The Bush gang? Blocking a scientific report they don’t like? You don’t say.
The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday.
The possibility that warming conditions may cause storms to become stronger has generated debate among climate and weather experts, particularly in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
In the new case, Nature said weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — part of the Commerce Department — in February set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes.
According to Nature, a draft of the statement said that warming may be having an effect.
It was then, of course, that political appointees intervened. A Commerce official emailed panel chair Ants Leetmaa explaining that the report was not to be released.
Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), charged that “the administration has effectively declared war on science and truth to advance its anti-environment agenda … the Bush administration continues to censor scientists who have documented the current impacts of global warming.”
If only this were the first time.
Let’s not forget, for example, that [tag]James Hansen[/tag], the longtime director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has spoken out repeatedly, explaining to anyone who will listen that Bush administration officials have tried to censor scientific information about [tag]global warming[/tag].
Indeed, NOAA itself has had repeated problems similar to this one.
Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.
Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether.
For example, Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had trouble writing a press release on how climate change would affect the nation’s water supply without running into trouble from officials at the Interior Department. In 2002, Milly was told that his release would cause “great problems with the department.” A few years later, officials allowed Milly to issue a statement on his research, but only after certain key words — “global warming,” “warming climate,” and “climate change” — were removed.
Scientists at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory told the WaPo they’ve had so many problems getting clearance to speak with journalists, a lot of reporters have just stopped asking, leading to a public that only has “a partial sense” of what government scientists have learned about climate change.
One of them said, “American taxpayers are paying the bill, and they have a right to know what we’re doing.”
There goes the reality-based community again, forgetting how the rules are different in Bush’s America….