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Rick Piltz, a gutsy whistleblower who revealed a pattern of politically torqued rewriting of climate science reports during the first term of President George W. Bush, died early Saturday morning after a fight with cancer.

He worked largely under the radar in his many years in the government climate science bureaucracy, but became a passionate defender of climate science and campaigner for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as a blogger and speaker after leaving government in 2005.

A healthy democracy needs more people like Piltz. This is just as true under a Democratic administration as it was in the Bush years. (See this 2013 report from the Committee to Protect Journalists to see what I mean.)

As far as I can remember, I first met Piltz in December 2002, at a three-day Washington workshop organized by the Bush administration to chart new directions for research on human-driven climate change. He was a bearish, soft-spoken and bespectacled man with an intensity and focus that took one by surprise.

The Washington meeting was seen by many climate scientists and campaigners as a delaying tactic. Piltz, who had held senior coordinating positions in the U.S. Global Change Research Program since 1995, took me aside and we talked for a long while about what he said was an growing pattern of political interference in the shaping of government climate documents.

Piltz encouraged me to stay in touch, saying that eventually he’d be able to provide concrete evidence.

Accounts had already emerged from the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and elsewhere in government of politically-driven editing, muzzling and other interference with climate science communication.

But Piltz meticulously and methodically compiled a critical paper trail. In 2005, as he left government, he delivered on that 2002 pledge, sending a fat Fedex package. In the sheaf were hand-scribbled editing marks and notations by Phil Cooney, a White House political appointee who’d come from the American Petroleum Institute.

Here’s the resulting 2005 Times story.

Here’s my followup piece when Cooney left the Bush White House and moved to ExxonMobil.

Piltz went on to found Climate Science Watch, a project associated with the Government Accountability Project. In a video feature produced by that group, Piltz recalls his whistle-blowing days:

Farewell, Rick Piltz.