Talk:Alan Carlin

Undue weight?

An editor added this tag in September 2009, but didn't specify any concerns. This section looks fine to me -- it is almost identical to the section that formerly appeared within Lisa P. Jackson as "Alan Carlin controversy".

Unless this editor specifies concerns, the tag should be removed. --Pete Tillman (talk) 23:49, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

Letter from Alan Carlin

I wrote to Dr. Carlin, asking for a photograph and for his comments on the article.

He's not very happy with it. His letter follows (dated 3/29/10):

With respect to your request for comments, I find that the current entry on me is seriously unbalanced and in many places outright incorrect. My comments to EPA concerned a matter of intense political debate and there are two sides to the issues involved, not one--as the entry appears to imply. The entry contains long, self-serving quotes from an EPA spokesperson with no attempt to put them in reasonable balance with opposing viewpoints. Many if not most of the spokesperson's quoted comments are demonstrably false or at best misleading. A balanced approach in my view should include phrase by phrase responses if Andy's comments are retained rather than what now appears to the reader to be acceptance of them as objective information. Two of the most important sources not used are the following;

• http://republicans.oversight.house.gov/images/stories/Reports/20091015epaendangermentjointreport.pdf which contradicts many if not most of Andy's conclusions after several months of careful interviews by Congressional staff with most of the principal actors and a careful review of the emails involved.

• http://www.globalwarming.org/2009/09/25/john-broder%E2%80%99s-spin-job-on-alan-carlin/ which corrects many of the errors in Broder's very biased New York Times September article.

If the Wiki article cites Andy or Broder, I believe that any balanced approach needs to discuss and cite these two pieces in detail since they paint a very different picture and to my knowledge an entirely accurate one. Just because an EPA spokesperson or a NYTimes reporter says something unfortunately implies nothing about its veracity or accuracy. Both veracity and accuracy need to be questioned and discussed if either's work is quoted or cited in my view.

Another problem is that although great weight is put on Andy's false/misleading comments, the Wiki article fails to really discuss what it is that I actually said in my comments to EPA. Surely at least a summary of at least the major points should be in order. Although Climategate and subsequent disclosures of fabricated IPCC conclusions were not known in March 2009 when I wrote my 100 page comments in 4-5 days to meet EPA-imposed deadlines, my comments have in fact proved remarkably prescient. I recommended, for example, that EPA do its own analysis and not use the IPCC et al. analyses. The result of not following my advice is that EPA's endangerment finding is now tarred with the same problems as its major source, the IPCC reports. I further argued that the important thing was whether the AGW hypothesis fits observable evidence, the only basis for valid science. It did not then and subsequent research (Lindzen and Choi, 2009, and the NIPCC report, 2009, to mention just two) has only further reinforced that conclusion. Surely this is relevant information for readers to have.

One footnote: My older Website would be better linked at its new URL: http://sites.google.com/site/carlineconomics/

The following quote from the Wiki article illustrates some of the many problems with it (there are similar or worse problems elsewhere in the article of course so this is by no means the worst section):

"Carlin also acknowledged in the article that his report had been produced under short deadline and, as critics have said since, was not fully or cleanly sourced, and there was no restriction on his contact with the media. Andy was quoted as calling "the accusation that Carlin had been muzzled for political reasons 'ridiculous.' 'There was no predetermined position on endangerment, and Dr. Carlin’s work was not suppressed,' 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.'" No further Congressional action was reported, in the September report.[7]

Sentence 1: What article is being referred to? Possibly Broder? If so, I made no such acknowledgement despite Broder's assertion that I did. What I said to Broder was that my Comments did not meet standards for journal articles, which generally take 6-9 months to write rather than the 4-5 days I was allowed by EPA for these comments. How could they? As to the sources cited in my Comments, they were as fully and cleanly sourced as was possible in a 100 page report written as required by EPA in 4-5 days. As it now turns out they were much better sourced than the IPCC AR4 report, whose authors had months if not years to add sources but repeatedly violated their own guidelines. These problems have been described in recent months by various largely British press items exposing the sourcing problems in AR4 and are often referred to as "Himalayagate," "Amazongate," etc., etc.

Sentence 2: Andy's alleged comments in this sentence were plainly false. There WAS a restriction on my contact with the media (and the rest of the world on this topic) between late March and late June when CEI broke the story, as detailed in the McGartland email and reinforced by personal interactions with him. This policy was changed by EPA in my view only in response to the June media onslought when EPA realized that this was an untenable policy from a public relations viewpoint. It is also obvious from the McGartland emails released by CEI that I was muzzled for political reasons during the March-June period. Personal interactions with McGartland further reinforced that conclusion.

Sentence 3: There was plainly a predetermined EPA position on Endangerment, which was more than clear from McGartland's emails, from the Workgroup meetings which I attended, and the EPA comments on the comments submitted during the public comment period. My comments were also clearly suppressed during the March-June period.

Sentence 4: The Administration clearly did not want to hear the alternative viewpoints I expressed in my comments. Why else would I be prohibited from expressing them? There is no other reasonable interpretation of the emails and EPA actions.

Sentence 5: As shown by my first cite above of an October 15 Congressional report, this sentence is also wrong. There was further congressional "action" in the same sense as Inhofe's earlier statement was "action."

One other fact not noted in the Wiki article but critical for understanding my approach to environmental issues: I am also known for my work with the Sierra Club providing an economic basis for rejecting two hydroelectric dams proposed by the then Administration to be built in the Grand Canyon of Arizona. This effort is well documented on my Website and also received substantial press coverage at the time. I have devoted most of my life to understanding and explaining the economic and scientific aspects of environmental issues without regard to the particular sides taken by environmental organizations or the governments involved in each case.

I would be happy to supply a photograph if the entry should be made more substantially more balanced. As it now stands I want nothing to do with it or Wiki. What is now included is primarily propaganda/spin in the guise of supposed objectivity, and reflects very poorly on Wikipedia that it would allow such an article to appear under its name. If you should be interested in producing a fair and balanced piece, I would be happy to work with you or others, but I would need to be convinced of your/Wikipedia's sincerity before even spending that time. Although most of the added information needed is in the two listed sources above, I would under these circumstances, be willing to identify the many other problems in the Wiki article beyond what I have done above. Simply quoting EPA's official spin is hardly a serious effort, particularly given the ready availability of much contrary and convincing information.

Thanks again for requesting my comments.

Alan Carlin

I haven't had time to review this, and probably won't for a bit, so I posted it FYI. Pete Tillman (talk) 06:04, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Notability

With seven third-party cites, including 3 separate articles in the NY Times, Mr. Carlin's wiki-notability seems well-established. Does the tagging editor have specific concerns? TIA, Pete Tillman (talk) 22:42, 6 January 2011 (UTC)