watered down

The Washington Post's environment reporter, Juliet Eilperin, had this story Saturday about the Bush administration's reported efforts to shape the latest report on climate change from the UN body studying it, and specifically to remove any call to action.

Some sections of a grim scientific assessment of the impact of global warming on human, animal and plant life issued in Brussels yesterday were softened at the insistence of officials from China and the United States, participants in the negotiations said.

In particular, U.S. negotiators managed to eliminate language in one section that called for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, said Patricia Romero Lankao, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., who was one of the report's lead authors.

In the course of negotiations over the report by the second working group of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, U.S. officials challenged the wording of a section suggesting that policymakers need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because countries will not be able to respond to climate change simply by using adaptive measures such as levees and dikes.

In that instance, the original draft read: "However, adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, and especially not over the long run as most impacts increase in magnitude. Mitigation measures will therefore also be required." That second sentence does not appear in the final version of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

See the full article here. This of course brings to mind the story of Philip A. Cooney, the former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality and former American Petroleum Institute official who did his own editing of government reports on climate. NY Times reporter Andrew Revkin brought the editing to light in this June 2005 story, and Cooney resigned days later.