The Bush Administration long ago secured a special place in history for the way in which it distorts, manipulates, or censors science for political ends.

But now the habit — and it does seem to be a habitual failing — has come to haunt President Bush himself.

As everyone knows, Mr. Bush has never taken the issue of climate change nearly as seriously as it should be taken.

Right off the bat, almost, he reneged on a campaign promise to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, and then he rejected the Kyoto agreement on climate change without consulting his allies — the first of many indignities that eventually persuaded Christy Whitman, his administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, to leave Washington for less tumultuous latitudes in New Jersey’s horse country.

Lately, though, Mr. Bush has been sounding more forthcoming about climate change. At a recent two-day summit of the big emitting countries in Washington, a summit Mr. Bush convened, he promised a major effort to develop greener technologies. “Our guiding principle is clear,” the President declared. “We must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions.” This was hardly a full-throated endorsement of the kind of mandatory caps on emissions that many people feel are necessary. But it was something.

Then, as if on cue, came yet another example of science-tinkering that seemed to undercut Mr. Bush’s sincerity. This was the revelation last week that White House editors had made deep cuts in written testimony given to a Senate committee this week by Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Her original testimony described climate change as positing “difficult challenges” and as a “serious public health concern.” It also said that the public health effects of climate change had gone “largely unaddressed.” All this disappeared, leaving only wordy generalities like “climate change is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans and the nation’s public health infrastructure.”

Dr. Gerberding herself seemed only mildly perturbed (“a mountain out of a molehill,” she said). Even so, the episode could not help but remind observers of the administration’s long history of muzzling people who disagree with it (e.g., James Hansen, the government’s pre-eminent climate policy expert), or censoring inconvenient truths (e.g, reports in 2003 and 2004 linking human activity to global warming, both of which were censored) or being highly selective in what science it actually chooses to use (e.g. a single, narrow economic analysis to justify Mr. Bush’s assertion that the Kyoto Protocol would wreck the American economy.)

After all these years, we would like to believe Mr. Bush now that he is saying that global warming is a real problem and one worth taking seriously and honestly. But we would feel a lot better if the editorial gremlins on the White House staff and in the Office of Management and Budget were on the same page.