White House sexed-down climate change reports | The Register

White House sexed-down climate change reports | The Register: "Official White House policy documents on climate change were altered by a former oil-industry lobbyist to play down the link between greenhouse gases and global warming, it emerged yesterday.

Philip Cooney, the chief of staff for the White House council on environmental quality, altered several draft reports in 2002 and 2003, after they had been approved by government scientists, despite having no scientific background himself. Much of his editing made it into final versions of reports.

Many of the changes were very simple. For instance, in one case he added the words 'significant and fundamental' before the word 'uncertainties. In another, he added the word 'extremely' to the sentence: 'The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult.'

Others were more blatant. According to the New York Times, Cooney deleted an entire paragraph dealing with the impact of global warming on glaciers and the polar ice cap from a 2002 report that discussed the effect global warming might have on flooding and water availability. Cooney noted in the margins that the paragraph was 'straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings.'

In all cases, the amendments cast doubt on scientific results that are increasingly accepted as robust by the scientific community, and by the general populace."