5.  The AAAS  provides many examples and editorially expresses grave concerns as to a dangerous politicization of studies and reports.  Editor Donald Kennedy in Science, 30 March 2001 reported over 30 peer reviewed studies related to global climate change in the preceding year. This elicited an immediate response by a Bush operative attempting to raise doubts.

The most recent
AAAS position statements

Science February 18, 2007

The following statement on global climate change was released today during the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco. The statement was approved by the board on 9 December 2006.

AAAS Board Releases New Statement on Climate Change

The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more. The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a critical greenhouse gas, is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years. The average temperature of the Earth is heading for levels not experienced for millions of years. Scientific predictions of the impacts of increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and deforestation match observed changes. As expected, intensification of droughts, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and severe storms is occurring, with a mounting toll on vulnerable ecosystems and societies. These events are early warning signs of even more devastating damage to come, some of which will be irreversible.

Delaying action to address climate change will increase the environmental and societal consequences as well as the costs. The longer we wait to tackle climate change, the harder and more expensive the task will be.

History provides many examples of society confronting grave threats by mobilizing knowledge and promoting innovation. We need an aggressive research, development and deployment effort to transform the existing and future energy systems of the world away from technologies that emit greenhouse gases. Developing clean energy technologies will provide economic opportunities and ensure future energy supplies.

In addition to rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is essential that we develop strategies to adapt to ongoing changes and make communities more resilient to future changes.

The growing torrent of information presents a clear message: we are already experiencing global climate change. It is time to muster the political will for concerted action. Stronger leadership at all levels is needed. The time is now. We must rise to the challenge. We owe this to future generations.

Original Here

Science 24 September 2004:
Vol. 305. no. 5692, p. 1873

Editorial

Science and the Bush Administration
David Baltimore*

In various ways, the scientific community in the United States--and in other nations as well--has expressed concern about the way in which decisions about scientific issues have been subjected to political tests by the Bush administration. For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), in a statement that I signed along with many others, said in pertinent part: "When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions." The UCS and John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science advisor, have continued to trade charge and countercharge. Now a committee of the National Academies is examining some of the issues at stake, including the important matter of criteria for appointing scientists to government posts and advisory committees.

I leave this unfinished debate in those capable hands. But as we approach the election, it is important to examine the most critical issues at the interface of science and politics in the determination of public policy. And on several of these issues, a new pattern of behavior by the administration is becoming clear. The sequence is as follows: A government position is taken on a matter of scientific importance; policy directions are announced and scientific justifications for those policies are offered; strong objections from scientists follow; the scientific rationale is then abandoned or changed, but the policies based on that science remain, stuck in the same place.

U.S. policy with respect to HIV/AIDS is a case in point. The virus is spreading at an alarming rate, devastating Africa and now making horrifying inroads into the teeming continent of Asia. Stopping the spread, especially among the youngest and most productive members of society, should be the highest international priority. With a vaccine far in the future, stemming the tide requires that we educate people to protect themselves; and although abstinence and fidelity prevent exposure to HIV, under most circumstances the only safe and effective protection is condoms.

Initially, the Bush administration gave scant recognition to the protective value of condom use. The Centers for Disease Control Web site (which was once changed to suggest, incorrectly, a possible relation between abortion history and breast cancer) contains a confusing mixture: some emphasis on condom failure rates and a plug for abstinence. Complaints apparently led to the addition of a positive statement about condom effectiveness. The U.S. Agency for International Development now promotes condom use. But the emphasis is on use in selected target populations, although the value of much more widespread use has been demonstrated repeatedly in scientific studies.

Climate change has had a similar history. Repeated administration statements questioned the science behind the position of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the global warming seen in the past 100 years is associated with human activity. Now, at last, comes a statement from an interagency administration committee, signed by cabinet secretaries, confirming the IPCC position. In the policy domain, however, we still have a long-range research program aimed toward a "hydrogen economy," but no commitment to current mitigation of this growing crisis.

As for stem cells, the arbitrary decision to restrict federally supported research to the few cell lines available before the president's statement in 2001 still holds. After sustained criticism from the scientific community, the administration has conceded that the research is valuable. It has made funding available for research but nevertheless maintains the cell line restriction. And it supports legislation that would criminalize research involving nuclear transfer from somatic donor cells--work focused on making stem cell research more valuable, both therapeutically and experimentally.

In these cases, either religious conservatism or economically based political caution has played a determining role in administration policy. However, it looks as though the criticism from individual scientists and from the UCS has been influential in causing the administration to be more honest about the underlying science. We should welcome this new posture. Nevertheless, although the realities of the science may be better accepted, the policy implications are still being ignored. Our goal now should be to have the policies track the science.

David Baltimore is president of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA.

Donald Kennedy’s editorial

Science 30 March 2001:
Vol. 291. no. 5513, p. 2515
Editorial

An Unfortunate U-Turn on Carbon
Donald Kennedy

Every once in a while, one misfortune begets another. That happened a couple of weeks ago, when President Bush decided that his campaign commitment to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants was, in the words of his White House spokesman, a "mistake." The rationale given for this about-face is contained in the president's letter to four Republican senators. That letter says, in pertinent part, "At a time when California has already experienced energy shortages, and other Western states are worried about price and availability of energy this summer, we must be very careful not to take actions that could harm consumers."

We Californians are experiencing some chagrin over this. Bad enough that we had our notorious deregulation fiasco, abetted by industry advocates and accomplished in Governor Pete Wilson's term; now, just when our electric bills have tripled, we get used as an excuse for another unfortunate move! It's almost enough to make us pretend we're from somewhere else. But if you think we're embarrassed, consider poor Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Whitman and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill. Administrator Whitman, who's had some New Jersey experience with air quality issues, knew better. So did Secretary O'Neill, who has extensive personal knowledge about climate science. They both made public commitments based on the president's campaign position and are now left to wonder where the rug went.

This reversal coincides with more than just the California energy crunch. Just a few weeks earlier, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its most recent assessment. Not only did the climate science panel reinforce the conclusions about global warming reached in earlier assessments, it raised the upper bound of the estimates for average global temperature rise during this century. And it has also strengthened the theory that the increase experienced during the past hundred years is partially due to emissions from fossil fuel combustion. By now the scientific consensus on global warming is so strong that it leaves little room for the defensive assertions that keep emerging from the cleverly labeled industrial consortium called the Global Climate Coalition and from a shrinking coterie of scientific skeptics. To be sure, the president didn't say he doubted that consensus. He just acted as though he did.

During the past year in these pages, we have published over 30 peer-reviewed reports and articles documenting findings that relate to global climate change. Some of these extended the kinds of modeling studies cited in the IPCC report. Others documented the intensification of the El Niño events that has accompanied the warming we have already experienced. Still others measured the retreat of glaciers, the thinning of polar ice caps, the extraordinary growth in the heat content of the world's oceans, and other indicators. All of them, in one way or another, support the concerns that the president now says he is not prepared to address.

And that's just from one journal. Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science. Of course there is room for arguments about the economics. How much should we reduce emissions? How fast? And at what cost? These questions are open to debate. But there is little room for doubt about the seriousness of the problem the world faces, and other nations, including most of our trading partners in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, understand that. This decision will surely discourage international efforts to move toward an emissions control regime.

We were all led to believe that the president, to the surprise of many, was prepared to take the constructive path he outlined in the campaign--the path his appointees had announced they would follow. News reports indicate that industry representatives talked him out of that position. Well, it must have been a one-sided argument. In this space a week ago, I argued that the absence of leadership in the Office of Science and Technology Policy had permitted the development of an unbalanced budget portfolio in the sciences. Here is another cost: There was no authoritative science voice around to say, in response to those who argue that global warming isn't to be taken seriously, "Mr. President, on this one the science is clear."

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