- The Bush administration is guilty of misrepresenting
scientific knowledge and misleading the public, a group of America's most
senior scientists claimed yesterday.
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- They said the government had manipulated information
to fit its policies on everything from climate change to whether Iraq had
been trying to make nuclear weapons.
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- The open letter from the independent Union of Concerned
Scientists (UCS) said: "When scientific knowledge has been found to
be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated
the process through which science enters into its decisions.
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- "This has been done by placing people who are professionally
unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and
on scientific advisory committees; by disbanding existing advisory committees;
by censoring and suppressing reports by the government's own scientists;
and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice."
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- The letter was signed by 60 senior US scientists, including
20 Nobel prize winners, such as the physicists Steven Weinberg and James
Cronin and the biologists Eric Kandel and Harold Varmus.
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- "We are not ... taking issue with the administration's
policies. We are taking issue with the administration's distortion of the
process with which science enters into its decisions," Kurt Gottfried,
a professor of physics at Cornell University and chairman of the UCS, told
reporters.
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- Russell Train, head of the Environmental Protection Agency
under the former Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, said
that during his tenure: "I do not recall ever receiving a suggestion,
let alone an order, from the White House as to how I should make a regulatory
decision. How times have changed."
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- Neal Lane of Rice University in Houston and a former
science adviser to ex-president Bill Clinton, said scientific findings
were being kept from decision-makers.
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- "I am afraid that our leading policymakers simply
don't know what they don't know, given the manipulation of the science
advice process," he said.
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- Last night, the White House denied the accusations. "I
can assure you that this is an administration that makes decisions based
on the best available science," said a White House spokesman, Scott
McClellan.
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- The UCS letter was published on the same day as a new
report from the National Academies of Science, which expressed serious
concern that the US government's plans to deal with climate change could
be scuppered by a lack of funds.
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- The US equivalent of Britain's Royal Society, the NAS
focused on the Bush administration's latest plans for the environment,
coordinated by the US climate change science programme (CCSP).
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- The NAS conceded that the new research plans were a significant
improvement on the CCSP's original strategy, which was the focus of much
international criticism when it was published in November 2002.
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- At the time, scientists around the world said that the
draft strategy flew in the face of international climate change research.
It ignored existing science and a great deal of its planned research would
merely repeat work that had been done already.
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- The strategy had followed the US withdrawal from the
Kyoto protocol, which commits countries to reducing emissions of greenhouse
gases.
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- It also raised fears among environmentalists that the
US would refuse to play its part in addressing the problems associated
with climate change.
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- The NAS reviewed the draft strategy and gave the CCSP
a chance to improve its plans. Yesterday's report is an evaluation of these
revisions.
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- "The plans are quite good now actually, it has been
quite responsive to the scientific community," said Diana Liverman,
director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and
a co-author of the NAS report. "But the academy's concerns are mostly
about whether the resources will actually be there to implement it. And
if the resources aren't there, which bits of it are going to be implemented?"
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- Linda Mearns of the national Centre for Atmospheric Research
in Boulder, Colorado, agreed: "I think it does indicate that they
have been certainly pressured by the criticism by the scientific community."
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- Writing in today's Guardian Life section, Prof Liverman
said scientists in the US were increasingly complaining of political interference
with their work. She outlines the increasing suppression of research that
goes against government policy on global warming. "To be a scientist
working on climate change in the US is to be frustrated by the backlash
against environmental science, research budget cuts and by the American
media's general lack of interest in environmental issues," she writes.
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- One group of scientists had federal lawsuits filed against
them by lobby groups for producing reports on the effects of climate change
across the US.
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- The UCS has long been critical of the Bush administrations
attitude to climate change. "The distortion of scientific knowledge
for partisan political ends must cease if the public is to be properly
informed about issues central to its well being," its letter said.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1151187,00.html
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