impossible to “reproduce” the Jones-Wigley temperature record, because there are no data to reproduce it from. Yet, as a factual basis of both the IPCC reports and the EPA endangerment finding, Jones-Wigley indisputably qualifies as “influential scientific or statistical information.”

Michaels’s terse conclusion speaks volumes: “No data, no science.” For decades, Jones-Wigley has been a mainstay of the alleged ”scientific consensus” supporting Kyoto-style energy rationing. Warmists have a lot of explaining to do.

Patrick Michaels today has a thought-provoking piece on NRO about the reliability of the temperature record. According to Michaels,

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate…

…Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/- 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/-” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?“

It doesn’t take a scientist to recognize that this last statement makes a mockery of the scientific method. After all, the entire point of peer review is to find something wrong with a scientist’s research, so as not to propagate inaccurate conclusions in academic journals. All of which begs the question: What is there to hide?  Stay tuned. Steve McIntyre, who exposed the fraudulent “hockey stick” temperature history, is working on the CRU issue.

On a related note, my colleague Marlo Lewis blogged on the inadequacy of the U.S. surface temperature record in this excellent post.