Florida Climate Censorship: A Page from Dubya’s Playbook

The Florida Climate Censorship story has blown up, I believe, because it’s a bit of a proxy for a public, and a media, that is belatedly waking up to the depth and seriousness of the problem, and the combination of malice and incompetence that has kept it from being properly debated nationally.

We are all Floridians, and climate change is indeed, much worse than a beach.

Chris Mooney in the Washington Post:

In October, this paper ran an obituary for Rick Piltz, a whistleblower who left the Bush administration after exposing, as our obituary put it, “how top-level George W. Bush administration officials edited scientific reports to minimize the link between human activity and climate change.” Piltz’s whistleblowing memo, dated June 1, 2005, is still online — and still a scathing indictment, precisely because it is logical and careful, and yet also uncompromising in taking a stand against political interference with science and scientific communications.

It’s required reading for any student of the politics of science, in the United States or anywhere else.

Here’s an excerpt, describing why Piltz left the U.S. Climate Change Science Program:

I believe the overarching problem is that the administration…does not want and has acted to impede forthright communication of the state of climate science and its implications for society….The problem is manifested especially at the points at which the key scientifically based assessments of climate change touch on the arenas of policymaking and research planning. The administration will not accept and use appropriately the findings and conclusions of the national and international climate assessments, and it hinders and even prevents the climate science program from doing so.

Thus, the story of political figures exerting control over the discussion and presentation of climate change, in official expert agency communications and actions, is really a very old one. The chief difference with the Scott story, though, is that since 2005, the science of climate change has gotten more and more certain and well established – making attempts to muffle it seem more and more egregious and out of touch.

In the year in which Piltz was writing — 2005 — the most recent scientific assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had come out in 2001. In that report, the critical sentence about whether global warming was human caused read thusly: “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.” “Likely,” in IPCC parlance here, meant a 66 to 90 percent scientific confidence in the judgment.

But Scott has the benefit of two additional assessments since then, both of which have upped the scientific certainty about this key conclusion significantly.