Waxman’s Attack on Bush Global Warming Distortions

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Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, opened oversight hearings this morning with a sharp attack on Phil Cooney, the former oil lobbyist who headed the Council of Environmental Quality, for tampering with scientific reports on global warming in order downplay its importance. (You can watch the hearings live online here.) Cooney resigned in 2005 after he was publicly criticized for playing politics with global warming. One New York Times report discussing government climate change reports written in 2002 and 2003 said, “In a section on the need for research into how warming might change water availability and flooding, [Cooney] 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.'”

Waxman says the committee knows the White House is hiding documents that show the Bush administration sought to weaken government reports by emphasizing the “beneficial effects,” of global warming, and downplaying its effects on human health.

Witnesses at the hearing are to include Dr. Drew Shindell, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Rick Piltz, the former senior associate of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, both of whom have protested at the White House meddling.

Mother Jones reporters at the hearing will be reporting as they go on.

Update: A new report from Union of Concerned Scientists uncovers new evidence of the Bush Administration tampering with global warming science.

An investigative report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Government Accountability Project (GAP) has uncovered new evidence of widespread political interference in federal climate science. The report, which includes a survey of hundreds of federal scientists at seven federal agencies and dozens of in-depth interviews, documents a high regard for climate change research but broad interference in communicating scientific results.

“The new evidence shows that political interference in climate science is no longer a series of isolated incidents but a system-wide epidemic,” said Dr. Francesca Grifo, Director of the UCS Scientific Integrity Program. “Tailoring scientific fact for political purposes has become a problem across many federal science agencies.”