Bush Admin Ordered to Produce Global Warming Reports

Bush Admin Ordered to Produce Global Warming Reports



Aug. 2007  - The Bush administration 
has been ordered by a federal judge to produce two scientific reports on 
global warming sought in a lawsuit filed by conservation organizations. 
U.S. District Court Judge Saundra Armstrong ruled Tuesday that the Bush 
administration had violated the Global Change Research Act of 1990 when it 
failed to meet deadlines for an updated U.S. Climate Change Research Plan 
and National Impact Assessment. 
The judge ordered the Bush administration to issue the draft overdue 
research plan by March 1, 2008, with a final version of the plan no later 
than 90 days thereafter, and the National Assessment by May 31, 2008. 
The last National Assessment was issued in late 2000 under the Clinton 
administration. 
The plaintiff groups clained that use and dissemination of this assessment 
was "suppressed by the Bush administration," and the required update in 
2004 was never produced. The Research Plan was required by law to be 
updated in 2006 but also has never been produced. 
"This administration has denied and suppressed the science of global 
warming at every turn," said Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological 
Diversity, one of the attorneys arguing the case. "Today's ruling is a 
stern rebuke of the administration's head-in-the-sand approach to global 
warming." 
The Research Plan guides all federal climate research, while the National 
Assessment serves to provide an understandable summary of global warming 
impacts on the environment, economy, human health and human safety of the 
United States and is to by used by Congress and federal agencies in 
setting policy and responding to global warming. 
"Knowledge is the key to effective action," said Danielle Fugere, global 
warming program director for Friends of the Earth, one of the plaintiff 
groups. "Congress knew this when it required the best minds in our 
government to conduct a National Assessment documenting the impacts of 
global warming on the U.S. Today's ruling will help make that information 
available." 
In April 2005, at the request of Senators John Kerry, a Massachusetts 
Democrat, and John McCain, an Arizona Republican, the U.S. Government 
Accountability Office, GAO, investigated the Bush administration's failure 
to produce a 2004 National Assessment. 
The GAO concluded that the administration "did not submit a scientific 
assessment in November 2004, four years after the previous assessment, as 
required by the Global Change Research Act. 
The GAO also found that the administration "expressly refuses to complete 
a single National Assessment." 
The White House's "piecemeal approach" lacks an "explicit plan 
for…assessing the effects of global change on the eight areas enumerated 
in the act: the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and 
use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, 
human social systems, and biological diversity," wrote the GAO, the 
investigative branch of the U.S. Congress. 
"From muzzling NASA's top climate scientist to political cronies in the 
White House editing climate science reports, the Bush administration has 
repeatedly tried to obscure and deny the science, while attempting to run 
out the clock on his administration," said John Coequyt, energy policy 
analyst with Greenpeace, the third plaintiff group in the lawsuit. 
The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, which was named in the 
lawsuit, had no comment on the ruling. 

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