Cooney's "editing" is all of a piece with the Bush administration's practice of bending science to fit its policies on subjects from breast cancer to mercury pollution -- but especially on climate change. The sheer audacity of this latest example, and the White House's inability to explain it away, brings new clarity to a sad situation.

We are a people who like to be told the truth. We are willing to put up with a certain amount of spin, and we expect any president -- any politician -- to drape the facts with self-serving interpretation. But bending and omitting the facts is another matter, and that is what Cooney did in his role as staff chief for the White House's Council on Environmental Quality.

As reported in the New York Times and, later, other media, Cooney's deletions and dilutions show a consistent effort to downplay the current impacts of global warming and to exaggerate the degree of scientific uncertainty about what is happening to the Earth's climate, and why. Samples of his work were revealed by a 10-year senior associate of the federal Climate Change Science Program, who has resigned over the meddling.

There would be no outcry if Cooney, a lawyer with no science background, had suggested changes in the reports' policy sections. Soft-pedaling the conclusions put forth by actual climate scientists -- who as a rule are quite cautious about overstating the evidence -- is a very different matter.

Much has been made of Cooney's background as a 10-year lobbyist for the American Petroleum Council, with a specialty in opposing regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Less attention has settled on his collaboration with Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in making these revisions.

As reported in Britain's Guardian newspaper, Ebell said Cooney had called him to mollify global-warming naysayers who felt government reports were giving too much weight to scientific consensus, not enough to dissenters. Ebell responded with a note that said, "Thanks for calling and asking for our help ... it's nice to know we're needed once in a while."

While the CEI calls itself a libertarian group, it's worth noting in this context that its biggest single funder is ExxonMobil; other oil and energy companies are also big donors. During the Clinton administration, the institute filed lawsuits to block release of government reports on global warming.

The Cooney episode has prompted calls in Congress for an investigation of White House meddling with climate science, and it's about time for one. It seems entirely plausible that Scott McClellan, the presidential press secretary, was speaking the unvarnished truth when he described Cooney's tampering as entirely normal procedure. It may also be, as McClellan said, that the revisions were approved by the Office of Science and Technology and perhaps even by its director, John Marburger, a physicist and electrical engineer.

If so, it only deepens this disgrace.

© 2005 Star Tribune

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