Bush league science project... just fiddle the facts

MacDoc · Jul 27th, 2005, 08:49 PM

This may have been posted before but the level of intensity from the science community is unprecedented for a single issue.

	Quote:
	Bush aide altered climate reports From Roland Watson in Washington Philip Cooney, a White House official who had no scientific training, doctored official warnings on climate change, inserting words to qualify evidence, and deleting paragraphs which he considered to be speculative FRESH evidence of White House unwillingness to accept a link between greenhouse gases and global warming emerged yesterday with leaked memos showing that a senior Bush aide consistently watered down official scientific warnings. Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House council on environmental quality, intervened to blur the conclusions of government scientists before they were published. Mr Cooney not only lacks any scientific training but was a former lobbyist with the oil industry’s largest trade group before he entered the White House in 2001. Sometimes his editing consisted of inserting words such as “significant and fundamental” before the word “uncertainties” to sow doubt about the assertions of scientists. At other times his brush was broader. For example, in the draft text of a November 2002 policy paper, Mr Cooney deleted a paragraph which gave warning that melting glaciers would change flood patterns and threaten native populations because the assertion was “straying from research in speculative findings/musings”. The leak, to The New York Times, is at least the third time in the past four years that the White House has been caught meddling with scientific findings. It came a day after President Bush, after talks with Tony Blair, ducked a direct question about whether he believed climate change was man-made.

Dr.G. · Jul 27th, 2005, 08:55 PM

MacDoc, not sure if this was posted before, but I did read about this shocking news. I agree that "the level of intensity from the science community is unprecedented for a single issue".

MacDoc · Jul 27th, 2005, 09:39 PM

I just came across this as well

	Quote:
	This just in from the Adminstrator at Chemical Forums.com quote: George W. Bush is the worst thing that the scientific community of the U.S.A. has ever seen. I hate that man and hope he burns in hell for eternity. He's a spoiled little brat who only cares about his own image and not about the country he is in charge of running. His stance against stem-cell research infuriates me like you wouldn't believe. As a type I diabetic, stem-cell research is my only hope at being cured. As long as he is in office, there is no chance that any of it will happen. He is tying his religious beliefs into the law of the land and the constitution clearly forbids that. If he is elected again, I will seriously consider ex-patriating and moving to Canada where at least they care about medical coverage and scientific research.

used to be jwoodget · Jul 27th, 2005, 11:28 PM

But I hear that there is a huge influx of scientists to the US who are trained in the theory of intelligent design....

MacDoc · Jul 27th, 2005, 11:35 PM

Then this in this month's Pop Sci

Lying buggers in the White House

	Quote:
	David Keith never expected to get a summons from the White House. But in September 2001, officials with the President’s Climate Change Technology Program invited him and more than two dozen other scientists to participate in a roundtable discussion called “Response Options to Rapid or Severe Climate Change.” While administration officials were insisting in public that there was no firm proof that the planet was warming, they were quietly exploring potential ways to turn down the heat. Most of the world’s industrialized nations had already vowed to combat global warming by reining in their emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief “greenhouse gas” blamed for trapping heat in Earth’s atmosphere. But in March 2001 President George W. Bush had withdrawn U.S. support for the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty mandating limits on CO2 emissions, and asked his administration to begin studying other options. Keith, a physicist and economist in the chemical and petroleum engineering department at the University of Calgary, had for more than a decade been investigating strategies to curtail global warming. He and the other scientists at the meeting—including physicists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who had spent a chunk of their careers designing nuclear weapons—had come up with some ideas for “geoengineering” Earth’s climate. What they proposed was tinkering on a global scale. “We already are inadvertently changing the climate, so why not advertently try to counterbalance it?” asks retired Lawrence Livermore physicist Michael MacCracken, a former senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program who helped organize the meeting. “If they had broadcast that meeting live to people in Europe, there would have been riots,” Keith says. “Here were the bomb guys from Livermore talking about stuff that strikes most greens as being completely wrong and off-the-wall.” But today, a growing number of physicists, oceanographers and climatologists around the world are seriously considering technologies for the deliberate manipulation of Earth’s climate. Some advocate planetary air-conditioning devices such as orbiting space mirrors that deflect sunlight away from Earth, or ships that intensify cloud cover to block the sun’s rays. Others are suggesting that we capture carbon dioxide—from the air, from cars and power plants—and stash it underground or react it with chemicals that turn it to stone.

Complete article

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviatio...075786,00.html

“If they had broadcast that meeting live to people in Europe, there would have been riots,”
....riots......without a doubt..and perhaps with good reason.

So how do YOU feel about the Bush crew "tinkering" with the climate

Carex · Jul 28th, 2005, 01:33 AM

Fuel for the fire

IronMac · Jul 28th, 2005, 07:16 AM

I think that the title of this thread is so apropo...

MacDoc · Jul 28th, 2005, 09:38 AM

Thank you, it took a minute or two to get the phrasing.
I'm hoping it sticks around long enough to get a real list of the crimes and misdemeanours against the larger science community and in particular the US community which from the looks of it is totally outraged and disgusted.

Happy hunting. A least Arnie bucked the trend and is funding stem cell research in California.

sinjin · Jul 28th, 2005, 11:07 AM

It gets worse. The Bush administration is strong-arming government scientists to shut up. Scientific objectivity be damned.

I have a scientist friend who works for one of the US agencies. About 1.5 years ago she signed a petition put forward by the Union of Concerned Scientist demanding that the Bush administration stop cherry picking the data it liked and twisting the data it didn't like.

A republican congressman got a hold of the signers names, cross-referenced them with names of government employees and set about having them reprimanded or fired. My friend was lucky and was told she would lose her job if she did anything like it again.

Some may say rightly so. To publicly speak out against your employer is a pretty stupid thing to do if you like your job. But when your job is to collect data and provide advice for the public well being, and your employer blatantly lies about what you are saying to the peril of all, do you just sit there and accept it? Do you let yourself be a mouthpiece for a misguided government through inaction? Depends on the sort of person you are.

Needless to say, I'm very proud of her.

sinjin · Jul 28th, 2005, 11:15 AM

Forgot to add, there many examples of "scientific abuse", if you will, on the <a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/">Union of Concerned Scientists website</a>.