Last week a White House official named Philip Cooney, proven to have rewritten scientific reports on global warming by The New York Times, abrupt resigned. A White House spokesperson said he had accrued vacation time and wanted to spend it with his family. This week it was revealed he will go to work for ExxonMobil, the same corporation that investigative reporter Chris Mooney showed has spent over fifty-five million dollars in the last few years funding groups of spokespeople eager to cast doubt on the reality of climate change.

Two days after being revealed as an official inside the White House who rewrote scientific research reports on climate change in 2002 and 2003, lawyer Philip Cooney resigns. A White House press secretary said he wanted "to take the summer off to spend the time with his family.”

His departure was "completely unrelated" to the disclosure, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said (according to the AP).

If we were feeling cynical, we might ask: Who will take over the rewriting-the-scientific-reports-on-global-warming chore inside the White House now?

More to the point, Cooney’s vanishing goes back to what Republican pollster Frank Luntz has been warning the White House for years: "Green issues are killing us." It’s tough to call for a policy based on "sound science" (a favorite White House phrase on this issue) when people find out that a former oil industry lobbyist is writing the White House version of "science."

In a front-page story in today’s New York Times , the invaluable Andy Revkin shows exactly how the Bush adminstration White House treats news it doesn’t want to hear on climate change. Here’s a paragraph from the U.S. Global Climate Research Program’s report in late 2002:

Warming will also cause reductions in mountain glaciers and advance the timing of the melt of mountain snow pack in polar regions. In turn, runoff rates will change and flood potential will be altered in ways that are currently not well understood. There will be significant shifts in the seasonality of runoff that will have serious impacts on native populations that rely on fishing and hunting for their livelyhood. These changes will be further complicated by shifts in precipitation regimes and a possible intensification and increased frequency of extreme hydrological events. Reducing the uncertainties in current understanding of the relationship between climate change and Artic hydrology is critical…

This became, two months later, after being rewritten by the White House:

Warming could also lead to changes in the water cycle in polar regions. Reducing the uncertainties…

Eight months later, when the report was released in July 2003, the paragraph was omitted.

Who was the fox in the henhouse? Philip Cooney, a lawyer. His credentials? He’s a former lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute.

The irony? When asked about climate change in a four-question "press conference" with Tony Blair, Bush took credit for the money being spent on the global climate research program…research his administration is doing everything possible to obscure, obfuscate, and deny.   

A big oak tree — nearly three feet wide at the base, and about forty feet high — split and dropped three-quarters of its trunk in our yard last week. Our neighbor Chris Nottoli came out to look at the massive remains on the ground that night and shook his head. Just a day before he had planted a squash near the tree, under a screen to protect it from the dogs. He figured the squash was probably squashed under the debris, and warned me to watch out for it as I attempted to clean up with a chainsaw.

I told him I wasn’t so sure. Oak trees — as dominating, as massive, and as heavy as they are — don’t seem to cause as much damage as one might expect when they fall. I went Googling looking for examples and found only two deaths listed, and that was because two people in a car in Georgia ran into a tree that had just fallen in a storm. Of course a less scientific method of research could hardly be imagined, but according to a USDA Forest Service chart from l982, the live oak is among the varieties of trees most resistant to storm damage — only longlife pines fare better.

Later in the day Chris Wilson, who has worked with trees in Santa Paula and Ojai for years, and is widely admired among those around here who know about trees and wood-working, came out to look at our situation and our other trees. He pointed out that the oak that fell had been severely wounded decades ago. He looked at the numerous other oaks overhanging structures in our area and shrugged. Even though they towered directly over the buildings, he said they looked healthy.

"I’d live there," he said. "I’d let my kids live there." He added that in his experience, healthy oaks rarely fall, and even when oaks do fall, they tend to cause less damage than people expect.

"They might poke a hole or two in your roof," he said. "But their weight is well-distributed. I’ve never seen an oak bring down a bearing wall."

And when we looked around in the debris under our fallen oak, we found that all three of the plants that had been living on the fringes of its shade were fine, even though they lay directly in the path of the fallen tree. Branches were all around them, and the trunk lay heavily on the ground, but Chris’s little squash was untouched.

In Yosemite, temperatures in the 80’s and rain on the snowpack threatens flooding.

In Colorado, similarly, temperatures fifteen and twenty degrees above normal are melting the snowpack: water levels haven’t been this high in twenty years, according to one kayaker.

And on the East Coast, it’s been a gloomy spring. The third coldest ever, according to a National Weather Service meteorologist.

The connection? All these facts can be seen as examples of a climatological trend predicted years ago by climatologists. For example, James Hansen, perhaps the best known climatologist in the country, has in more than one study argued that in a global warming scenario, the East Coast will actually get colder. Not enormously colder — about two degrees on the average — but measurably and noticeably.

Question: Why is this prediction never mentioned in newspaper stories about unusual weather? Wouldn’t it be worth at least a question to a climatologist once in a while? Then maybe we could have "a conversation" about the issue, as they say in newsrooms.

Just a thought.

Nuclear energy is in the headlines again, because John McCain and Joseph Lieberman are soon to float a bill proposing massive subsidies to major corporations — notably General Electric — that want to build nuclear energy plants again. Some notable enviros, such as Steward Brand, support the idea. Others, such as the National Resources Defense Council do not.

Thomas B. Cochran, the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s nuclear program said in The New York Times  (registration required): "The issue isn’t: Do you support nuclear? The issue should be: Do you support massive subsidies to the tune of billions of dollars for nuclear power?" He said, "The answer is no."

One point often overlooked when it comes to nuclear power: the American insurance industry, back in l957, refused to insure these plants. Congress had to pass a law allowing the Federal government to insure the plants berfore they could be built (the Price-Anderson Act). This to me is argument enough against them, given that the insurance industry will, for a price, cover just about any other public activity under the sun.

But "The Onion," as usual, gets to the heart of the matter, with its hiliarious piece from the May 4th issue, entitled "Actual Expert Too Boring for TV."

They quote an expert from MIT thoughtfully discussing the issue, then a segment producer for MSNBC discussing the expert:

"[The expert] went on like that for six… long… minutes," Salters said. "Fact after mind-numbing fact. Then he started spewing all these statistics about megawatts and the nation’s current energy consumption and I don’t know what, because my mind just shut off. I tried to lead him in the right direction. I told him to address the fears that the average citizen might have about nuclear power, but he still utterly failed to mention meltdowns, radiation, or mushroom clouds."

If the on-the-ground news of melting ice and permafrost in the Artic wasn’t proof enough,
today a team of scientists led by James Hansen at NASA released a study comparing precise measurements of ocean temperatures against projections based on climatological models. The measurements, taken over a period of ten years, showed that the earth is now absorbing more solar energy than it radiates to space as heat.

The observations tracked with five climatological model runs from the Godard Institute for Space Studies models remarkably accurately. This obviates a great deal of the alleged controversy over global warming, because most of the complaints about global warming have focused on this or that aspect of “math worlds,” arguing that they did not accurately reflect what was happening in the real world. (Much of this alleged controversy was stirred up by papers from foundations backed by ExxonMobil, as Chris Mooney in Mother Jones showed this month, but that’s a topic for another time.)
However, although the study proves that additional global warming is “in the pipeline” already, due to excess heat stored in oceans around the world, the scientists concluded with a different message. As the fifteen scientists said in the study, which is available for free at ScienceExpress :

“This delay provides an opportunity to reduce the magnitude of anthropogenic climate change before it is fully realized, if appropriate action is taken. On the other hand, if we wait for more overwhelming empirical evidence of climate change, the inertia implies that still greater climate change will be in store, which may be difficult or impossible to avoid.”

Scientists tend to speak in quiet understatements: This is the sound of scientists screaming.