In its recent attempt to revise an EPA report on climate change and the environment, the White House cites a study by Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that has drawn harsh criticism from climatologists. "Greenhouse skeptics, pro-industry groups and political conservatives have seized on the results," David Appell writes in Scientific American. "But mainstream climatologists, as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are perturbed that the report has received so much attention; they say the study's conclusions are scientifically dubious and colored by politics. ... 'The fact that it has received any attention at all is a result, again in my view, of its utility to those groups who want the global warming issue to just go away,' comments Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose work Soon and Baliunas refer to.'"