Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

There is climate change censorship - and it's the deniers who dish it out
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2053521,00.html
Global warming scientists are under intense pressure to water down
findings, and are then accused of silencing their critics

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 10, 2007
The Guardian

The drafting of reports by the world's pre-eminent group of climate
scientists is an odd process. For months scientists contributing to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing
gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel's
reports are conservative - even timid. It also means that they are as
trustworthy as a scientific document can be.

Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in
and seek to excise from the summaries anything that threatens their
interests.

The scientists fight back, but they always have to make concessions. The
report released on Friday, for example, was shorn of the warning that
"North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage,
plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate
change related events".

This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the rightwing
press: that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is conspiring to
exaggerate the science. No one explains why governments should seek to
amplify their own failures. In the wacky world of the climate conspiracists
no explanations are required. The world's most conservative scientific body
has somehow been transformed into a conspiracy of screaming demagogues.

This is just one aspect of a story that is endlessly told the wrong way
round. In the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in columns by Dominic
Lawson, Tom Utley and Janet Daley, the allegation is repeated that climate
scientists and environmentalists are trying to "shut down debate". Those
who say that man-made global warming is not taking place, they claim, are
being censored.

Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid example. The
closest any of them have been able to get is two letters sent - by the
Royal Society and by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe - to
that delicate flower ExxonMobil, asking that it cease funding lobbyists who
deliberately distort climate science. These correspondents had no power to
enforce their wishes. They were merely urging Exxon to change its
practices. If everyone who urges is a censor, then the comment pages of the
newspapers must be closed in the name of free speech.

In a recent interview, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4's film The Great
Global Warming Swindle, claimed he was subject to "invisible censorship".
He seems to have forgotten that he had 90 minutes of prime-time television
to expound his theory that climate change is a green conspiracy. What did
this censorship amount to? Complaints about one of his programmes had been
upheld by the Independent Television Commission. It found that "the views
of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been
distorted by selective editing" and that they had been "misled as to the
content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part". This,
apparently, makes him a martyr.

If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show you what
has been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists whose
research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have been
repeatedly threatened and silenced and their findings edited or suppressed.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate
scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its
survey reported that they had experienced one of the following constraints:
1. Pressure to eliminate the words "climate change", "global warming", or
other similar terms from their communications; 2. Editing of scientific
reports by their superiors that "changed the meaning of scientific
findings"; 3. Statements by officials at their agencies that misrepresented
their findings; 4. The disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports,
or other science-based materials relating to climate; 5. New or unusual
administrative requirements that impair climate-related work; 6. Situations
in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed
themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific
findings. They reported 435 incidents of political interference over the
past five years.

In 2003, the White House gutted the climate-change section of a report by
the Environmental Protection Agency. It deleted references to studies
showing that global warming is caused by manmade emissions. It added a
reference to a study, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute,
that suggested that temperatures are not rising. Eventually the agency
decided to drop the section altogether.

After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising emissions
with more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his superiors from
speaking to the media. He agreed to one request to appear on MSNBC, but a
public affairs officer at NOAA rang the station and said that Knutson was
"too tired" to conduct the interview. The official explained to him that
the "White House said no". All media inquiries were to be routed instead to
a scientist who believed there was no connection between global warming and
hurricanes.

Last year Nasa's top climate scientist, James Hansen, reported that his
bosses were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web postings. He was
told by Nasa's PR officials that there would be "dire consequences" if he
continued to call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases.

Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US fish and wildlife service told its
scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must understand "the
administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and
will not be speaking on or responding to these issues".

At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a former
White House aide who had previously worked at the American Petroleum
Institute, admitted he had made hundreds of changes to government reports
about climate change on behalf of the Bush administration. Though not a
scientist, he had struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and
inserted phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about
global warming.

The guardians of free speech in Britain aren't above attempting a little
suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received several letters
from the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton threatening us with libel
proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate science. On two of
these occasions he has demanded that articles are removed from the
internet. Monckton is the man who wrote to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe,
claiming that their letter to ExxonMobil offends the corporation's "right
of free speech".

After Martin Durkin's film was broadcast, one of the scientists it
featured, Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate
change had been misrepresented. He says he has received a legal letter from
Durkin's production company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for defamation
unless he agrees to make a public statement that he was neither
misrepresented nor misled.

Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when such people complain of
censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking place?
Monbiot.com