The Bush administration will announce today the details of its 10-year plan to study climate change and determine whether human activity or natural occurrences are causing the Earth’s atmosphere to heat up. The Climate Change Science Program will compile expertise from 13 federal agencies that collectively spend $4.5 billion on climate-change related programs; it will also redirect $103 million for satellite technologies to gather global climate data. The plan is being criticized harshly by environmentalists, who say the study will waste time and money by rehashing questions that have already been answered by the scientific community. “Most climate scientists around the world will see this as fiddling while Rome burns. More research is always welcome, but the goal here is just to delay doing anything about the problem,” said Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust.
