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White House advisor edits climate report

Olive Heffernan

In this week’s Nature, Jeff Tollefson reports on the claims that a White House science advisor edited a congressional testimony by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the public health impacts of climate change.

First reported last week by the Associated Press, the story has since been picked up by Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post, in The Boston Globe and in The Wall Street Journal (which takes a different line, reporting that the CDC director says that the testimony wasn’t diluted).

Although White House spokesperson Dana Perino initially denied claims that Julie Gerberding’s testimony had been watered down, it eventually became clear that it had been chopped from 12 to six pages.

Bush’s chief science advisor, John Marburger, said the edits were made in order to align the testimony with the findings of the reports released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But concerned scientists and Democrats believe that the White House was suppressing science at odds with its policy positions.

According to Eilperin “White House officials eliminated several successive pages of Gerberding’s testimony” including a statement that the “CDC considers climate change a serious public concern”.

Tollefson reports in Nature that the missing material "focused on a range of potential public- health impacts related to climate change. These included the effects of heat waves, air pollution, extreme weather and infectious diseases.”

Read the whole story in Nature here.

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    Phil Henshaw said:

    This is an old story in lots of ways, ‘cooking the books’, and quite embarrassing for our government’s apparent preference for magical thinking rather protecting our future. Those of us in the environmental movements should not be smug about it though, since in many ways the overall design of our own crisis response plans often only put off rather than resolve their underlying conflicts, and in that way just amount to plans for having a bigger crisis too.

    One dilemma we persistently solve the wrong way is the kind Malthus foresaw when he noticed the ‘persistent diverging rates’ of population growth and food production. We often only come up with delaying actions. The major cases in point include how the IPCC models for limiting global warming call it ‘decoupling’ to have environmental ‘pressures’ continuing to grow exponentially if we are able to slow that exponential rate down a little. It’s really an amazing oversight, but all the mainstream sustainability models I’ve looked at assume essentially the same thing.

    Yes, delaying action does succeed in pushing the consequences to someone else’s watch, beyond the horizon of the model makers, but is that good enough ?

    Phil Henshaw

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