White House Spins IPCC Climate Change Report

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chance (IPCC) today released a frightening summary (.pdf) of its latest report on climate change, predicting flood, drought and a host of biblical trouble that could wreak havoc on the planet in coming years. You can be sure that the 20-page summary is about as far into the report as most policymakers will get, which is why governmental delegates were meddling with it up to the last minute. Reuters quotes Neil Adger, one of the report's lead authors, as saying: "Very blatant vested interests are trying to stop particular messages getting out."

Two of those blatant vested interests held a pre-dawn press briefing at the White House this morning. Sharon Hays, associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, made the political meddling sound like an Elks Lodge meeting:

"[T]his is, I think, a good opportunity to make sure that you understand another really important point in developing these summary documents, and that is that many of the lead scientific authors of the underlying technical report are present during the discussions. And so those scientific authors played a very important role in helping the governments involved in these discussions to make sure that the summary document accurately reflect the scope of all of the information in their much longer technical report."

And James Connaughton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, described climate change as if it were a problem discovered by a Texas oilman:

"This report further underscores what the President has been saying for some time about the seriousness of this challenge, a point the President emphasized in the State of the Union this year of the need to confront the challenge."

When asked if the administration still planned to sit out the Kyoto process, Connaughton said the U.S. is "leading the way." He also hyped the positive impact of global warming on agriculture. Perhaps he missed the IPCC's prediction of a new Dust Bowl in the American Southwest thanks to global warming. Connaughton used to be a lobbyist for utilities, mining, chemical and other industries. His predecessor at the White House Council on Environmental Quality was Phil Cooney, a former oil and gas lobbyist who distorted climate change science to fit White House policy.