At The American's Enterprise Blog, an entry notes the importance of Climategate to judicial review of EPA's forthcoming decision to list CO2 as harmful pollutant.
Long ago, in defining the level of inquiry a court should make in the course of determining whether an agency action is "arbitrary and capricious," the D.C. Court of Appeals said that the inquiry cannot be performed without some attention to the factual basis for an action, because an agency decision premised on a particular state of facts is, obviously enough, highly capricious if those facts do not exist.
From this seed has grown the doctrine that an agency must be very forthcoming in revealing any technical and scientific studies, and the basis of any models, that underpin a decision. The American entry contains a recent quotation from the court summing up this Law of Openness.
Given the state of the data and the models revealed by Climategate, EPA is going to have a hard time meeting this standard.
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