Editorial: Politics and facts collide

Monday, Oct. 29, 2007 | 7:08 a.m.

A government expert last week planned to deliver 12 pages of testimony to a Senate committee about the likely effects of global warming on public health.

But first she had to submit her written testimony to the White House for review.

Her report was chopped in half.

Now the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, lead by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., is demanding that every word of the original report be released to it for inclusion in the public record.

The committee's demand of the White House is highly justified. The Bush administration has a history of overlaying the work of government scientists with its political ideology.

Two years ago, in perhaps the most high-profile incident of this blurring of science and politics, NASA's top climatologist, James Hansen, disclosed that government censors were diluting not only his work, but also the work of other government scientists.

In deference to fossil-fuel energy industries, whose emissions contribute to global warming, the Bush administration plays down the whole notion of man-made climate change.

Last week Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was prepared to testify in detail about global warming and public health. Six pages, covering such issues as the effects of excessive heat on individuals, warming-related air pollution and the potential for the spread of disease as temperatures rise, were deleted from her report by the White House.

The deletions became known when the Associated Press was able to obtain an original copy of her testimony.

The White House said it merely deleted passages that conflicted with findings this year by a U.N. panel on global warming. On Thursday, however, Boxer released comparisons of the panel's findings and Gerberding's planned testimony, showing them to be nearly identical.

Objective peer review is the time-honored and traditional way of validating the work of scientists. We're quite certain that the White House is not the place where any scientist - or any ethical person, for that matter - would want that review to take place.