By William Neikirk
Tribune senior correspondent
Published January 30, 2007, 7:07 PM CST
WASHINGTON -- As a United Nations panel readied an update on global warming this week, charges erupted in Congress Tuesday over alleged White House political manipulation of scientific climate-change research.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said at a hearing that evidence indicated Bush administration officials had tried to "mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming."
Two advocacy groups released a survey to the panel in which a number of government climate scientists claimed either that their research had been edited to change the meaning or that they were told to delete references to "global warming" or "climate change" from reports.
White House officials did not appear before the committee, but President Bush in his State of the Union Address last week referred to "global climate change" and said technology should be used to address the problem. The White House has conceded in the past that changes had been made in some reports to achieve "balance" in the debate.
To many observers, Bush's mere mention of the subject indicated that the White House has softened its stance on the climate-change issue, although the president remains opposed to capping carbon dioxide emissions, a step many scientists believe is necessary to stave off global warming.
The climate-change issue has heated up in Congress with the Democrats coming to power. But it is not clear what will be done this year. Bush is seeking to address it primarily through development of cleaner, renewable sources of energy. There are several bipartisan bills to cap emissions and increase the supply of such cleaner-burning fuels as ethanol.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change plans Friday to issue its first of four reports this year on the risks of global warming. According to Reuters, a draft of the report said there is at least a 90 percent chance that human activities are the main cause of climate change.
The alleged political manipulation of global warming research marked Waxman's first inquiry since he took over as head of one of Congress' premier investigative panels. He has promised investigations of fraud, waste and abuse in the administration.
Waxman reported that he and the ranking Republican on the panel, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), had unsuccessfully sought documents from the White House on climate-change policy.
He said this effort was based on published reports last year that a Bush aide, Phil Cooney, a former lobbyist for the oil industry who at the time was head of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, had "imposed his own views on the reports scientists had submitted to the White House." Waxman called it an "orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change."
But Davis said that, while he does not deny that global warming is a problem, he is concerned that such allegations of political interference show that "politicizing science has itself become politicized."
A University of Colorado political scientist, Roger Pielke, told the committee that it was a "myth" that politics and science could be separated. He said scientists often join interest groups that agree with their point of view, and that this politicization had gone on for a long time.
The two advocacy groups, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Government Accountability Project, conducted separate investigations and produced a joint report entitled "Atmosphere of Pressure: Political Interference in Federal Climate Science."
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a frequent government critic, mailed a questionnaire to more than 1,600 climate scientists at seven federal agencies. Of the 279 respondents, the survey said that 43 percent "perceived or personally experienced changes or edits" to their research that "changed the meaning of scientific findings."
Another 46 percent "perceived or personally experienced pressure" to eliminate "climate change" or global warming from their communications, the report said.
The Government Accountability Project, which calls itself as the nation's largest whistleblower-protection organization, reported that government scientists it interviewed complained of difficulty in releasing official press releases on their research. One unnamed agency scientist who had done research indicating a connection between global warming and devastating hurricanes "was repeatedly barred from speaking to the media," the report said.
Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that before the space agency recently relaxed restrictions on talking to the press about research, interview requests went through the White House, and were often rejected or delayed.
In 2004, Shindell said he and a team of scientists had written a report predicting a warming of the climate in Antarctica, only to find it "repeatedly delayed, altered, and watered down." He said he was told that the delay came because two political appointees and the White House were "reviewing all climate-related press releases."
Meanwhile, the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee held a hearing on global warming where senators weighed in on the issue. Among them were Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), co-sponsor of a bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions, and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). LINK
