[Menydh]

What was your job? Describe your program.

We were dealing with issues like strategic planning, reports to Congress, websites, and interagency scientific working groups—the carbon cycle and water cycle.

So, I was in a position to have a very broad view of what was happening in the program, particularly the relationship between the political people and the federal science managers who are responsible for funding the scientists.

In a letter about your resignation, you wrote that the program’s annual report to Congress, called Our Changing Planet, was being dramatically altered by the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

I edited this report for nine years. It’s a basic primer on the Climate Change Science Program—what we’re doing, who we’re funding—and it does include a lot of material on current scientific development.
Federal career science professionals develop the different chapters of the reports and then revise and fix them. Then it goes for a high-level review to the White House, and at that point you would have the President’s CEQ weigh in.
The White House likes to characterize this as, “Well, everyone gets to weigh in and then we all hash it out.” As though this is some sort of collegial seminar.
But that’s not the role the White House plays. They have a top-down approach.

So after the program professionals analyze the writing, it gets kicked up to the White House political people to make all these changes?

Yes. And the changes created a greater sense of scientific uncertainty about observed climate change and potential climate change. Sometimes they would just delete chunks of texts or line out sentences.

One of your other claims is that there were instances in which documents were changed in such a way that it wasn’t evident who had made the changes.

Well, [in] the first year of the Bush [Administration], I was directed over the phone to just delete a whole section on the National Assessment [Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change]. That was done just by phone call. Under [President] Clinton, there were notes and you could usually tell where they were coming from.
The CEQ didn’t always get its way, although their role was always very aggressive, especially after the election in 2004.

What is so frightening to the White House about this National Assessment Climate Change Impacts on the United States?

The National Assessment was produced from around 1998 to 2001. It is an overview of reports by federal, university, and regional scientists around the country. It was the most comprehensive look at the implications of climate change to the United States.

A decision was made very early on by this president to deep-six the National Assessment. Any reference to the National Assessment is continually removed from any document or report. There is also no new National Assessment under way. Sen. McCain (R-AZ) raised this issue at a recent hearing and asked, “Where is the next National Assessment?”
They are required by statute every four years.

What makes the National Assessment different from strategic plans, Our Changing Planet reports to Congress, reports to the UN, and all the other reports put out by your program?

With all these arcane debates about climate models and cost–benefit economic models, the general public can’t get their arms around climate change. With the National Assessment, we’re not talking about what causes global warming or how to mitigate it, but what happens sector by sector in the United States. What are the consequences? What do you have to do if you live on the Gulf Coast? What happens if you live in the [Midwestern] Grain Belt? What happens to the runways at [New York City’s] LaGuardia [Airport] and to the subway tunnels in Manhattan during storm surge after sea levels rise?

So you had all these experts across the country writing about actual communities, and you had a distinguished panel synthesize this—not just the modelers in their labs and the economists with cost–benefit projections. This engenders a national discussion.

So when you stop debating the carbon cycle and the contribution of aerosols to radiative forcing and begin discussing the effects of climate change to Alabama or Colorado, the administration gets scared?

Yes, you start talking about real things that affect people.

The National Assessment political controversy stems from lawsuits brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. Wasn’t there some letter sent by their skeptic Myron Ebell to Phil Cooney while he was in the White House?

Well, this letter wasn’t supposed to come out. What happened was that we sent a Climate Action Report to the UN [in 2002] that included a chapter summarizing parts of the National Assessment. Some actual science got into that chapter. This made the people who had suppressed the National Assessment unhappy.

I don’t think the government has mentioned that Climate Action Report since it came out. The president once said, “Oh, you mean that thing that was put out by the bureaucracy?” as though it was some mid-level report that didn’t deserve notice.

The National Assessment’s still there. But it requires a disclaimer that it did not go through the Data Quality Act, which was passed after the report was done.

I think the administration was reluctant to delete the National Assessment from the web. That would have been too scandalous.

You sat in on numerous meetings where officials voiced concern over the National Assessment. There was another incident involving the National Academy of Science and the National Assessment.

There was talk in January 2004 to commission a National Academy study on lessons learned from previous climate assessments with an eye to doing better for the future. So the Academy staff prepared a proposal.
In a meeting, a person from NASA said, “I’m concerned that this might cause the National Academy to take another look at the National Assessment. It’s controversial.”

So they went around the table, and the message was, “Let’s not have the National Academy take another look at the National Assessment. Let’s frame the task so that they will talk about ways to do future impacts without looking back.”

How do you do better in the future without looking at what you have already done?

To my knowledge, that study has never been commissioned.

[Note: In a brief interview, James R. Mahoney, the director of the Climate Change Science Program, confirmed that the program has been restricted “on our use of information” from the National Assessment. He added that the program has just contracted a study by the National Academy to look at “lessons learned” from national assessments. Such a study may involve analysis of the National Assessment, but ES&T has not viewed the task list for this study.]

Why doesn’t the White House just do another National Assessment if they are so good at spinning?

Well, the National Assessment was an independent report, and there is reluctance to commission reports from independent, eminent scientists.

So there’s a movement to ensure that future assessments on the impacts of global climate change to Americans stay within the government?

They want it to be a government publication, not an independent publication. In my resignation, I pointed out that it begins with suppression of the National Assessment and then continues with the substitution of numerous technical reports that go through a government clearance.

But there is criticism by the science community because now there’s no guarantee that they’ll be good. Why not just commission a group of independent scientists? But that [would] take away the control by CEQ and others in the White House.

How do you think the press covers this? Do journalists do a good job of investigating and explaining?

Well, how many [U.S.] newspapers even have a science section, other than the New York Times? Even if they have a science reporter, they don’t give the reporter much space.

Then there’s this concept of “balance” that’s framed in such a way as to really enable intellectual superficiality. Get a quote from each side. Then you can do the “he said–she said”.

There’s no sense that it’s the journalist’s job to dig and see if either side has more merit. At least provide some context. You can’t get that from the media.

You wrote in your resignation letter that articles in the New York Times create problems for the White House. What about these articles causes so much trouble?

Well, there was an article last year about the Our Changing Planet report to Congress that implied that the White House was changing its position on climate change. The article focused on models showing that you couldn’t account for increased temperatures unless you took into account human factors. Natural climate variability can’t account for all the temperature increases.

These models came from scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the leading modeling centers.

After it’s in the New York Times, then you see editorials appearing in Austin, Texas, and Minneapolis, Minn., [newspapers] stating, “Well, if the White House is acknowledging that climate change is a problem, then why don’t we have a strong policy?”

This is an embarrassment to the White House.

The response is to get mad at the media. Not to think that maybe we have created this hermetically sealed environment so that journalists start scrutinizing our documents. There’s no consideration that maybe we need to shift policy in light of the science. The thinking becomes, “Let’s make damn sure that the reporters don’t get any more material from our reports.”
It sends a message to the science program officials that they need to be careful what they write and that the [program] editors need to consider scrubbing material so that there aren’t any political problems for the president.

Do journalists need to work harder to get at important documents?

In a nutshell, you will find that people in a position to make decisions don’t leave a paper trail—no minutes from meetings or documents that can be found with a journalist’s Freedom of Information Act request. And when they see a Freedom of Information Act request, they just won’t honor it.
Plus, the politicos learn how to not create a paper trail. I’ve heard them make decisions where they say, “Let’s not create a paper trail.” So they’re very careful.

You point out that the overview of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was released but the full report is now sitting around in boxes instead of being passed out.

The models predict you will see the warming effects more in the Arctic, and you have great global implications if you get melting of the ice cap, which will lead to a sea-level rise. Maybe this report will get out now because I’m agitating.

People already see effects. We are now relocating Inuit villages.
Sen. [Ted] Stevens (R-AK), I heard him refer to global warming as a slow, rolling disaster to populations in Alaska. But he does not want to acknowledge that this is caused by humans, because this has implications for the oil industry.

I actually heard him say that when we open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling that he wants to divert part of the revenue stream into relocating Inuit villages. How’s that for a loop of reasoning?

[Note: These comments by Sen. Stevens were made during Senate committee hearings. The previous year, Sen. Stevens also fought to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.]

I spoke with officials familiar with your resignation letter, and one person said, “The Bush Administration won the White House, and they get to set the policy on climate change.”

They are entitled to their policy, but they aren’t entitled to suborn the entire technocracy into altering their work so that it suits White House politics.

The most recent edition of the Our Changing Planet report to Congress had content pulled out solely because it could cause embarrassment for the White House during last year’s election.

The people who wrote the report . . . it would have never occurred to government workers that this should be a priority. And it would have never occurred to me that it was the job of our program to be an arm of the election [campaign].

Did you discuss your concerns with other people in the program?

You learn to only talk with certain people and not engage in topics with people who might see you as a problem. It’s hard to be specific without causing problems for people who are still in the government.

People don’t want to have problems with their bosses; people don’t want to have problems with their budgets. It’s something that almost works by osmosis. Everybody knows it but doesn’t talk about it.

Do you think the people from the science agencies are politically savvy?

People know where the political winds blow, but the different agencies are very specialized and [are] trying to understand things like carbon sequestration, trying to measure what’s happening to the snow pack on the western slope of the Rockies.

And I think most people in the science community don’t understand the complexities of the political process any better than politicians understand journal articles in Science or Nature.

What could happen to people for speaking up or talking to the press?

They could have problems with other people in their own agency. They have science they are supporting that could get cut. They’re concerned that if they are seen as a dissident . . . it’s career-limiting. And people who are like that never even make it into these positions; they get weeded out earlier in their careers.

I didn’t control a budget, and I didn’t have a staff. I was producing reports and advising people and tracking documents and helping with the planning process.

When the president released his last budget, there was a lot of talk about increased spending for climate change, but you can’t really tell what is going on with the money.

We’re spending a lot of money on global change research. So the White House can say we are spending more money than anyone else in the world.
The budget for climate change tended to go up under the Clinton–Gore Administration, although not radically. Under Bush, there’s this constant moving around of money so that it’s difficult to track, but my overall sense is that the funding has been level. There might be some cutbacks at NASA with all this focus on going to Mars.

The Marshall Institute constantly hosts panels and discussions on global warming, and their president is a lobbyist for ExxonMobil. What role do these climate skeptics and all the lobbying think tanks play in the debate?

I hate to use the term “climate skeptic”, because all good scientists and intellectuals are skeptics. We’re all skeptics.

Because of the current politics in Washington, people who aren’t in the mainstream of the science community and who sometimes aren’t even scientists get elevated. It always strikes me as ironic [that] these people can’t get into the peer-reviewed literature but operate by going to luncheons or congressional meetings, or have something at the National Press Club to get on TV and accuse everyone else of politicizing global warming.

Most scientists will just think, “Who, me? I’m just publishing this material.”

You point out in your resignation letter that the White House has worked with David Legates, who is affiliated with the Marshall Institute. This group also employed the vice president’s former speechwriter, Jeffrey Salmon.

Friends of the Earth filed a lawsuit against the Export-Import Bank for funding projects that produce greenhouse gases. What interested me was that Friends of the Earth presented a science affidavit written by Mike MacCracken, who used to be the head of the climate change program.
All MacCracken did was summarize the major scientific conclusions.

But who did the government go to when they needed a science paper? Did they come to the program? I don’t think so. Were any of the leaders from the different agencies consulted for the lawsuit?

The U.S. government filed as their science affidavit a paper by David Legates, who is an associate professor [in the geography department] at the University of Delaware. Was Legates’s paper peer-reviewed by government scientists? I don’t think so. They just picked a guy with conclusions they liked, because it buttressed the case that there is no basis to think about constraining greenhouse gases.

Do you think academic scientists need to become more involved in the political process to provide some oversight and guidance?

Scientists see politics as beneath them. So they don’t learn how to engage policy makers. You can’t just drop some journal article over the transom and hope for the best.


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