White House Edits Global Warming Reports

Posted on March 20, 2006

A CBS News article says the Bush administration is rewriting environmental reports to hide scientists' true concerns about global warming. The article says the Bush administration is also effectively muzzling scientists and restricting their access to the press. Phil Cooney, the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality, gets blamed for a lot of the rewrites in the article. Before his White House job Cooney was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute.

In a report, Piltz says Cooney added this line "... the uncertainties remain so great as to preclude meaningfully informed decision making. ..." References to human health are marked out. 60 Minutes obtained the drafts from the Government Accountability Project. This edit made it into the final report: the phrase "earth may be" undergoing change made it into the report to Congress. Piltz says there wasn't room at the White House for those who disagreed, so he resigned.
"Even to raise issues internally is immediately career limiting," says Piltz. "That's why you will find not too many people in the federal agencies who will speak freely about all the things they know, unless they're retired or unless they're ready to resign."
Jim Hansen isn't retiring or resigning because he believes earth is nearing a point of no return. He urged 60 Minutes to look north to the arctic, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the rest of the world. When 60 Minutes visited Greenland this past August, we saw for ourselves the accelerating melt of the largest ice sheet in the north.
"Here in Greenland about 15 years ago the ice sheet extended to right about where I'm standing now, but today, its back there, between those two hills in the shaded area. Glaciologists call this a melt stream but, these days, its a more like a melt river," Pelley said, standing at the edge of Greenland's ice sheet.

The article says Phil Cooney never returned 60 Minutes phone calls and he never will. Cooney left the White House last June after the editing controversy first appeared and nows works at Exxon Mobil. This is certainly not the first time the White House has been accused of modifying scientific articles to their liking.

CLIMATE CHANGE