Two senior US lawmakers called for a congressional probe into charges the White House altered government documents to cast doubt on the generally-accepted scientific consensus about the causes and effects of global warming.

Representative Henry Waxman and Senator John Kerry asked the General Accountability Office (GAO) -- Congress' investigative arm -- to look into a recent whistleblower report that a former oil industry lobbyist altered government reports on global warming.

The allegations were reported Wednesday in the New York Times.

"We request that the Government Accountability Office investigate the extent to which White House officials and political appointees at federal agencies have interfered with federally funded science on global warming," said Kerry and Waxman.

"Unfortunately, the incidents reported by the Times are simply the latest in a pattern of interference with climate science by the Bush Administration," the Democratic lawmakers said.

The Times reported that a White House official with no scientific training edited government climate reports to play down the links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, according to internal documents obtained by the daily.

Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, allegedly subtly altered documents, adding qualifiers like "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties" to give the impression of considerable doubt about the findings.

On one document, Cooney added the work "extremely" to the sentence: "The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult."

The alterations Cooney made on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003 often appeared in the final reports, said the daily.

Cooney is a lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics and lacks scientific training, the daily said.

Before working at the White House in 2001, he was a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute and led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases, according to the Times report.

Rick Piltz, who resigned in March as a senior associate in the office that coordinates government climate research, said in a memorandum sent to top US officials last week that editing of scientific reports tainted official efforts to establish the causes of climate change.

"Each administration has a policy position on climate change," Piltz wrote, according to The New York Times. "But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed under this administration during the past four years, in which politicization by the White House has fed back directly into the science program in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the program."

© 2005, AFP

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