US climate scientists pressured on climate change
15:01 31 January 2007
NewScientist.com news service
New Scientist Environment and Reuters

US scientists were pressured to tailor their reports on global warming to fit the Bush administration's climate change scepticism, a congressional committee heard on Tuesday 30 January. In some cases, this occurred at the request of a former oil-industry lobbyist.

"High-quality science [is] struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo, of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A UCS survey found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years in a total of at least 435 incidents.

"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change', 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.

Rick Piltz, a former US government scientist, told the committee that former White House official Phil Cooney took an active role in casting doubt on the consequences of global climate change. Piltz said he resigned in 2005 as a result of pressure to soft-pedal findings on global warming.

Cooney, who was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute before becoming chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, also resigned in 2005. He went on to work for oil giant ExxonMobil, which was recently accused of spending $16 million on supporting climate sceptics.

"Speculative musing"
Documents on global climate change required Cooney's review and approval, Piltz said, adding that "If you know what you are writing has to go through a White House clearance before it is to be published, […] an anticipatory kind of self-censorship sets in."

He added: "[Cooney's] edits of programme reports, which had been drafted and approved by career science programme managers, had the cumulative effect of adding an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about global warming and minimising its likely consequences."

According to The Guardian newspaper, Piltz described how Cooney had personally edited out a key section of an Environmental Protection Agency report to Congress on the dangers of climate change, calling it "speculative musing".

Seeking answers
Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who chairs the oversight committee, complained that the White House has balked at supplying documents requested over six months to investigate these allegations.

"The committee isn't trying to obtain state secrets or documents that could affect our immediate national security," Waxman said. "We are simply seeking answers to whether the White House's political staff is inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists."

Kristen Hellmer, of the Council on Environmental Quality, part of the Executive Office of the US President, said the CEQ had been cooperating with Congress. When asked about allegations of political interference in scientific documents, she said: "We do have in place a very transparent system in science reporting."

Spate of accusations
Reporting on the hearing, the New York Times says that even Republicans had little good to say of the Bush administration's handling of climate change science. Almost all the Republicans on the panel began by stating that global warming was happening and that greenhouse gases from human activities were largely to blame.

The Bush administration has suffered a spate of accusations of muzzling climate scientists in recent years. In January 2006, James Hansen, director of the US space agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered their staff to review his lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard website and requests for media interviews (see Top climatologist accuses US of trying to gag him).

In February 2006, the topic was brought up in the House Committee on Science, and New Scientist reported that scientists at another government agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, were also upset about the situation.

The UCS issued its first accusations in February 2004, followed closely by more finger pointing in July of that year.

Mandatory limits
President George W Bush's position on global warming has evolved over his presidency, from open scepticism about the reality of the phenomenon to acknowledgment at a global summit in 2006 that climate change is occurring and that human activities speed it up.

In his 2007 State of the Union address, Bush called climate change "a serious challenge" that should be addressed by technology and greater use of alternative sources of energy. But he stopped short of calling for mandatory limits on US emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed in part for global warming.

The congressional discussions come in the run-up to the release of a major United Nations report on climate change, scheduled for Friday in Paris, France.

Leaked drafts of the report suggest it will state that "there is a 90% chance humans are responsible for climate change", mostly due to the burning of fossil fuels. That contrasts with the last version of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report, issued in 2001, which concluded there was a 66% chance that humans were responsible for rising temperatures.