There you go again, ignoring well-documented facts. If we have to constantly educate you folks with what everyone else knows, no wonder we don't get very far in debates. You need to ask yourself why it is that the Bush White House felt the need to review and censor EPA reports, whenever it had to do with climate change topics. These agencies are intended to be somewhat autonomous, independent bodies that provide a public services. Instead, Bush has turned them into mouthpieces for his agenda and silenced any scientific inquiry into anything that calls into question his policies of enriching the oil industry first and foremost.
query.nytimes.com
a draft report that is due out next week from the Environmental Protection Agency...was intended to provide the first comprehensive review of what is known about environmental problems and what gaps in understanding remain to be filled. But by the time the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Management and Budget finished with it and hammered the E.P.A. into submission, a long section on the risks posed by rising global temperatures was reduced to a noncommittal paragraph.
Gone is any mention that the 1990's are likely to have been the warmest decade in the last thousand years in the Northern Hemisphere. Gone, also, is a judgment by the National Research Council about the likely human contributions to global warming, though the evidence falls short of conclusive proof. Gone, too, is an introductory statement that ''Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment.'' All that is left in the report is some pablum about the complexities of the issue and the research that is needed to resolve the uncertainties.
...Last September, a whole chapter on climate was deleted from the E.P.A.'s annual report on air-pollution trends. That deed was done by Bush appointees at the agency, with White House approval, possibly because the White House had been angered by a previous report from the State Department suggesting the dire harm that could come from climate change. President Bush had dismissed that report as ''put out by the bureaucracy.'' |
