Subject: Re: Re: Any one know anything about A/C?

[chris.miller at infofoundry.com (Miller, Chris)]

-----Original Message-----
From: David Utley [mailto:fahrvegnugen@cox.net] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2005 9:30 AM
To: Miller, Chris; scirocco-l@scirocco.org
Subject: Re: RE: Subject: Re: Re: Any one know anything about A/C?

> Did you see that the junkscience link was a reprint from a Washington
paper?

-----------<snip>----------

Here's a related and recent article (June 7 or 8?) from the New York
Times.  I think we're straying pretty far from Sciroccos, and pretty
close to politics.

Chris
---

Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Links to Global Warming

By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times

AP
Critics argue scientific content in such reports should be reviewed by
scientists. 

   
A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against
limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate
reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global
warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and
2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions
of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors,
including some senior Bush administration officials, had already
approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the
phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties,"
tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts
say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on
Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote
administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team
leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest
trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer
with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

The documents were obtained by The New York Times from the Government
Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for
government whistle-blowers.

The project is representing Rick S. Piltz, who resigned in March as a
senior associate in the office that coordinates government climate
research. That office, now called the Climate Change Science Program,
issued the documents that Mr. Cooney edited.

A White House spokeswoman, Michele St. Martin, said yesterday that Mr.
Cooney would not be available to comment. "We don't put Phil Cooney on
the record," Ms. St. Martin said. "He's not a cleared spokesman."

In one instance in an October 2002 draft of a regularly published
summary of government climate research, "Our Changing Planet," Mr.
Cooney amplified the sense of uncertainty by adding the word "extremely"
to this sentence: "The attribution of the causes of biological and
ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely
difficult."

In a section on the need for research into how warming might change
water availability and flooding, he crossed out a paragraph describing
the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and snowpack. His note in
the margins explained that this was "straying from research strategy
into speculative findings/musings."

Other White House officials said the changes made by Mr. Cooney were
part of the normal interagency review that takes place on all documents
related to global environmental change. Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for
the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted that one
of the reports Mr. Cooney worked on, the administration's 10-year plan
for climate research, was endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences.
And Myron Ebell, who has long campaigned against limits on greenhouse
gases as director of climate policy at the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, a libertarian group, said such editing was necessary for
"consistency" in meshing programs with policy.

But critics said that while all administrations routinely vetted
government reports, scientific content in such reports should be
reviewed by scientists. Climate experts and representatives of
environmental groups, when shown examples of the revisions, said they
illustrated the significant if largely invisible influence of Mr. Cooney
and other White House officials with ties to energy industries that have
long fought greenhouse-gas restrictions.

In a memorandum sent last week to the top officials dealing with climate
change at a dozen agencies, Mr. Piltz said the White House editing and
other actions threatened to taint the government's $1.8 billion-a-year
effort to clarify the causes and consequences of climate change.

"Each administration has a policy position on climate change," Mr. Piltz
wrote. "But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed
under this administration during the past four years, in which
politicization by the White House has fed back directly into the science
program in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of
the program."

A senior Environmental Protection Agency scientist who works on climate
questions said the White House environmental council, where Mr. Cooney
works, had offered valuable suggestions on reports from time to time.
But the scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because all
agency employees are forbidden to speak with reporters without
clearance, said the kinds of changes made by Mr. Cooney had damaged
morale. "I have colleagues in other agencies who express the same view,
that it has somewhat of a chilling effect and has created a sense of
frustration," he said.

Efforts by the Bush administration to highlight uncertainties in science
pointing to human-caused warming have put the United States at odds with
other nations and with scientific groups at home.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who met with President Bush at the
White House yesterday, has been trying to persuade him to intensify
United States efforts to curb greenhouse gases. Mr. Bush has called only
for voluntary measures to slow growth in emissions through 2012.

Yesterday, saying their goal was to influence that meeting, the
scientific academies of 11 countries, including those of the United
States and Britain, released a joint letter saying, "The scientific
understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify
nations taking prompt action."

The American Petroleum Institute, where Mr. Cooney worked before going
to the White House, has long taken a sharply different view. Starting
with the negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty in
1997, it has promoted the idea that lingering uncertainties in climate
science justify delaying restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide and
other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases.

On learning of the White House revisions, representatives of some
environmental groups said the effort to amplify uncertainties in the
science was clearly intended to delay consideration of curbs on the
gases, which remain an unavoidable byproduct of burning oil and coal.

"They've got three more years, and the only way to control this issue
and do nothing about it is to muddy the science," said Eileen Claussen,
the president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a private
group that has enlisted businesses in programs cutting emissions.

Mr. Cooney's alterations can cause clear shifts in meaning. For example,
a sentence in the October 2002 draft of "Our Changing Planet" originally
read, "Many scientific observations indicate that the Earth is
undergoing a period of relatively rapid change." In a neat, compact
hand, Mr. Cooney modified the sentence to read, "Many scientific
observations point to the conclusion that the Earth may be undergoing a
period of relatively rapid change."

A document showing a similar pattern of changes is the 2003 "Strategic
Plan for the United States Climate Change Science Program," a thick
report describing the reorganization of government climate research that
was requested by Mr. Bush in his first speech on the issue, in June
2001. The document was reviewed by an expert panel assembled in 2003 by
the National Academy of Sciences. The scientists largely endorsed the
administration's research plan, but they warned that the
administration's procedures for vetting reports on climate could result
in excessive political interference with science.