Leahy: President censored warming research
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By Kevin O'Connor Staff Writer - Published: October 29, 2006
BURLINGTON — U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., joined the world's leading researcher on global warming Saturday to charge that the Bush administration's use of censorship to foil terrorism is hurting the fight against climate change and other environmental threats.
"If you have information that points out a problem, the only way you're going to make a correction is if you find out about it," Leahy said. "I have never seen an administration, either Republican or Democratic, as secretive as this one. It has become absolutely farcical, except that the country has been damaged by it."
Leahy, speaking in Burlington, punctuated his point by sitting beside top NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who alleged in January that the government was trying to stop him from speaking out after he called for prompt reductions in pollution emissions linked to global warming.
"There's a huge gap between what is understood by scientists and what is known by the public and policymakers," Hansen said Saturday. "I think people are unaware how close we are to the tipping point. That's not speculation. The science is clear."
Leahy and Hansen made their comments at the Society of Environmental Journalists international conference at the Sheraton Burlington Hotel, which drew 800 participants from around the world. Hansen is known as the man who testified before Congress in 1988 about a strong "cause and effect relationship" between temperature and pollution emissions into the atmosphere, sparking the first news reports about global warming.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration ordered federal agencies to stop releasing sensitive information. That clampdown has extended beyond national security to such scientific agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA. Journalists writing about fish migration, for example, often can't obtain basic information about bridges and dams because the data is stamped classified.
The government is censoring its research findings on global warming for a different reason, Hansen said.
"There's simply not agreement in this administration that we should do the things that need to get done. Because this has policy implications and they don't like them, they prefer we don't talk about it."
Hansen isn't the only federal employee complaining of a clampdown. Earlier Saturday, Rick Piltz told conference-goers that he resigned his senior position in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program last year after an administration official cut portions of his global warming reports before publication.
"They have never given any reason why they have suppressed the report, they just suppressed it," said Piltz, now director of the national watchdog group Climate Science Watch. "The net effect has been to misrepresent the information about climate change and therefore undermine national preparedness."
Piltz commended Hansen for speaking out publicly.
"Not all scientists have the cachet to be able to do that," he said.
Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he is working to strengthen the country's Freedom of Information Act, but is facing resistance from Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.
"The secrecy is hurting everybody — it makes the days of Watergate look like child's play," Leahy said. "But it is possible that, if there really is a tsunami about 10 days from now in the congressional races, it will change."
Leahy and Hansen prefaced their remarks by saying government secrecy isn't new.
"I've had problems with prior administrations," Hansen said. "But there's apparently a feeling (the Bush administration) has the right to influence what gets out to the public rather than let it be based on scientific results."
The Society of Environmental Journalists conference, being held for the first time in Vermont, has included such speakers as Middlebury College scholar Bill McKibben, whose 1989 book "The End of Nature" was the first to explain global warming to a general audience, and New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the latest book on the topic, "Field Notes from a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change."
Participants also heard from Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, and previewed an environmentally themed work in progress by John O'Brien, the Tunbridge filmmaker behind "Man with a Plan."
Contact Kevin O'Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.
PQ: "There's a huge gap between what is understood by scientists and what is known by the public and policymakers," Hansen said Saturday. "I think people are unaware how close we are to the tipping point. That's not speculation. The science is clear."
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