2. Jim Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies suffered censorship of his reports by Bush political
operatives. New York Times, Columbia U website
(includes full text of testimony before the Congress) Original
Interview Climatologist Stephen Schneider interviewed by the
Sierra Club on how industry has manufactured 'uncertainty'
From the interview
"Schneider: First, the so-called contrarians. The group
that will take any study that just comes off any press anywhere
and if it has any element that slightly disagrees with the mainstream
wisdom, they immediately declare the overall, basic, well-established
consensus to be dead until this study is resolved. Now, that
is not how science is done. Science is done on the basis of the
large preponderance of evidence contained in hundreds—in
this case, thousands—of studies. No one new study can
come along and prove it right or prove it wrong. This is a
deliberate manipulation.
I left the media out of this. The pinnacle
of the profession are White House reporters, political reporters,
economic reporters, sports reporters. Where are the science
and environmental folks? They’ve been firing that group. So you’ve got a problem
that when you’ve got political reporters, they are trained
in journalism school to be “fair and balanced”—and
I don’t mean in the sense of Fox News, I mean really. Journalists
are rightly trained: “If you get the Democrat, get the
Republican.” And they play them off against each other.
In political reporting, where there is no standard of who is
right or wrong because you’re reporting on philosophy,
you give roughly equal weight to these two sides and you let
them duke it out. When you apply that model to science, you end
up in the cacophonous disaster we have now. Because in science,
there aren’t two sides. "
New York Times Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming By ANDREW C. REVKIN A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents. White House Calls Editing Climate Files Part of Usual Review (June 9, 2005) In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.
The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust. Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues. Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.
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