Western Business Roundtable: Stop Rulemaking until U.S. Completes Corrupted Data Probe
All work by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to develop mandatory limits on greenhouse gases should be put on hold until congressional investigators determine whether or not the science upon which EPA is relying was doctored, a group of Western business leaders urged in a Dec. 1 press release.
"The scientists who developed the data on which EPA is basing its work have all but admitted that their data was corrupted and that some of it might have been purposely deleted to avoid public disclosure," said Jim Sims, president and CEO of the Western Business Roundtable. "They have admitted to corrupting the very scientific process needed to ensure the integrity of the computer models on which climate predictions are based.
"At a minimum, the U.S. government should put a moratorium on spending any tax dollars on a process that is based on potentially faulty and corrupted data," Sims said.
"The revelation of data corruption at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom must be investigated fully before any public policies based upon that data are completed," Sims said. "Without a complete and full investigation, the public's trust in any of these regulations is going to be damaged severely, and they will fail in their mission."
EPA should focus on making "technology development grants" to companies working on technologies aimed at reducing emissions across the spectrum.
Sims also urged the leaders of the U.S. House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to ask "tough" questions in the Dec. 2 hearing and to call for the following actions to be taken following revelations from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.:
- All raw temperature data collected by the East Anglia Climate Research Unit since its inception should be released so that scientists around the world can examine the data in detail and seek to replicate the interpretations made of that data by scientists at the East Anglia center. Data checking and replication is a fundamental tenet of the scientific method.
- A full accounting should be provided of any and all data destruction and/or manipulation that was done by scientists at the center.
- A full accounting should be made of any an all attempts to corrupt the peer review process connected with the review of data regarding climate science.
- An independent audit should be conducted of all sources of funding that supported the work at the East Anglia CRU and of the individual scientists that work in conjunction with the center. According to the CRU, its work is funded through "external contracts and grants from academic funding councils, government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations, non-governmental organizations, commerce and industry."
"Only when all information is made publicly available and full discovery is completed in these critical areas will the public's confidence begin to be restored in the work that has been done by climate scientists and by the IPCC," Sims warned. "In the absence of such disclosure, the cloud that has descended over climate science and IPCC computer models will only get worse."