The administration’s war on science — revisited

Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a Senate panel yesterday that climate change “is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans.” If that sounds a little vague and non-specific, there’s a good reason — the White House refused to let her say what she wanted to say.

Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents. Specific scientific references to potential health risks were removed after Julie L. Gerberding submitted a draft of her prepared remarks to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review. Instead, Gerberding’s prepared testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee included few details on what effects climate change could have on the spread of disease. Only during questioning did the director of the government’s premier disease-monitoring agency describe any specific diseases likely to be affected, again without elaboration.

A CDC official familiar with both versions told the AP that Gerberding’s draft “was eviscerated.” Among the deletions were “details on how many people might be adversely affected because of increased warming and the scientific basis for some of the CDC’s analysis on what kinds of diseases might be spread in a warmer climate and rising sea levels.”

Consider the big picture here. We have a CDC, financed by taxpayers, committed to public safety. We have a CDC director, whose salary is financed by taxpayers, prepared to tell senators the truth. We have CDC research, financed by taxpayers, pointing to potential public-health consequences associated with climate change.

And we have a White House that believes the truth should be muzzled, and information should be kept from the public, because it conflicts with the Bush agenda.

This might be amusing if a) it weren’t so serious; and b) it didn’t happen all the damn time.



Let’s not forget, for example, that in June 2005, the New York Times uncovered the fact that the White House hired Philip Cooney, a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, to be chief of staff of the president’s Council on Environmental Quality. As part of his responsibilities, Cooney re-wrote government reports on global warming, editing out scientific conclusions he didn’t like, and substituting the conclusions of scientists with his own politically-motivated opinions.

For that matter, Gerberding is hardly the first to be muzzled. James Hansen, the longtime director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has spoken out repeatedly, explaining to anyone who will listen that administration officials have tried to censor scientific information about climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s scientists have reported similar problems.

In one particularly egregious example from a year ago, weather experts at NOAA set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes. When the data suggested that global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the Bush administration blocked the release of the report. (It led Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to argue that “the administration has effectively declared war on science and truth to advance its anti-environment agenda.”)

Moreover, TP notes that a “January report found 435 instances in which the Bush administration interfered into the global warming work of government scientists over the past five years.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the committee chairperson, said in a statement last night that the administration “should immediately release Dr. Gerberding’s full, uncut statement, because the public has a right to know all the facts about the serious threats posed by global warming.”

Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?