Science In EPA Climate Change Report Censored by White House

In the “Global Issues” section of the draft returned by the White House to EPA in April, an introductory sentence reading, “Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment” was cut and replaced with a paragraph that starts: “The complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components make it a scientific challenge to document change, diagnose its causes, and develop useful projections of how natural variability and human actions may affect the global environment in the future.”

The changes were mainly made by the Council on Environmental Quality, although the Office of Management and Budget was also involved, several EPA officials said. It is the second time in a year that the White House has sought to play down global warming in official documents. Last September, an annual EPA report on air pollution that for six years had contained a section on climate was released without the usual climate portion, and the decision to delete it was made by Bush administration appointees at the agency with White House approval.

“Political staff are becoming increasingly bold in forcing agency officials to endorse junk science,” said Jeremy Symons, a climate policy expert at the National Wildlife Federation. “This is like the White House directing the secretary of labor to alter unemployment data to paint a rosy economic picture.”

Outgoing EPA head Whitman defended the editing. “The first draft, as with many first drafts, contained everything,” she said. “As it went through the review, there was less consensus on the science and conclusions on climate change. So rather than go out with something half-baked or not put out the whole report, we felt it was important for us to get this out because there is a lot of really good information that people can use to measure our successes.”