In case you haven’t heard the latest craze among right-wing talkers, it’s about Al Carlin, an Environmental Protection Agency analyst who stated his skepticism about global warming. Conservatives are saying that Carlin’s views on climate change were suppressed by EPA honchos because they didn’t agree with Obama administration opinions.

Now, it’s true that conservatives are well-versed in the issue of presidents stifling scientists who oppose their views — Bush did it for a solid eight years, after all. But here’s the big difference: Carlin is not a climate scientist — he’s an economist who wrote some reports on his own, without prompting by the EPA, after taking on the issue of global warming as a “hobby” on his own time. Nothing was “suppressed,” since Carlin’s reports weren’t EPA reports at all. Meanwhile, of course, Sen. James “The global warming debate is predicated on fear, rather than science” Inhofe of Oklahoma is calling for a criminal investigation into the Carlin matter – in order, we imagine, to scare the daylights out of the scientists at the EPA.

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