Jumbo deceptions

Updated At one point in the movie "Jumbo," a musical about a down-on-its-luck circus threatened with a takeover by a rival circus, Jimmy Durante is trying to sneak Jumbo the elephant away from creditors. While leading it down a hallway, he's caught by the people he's trying to avoid.

"Where are you going with that elephant?" they demand.

Wide-eyed with innocence, Durante looks left and right and says, "What elephant?"

I'm reminded of that scene every time I hear the Bush administration on the subject of global warming.

On Wednesday, The Independent (UK) reported that

[a]n unprecedented joint statement issued by the leading scientific academies of the world has called on the G8 governments to take urgent action to avert a global catastrophe caused by climate change.

The national academies of science for all the G8 countries, along with those of Brazil, India and China, have warned that governments must no longer procrastinate on what is widely seen as the greatest danger facing humanity.

Among the signers was Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, whose agency's advice has been consistently ignored by the White House.

Climate change is real, global warming is occurring and there is strong evidence that man-made greenhouse gases are implicated in a potentially catastrophic increase in global temperatures, the statement says. "It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities. This warming has already led to changes in the Earth's climate."

Human activities are causing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to rise to a point not reached for at least 420,000 years. Meanwhile average global temperatures rose by 0.6C in the 20th century and are projected to increase by between 1.4C and 5.8C by 2100.

Perhaps most ominously, the report noted the scientific consensus that even if greenhouses gases were to be held to their present levels, global warming and its associated climate effects will continue to increase for some years to come: The global climate typically responds sluggishly to such "forcings," meaning that the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases already pumped into the atmosphere have not yet been fully seen.

"Further changes in climate are therefore unavoidable. Nations must prepare for them," the statement says.

And still the Shrub team blinks and says "What elephant?"

Consider this recent smug observation from Harlan Watson, who is the chief climate negotiator for the State Department despite having no background in climatology - and who got his job after being specifically recommended for it by a lobbyist for Exxon-Mobil:

"We are still not convinced of the need to move forward quite so quickly," he told the BBC in London last month. "There is general agreement that there is a lot known, but also there is a lot to be known."

I wonder if Watson, who holds a doctorate in solid-state physics, would recommend no one use integrated circuits or other solid-state materials because the nature of the transfer of charge across the boundary between two materials is not fully understood at a quantum level. What's more, people have been searching for decades for a quantum explanation for gravity. Should I stop expecting things to fall? Is absolute certainty required before action?

And what would be the effect on US policy if the White House applied the same sort of standards - "do nothing if there are any doubts" - to, say, Iraq? Or the prisoners at Gitmo?

Their determination to ignore facts, to ignore an overwhelming scientific consensus, borders on the astounding - and would be simply astounding if the corporate agenda it serves were not so obvious.

In fact, the very same day as The Independent's story, the New York Times reported (in the same story in which the Watson quote appeared) that

[a] White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

Before coming to the White House, the Times says, Cooney was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute. He is a lawyer with a degree in economics and no scientific training - which of course made him the perfect candidate for his present job as

chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Among "dozens" of changes made by Cooney in various reports were changing "uncertainties" to "significant and fundamental uncertainties," changing "difficult" to "extremely difficult," changing "the Earth is undergoing a period of relatively rapid change" to "the Earth may be undergoing a period of relatively rapid change," and removing a whole section on projected glacier loss that he labeled "musings."

The White House insists this is all part of the everyday vetting process, but changes in scientific documents normally would and always should be made or at least approved in their final form by people who know what the hell they are talking about, which clearly is not the case here. The point was made, quite by accident, by Myron Ebell of the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, a man who in November, 2004 called Sir David King, the chief scientific adviser to the government of Great Britain, an "alarmist with ridiculous views who knows nothing about climate change." Such editing, he said, is necessary for "consistency" in meshing programs with policy.

I'm sure it is. I'm sure that's exactly why it was done. The question is what is driving the policy? Clearly, what is not driving it is any connection to scientific reality.

Updated with the news that Cooney has resigned. The White House insists it's unconnected to the revelations about his creative editing, but knowing their penchant for message control, that seems unlikely.

A footnote to the update is that in reporting on it, Raw Story quoted Philip Clapp, the president of the National Environmental Trust, as saying

"His resignation is less surprising than the fact that the lead oil industry lobbyist on global warming should have been given this kind of power over climate science and scientists."

Frankly, Mr. Clapp, I think you have that exactly backwards.