A White House official, who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases, has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, a media report said on Wednesday.
In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved, The New York Times reported quoting internal government documents.
In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports. The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust, the report said.
Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.
Before going to the White House in 2001, the paper reported, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.
The paper obtained the documents from the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers.
A White House spokeswoman, Michele St. Martin, was quoted as saying that Cooney would not be available to comment. "We don't put Phil Cooney on the record," St. Martin said. "He's not a cleared spokesman."
In one instance in an October 2002 draft of a regularly published summary of government climate research, "Our Changing Planet," Cooney amplified the sense of uncertainty by adding the word "extremely" to this sentence: "The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult," the report said.
In a section on the need for research into how warming might change water availability and flooding, he crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and snow-pack.
His note in the margins explained that this was "straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings."
Other White House officials were quoted as saying the changes made by Cooney were part of the normal interagency review that takes place on all documents related to global environmental change.
