Dog bites man

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 8, 2005
Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

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.

Another political appointee who has played an influential role in adjusting
language in government reports on climate science is Dr. Harlan L. Watson,
the chief climate negotiator for the State Department, who has a doctorate
in solid-state physics but has not done climate research.

In an Oct. 4, 2002 memo to James R. Mahoney, the head of the United States
Climate Change Science Program and an appointee of Mr. Bush, Mr. Watson
"strongly" recommended cutting boxes of text referring to the findings of a
National Academy of Sciences panel on climate and the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that periodically reviews
research on human-caused climate change.

The boxes, he wrote, "do not include an appropriate recognition of the
underlying uncertainties and the tentative nature of a number of the
assertions."

While those changes were made nearly two years ago, recent statements by
Dr. Watson indicate that the admnistration's position has not changed.

"We are still not convinced of the need to move forward quite so quickly,"
he told the BBC in London last month. "There is general agreement that
there is a lot known, but also there is a lot to be known."

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