Has politics trumped science in the transparent Obama administration?

Has the most transparent administration in history gone a bit murky?

While the House urgently rushed to pass a cap-and-tax-and-tax-and-tax bill to stave off the imminent collapse of the global biosphere under the weight of carbon dioxide emissions, it seems that over at the EPA there were a couple of naysayers who weren’t being heard.

A report prepared for the National Center for Environmental Economics by Alan Carlin and John Davidson was — How shall we put it this? — being suppressed by the bosses at EPA.

Was it because the report said:

— Global temperatures have declined for 11 years while CO2 levels increased?

— Consensus on hurricane behavior has changed to an opinion that global warming has little or no effect?

— There is little evidence Greenland is shedding ice?

— The bad economy has cause a decline in greenhouse gas emissions.

— Assumptions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used false assumptions about the effect of water vapor?

— The IPCC used faulty data on solar variability, which new research suggests could account for 68 percent of any increase in global temperatures?

I first read about Carlin and Davidson in an Investor’s Business Daily editorial, which noted that Carlin, who has worked for EPA for 38 years, has been taken off climate-related work.

IBD noted that, when Carlin asked that his report be forwarded up the ladder for consideration along with what he described as faulty data from IPCC, he was stiffed by his boss, who replied in an e-mail: “The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. 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. … I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

Politics trump science? Not in an Obama administration, we were assured.

This contretemps was first reported by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which released both the report and an exchange of e-mails.

The New York Times did a story on its Web site over the weekend, even following it up with questions to people in Congress. The paper quoted Republican Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, ranking member of the House Select Committee on Energy and Global Warming, as saying, "What's happening here is that the EPA is cooking the books. They have suppressed a study that completely blows apart the scientific underpinnings of the endangerment finding that the EPA administrator made on CO2, and this study has been suppressed because it does not fit the Obama administration's political objectives."

I asked our wire editor that day to ask Associated Press if it would look into the story. She was told the environmental reports were really busy with the climate bill, but they would make a note of it and follow-up if their schedules clear up.