- The Prime Minister has told his chief scientist to avoid
talking to journalists about climate change in an attempt to calm the Bush
administration's concerns over the adviser's outspoken criticisms of the
US Government.
-
- The instruction was made public after the press officer
of Sir David King, Mr Blair's chief scientist, left details of prepared
answers to 136 questions and a memo from Number 10 in the press room of
the world's biggest general science meeting.
-
- Sir David has attacked the Bush administration for its
failure to take a leading role on curbing emissions of greenhouse gases,
because "climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today
- more serious even than the threat of terrorism".
-
- Last month Mr Blair tried to calm the controversy at
a Parliamentary committee meeting by saying that, while terrorism and global
warming are both of "critical urgency", you "can get into
a rather cerebral debate about which is more important".
-
- The current issue of Science reports that Downing Street
remained sufficiently concerned for Mr Blair's private secretary, Ivan
Rogers, to send Sir David a memo dated Feb 10 advising him to "decline
[interview requests from] the UK or US national media" during a visit
to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle,
where Sir David was talking about global warming.
-
- The memo said that "this sort of discussion does
not help us achieve our wider policy aims" and "distracts from
our wider efforts to engage the US on climate change".
-
- The memo and other documents related to the controversy
were on a computer disk obtained by a freelance journalist Mike Martin,
after it was inadvertently left in the AAAS press room by Sir David's personal
press secretary, Lucy Brunt-Jenner.
-
- The disk, which Miss Brunt-Jenner confirms was genuine,
contained mock exchanges that Mr Martin said suggested Sir David was ready
to tone down his rhetoric about how, as he put it, "the US government
is failing to take up the challenge of global warming".
-
- In one Sir David was prepared to say the value of comparisons
between the death toll of climate change and terrorism "would be highly
questionable, [since] we are talking about threats that are intrinsically
different".
-
- Miss Brunt-Jenner said the memo "did not muzzle"
Sir David and that there were opportunities to talk to him at the conference.
-
- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
-
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/03/08/ngag08.
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