Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / January 2007

Bush administration accused of doctoring scientists' reports on climate change

o  Inconvenient conclusions censored, hearing told
o  Researchers warned not to talk about global warming

By Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
The Guardian
Wednesday, January 31, 2007

The Bush administration was yesterday accused of systemic
tampering with the work of government climate scientists to
eliminate politically inconvenient material about global
warming.

At a hearing of Congress, scientists and advocacy groups
described a campaign by the White House to remove
references to global warming from scientific reports and
limit public mention of the topic to avoid pressure on an
administration opposed to mandatory controls on greenhouse
gas emissions.

Such pressure extended even to the use of the words "global
warming" or "climate change", said a report released
yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the
Government Accountability Project. The report said nearly
half of climate scientists at government agencies had been
advised against using those terms.

Yesterday's hearings, overseen by the new Democratic chair
of the House committee on oversight and government reform,
Congressman Henry Waxman, follow years of complaints by
scientists that the Bush administration was seeking to put
its own spin on scientific research at government agencies.
They also complain of a reduction in funding for climate
research since the 1990s.

The committee was warned that the campaign by the Bush
administration discouraged free academic inquiry. "If you
know what you are writing has to go through a White House
clearance before it is to be published, people start
writing for the class," said Rick Piltz, a former senior
associate at the US Climate Change Science Programme. "An
anticipatory kind of self-censorship sets in."

The balance appears to have shifted somewhat since the
Democrats took control of Congress this month. At least
five bills proposing mandatory caps on greenhouse gas
emissions - an idea that is anathema to the White House -
have been introduced in the House and Senate.

However, Mr Piltz told Congress even he was taken aback by
the extent of the political interference, in technical
reports, public meetings as well as exchanges with the
media, in which scientists were assigned minders from the
administration.

In the survey of 1,600 government scientists by the Union
of Concerned Scientists, 46% had been warned against using
terms like global warming in speech or in their reports.
The scientists interviewed were working at seven government
agencies, from Nasa to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Forty-three percent of respondents said their published
work had been revised in ways that altered the meaning of
scientific findings. Some 38% said they had direct
knowledge of cases where scientific information on climate
was stripped from websites and printed reports.

"There were a very large number of edits that came at the
12th hour after all the earlier science people had signed
off," said Mr Piltz, who eventually resigned from his job
because of such pressure. In one such case, a White House
appointee, Phil Cooney, demanded 400 last-minute changes
which significantly changed the meaning and tone of the
report.

No detail was beyond the scrutiny of administration
officials, it seemed. Drew Shindell, a scientist at Nasa's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, described how
officials repeatedly objected to the title of a report
which measured rapid warming in Antarctica before dictating
their own choice. "Word came back from above that it should
be: 'Scientists study Antarctic Climate Change'," Dr
Shindell said. "I thought it was so watered down it would
be of little interest to anybody."

Much of the testimony yesterday centred on the influence
exerted by Mr Cooney, a former lobbyist for the petroleum
industry who was put in charge of the Council on
Environmental Quality. Mr Cooney now works for Exxon Mobil,
the committee was told. In one instance, Mr Cooney
personally edited out a key section of an Environmental
Protection Agency report to Congress on the dangers of
climate change. "He called it speculative musing," Mr Piltz
said.

Mr Waxman said he knew of further evidence of such
tampering but had been stonewalled by a White House which
had repeatedly resisted requests for documents about Mr
Cooney's involvement in controlling information.

More at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,2002574,00.html

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