May 2007 | Art & Soul
No Oil, No Auto Profits Left Behind
Bush & Co. fight global warming the only way they know how: by denying its existence
By Timothy Donaghy, Jennifer Freeman, Francesca Grifo, Karly Kaufman, Tarek Maassarani & Lexi Shultz
A six-year pattern of deceit
The primary context and motivation for both the UCS and GAP investigations presented in this report were numerous widely reported instances of political interference with federal climate science in the last six years.
These instances include the editing of government climate reports by high-level administration officials to amplify uncertainty in the scientific conclusions; delay and/or disappearance of government reports on climate change; denial of media access to prominent climate scientists; changes to agency mission statements to de-emphasize climate research; and congressional hearings seeking to discredit scientific findings on climate change. This section summarizes several of these incidents.
• In 2000, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (usgcrp.gov) published a research report that clearly affirmed the reality of global warming. In subsequent years, however, references to it went missing from government discussions of climate change including, most importantly, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s (climatescience.gov) 2003 Strategic Plan. Former CCSP Senior Associate Rick Piltz resigned his position in June 2005, after 10 years of government service, in part to protest such obfuscation.
In his resignation letter, Piltz wrote: “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 in its relationship to the research community, to program managers, to policymakers, and to the public interest.”
• According to an internal EPA memo, White House officials demanded so many qualifying words, such as “potentially” and “may,” that the result would have been to insert “uncertainty...where there is essentially none.” Former NOAA official Jerry Mahlman, who served as a reviewer for the EPA report, noted in an interview, “it was obvious that senior EPA officials felt compelled to water down the conclusions.” In the end, the entire section on climate change was deleted from the version of the report released for public comment. According to internal EPA documents and interviews with EPA researchers, agency staff chose this path rather than compromising credibility by misrepresenting the scientific consensus.
• The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) was denied a September 2003 request to reprint a popular informational brochure about carbon sequestration in the soil and what farmers could do to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases. “It is not just a case of micromanagement, but really of censorship of government information,” according to an anonymous USDA official. “In nearly 15 years of government service, I can’t remember ever needing clearance from the White House for such a thing.”
• In February 2006, the phrase “to understand and protect the home planet” was removed from the NASA mission statement.
• Some critics have accused NOAA of distorting the ongoing scientific debate on this issue of global warming and hurricanes by alerting the media to a prominent article the agency published in its online magazine in November 2005 attributing the upswing in hurricane activity to a natural multi-decadal cycle (NOAA 2005), while not mentioning other research by NOAA scientists linking increased hurricane intensity to climate change. A Nature article quoted NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher as saying the information “could not be released because the agency cannot take an official position on a field of science that is changing so rapidly,” although NOAA had in fact taken such a position on this topic in its own November 2005 magazine article.
While the examples described above involved scientists who were U.S. government employees, there have also been notable incidents of interference with climate scientists outside the federal government.
• In June 2005, Representative Joe Barton (R-TX), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, disputed climatologist Michael Mann’s methods in reconstructing the historical temperature record that appeared in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report. Barton relied on a study published by Steve McIntyre (a mining executive) and Ross McKitrick (an environmental economist) claiming to have discovered flaws in the work of Mann and his colleagues. Barton demanded that Mann and his colleagues provide vast amounts of information to the committee, including a list of all their studies and funding sources, the location of data archives, and information about their use of data, their computer code, and their role in the IPCC (Barton 2005).
• In a September 28, 2005, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on global warming, James Inhofe (R-OK) invited novelist Michael Crichton to testify as an “expert witness.” Crichton, whose fiction novel State of Fear attempted to discredit global change research, gave testimony that similarly sought to undermine peer-reviewed climate science.
Survey results show scope of censorship
The results of UCS and GAP investigations demonstrate that these are not isolated incidents but rather part of a larger problem facing climate scientists to varying degrees across the federal government.
The UCS survey showed that thirty-seven percent perceived or personally experienced statements by officials at their agencies that misrepresented scientists’ findings; 38 percent perceived or personally experienced disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate; 46 percent perceived or personally experienced new or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate related work; and a full quarter of respondents perceived or personally experienced situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings.
Excerpted from Atmosphere of Pressure: Political Interference in Federal Climate Science. ©2007 Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project. All rights reserved. Books can be ordered for $20 at ucs usa.org/publications. The full text of this report is available for free in pdf form. For more information, visit ucsusa.org/scienti fic_integrity and whistleblower.org
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