Shock of the Day

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), the Democratic chairman of a House panel examining the government's response to climate change, stated yesterday that extensive evidence exists in which senior Bush administration officials attempted repeatedly "to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming".

If you could not tell, my title for this particular posting is extremely sarcastic. If the Bush administration would produce lie after lie in order to justify a war in Iraq, it is not at all surprising that similar tactics would not be utilized against trivial matters (trivial in the administration's eyes) as the environment. Two private advocacy groups presented a survey which shows 2 in 5 of the 279 climate scientists responding to a questionnaire complained that portions of their scientific papers had been edited to intentionally alter their meaning. In regards to another question, approximately half of those 279 scientists responded that, at some point, they were pressured by the Bush administration to delete references to "global warming" and "climate change" from their reports. What do you expect from an administration which still refuses to ratify the Kyoto Protocol (aimed at reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases) even though 169 other nations have done so already?