A Congressman Brandishes His Gavel

By Eli Kintisch
ScienceNOW Daily News
30 January 2007

WASHINGTON, D.C.-- In an indication of Democratic eagerness to investigate whether the Bush administration has interfered with federal global warming research, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) today charged the White House with "an orchestrated effort to mislead the public." Waxman, who this month became chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, says his staff has found evidence that scientific reports were manipulated for political ends despite efforts by the Administration to block recent requests for information.

Nonprofit groups and a prominent whistleblower have alleged for several years that White House political appointees have distorted federally funded climate science. The whistleblower, former Administration climate change program official Rick Piltz, said in 2005 that former White House Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff Philip Cooney manufactured doubt and uncertainty in a number of reports by the Administration. A number of the incidents have been reported previously. A call to the White House was unreturned at press time.

At the hearing, Waxman cited several White House documents in support of his allegations. Last July, Waxman joined then-committee chair Tom Davis (R-VA) in requesting memos, letters, and notes related to climate science reports. Yesterday, the White House released nine of the 39 requested documents, although Waxman said only some of the papers related to his request. We've "received virtually nothing from this Administration," he said. White House officials allowed Waxman's staff to see the other documents but not keep copies, citing concerns about the release of diplomatic correspondence and other "deliberative" documents.

Among those documents, Waxman said, was evidence showing efforts by political officials including Cooney to delete discussion of human impacts by climate change, remove mention of specific carbon emission levels, and remove statements connecting human activities to warming trends. The documents related to a 2002 Climate Action report to the United Nations, a draft of the 2003 State of the Environment report by the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Asia-Pacific partnership the Administration led in 2005. "The political gatekeepers would step in" to alter findings and create doubt, Piltz testified.

In one edit Waxman's staff says they saw, Cooney had removed a reference to the 2001 National Research Council report on the human contribution to warming. Elsewhere, he had added that "satellite data disputes global warming," a statement NASA climate researcher Drew Shindell of Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City told the committee was wrong.

Another witness, University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr., described what he called "heavy-handed Bush Administration information management" on a number of climate policy issues. But Pielke said past Administrations had acted in a similar fashion, citing among other things poor scientific evidence by the Clinton Administration to justify missile strikes in 1998 on the Al-Shifa factory in Sudan. Waxman plans to hold follow-up hearings, but no date has been set.