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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-Cheney Administration spins a sound legal defeat into an affirmation of their illegal actions
Posted on Monday, August 27, 2007
On August 22, a spokesperson for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Kristin Scuderi, released an official statement of reaction to the court case, Center for Biological Diversity et al. v. Dr. William Brennan et al (see related post). The ruling by Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong was clear: by failing to meet deadlines to produce a research plan and climate change impacts assessments, the Administration is in violation of the law, and now is under an enforceable court order to comply. However, the inaccurate and grossly misleading OSTP statement "attempts to spin a complete legal defeat into an affirmation of their illegal actions” says the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Brendan Cummings with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). We list OSTP's claims and Cummings' point-by-point rebuttals.
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Inslee, Kerry Applaud Decision Forcing Administration to Comply with Climate Change Law
Posted on Thursday, August 23, 2007
The office of Repesentative Jay Inslee (Democrat, Washington) released a press release on 22 August 2007 in response to the court order issued on 21 August 2007 regarding Center for Biological Diversity et al. v. Dr. William Brennan et al. Senator Kerry and Congressman Jay Inslee had filed a memorandum of Amici Curiae to the court on 17 April 2007. According to Rep. Inslee, the decision “makes clear that the Bush Administration has been illegally suppressing the scientific facts that link global warming to the very real impacts on our daily lives.” We provide the full press release.
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Court Rules that Bush Admin. Unlawfully failed to produce Scientific Assessment of Global Change
Posted on Wednesday, August 22, 2007
A Federal judge says the Bush Administration has violated the Global Change Research Act by failing to produce a national global change research plan that was due by July 2006; and a scientific assessment of global change that was due in November 2004. The last scientific assessement, the US National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, was submitted to Congress in November 2000. Climate Science Watch has long maintained that the Bush administration’s suppression of official use of the first National Assessment report and its termination of the national climate change assessment process for connecting scientists to policymakers and society is the central climate science scandal of the administration. Ruling on the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity et al, U.S. District Judge Sandra Brown Armstrong has ordered the Administration to produce both the plan and the assessment no later than the end of May 2008.
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Congressman Markey Queries Federal Aviation Administrator on Failure to Consider Climate Change
Posted on Saturday, August 18, 2007
The Chairman of the House Select Committee on Global Warming and Energy Independence, Rep. Ed Markey (Democrat from Massachusetts), prompted in part by a Climate Science Watch report [PDF] and Web site post, has sent a letter [PDF] to the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration expressing concern that the FAA’s Next Generation Air Transport System (NextGen) fails to include climate change considerations in planning for future air travel challenges.
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“In These Times” says U.S. Puts Concerns about Aviation’s Climate Impacts “On Stand-by”
Posted on Saturday, August 18, 2007
An article published August 15 by the online magazine In These Times quotes CSW Director Rick Piltz and echoes concerns raised in a CSW report issued July 18 that the FAA is failing to take into account the potential climate change impacts of aircraft emissions in its long-term planning for the rapidly expanding airline industry.
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House of Representatives Passes the Global Change Research and Data Management Act of 2007
Posted on Monday, August 13, 2007
A legislative proposal repealing the US Global Change Research Act of 1990 and replacing it with a set of provisions that re-establishes an interagency Global Change Research Program passed the US House of Representatives on August 4 as part of an omnibus energy bill (see related post).
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Energy Bill Passed by House Has Many Provisions on Climate Change Impacts, Assessment, Adaptation
Posted on Monday, August 13, 2007
An omnibus energy bill (HR 3221) and a companion energy tax package (HR 2776) were passed by the House of Representatives in a rare Saturday session on August 4 2007. Both are voluminous and contain hundreds of provisions that, if signed into law, would reorient the United States toward cleaner and more efficient energy technologies and approaches, and take significant steps to address climate change. However, President Bush has already indicated he will veto both bills.
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CSW Director on leave
Posted on Thursday, August 09, 2007
Climate Science Watch Director Rick Piltz will be on leave working on a writing project from August 10 through September 2. During that time the Climate Science Watch research team will continue to post occasional entries (see below). Media inquiries should be directed to Dylan Blaylock, Communications Director, Government Accountability Project.
IPCC 2007 final report on climate change impacts now available online
Posted on Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, the Working Group II contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is now available online. Chapter 14 focuses on climate change impacts on North America.
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House Science Chairmen suggest NOAA is railroading Hurricane Center Director Bill Proenza
Posted on Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Continuing their investigation of the recent controversy at the Tropical Prediction Center / National Hurricane Center (TPC/NHC), chairmen of two House Science and Technology Subcommittees have called on NOAA Administrator Lautenbacher either to reinstate the Center’s Director William Proenza or return him to the position he held prior to running the TPC/NHC—instead of subjecting him to a “drastic demotion,” which the Administration’s political agents at NOAA are apparently intending to do. In the letter, the Science Chairmen said it appeared Proenza had been treated with “little evidence of fairness” when removed from his post in early July.
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Science editor Kennedy: Science community recognizes Administration puts politics before science
Posted on Tuesday, August 07, 2007
"The science community now recognizes that this administration completely puts its political cart before the scientific horse,” Science magazine editor in chief Donald Kennedy told USA TODAY. “We’ve seen it with one issue after another.”
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Newsweek cover story focuses on the global warming denial machine
Posted on Sunday, August 05, 2007
”Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine,” a 4,700-word cover story in the August 13 issue of Newsweek (now available online), explores the history and current situation with what the article terms the global warming denial machine. “Killing bills in Congress was only one prong of the denial machine’s campaign,” the article says at one point. “It also had to keep public opinion from demanding action on greenhouse emissions, and that meant careful management of what federal scientists and officials wrote and said. ‘If they presented the science honestly, it would have brought public pressure for action,’ says Rick Piltz, who joined the federal Climate Science Program in 1995...Following the playbook laid out at the 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, [administration] officials made sure that every report and speech cast climate science as dodgy, uncertain, controversial -- and therefore no basis for making policy.
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Hurricane Center Director Proenza charges NOAA violated Whistleblower Protection Act
Posted on Friday, August 03, 2007
In a letter from his lawyers to officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Bill Proenza, who in July was removed from his position as director of the National Hurricane Center, charges that this action by administration officials violated the Whistleblower Protection Act.
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