The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming

[GaryC 7]

Well the obvious point is that there are many thousands of earth/climate scientists around the world - and every single one of them belongs to one or more professional societies.

Thank you for making my point. When you say this or that group falls on the side of man-made global warming and hold that up as your proof if doesn't prove a thing. These scientists may be part of these groups and they disagree. So just because the leader of the group says they believe something does not mean there is a consensus. It only means they must publicly state the pro-global warming line to placate the contributors.

Can you substantiate that argument with reference to say, theAmerican Geophysical Union?

The point is we are wasting billions of dollars on a fake "consensus". There is no consensus at all unless you count the lefts political consensus. This is a political debate and not a scientific one.

[GaryC 7]

Something that people seem to overlook is that from the 1600's to the beginning of the 1900's we were in a little ice age. That ice age ended and the planet has been warming ever since. All of these changes are natural and unstoppable. When a scientist puts up a graph of global temps starting in 1900 it looks dramatic but it is deceiving. All it shows is the natural recovery from the cold period we had. Instead of spinning our wheels trying to stop the unstoppable and laying blame on humans we need to start planning for the effects of this natural warming. We are arguing in a burning house and it will only amplify the misery that will result.

Let me show you all a graph of global temps with CO2 and Methane superimposed over it. This graph is scaled in the thousands of years and clearly shows the natural fluctuations that our planet goes through.

You will not see this in any of the pro human caused GW types because it blows their theory out of the water. To take a 100 year slice out of the total picture of our climate is dishonest to say the least.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Deja vous all over again...

[Ban Hammer 13,340]

Deja vous all over again...

except this time global warming is bush's fault

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Well the obvious point is that there are many thousands of earth/climate scientists around the world - and every single one of them belongs to one or more professional societies.

Thank you for making my point. When you say this or that group falls on the side of man-made global warming and hold that up as your proof if doesn't prove a thing. These scientists may be part of these groups and they disagree. So just because the leader of the group says they believe something does not mean there is a consensus. It only means they must publicly state the pro-global warming line to placate the contributors.

Can you substantiate that argument with reference to say, theAmerican Geophysical Union?

The point is we are wasting billions of dollars on a fake "consensus". There is no consensus at all unless you count the lefts political consensus. This is a political debate and not a scientific one.

I'm not sure anyone said that consensus = unanimity.

[Hilarious Clinton 452]

I'm actually trying to see if people will read the article before they start slamming the source. My theory is that most of the time people react to the website banner rather than the words on the page.

welcome to my world

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I'm actually trying to see if people will read the article before they start slamming the source. My theory is that most of the time people react to the website banner rather than the words on the page.

welcome to my world

There's been few references to the points made in the original article - the 'consensus' stuff is tangential.

[GaryC 7]

I'm actually trying to see if people will read the article before they start slamming the source. My theory is that most of the time people react to the website banner rather than the words on the page.

welcome to my world

There's been few references to the points made in the original article - the 'consensus' stuff is tangential.

I read the first 2 pages of it. It's just more of the same GW BS. They speak in absolutes as if they know the answer. They don't. They started out with the bias that man-made GW is real and worked from there. No objectivity what so ever.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

You must have missed the part that indirectly ties to this other thread on ####### Cheney - claiming that his office is disavowed from executive authority. If nothing else - the list of names holding key positions in determining White House' energy policy is not unsurprising; and appears to be represented exclusively by people who work or have worked in various capacities for Big Oil.

...Prior to joining the Cabinet, she (Christine Todd Whitman) sought personal assurance from Bush that the EPA would be able to call its own shots without deferring to the CEQ - the Council on Environmental Quality, a policy arm of the White House. As Whitman recalls it, Bush made no effort to mask his bureaucratic ignorance. "What's CEQ?" he asked blankly.

Cheney took full advantage of the president's cluelessness, bringing the CEQ into his own portfolio. "The environment and energy issues were really turned over to him from the beginning," Whitman says. The CEQ became Cheney's shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots. To head up the council, Cheney installed James Connaughton, a former lobbyist for industrial polluters, who once worked to help General Electric and ARCO skirt responsibility for their Superfund waste sites.

Industry swiftly took advantage of its new friend in the White House. In a fax sent to the CEQ on February 6th, 2001 - two weeks after Bush took office - ExxonMobil's top lobbyist, Randy Randol, demanded a housecleaning of the scientists in charge of studying global warming. Exxon urged CEQ to dump Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC, along with Rosina Bierbaum and Mike MacCracken, who had coordinated the National Assessment.

Exxon's wish was the CEQ's command. According to an internal e-mail obtained by Rolling Stone, Connaughton's first order of business - even before his nomination was made public - was to write his White House colleagues-to-be from his law firm of Sidley & Austin. He echoed Exxon's call that Bierbaum, the acting director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, be "dealt." In the end, each of the scientists on Exxon'####### list was replaced. "It was clear there was a strong lobby and activity against me by some in the energy industry - especially ExxonMobil," says Watson.

When Whitman heard that Bush was wavering on warming, she "broke through the palace guard," as the president had urged her to do, and marched into the Oval Office. "I wanted to tell him that there were ways to call for a cap on carbon that wouldn't hamstring the economy," she says, "and that it was vitally important we not be seen as ignoring the issue of climate change." But before Whitman could even present her case, the president cut her off. "It was clear the decision had already been made," she says.

As a dumbstruck Whitman walked out of the Oval Office, she bumped into the true Decider. There was Cheney, collecting the envelope from a secretary that contained Bush's "clarification" on climate-warming pollution - which he was on his way to deliver, in person, to his allies in the Senate.

Although the letter was signed by the president, it bore Cheney's unmistakable stamp. Quoting the language of the vice president's energy staffers almost verbatim, it not only reversed Bush's promise to regulate CO2, it also made a sweeping new declaration: that carbon dioxide "is not a 'pollutant' under the Clean Air Act." (The administration would cling to this untenable position for six years, until the Supreme Court ruled in April that federal law compels the EPA to take regulatory action on climate pollution.)

The letter concluded with a hint of things to come: "I look forward to working with you and others to address global climate change issues in the context of a national energy policy." Bush's about-face on planet-warming pollution thus enabled Cheney to take control of the White House's energy policy and to work with industry behind closed doors to craft a polluter-friendly approach to global warming. "By having control of the energy plan, the vice president also had the reins on the climate policy," says Symons, who sat in on Cheney's energy task force. "The ideology is simple: You don't put limits on greenhouse-gas pollution, because that might put limits on coal and oil - and that would hurt industry's performance. Everything else flowed from that."

On February 14th, 2002, Bush gave a speech at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that laid out his policy on global warming for the first time. The speech was a Valentine's Day gift to polluters, officially enshrining the GCC's agenda, almost point for point, as the White House's climate policy. Under the plan, planet-warming pollution would actually increase by thirty-four percent by 2030. Bush vaguely promised to cut the "intensity" of carbon emissions by eighteen percent over the next ten years - neglecting to mention that the nation was already on track for a fourteen percent reduction. He touted $700 million in new funding for technologies that might someday reduce emissions - money that government auditors were later unable to find any trace of. And he promised that the entire plan would be thoroughly reviewed and re-evaluated - in 2012, four years after he left office.

The National Academy of Sciences blasted the policy, saying it lacked a "guiding vision, executable goals, clear timetables and criteria for measuring progress." Even the technology promoted in the president's plan was bogus. "It's as if these people were not cognizant of the existing science," one member of the academy remarked. "Stuff that would have been cutting-edge in 1980 is listed as a priority for the future."

...Jim Connaughton's mission at the CEQ was to make sure climate regulations never got in the way of energy development. A Yale-educated lawyer, Connaughton comes across like a slightly caffeinated Ron Howard, with a manic energy and a balding pate of wispy red hair. As head of the CEQ, he put a green spin on polluter-friendly measures: Lowering air quality became the "Clear Skies Initiative," while allowing timber companies to step up their clear-cutting was dubbed the "Healthy Forests Initiative."

In case you missed it, James Connaughton - "A former lobbyist for utilities, mining, chemical, and other industrial polluters, Connaughton, represented the likes of General Electric and ARCO in their effort to escape responsibility for cleaning up toxic Superfund sites. Now he heads up pollution-policy development for the administration and coordinates its implementation. He has led the charge to weaken the standards of getting arsenic out of our drinking water, and he has steadily advised Bush to ignore, divert, stall, dismiss, and otherwise block out all calls for action against the industrial causes of global warming." is currently chair of the Council on Environmental Quality

To direct the White House's spin on global warming, Connaughton appointed Philip Cooney as his top deputy. Cooney had the right experience for the job: He worked as "climate team leader" for the American Petroleum Institute. In 1998, the API took part in an industry coalition that created the "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan." The plan, recently entered into evidence by the House Oversight Committee, maps out an elaborate disinformation campaign to prevent "precipitous action on climate change." The strategy was to sow doubt about global warming, disseminating industry-funded research to challenge "the science underpinning the global climate change theory."

Now, with Cooney in the White House, the industry had its own anti-climate man running the disinformation campaign. As the "action plan" directed, Cooney set out to censor the EPA's science on global warming and inject the industry's denialist positions into government documents. "They decided they didn't need to win the debate on climate," says Piltz, the former official who exposed Cooney's tactics. "They just had to leave an atmosphere of uncertainty about it and dissipate the will for political action."

But for all his credentials as a master of spin, Cooney got off to a rough start. In May 2002, the administration released its Climate Action Report, a dispatch to the U.N. that documents progress on climate-treaty obligations. The report was developed by the EPA, but internal documents reveal that Cooney edited it to reflect positions advocated by the API and Ford. On the opening page of the chapter on climate impacts, Cooney inserted a litany of language in bold intended to cast doubt on the science: "the weakest links in our knowledge . . . a lack of understanding . . . uncertainties . . . considerable uncertainty . . . perhaps even greater uncertainty . . . regarded as tentative."

But the clumsy caveats weren't enough to obscure the report's real science. With the help of an EPA source, The New York Times filtered out Cooney's waffling and filed a front-page story that called the report "a stark shift for the Bush administration." The report, the Times observed, detailed "far-reaching effects that global warming will inflict" and "for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming."

Cooney was horrified: An obscure government report he had tried to whitewash now threatened to undermine his former employers in the energy industry. Panicked, he called on an old friend for help. Myron Ebell had been a key member of the coalition that crafted the disinformation "action plan." In fact, casting doubt on global warming is Ebell's full-time job: He heads the climate-denial campaign at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank that was underwritten in part by ExxonMobil.

Ebell recalls that Cooney was frantic over the story in the Times. "We tried to put some qualifiers on that chapter in the report," Cooney told him. "We'd take the text from EPA, and then we'd add a sentence like, 'We don't really know if this is really happening.' So we tried to do it, but I can see now that we made a total mess of it."

Ebell's advice to Cooney is contained in a e-mail dated June 3rd, 2002. "Thanks for asking for our help," he wrote. "I know you're in crisis mode. . . . I want to help you cool things down, but after consulting with the team, I think that what we can do is limited until there is an official statement from the administration repudiating the report."

That repudiation came the very next day. President Bush himself dismissed the report, saying it had been "put out by the bureaucracy." Forget the headlines, he said - there was no shift in the administration's policy.

What happened next, according to internal e-mails obtained by Rolling Stone, reveals just how seriously the White House took its intelligence fixing on global warming. Cooney was put in charge of damage control and was apparently instructed to craft a letter to the Times denying that the president had changed course on climate change. But this time, Cooney's editor was not just Connaughton, but Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove. The collaboration with Rove raises questions about Cooney's congressional testimony last March, in which he insisted, under oath, that he had not discussed with Rove his work at the CEQ.

The letter drafted by Cooney - and vetted by Rove - insists that the Climate Action Report "reinforces" the "significant scientific uncertainties" emphasized in the president's climate policy.

From then on, Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official reports on global warming. Not content to obscure science with uncertainty, he began to rewrite the science itself. Draft documents made public by the House Oversight Committee reveal that Cooney now had veto power over federal scientists, including Richard Moss, coordinator of the Climate Change Science Program Office, and even James Mahoney, the assistant commerce secretary nominally in charge of America's climate science.

In one document, Moss and Mahoney attempted to push back on several of Cooney's more than 100 edits to an EPA document called "Our Changing Planet" - each of which served to amplify uncertainty and downplay the threat posed by global warming. Cooney repeatedly overruled Moss and Mahoney with an aggressive "no" scrawled in the margins. On another document Cooney marked up, he commanded EPA officials that "these changes must be made." Beside one strike-through marked with a star, Cooney wrote, "Red Flag: Do not cite National Assessment" - dismissing the landmark report commissioned by Bush's father.

Although some of Cooney's edits were revealed in a New York Times story in June 2005 that led to his departure, the full extent of his interference has never been reported. His commissarial coup came in April 2003, with his revisions to the EPA's Draft Report on the Environment. He began by deleting the sentence "climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." He then deleted the top-line assessment by the National Research Council, which establishes an unequivocal cause-and-effect link - "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere as the result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." In its place, Cooney wrote the following mishmash of his own creation: "Some activities emit greenhouse gases and other substances that directly or indirectly may affect the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation, thereby potentially affecting climate on regional and global scales."

The changes sparked a rebellion by the EPA's senior scientists. In an internal memo uncovered by Congressional investigators, they wrote that Cooney's edited text "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change" and "may leave an impression that cooling is as much an issue as warming." Whitman was also furious. "The language that CEQ found acceptable was such pablum," she says now. "It was so much below the level of sophistication of the report that I felt it would have denigrated it all." But her solution to this problem was to simply delete the section on climate change - handing Cooney a carte-blanche victory.

Like James Connaughton, Philip Cooney is a lawyer - with no specific science background, unless you count his lobbying for the American Petroleum Institute. So why should his words carry more weight than the actually people doing the work?

...Cooney did far more than edit scientific reports to suit the administration's point of view. Just as neoconservative hawk Douglas Feith funneled false intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs to the vice president, Cooney steered industry-sponsored junk science on global warming to Cheney. "What disturbed me most," Whitman says, "was the administration's record of taking the most extreme of the science - what I call the 'political science' - and giving it the same weight as the real science." The most egregious example of cooked intelligence was a study underwritten in part by the API, Cooney's former employer. The study, which purported to show that the twentieth century was not unusually warm, was authored by two astrophysicists, both of whom were on the payroll of the George C. Marshall Institute, a climate-denial group funded by ExxonMobil and now headed by Bill O'Keefe, Cooney's former boss. The paper's publication in a minor German journal in January 2003 quickly created a scandal, with the editor in chief and three other editors resigning in shame after acknowledging that the paper was fundamentally flawed and should never have been published.

"It was sham science," says McCarthy, the Harvard scientist. "It's almost laughable, except that this study was held up by the administration as a definitive refutation of the temperature record."

One e-mail exchange about the study underscores just how many industry foxes were guarding the climate henhouse. When Matthew Koch (a White House energy adviser who today lobbies for API) saw the study, he wrote to Cooney (the former API lobbyist who is now "corporate issues manager" for ExxonMobil) and CC'd O'Donovan (who now works for Shell Oil).

"What??!!" Koch wrote in mock disbelief at the study's claim that the planet isn't really heating up. "I want to grow oranges in the Arctic!"

Such joking aside, the administration continues to hold up the discredited study as a counterweight to the IPCC's scientific, peer-reviewed findings on global warming.

[Scott & Lai 12]

I'm actually trying to see if people will read the article before they start slamming the source. My theory is that most of the time people react to the website banner rather than the words on the page.

welcome to my world

Seems your point was either missed or intentionally ignored...

[Dan J 277]

The systems that regulate climate are so complex, that if anyone claims that they know exactly what is causing the current climate change trends, they are talking out of thier a$$ or have money to be made by the point they make.

Its pretty clear that global average temperatures have risen over the past 100 years. But the question is why? To say that humans are solely responsible, is probably wrong, there are factors we have no control over. But also to say that humans have had no effect on climate is also wrong, We generate massive amounts of carbon dioxide and put other elements into the air and water which are known to affect climate systems.

In this debate, you can find science to say what you want. And if you only look at part of the picture it will probably support your point.

Also for some businesses, evidence of human contributions to climate change is bad for business, it will likely cause more regulation, higher costs, and less profit. So its only natural for them to try to question or put doubt into any evidence or if possible even censor any science being done.

The question is who do we want to determine energy and environmental policy? Those who have a financial interest in the status quo no matter what the cost is in the future? Scientists who may be sometimes overzealous on the human contributions to climate change at an economic cost? or something in the middle?

[Dan J 277]

Something that people seem to overlook is that from the 1600's to the beginning of the 1900's we were in a little ice age. That ice age ended and the planet has been warming ever since. All of these changes are natural and unstoppable. When a scientist puts up a graph of global temps starting in 1900 it looks dramatic but it is deceiving. All it shows is the natural recovery from the cold period we had. Instead of spinning our wheels trying to stop the unstoppable and laying blame on humans we need to start planning for the effects of this natural warming. We are arguing in a burning house and it will only amplify the misery that will result.

Let me show you all a graph of global temps with CO2 and Methane superimposed over it. This graph is scaled in the thousands of years and clearly shows the natural fluctuations that our planet goes through.

You will not see this in any of the pro human caused GW types because it blows their theory out of the water. To take a 100 year slice out of the total picture of our climate is dishonest to say the least.

While that may be true, it still doesn't exclude human contributions to climate change. Human interaction could be hastening the cycle or even making the extreme of the cycle more extreme. You look at part of the picture you support your political point, but what would this graph look like if humans never existed? But then that graph is on a scale of 400,000 years, when humans have primarily contributed for the last 100 or so.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

The systems that regulate climate are so complex, that if anyone claims that they know exactly what is causing the current climate change trends, they are talking out of thier a$$ or have money to be made by the point they make.

Its pretty clear that global average temperatures have risen over the past 100 years. But the question is why? To say that humans are solely responsible, is probably wrong, there are factors we have no control over. But also to say that humans have had no effect on climate is also wrong, We generate massive amounts of carbon dioxide and put other elements into the air and water which are known to affect climate systems.

In this debate, you can find science to say what you want. And if you only look at part of the picture it will probably support your point.

Also for some businesses, evidence of human contributions to climate change is bad for business, it will likely cause more regulation, higher costs, and less profit. So its only natural for them to try to question or put doubt into any evidence or if possible even censor any science being done.

The question is who do we want to determine energy and environmental policy? Those who have a financial interest in the status quo no matter what the cost is in the future? Scientists who may be sometimes overzealous on the human contributions to climate change at an economic cost? or something in the middle?

That's a fair point - but from the above it looks very much like industry-affiliated spin-doctors have had the reins for a long time.

One thing I don't understand is how exactly environmentalists are able to exert more pressure on this issue than the mega-rich, mega-influential oil industry. Seems to me that's rather #######-backwards, but not unpredictable - who else can be to blame for politicizing this issue except those with the least power and influence to actually do it.

[mawilson 2,133]

The earth has only so much carrying capacity and when it eventually gets exceeded...it won't be pretty. Unfortunately humankind has never shown much inclination to voluntarily restrain itself. Natural forces will eventually do what humankind refuses to do.

Exactly. The "legions of Katrinas" will exterminate the surplus population and things will go back to normal.

Do I detect a hint of ridicule and scoff to your reply to my post? I'm wounded!

Not at all, peejay! The world is vastly overpopulated, and I'm sure that global warming will take care of that.

[poppscc 0]

global warming is a funny topic.

I dont see what the big deal is, but seems like a lot of people are using fear mongering as a MMGW tactic... for the Pro MMGW crowd, what do you think about:

Warming on other planets.....

Mars:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=07...;show_article=1

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...rs-warming.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4266474.stm

Pluto:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/plut...ing_021009.html

Triton:

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/199805260...trunc_sys.shtml

Jupiter

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space...htm?POE=TECISVA

and

Cows producing more global warming than cars....

The report notes that populations of sheep, chickens, pigs and goats are also damaging, but that the world's 1.5 billion cattle are the primary offenders. The fuel burned in the clearing of vegetation for grazing, the production of fertilizer for feed and the meat itself, and in the product's transportation is responsible for 9 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions. While carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas, the flatulence and manure of cattle herds emit more than one-third of all methane, a greenhouse gas that warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide. Livestock also produce ammonia, a primary cause of acid rain, along with more than 100 other gasses. Cattle emit 18 percent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, which beats out the emissions from all manner of transportation combined.

http://www.newstarget.com/021296.html

_______________________________

Seems like this whole global warming debate is about politics and not about reality. It's about partisan politics designed to drive conservatives and liberals apart, much like the stem cell balony the democrats are pushing.

in reality, al gore is a resource hog, and George W bush is the opposite:

http://www.sierraclub.org/compass/2006/03/brokeback-bush.asp