Hill Heat

Mitchell Anderson at DeSmogBlog:

NASA was given over $100 million in taxpayers money to build the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a spacecraft designed to measure the energy budget of our warming planet from the unique vantage of a million miles away.

Even though it is fully completed over five years ago, DSCOVR is still sitting in a box at the Goddard Space Center – likely for political reasons.

In 2006, Anderson filed a FOIA request with NASA, receiving only letters from scientists to NASA concerned about the cancellation, but no documents about the internal decision-making process.

In 2007, NOAA proposed a joint NASA-NOAA mission with the private launch company Space Services Inc. using the DSCOVR satellite.

Anderson now reports on his 2007 FOIA request to NOAA on the fate of DSCOVR:

My request was sent in November. I was told my documents would be emailed on December 11. Then I got call from NOAA General Counsel Hugh Schratwieser before Christmas telling me that it going to take longer than they thought but I should get the document package in early January. Mr. Schratwieser also assured me NOAA takes pride in their compliance with the Freedom of Information Act and that I shouldn’t worry.

Then silence.

I have since sent five unanswered emails to NOAA requesting updates on my request. Government bodies like NOAA have a legal obligation to respond to FOIA requests in 20 working days. It is now over three times that long and counting.

Since I was repeatedly told over the last two months that the package of documents was very close to being assembled, I can only assume that it is now complete but being held up for political reasons.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), today released a draft report entitled Political Interference with Climate Change Science Under the Bush Administration.

The report is based on the committee’s January 30 and March 19 hearings, depositions, and interviews of government officials on White House censorship and manipulation of governmental climate change science over the last 16 months.

Scientists, reports, and testimony from NOAA, NASA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Climatic Data Center, and the Environmental Protection Agency were affected.

Findings include:

• Media requests to speak with federal scientists on climate change matters were sent to Council on Environmental Quality for White House approval
• The White House edited congressional testimony regarding the science of climate change
• CEQ Chief of Staff Phil Cooney and other CEQ officials made at least 294 edits to the Administration’s Strategic Plan for the Climate Change Science Program to exaggerate or emphasize scientific uncertainties or to deemphasize or diminish the importance of the human role in global warming
• The White House insisted on edits to EPA’s draft Report on the Environment that were so extreme that the EPA Administrator opted to eliminate the climate change section of the report
• CEQ eliminated the climate change section of the EPA’s Air Trends Report
• CEQ Chairman James Connaughton edited the August 2003 EPA legal opinion disavowing authority to regulate greenhouse gases

NOAA has recently debuted a new website, Arctic Report Card 2007, summarizing the state of environmental changes in the arctic, linking each section with the detailed reports from NOAA researchers. Their summary:

Collectively, the observations indicate that the overall warming of the Arctic system continued in 2007. There are some elements that are stabilizing or returning to climatological norms. These mixed tendencies illustrate the sensitivity and complexity of the Arctic System.

Redacting the Science of Climate Change, Government Accountability Project Report

Witnesses

• Dr. James J. McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University, Board Member, Union of Concerned Scientists
• Sheldon Rampton, SourceWatch, Co-Author of “Trust Us, We’re Experts!”
• Tarek Maassarani, Government Accountability Project
• Jeff Kueter, George C. Marshall Institute

28/03/2007 at 02:00PM