Politics vs. Climate Reality

An article criticizing the Bush Administration's policy of smearing, covering up, and discrediting science fact and replacing it with his misinformation.

From USAToday:

Would that the rise and fall of George C. Deutsch, 24, a NASA political appointee, could become a metaphor — one taken all the way to its logical conclusion — for the Bush administration's policies on global warming. Deutsch has for months embodied the White House's earth-is-flat take on why the earth is warming, with consequences from melting glaciers to freak weather.

Working in NASA's public relations, he tried to muzzle a renowned climate scientist who — like serious scientists the world over — warns that global warming is a threat requiring government intervention to curb emissions from cars, factories and more.

This furthered the business-friendly Bush administration's increasingly lonely mantra that the science isn't solid enough for more than voluntary measures. But scientific consensus long ago moved on. The issue now is not whether global warming is happening, but how severe the effects will be.

This week, evangelical Christians, normally among President Bush's most loyal supporters, broke with him on the issue and urged action: 86 prominent figures released a statement warning that "millions of people could die" because of global warming.

One casualty of all this was Deutsch, who resigned when it was discovered his résumé was longer on political loyalty — work on Bush's re-election campaign — than on education. Texas A&M University said he never received the journalism degree he claimed.

But that merely removed the symptom, not the underlying problem.

That a low-level bureaucrat could overrule a prestigious scientist says worlds about how the administration balances politics against science. Further evidence can be found at the Food and Drug Administration, which has stifled overwhelming evidence that the "morning-after pill" is safe and effective. It blocked over-the-counter sales — a transparent payoff to abortion opponents.

Global warming is a good place to beginaltering that facts-be-damned approach. The administration has a ready-made environmental bandwagon to jump back onto. The world agreed in 1992 to prevent dangerous climate change. Countries have since worked on mandatory emissions curbs in what is known as the Kyoto Protocol, but Bush, as soon as he took office, turned his back on it.

Ignoring the impact of climate change is getting difficult: Federal officials are considering declaring the polar bear a threatened species because rising Arctic temperatures are melting the ice pack that's their home.

Now that scientific fact has spoken louder than ideology at NASA, perhaps the same can happen at the White House.

Politics vs. climate reality

Technorati tags: Bush, GOP, Environment, Science, Global Warming, Deutsch