Researcher alleges climate cover-up

Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News

Thursday, June 8, 2006

BOULDER - The American public is not hearing the full story on global warming because Bush administration officials are muzzling government scientists, a top climate researcher said Wednesday.

Warren Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said that Bush appointees are suppressing information about climate change, restricting journalists' access to federal scientists and rewriting agency news releases to stress global warming uncertainties.

"The news media is not getting the full story, especially from government scientists," Washington told about 160 people attending the first day of "Climate Change and the Future of the American West," a three-day conference sponsored by the University of Colorado's Natural Resources Law Center.

Trigg Talley, acting director of the U.S. Office of Global Change, also spoke at Wednesday's meeting. He would not directly address Washington's allegations, but said the Bush administration is serious about reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.

He cited FutureGen, a 10-year, $1 billion, U.S.-led international effort to build the first zero-emission power plant, as an example of that commitment. The coal-fired plant would capture greenhouse-gas emissions and store them deep underground, using an emerging technology called carbon sequestration.

Washington said in an interview that the climate cover-up is occurring at several federal agencies, including NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Forest Service. NOAA operates several Boulder laboratories that conduct climate and weather research.

Washington's comments echoed statements made by NASA climate researcher James Hansen in a Jan. 29 article in The New York Times. Hansen said the Bush administration tried to stop him from speaking out after he called for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The Bush administration has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement that sets binding national targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Talley referred all questions about Washington's charges to a federal spokesman. Jordan St. John, a NOAA spokesman, said the allegations against his agency are false.

"NOAA is an open and transparent agency," he said. "It's unfair to the people who work at this agency that this kind of characterization keeps being made. Hansen said it once, and it took on a life of its own and just keeps getting repeated."

But Washington insisted that government officials are "trying to confuse the public" about climate change and the scientific consensus that global warming is a real problem.

In his remarks at Wednesday's meeting, Talley outlined the administration's program to address global warming and the mounting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced largely by the burning of fossil fuels.

The plan includes voluntary programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by industry, expenditures of about $2 billion per year for climate-change research, a proposal to spend $3 billion a year on alternative energy technologies, and more emphasis on nuclear power.

But in a question-and-answer period following Talley's talk, New York University physicist Martin Hoffert pointed out that 850 new coal-fired power plants are planned for the U.S., China and India. None of them would capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions.

One highly touted FutureGen won't do much to counter the "oncoming wave of carbon" from those 850 plants, he said.

"It's a totally ineffective program," Hoffert said later of the Bush plan outlined by Talley.

"First of all, we should be spending $10 billion to $20 billion a year to develop alternative energy sources - similar to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program," said Hoffert, a professor emeritus.

In partnership with India and China, the U.S. should begin building numerous coal gasification power plants capable of capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide, he said.