The House Oversight committee has released its official report (PDF) on White House efforts to interfere with climate change science, and its conclusions are … well, totally predictable. To wit:
The Committee’s 16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress. The White House was particularly active in stifling discussions of the link between increased hurricane intensity and global warming. The White House also sought to minimize the significance and certainty of climate change by extensively editing government climate change reports. Other actions taken by the White House involved editing EPA legal opinions and op-eds on climate change.
The sheer volume and magnitude of chicanery, when laid out in nearly 30 pages of detail, betrays a remarkably fastidious program of misinformation.
I suppose it’s in the nature of things that many of the sub rosa efforts to tamper with the findings of real scientists would leak to the press and the Congress. After all, it’s only Bush appointees who take an oath — explicit or otherwise — to uphold the president. The scientists who work in those appointees’ agencies, on the other hand, were apparently pretty upset about all of this.
