csua.org/u/cai -> www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html?ex=1275883200&en=22149dd70c073fd8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
ANDREW C REVKIN Published: June 8, 2005 A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limi ts 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.
Forum: The Environment In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003 , the official, Philip A Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of cl imate research that government scientists and their supervisors, includi ng some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In m any 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," te nd to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts s ay are robust. Mr Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration polici es 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 g roup representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bac helor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training. The documents were obtained by The New York Times from the Government Acc ountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government w histle-blowers. The project is representing Rick S Piltz, who resigned in March as a sen ior associate in the office that coordinates government climate research . That office, now called the Climate Change Science Program, issued the documents that Mr Cooney edited. Martin, said yesterday that Mr Co oney would not be available to comment. In one instance in an October 2002 draft of a regularly published summary of government climate research, "Our Changing Planet," Mr Cooney ampli fied the sense of uncertainty by adding the word "extremely" to this sen tence: "The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological chang es to climate change or variability is extremely difficult." In a section on the need for research into how warming might change water availability and flooding, he crossed out a paragraph describing the pr ojected reduction of mountain glaciers and snowpack. His note in the mar gins explained that this was "straying from research strategy into specu lative findings/musings." Other White House officials said the changes made by Mr Cooney were part of the normal interagency review that takes place on all documents rela ted to global environmental change. Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted that one of t he reports Mr Cooney worked on, the administration's 10-year plan for c limate research, was endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences. And M yron Ebell, who has long campaigned against limits on greenhouse gases a s director of climate policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian group, said such editing was necessary for "consistency" in meshing programs with policy. But critics said that while all administrations routinely vetted governme nt reports, scientific content in such reports should be reviewed by sci entists. Climate experts and representatives of environmental groups, wh en shown examples of the revisions, said they illustrated the significan t if largely invisible influence of Mr Cooney and other White House off icials with ties to energy industries that have long fought greenhouse-g as restrictions. "Each administration has a policy position on climate change," Mr Piltz wrote. "But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed under this administration during the past four years, in which politiciz ation by the White House has fed back directly into the science program in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the progr am."
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