Editorial: A disturbing trend

Saturday, Oct. 7, 2006 | 7:55 a.m.

Federal scientists say the Commerce Department has spiked a scientific paper and a series of news releases that present conclusions about global warming that conflict with the Bush administration's views on the phenomenon.

According to a recent Newhouse News Service story, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say the news releases and a position paper that examined numerous studies assessing the risks of global warming all offered information linking intensified hurricanes, droughts and floods to global warming. The research also showed that at least a portion of the warming trend is irreversible.

But those reports were deliberately kept from the public's view, the scientists said, by officials at the Commerce Department. The allegations were first reported in the most recent issue of the journal Nature, when one of the scientists said the Bush administration had quashed a report about hurricanes and climate change that was prepared last spring.

Richard Wetherald, a career scientist at the federally funded climate-tracking agency, told Newhouse News that Bush officials started rejecting his press releases about global warming's far-reaching effects in 2001 after Congress refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Nations that signed the international treaty made a pact to reduce the amount of fossil fuel emissions, or greenhouse gases, from their countries. The United States produces 25 percent of Earth's greenhouse gas.

Neither the White House nor top NOAA officials would respond to Wetherald's accusations, Newhouse News reports. And there probably isn't all that much that Bush administration officials could say.

It is abundantly clear that the president refuses to acknowledge the problems created by his failure to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the energy industry and Americans' seemingly insatiable consumption of fossil fuel. Bush's friends in the energy industry don't want him to enact any legislation that would force them to clean up their acts or curtail Americans' appetite for gasoline.

This is business as usual for the Bush administration. If the president doesn't like what the facts show, he ignores the facts and spins the issue in whatever way he chooses. The only truths that exist are the ones that benefit Bush's political and industry cronies.