WASHINGTON – Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming.
Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at a NOAA lab, said that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether.
These scientists say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004.
“There has been a change in how we’re expected to interact with the press,” said Pieta Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at Noah’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He added that although he often “ignores the rules … some people feel intimidated – I see that.”
Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation’s water supply.
Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause “great problems with the department.” In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but “purged key words from the releases, including ‘global warming,’ ‘warming climate’ and ‘climate change.’”
Administration officials said they are following long-standing policies that were not enforced in the past. Kent Laborde, a NOAA public affairs officer who flew to Boulder last month to monitor an interview Tans did with a BBC film crew, said he was helping facilitate meetings between scientists and journalists.
“We’ve always had the policy, it just hasn’t been enforced,” Laborde said. “It’s important that the leadership knows something is coming out in the media, because it has a huge impact. The leadership needs to know the tenor or the tone of what we expect to be printed or broadcast.”
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