Government scientists protest to panel on climate
WASHINGTON — Government scientists, armed with copies of heavily edited reports, charged Monday that the Bush administration and its political appointees had soft-pedaled their findings on climate change.
The accusations led Democrats and Republicans at the congressional hearing to accuse each other of censorship, smear tactics and McCarthyism.
To underscore the administration’s oil-friendly stance, Democrats grilled an oil lobbyist who was hired by the White House to review government climate change documents and who made hundreds of edits that the lawmakers said minimized the impact of global warming.
“You were a spin doctor,” Rep. John A. Yarmuth, D-Ky., said.
Republicans targeted a NASA director who testified about administration pressure, accusing him of political bias, of politicizing his work and of ignoring uncertainties in climate change science.
And they disputed his contention that taxpayer-funded scientists are entitled to free speech. “Free speech is not a simple thing and is subject to and directed by policy,” said Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah.
The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing was marked by an open confrontation between chairman Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., and the ranking Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. — a rare display of direct debate in otherwise carefully choreographed hearings.
The hearing was the latest effort to challenge what the Democratic congressional majority sees as the Bush administration’s unchecked use of power. In the past few weeks, Democrats have held inquiries or announced plans to examine the uncontrolled use of national security letters that allow the government to spy on Americans, the dismissal of U.S. attorneys and the unveiling of former covert CIA spy Valerie Plame, among other issues.
Waxman has been particularly aggressive, pursuing inquiries about intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war and the politics of global warming.
To support their charges Monday, the Democrats produced hundreds of pages of legal depositions, exhibits and e-mail exchanges between administration officials. The paper trail illustrated how officials with no scientific training shaped the administration’s climate change message and edited global warming reports, inserting doubt in the place of definitive statements and diminishing the role people play in the planet’s rising temperatures.
Waxman’s committee received more than eight boxes of papers from the White House Council on Environmental Quality that he said provided disturbing indications of political interference.
“There may have been a concerted effort directed by the White House to mislead the public about the dangers of global climate change,” said Waxman, who also cited the administration practice of “controlling what federal scientists could say to the public and the media about their work.
”It would be a serious abuse if senior White House officials deliberately tried to defuse calls for action by ensuring that the public heard a distorted message about the risks of climate change,“ Waxman said.
One example showed how a report originally said the U.S. National Research Council had concluded that ”greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures to rise and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.“
Philip Cooney, the oil lobbyist who became chief of staff at the Council on Environmental Quality, changed that to read: ”Some activities emit greenhouse gases that directly or indirectly may affect the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation, thereby potentially affecting climate on regional and global scales.“
Cooney, who now works for Exxon, came to the White House in 2001 after more than 15 years with the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry lobby group.
Cooney, soft-spoken but increasingly red-faced as the hours went by, repeatedly stressed that his job was to align reports with administration policy, as reflected by a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report that indicated some doubt about climate change models.
He denied his aim was to sow doubt or that he had any loyalty to the oil industry, even as lawmakers pointed to some 181 changes he made to one document, which Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said ”had the effect of emphasizing or exaggerating the level of uncertainty surrounding global warming science.“
Republicans, in turn, came down hard on Democrats and James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, often sparking verbal fisticuffs.
Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana raised Hansen’s work on the Al Gore documentary about global warming, ”An Inconvenient Truth,“ as evidence of Hansen’s Democratic sympathies. Hansen is a registered independent.
Several Republicans criticized Hansen for comparing administration efforts to limit and monitor scientists’ speech with similar efforts in Nazi Germany.
