US Official Edited Warming, Emission Link

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A White House official, who previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute, has repeatedly edited government climate reports in a way that downplays links between greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, made changes to descriptions of climate research that had already been approved by government scientists and their supervisors, the newspaper said, citing internal documents.

The report said the documents were obtained by the newspaper from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that provides legal help to government whistleblowers.

The group is representing Rick Piltz, who resigned in March from the office that coordinates government research and issued the documents that Cooney edited, the Times said.

The newspaper said Cooney made handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, removing or adjusting language on climate research.

White House officials told the newspaper the changes were part of a normal interagency review of all documents related to global environmental change.

"All comments are reviewed, and some are accepted and some are rejected," Robert Hopkins, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told the the newspaper.

In a memo sent last week to top officials dealing with climate change at a dozen agencies, Piltz charged that "politicization by the White House" was undermining the credibility and integrity of the science program.

How important are these changes in a longer-term context?

Paleoclimatic data are critical for enabling us to extend our knowledge of climatic variability beyond what is measured by modern instruments. Many natural phenomena are climate dependent (such as the growth rate of a tree for example), and as such, provide natural 'archives' of climate information. Some useful paleoclimate data can be found in sources as diverse as tree rings, ice cores, corals, lake sediments (including fossil insects and pollen data), speleothems (stalactites etc), and ocean sediments. Some of these, including ice cores and tree rings provide us also with a chronology due the nature of how they are formed, and so high resolution climate reconstruction is possible in these cases. However, there is not a comprehensive 'network' of paleoclimate data as there is with instrumental coverage, so global climate reconstructions are often difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, combining different types of paleoclimate records enables us to gain a near-global picture of climate changes in the past.

For the Northern Hemisphere summer temperature, recent decades appear to be the warmest since at least about 1000AD, and the warming since the late 19th century is unprecedented over the last 1000 years. Older data are insufficient to provide reliable hemispheric temperature estimates. Ice core data suggest that the 20th century has been warm in many parts of the globe, but also that the significance of the warming varies geographically, when viewed in the context of climate variations of the last millennium.

Large and rapid climatic changes affecting the atmospheric and oceanic circulation and temperature, and the hydrological cycle, occurred during the last ice age and during the transition towards the present Holocene period (which began about 10,000 years ago). Based on the incomplete evidence available, the projected change of 3 to 7°F (1.5 - 4°C) over the next century would be unprecedented in comparison with the best available records from the last several thousand years.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html#Q10

Interesting.

And just when are RotoReuters and the New York Crimes gonna do the research and run the big headlines about massive changes being observed outside of this little dirtball called Earth- like in the rest of the solar system. The research has been done. It's easy to find. NASA, US Governement, and many others have information on such changes. But, of course, that wouldn't promote their "Global Warming- The Sky is Falling" agendas.

On another GW thread, I pointed out:
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OK, so everyone knows that man has created the global warming by producing all these greenhouse gasses by farting, breathing, driving SUV's and all other types of activities called "living". So these greenhouse gases and humanity are the cause of it all, right?

Interestingly enough, if we look to the rest of the solar system, where humanity just doesn't seem to be much of a factor, we find some real interesting things:

Sun: More activity since 1940 than in previous 1150 years, combined

Mercury: Unexpected polar ice discovered, along with a surprisingly strong intrinsic magnetic field … for a supposedly “dead” planet

Venus: 2500% increase in auroral brightness, and substantive global atmospheric changes in less than 30 years

Mars: “Global Warming,” huge storms, disappearance of polar icecaps

Jupiter: Over 200% increase in brightness of surrounding plasma clouds

Saturn: Major decrease in equatorial jet stream velocities in only ~20 years, accompanied by surprising surge of X-rays from equator

Uranus: “Really big, big changes” in brightness, increased global cloud activity

Neptune: 40% increase in atmospheric brightness

Pluto: 300% increase in atmospheric pressure, even as Pluto recedes farther from the Sun

None of these statistics are from “fringe” scientists. This scientific data, from a variety of highly credible institutions (including NASA itself), reveals that startling “climate change” phenomena are occurring, not just here on Earth, but, in fact -- throughout the entire solar system. This material has been publicly available for nearly a decade in some cases.

Now, just how many SUV's are being driving on Pluto and Mars, never mind Uranus! Oh, wait, maybe that's being caused by methane farts.
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Is there global climate change taking place on Earth?? Certainly! And obviously throughout the solar system, also.

Has global climate change always been taking place?? Certainly! Viz., Ice Ages, Maunder Minimum, et al.

Is there anything proving that we humans can actually do anything about it?? Nope!

Junk science by any other name is still junk science. Human caused Global Warming is junk science.

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