Dems: White House censored testimony on climate change

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — The White House censored climate scientists and edited their testimony on global warming before Congress, Democrats charged Monday after a 16-month investigation into allegations of political interference with scientific inquiries.

The Bush administration was “particularly active in stifling discussions” of a potential link between climate change and the intensity of hurricanes, according to the findings in a draft report issued Monday by Democrats on the House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Climate scientists are divided about whether the storms that hit the U.S. in 2004 and 2005 were part of a cyclical weather pattern or attributable to higher global temperatures.

The report said that after Hurricane Katrina, the administration steered journalists toward government scientists who discounted a link between climate change and increased hurricane intensity. It also accused staffers on the Senate Commerce Committee of influencing the public testimony of climate experts such as former National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield.

“The White House exerted unusual control over the public statements of federal scientists on climate change issues,” said the report, which acknowledges that there’s no scientific consensus on whether global warming leads to stronger hurricanes.

The report also charges that the administration has engaged in a “systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warning.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called the report “rehashed rhetoric” and said the Bush administration understands the “urgent challenge that is posed by climate change,” a term the White House prefers to “global warming” because it doesn’t suggest that human activity is responsible.

House Republicans on the oversight committee dismissed the report as “seriously flawed” and complained in their own report that an investigation that began as a bipartisan effort into the presidential Council on Environmental Quality’s role in climate-change policy “veered into a partisan diatribe against the Bush administration.”