Ethics Newsline®

WASHINGTON
The White House last week again faced accusations of watering down scientific findings to suit political goals, this time fending off criticism for altering global warming reports to downplay the research tying greenhouse gas emissions to global warming.

Dozens of such changes have been made to official reports by Philip Cooney, a lawyer with no scientific training, who is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Cooney moved into his job after more than 10 years with the American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s largest oil industry trade group, where he served as a lobbyist and worked to defeat legislation restricting heat-trapping gases, reported the New York Times.

The Times was the first to report on Cooney’s role in watering down language about global warming in official U.S. reports, copies of which were obtained by the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that provides legal assistance for whistle-blowers.

The group is representing Rick Piltz, who resigned in March from the Bush administration’s Climate Change Science Program, which issued the documents edited by Cooney.

Last week, Piltz sent a memo to top officials warning that political interference with scientific findings was damaging morale and the integrity of research, according to the Times.

“Each administration has a policy position on climate change,” 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 politicization 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 program.”

Piltz’s memo follows similar warnings from the science community, which repeatedly has complained that the Bush administration is tampering with scientific findings to make them match policy goals.

The White House refused to let Cooney comment last week, saying he is “not a cleared spokesman,” but defended his alterations of the reports as part of the standard process of letting policymakers take a red pen to final documents.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week denied that Cooney had done anything improper in editing the reports’ language to make scientific findings of climate change seem less robust. “The reports are based on the best scientific knowledge that we have at this time,” McClellan insisted.

That view was echoed last month by Dr. Harlan L. Watson, the chief climate negotiator for the State Department, who told the BBC, “We are still not convinced of the need to move forward quite so quickly.”

The scientific academies of 11 countries, including those of the United States and Britain, last week released a joint letter contradicting the U.S. government’s official view. “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action,” they warned.