WASHINGTON—US scientists were pressured to tailor their
writings on global warming to fit the Bush administration’s skepticism, in some
cases at the behest of a former oil-industry lobbyist, a congressional committee
heard on Tuesday.
"Our investigations found high-quality science struggling to
get out," Francesca Grifo of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists
told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
A survey by the group found that 150 climate scientists
personally experienced political interference in the past five years, for a
total of at least 435 incidents.
"Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally
experienced pressure to eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’
or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.
Rick Piltz, a former US government scientist who said he
resigned in 2005 after pressure to soft-pedal findings on global warming, told
the committee in prepared testimony that former White House official Phil Cooney
took an active role in casting doubt on the consequences of global climate
change.
Cooney, who was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum
Institute before becoming chief of staff at the White House Council on
Environmental Quality, resigned in 2005 to work for oil giant ExxonMobil.
Documents on global climate change required Cooney’s review
and approval, Piltz said.
"His edits of program reports, which had been drafted and
approved by career science program managers, had the cumulative effect of adding
an enhanced sense of scientific uncertainty about global warming and minimizing
its likely consequences," Piltz said.
Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who chairs the
committee, complained that the White House has balked at supplying documents
requested over six months to investigate these allegations.
"The committee isn’t trying to obtain state secrets or
documents that could affect our immediate national security," Waxman said. "We
are simply seeking answers to whether the White House’s political staff is
inappropriately censoring impartial government scientists."
Kristen Hellmer of the Council on Environmental Quality said
the council had been cooperating with Congress. When asked about allegations of
political interference in scientific documents, she said, "We do have in place a
very transparent system in science reporting."
The hearing was one of two on Tuesday spotlighting global
climate change; a Senate forum featured testimony from members including
presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois
among Democrats and Republican John McCain of Arizona.
President George W. Bush’s position on global warming has
evolved over his presidency, from open skepticism about the reality of the
phenomenon to acknowledgment at a global summit last year that climate change is
occurring and human activities speed it up.
In his State of the Union address on January 23, Bush called
climate change "a serious challenge" that should be addressed by technology and
greater use of alternative sources of energy. But he stopped short of calling
for mandatory limits on US emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed
in part for global warming.
These discussions are part of the run-up to release of a major United Nations
report on climate change, scheduled for Friday in Paris. Drafts of the report
strengthened the case that humans are the principal cause of global warming
after 1950.
