States’ Global Warming Case Flawed, New Amicus Brief Argues

Anti-Alarmist Scientists Weigh In on Supreme Court Case

By CEI Staff

October 25, 2006

<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />Contact: Christine Hall, 202.331.2258

Washington, D.C., October 25, 2006—The Competitive Enterprise Institute yesterday filed an amicus brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, supporting the decision of the Environmental Protection Agency not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. The amicus brief, filed on behalf of eight scientists with expertise in climate sciences, disputes claims of global warming catastrophe being made by <?xml:namespace prefix = u1 />Massachusetts and other states in their challenge to EPA.

In July, 2005, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld EPA’s decision against regulating carbon dioxide.

The states and their allies largely rely on climate change models in their effort to force draconian EPA regulation. But according to the CEI amicus brief, these models “are based on assumptions of increases in carbon dioxide concentration that are well known to be substantial overestimates of what is occurring and what has occurred in recent decades.”

Moreover, a scientists’ brief supporting the states “mischaracterizes the effects of greenhouse gases on the globe’s temperature history, on hurricanes, on melting of ice and sea-level rise, and on health and mortality,” concludes the CEI brief. “It is simply impossible to conclude that the net effect of greenhouse gases endangers human health and welfare.”

The case before the court is Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The CEI brief was filed on behalf of scientists Sallie Baliunas, John R. Christy, Christopher de Freitas, David Legates, Anthony Lupo, Patrick Michaels, Joel Schwartz, and Roy W. Spencer.

Read the amicus brief.

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