Bush the anti-scientist and global warming obfuscation
Submitted by Martin on Tue, 11/28/2006 - 20:42
Couldn't resist a post here using this as headline!
WILLIAMS MOCKS BUSH OVER GLOBAL WARMING
Even tho it's about comedian Robin Williams:
Quote:
Williams says, "There is global warming. I know our president doesn't agree. (Bush thinks) 'Global Warming. Oh just go inside for a bit.'"
Post edited by: Martin, at: 2007/06/22 02:47
Comments
Cheney and ExxonMobil versus the environment
On LA Times blogs:
Report links Cheney office, oil giant to global warming policy shift
Bush talks but does not walk the walk
Bush has finally announced something like plans re warming, right in the twilight of his presidency. Woeful stuff, though:
The proposal on global warming, which fell short of European proposals, was announced as the US Congress prepares to consider more ambitious plans and before international climate change negotiations take place in Paris.
Mr Bush offered only broad principles, such as focusing on emissions from the power industry, and rejected new taxes, abandoning nuclear power and trade barriers.
President Bush's environment plans criticised
Bush admin ignores science and law re California emissions s
No big surprises here, I'm afraid
On Wednesday Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Stephen Johnson denied California's request because the state did not meet certain legal requirements for being permitted its own emissions limits.
But Friday The Los Angeles Times cited several sources inside and outside the agency as saying that EPA staff who had studied the issue for months had advised Johnson that the opposite was true.
"California met every criteria ... on the merits. The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years on all the other waivers," one EPA staff member told the Times. "We told him (Johnson) that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts."
California Air Resources Board Chairwoman Mary Nichols told the Times she had learned from EPA staff that they were over-ruled by Johnson.
Nichols said the decision showed that President George W. Bush's administration "ignores the science and ignores the law to reach the politically convenient conclusion."
US environment chief ignored advice on Cal. emissions: report
Bush White House manipulated climate science
US Committee on Oversight and Government reform has produced damning report on Bush administration's attempts to distort and downplay climate science.
Summary:
Includes:
The White House exerted unusual control over the public statements of federal scientists on climate change issues. It was standard practice for media requests to speak with federal scientists on climate change matters to be sent to CEQ for White House approval.
Committee Report: White House Engaged in Systematic Effort to Manipulate Climate Change Science
White House the last island of ignorance re warming
Boston Globe has column re US administration's foot dragging, and behind the times attitude, re global warming. Includes:
Ban listed several threatened world "treasures," such as melting Antarctic ice and the drying out of the Amazon rainforest into a savanna. He talked of children wearing protective clothing for ultraviolet radiation in Punta Arenas, Chile, under the hole in the ozone layer. "These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie," Ban said. "But they are more terrifying because they are real."
Bush officials treat this as fiction. The United States reportedly tried to eliminate a part of the report that detailed possible outcomes of global warming, such as a melting of ice sheets more rapidly than originally thought. The prospect of melting is considered so dire that it "would make it not just difficult, but impossible to adapt successfully" to climate change, Princeton scientist Michael Oppenheimer said in The New York Times.
Yet, when queried as to what level of global warming the White House found acceptable, senior environmental adviser James Connaughton said incredibly, "We don't have a view on that."
Here at home, many governors with a longer view, both Democrat and Republican, are taking matters into their own hands.
...
In dire scenarios of climate change, many islands will be swamped. The White House is the last island of ignorance in a fast-rising sea.
Hesitance on the warming front
White House eviscerates testimony re warming and health
So, the days of Bush government trying to muffle news re global warming and its impacts are not over yet.
From Think Progress:
“It was eviscerated,” said a CDC official, familiar with both versions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process.
The official said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly “heavy-handed,” with the document cut from its original 14 pages to four. It was six pages as presented to the Senate committee.
The White House’s deletions included “details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC’s analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea levels.”
White House ‘Eviscerates’ CDC Director’s Senate Testimony On Global Warming
ABC News also picked up this story; report includes:
The original, unedited testimony presented to Congress by Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and obtained by ABC News was 14 pages long, but the White House Office of Management and Budget edited the final version down to a mere six pages.
Scientists and public health organizations called the move "frustrating," "terrible" and "appalling." The edits essentially deleted all sections that referred to climate change as a public health concern -- including the risks of increased food-borne and waterborne diseases, worsening extreme weather events, worsening air pollution and the effect of heat stress on humans.
Scientists Denounce Global Warming Report 'Edits'
Public Health Experts Say Edits Represent Censoring of Science
Bush morphed from sneering skeptic into disinterested thumb-
George "Warmer" Bush isn't going to look good in history, especially for his environmental record.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution has short but scathing piece on Bush and his wobbly wimpiness re warming. Includes:
Upon election, however, he morphed into a sneering global warming skeptic and then a disinterested thumb-twiddler. He leads the nation responsible for generating 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, yet declines to take a decisive leadership role in fixing the problem.
Unfortunately, global warming is moving much faster than the president, and much faster than scientists originally predicted.
A matter of life and global warming
President Bush's hot-and-cold approach delays strategy to cut harmful gases
Belated Bush warming to warming
Though certain energy industry types and allies/near allies keep churning out disinformation, even George Bush is being persuaded global warming is a real issue - but still figuring it's best to talk rather than act.
Reuters has short timeline, showing how his views have changed. Includes:
FACTBOX-Bush's evolving policy on global warming
Bush advisor says man surely to blame for warming
From Daily Telegraph - showing even Bush surely having to change views, though highly unlikely that he'll take any real action.
Professor John Marburger said it was more than 90 per cent likely that mankind was causing global warming and that the earth may become "unlivable" without reductions in CO2 output.
"I think there is widespread agreement on certain basics, and one of the most important is that we are producing far more CO2 from fossil fuels than we ought to be," he told the BBC.
"And it's going to lead to trouble unless we can begin to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we are burning and using in our economies."
Man is to blame for global warming, US admits
Bush taken to court for dilly-dallying
U.S. District Judge Saundra Armstrong in Oakland, California, said yesterday that the administration violated a 1990 U.S. law requiring the government to produce the research plans every three years and the assessments every four years. She ordered a summary of the research plan to be produced by March and the assessment by May.
The administration ``unlawfully withheld action'' required under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, said Armstrong. The last research plan was in 2003, and the last assessment was published in 2000. Greenpeace International and two other environmental groups sued in November seeking a court order to produce the reports.
``This administration has denied and suppressed the science of global warming at every turn,'' Brendan Cummings, an attorney arguing the case for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. Cummings called the ruling ``a stern rebuke of the administration's head-in-the-sand approach to global warming.''
President Bush Ordered to Release Overdue Global-Warming Plan
Rolling Stone on Bush global warming denial campaign
Big article in the Rolling Stone, includes:
"They've got a political clientele that does not want to be regulated," says Rick Piltz, a former Bush climate official who blew the whistle on White House censorship of global-warming documents in 2005. "Any honest discussion of the science would stimulate public pressure for a stronger policy. They're not stupid."
Bush's do-nothing policy on global warming began almost as soon as he took office. By pursuing a carefully orchestrated policy of delay, the White House has blocked even the most modest reforms and replaced them with token investments in futuristic solutions like hydrogen cars. "It's a charade," says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in secret to craft the administration's energy policy. "They have a single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it look like they are doing something."
...
The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming
Bush the Anti-Scientist cuts global warming monitoring
If to have a thread with this title, may as well add some posts about George "Warmer" Bush, the world's leading Anti-Scientist (leading as in his powerful position, has downplayed science, notably re global warming).
Now this buffoon is presiding over major cut in satellite monitoring that's important for knowing what's happening with global warming. (Any skeptics wander by: important, too, for showing whether and to what extent global warming really is an issue.)
From AP report, here in the Guardian:
A confidential report to the White House, obtained by The Associated Press, warns that U.S. scientists will soon lose much of their ability to monitor warming from space ...
the Pentagon and two partners - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA - will rely on European satellites for most of the climate data.
``Unfortunately, the recent loss of climate sensors ... places the overall climate program in serious jeopardy,'' NOAA and NASA scientists told the White House in the Dec. 11 report obtained by the AP.
They said they will face major gaps in data that can be collected only from satellites about ice caps and sheets, surface levels of seas and lakes, sizes of glaciers, surface radiation, water vapor, snow cover and atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch, a watchdog program of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, called the situation a crisis.
``We're going to start being blinded in our ability to observe the planet,'' said Piltz, whose group provided the AP with the previously undisclosed report. ``It's criminal negligence, and the leaders in the climate science community are ringing the alarm bells on this crisis.''
...
Jerry Mahlman, a former scientist at NOAA who is now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said he and other colleagues warned of problems as far back as 1995.
He compared the preparations for the satellites to a ``planned train wreck.''
U.S. Cuts Back Climate Checks From Space