posted on June 8, 2005 06:42:06 AM
WASHINGTON - A White House official who previously worked for the oil industry's lobby group has repeatedly edited government climate reports in a way that downplays links between global warming and greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, made changes to descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists and their supervisors, the newspaper said, citing internal documents.
For example, the Times reported, the words "significant and fundamental" were added before the word "uncertainties" when describing the state of climate science.
The White House declined comment on the report.
The report said the documents were obtained by the newspaper from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that provides legal help to government whistleblowers.
Official resigned
The group is representing Rick Piltz, who resigned in March from the office that coordinates government climate research. That office, the Climate Change Science Program, issued the documents that Cooney edited, the Times said.
The newspaper said Cooney made handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, removing or adjusting language on climate research.
In one document, Cooney reportedly crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and snowpack from warming. Those projections, he noted in the margins, are "straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings."
Cooney is a lawyer who previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, which like the Bush administration opposes mandatory curbs on greenhouse gas emissions.
Normal review, White House says
White House officials told the newspaper the changes were part of a normal interagency review of all documents related to global environmental change.
“All comments are reviewed, and some are accepted and some are rejected,” Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told the newspaper.
In a memo sent last week to top officials dealing with climate change at a dozen agencies, Piltz charged that “politicization by the White House” was undermining the credibility and integrity of the science program.
A senior Environmental Protection Agency scientist, who spoke to the Times on condition of anonymity, said the editing "has somewhat of a chilling effect and has created a sense of frustration" among government scientists.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
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President George Bush: "Over time the truth will come out."
President George Bush: "Our people are going to find out the truth, and the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence. There's no doubt in my mind."
Bush was right. The truth did come out and the facts are he misled Congress and the American people about the reasons we should go to war in Iraq.
