ClimateScienceWatch |
Promoting integrity in the use of climate science in government |
Climate Science Watch is a nonprofit public interest education and advocacy project dedicated to holding public officials accountable for the integrity and effectiveness with which they use climate science and related research in government policymaking, toward the goal of enabling society to respond effectively to the challenges posed by global warming and climate change. See Details |
Bush Administration submits evasive Climate Action Report to the UN
Posted on Monday, July 30, 2007
The Bush administration’s long overdue U.S. Climate Action Report – 2006, given a stealth release on Friday afternoon July 27, lacks a forthright discussion of a range of likely adverse climate change impacts on the U.S. and fails to draw on the IPCC 2007 impacts assessment report and the substantial scientific literature on which it is based, including the assessment of North America impacts. The failure to use this material, and the overall evasiveness of the impacts and vulnerability chapter of the report, was clearly a political decision. Administration officials have once again defaulted on an opportunity to address a crucial challenge for national preparedness.
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Washington Post coverage of aviation and global warming should look at federal NextGen program
Posted on Sunday, July 29, 2007
On July 28 the Washington Post business section featured a page one article on the issue of greenhouse gas emissions from aviation and how U.S. airlines and aircraft manufacturers are finally being drawn into the debate on global warming policy. Future coverage of this issue in the Post should deal with how the Bush administration has been sweeping the global warming problem under the rug in the federal government’s NextGen planning and development program for enabling a major expansion of U.S. aviation. A Climate Science Watch report released on July 18 offers a critical analysis of the NextGen situation.
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House appropriations for NASA and NOAA would begin to reverse damage to climate observing system
Posted on Saturday, July 28, 2007
On July 26 the House of Representatives approved a Fiscal Year 2008 appropriations bill with funding for NASA and NOAA. The bill, if enacted, would take a few steps toward rectifying the damage that has been done during the current administration to the future of global climate change space-based observations and to Earth science research and analysis at NASA. The Appropriations Committee report on the bill challenges administration priorities and underscores the need for a stronger national climate program.
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House committee hearing July 31 on Administration politicization of Endangered Species Act science
Posted on Friday, July 27, 2007
The House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on July 31 on “Crisis Of Confidence: The Political Influence of The Bush Administration on Agency Science and Decision-Making.” According to a press release from committee Chairman Joe Nick Rahall (D-WV), the hearing was organized in response to a recent report in the Washington Post that revealed how Vice President Cheney’s manipulation in 2002 of the use of science in Interior Department decisionmaking led to the die-off of more than 70,000 salmon in the Klamath River Basin, said to be the worst fish kill on record in the western United States.
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Federal court ruling pending in lawsuit to compel new National Climate Change Assessment
Posted on Thursday, July 26, 2007
A federal court ruling is pending in the Center for Biological Diversity et al. lawsuit against the U.S. Climate Change Research Program and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to compel the preparation of a new National Assessment of Climate Change. In July the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, directed the parties to file a supplemental briefing in response to several questions about the content of the assessment required by the Global Change Research Act and its relationship to the CCSP research plan. The government defendants have an August 3 deadline for filing their briefing. A ruling in the case could come at any time after that. See Details for links to Plaintiffs documents in the case and the detailed Declaration of Climate Science Watch Director Rick Piltz.
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Climate Science Watch report: Federal NextGen aviation planning is ignoring global warming
Posted on Wednesday, July 18, 2007
On June 18 Climate Science Watch published a white paper report criticizing the administration’s failure to address aviation’s contribution to global warming in the federal multiagency NextGen aviation planning and development program. The report highlights the administration’s inattention to quantifying greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft in strategic planning for the development of the industry, and cautions that this omission could have harmful effects on the future of U.S. aviation if action is not taken. See Details to view or download the report.
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CSW Director Rick Piltz radio interview on Quality News Network
Posted on Tuesday, July 17, 2007
On July 17 Climate Science Watch Director Rick Piltz was interviewed on the America Back on Track program on the Quality News Network. We talked about climate change, the Bush-Cheney administration, national preparedness, the climate research and observations budget, the NASA administrator, the National Hurricane Center, U.S. climate change regional assessment, former Surgeon General Carmona, and the Washington culture of risk aversion to speaking up and speaking out. The interview is archived on the QNN web site.
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Union of Concerned Scientists Northeast climate change report does the government’s job
Posted on Sunday, July 15, 2007
On July 11 the Union of Concerned Scientists released a major report, Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast: Science, Impacts, and Solutions. The report identifies a wide range of signficant, harmful, likely impacts on cities and ecosystems in a nine-state region. In the absence of federal support under the current administration for national and regional-scale climate change impacts assessments like this, the Union of Concerned Scientists is filling in a gap that should not be there in the first place, doing a job the government should be doing but is currently unwilling to do.
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What is a climate disinformation activist and former Cheney speechwriter doing as #2 at DOE Science?
Posted on Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Jeffrey Salmon is the Associate Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy. Prior to moving to DOE, from 1991-2001 he was Executive Director of the George C. Marshall Institute, a key actor in the global warming disinformation campaign. In 1998 he participated in the development of a now-notorious oil industry-sponsored plan to wage a campaign against the mainstream science community on global warming. Before that, he was senior speechwriter for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense. The Office of Science oversees roughly $4 billion a year in DOE-supported research, including a roughly $140 million climate change research budget. What does Salmon do in this position—for example, on matters of climate change research, assessment, and communication?
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Former Surgeon General says Bush political appointees censored science communication
Posted on Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Reuters reports: The first U.S. Surgeon General appointed by President Bush accused the administration on July 10 of political interference and muzzling him from discussing the scientific underpinnings of key issues like embryonic stem cell research. “Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried,” Dr. Richard Carmona, who served from 2002 until 2006, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The New York Times reports that Carmona described attending a meeting at which top officials dismissed global warming as a liberal cause. “And I said to myself: ‘I realize why I’ve been invited. They want me to discuss the science because they obviously don’t understand the science.’ I was never invited back.”
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House Oversight deadline for White House to release climate change documents
Posted on Tuesday, July 10, 2007
In a bipartisan June 20 letter to White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairman James Connaughton, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ranking Member Tom Davis (R-VA) set a firm deadline of June 27 for the White House to provide climate change documents that were requested eleven months ago. Despite numerous discussions and requests, CEQ has withheld more than 500 documents from the Committee. What do these documents contain? Who is responsible for CEQ’s stonewalling?
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OSTP Director Marburger’s misleading testimony on NPOESS space-based climate observations
Posted on Saturday, July 07, 2007
In his testimony at a June 7 House Energy and Environment Subcommittee hearing on the development of the NPOESS satellite system, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Marburger played down the extent to which the future of essential climate change observations from space has been jeopardized by the Pentagon’s elimination or downgrading of eight climate sensors originally planned for NPOESS. In addition to an internal NOAA-NASA report to the White House released in June by Climate Science Watch, a presentation to a National Research Council panel on NPOESS by the director of the NOAA Climate Program Office is another source that paints a more truthful picture.
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Letter to the House Science and Technology Committee on global change research legislation
Posted on Sunday, July 01, 2007
On June 27 the House Science and Technology Committee reported the Global Climate Change Research Data and Management Act of 2007 (H.R. 906). Climate Science Watch and the Union of Concerned Scientists have communicated to the Committee our concern that the bill remains underdeveloped in two key respects: (1) It does not address the need to protect the integrity of scientific communication from political interference; and (2) It does not adequately address the need for an explicit focus on national assessment of U.S. climate change impacts and response strategies.
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