05 Jun 2002 Bush Sets Record Straight with Repudiation of Global Warming Report

President George W. Bush is being attacked by conservative pundits and praised by the leadership of environmental groups because a just-released document from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been incorrectly reported by the media as endorsing the concept of human-induced global warming.

“Our national media should be ashamed of themselves for taking the facts of this report out of context and using it to push policy that is not based on sound science,” said Tom Randall, director of the John P. McGovern MD Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs.

Many media reports cite one line of the approximately 100-page document, U.S. Climate Action Report 2002, that quotes an earlier National Research Council (NRC) study as saying, “…green house gases are accumulating in the Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing mean surface and air temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise.”

What isn’t reported is the line that follows, which reads, “While the changes observed over the last several decades are likely due mostly to human activities, we cannot rule out that some significant part is also a reflection of natural variability.” Another fact that is rarely pointed out is the great deal of uncertainty expressed about climate change by both the EPA document and the NRC study to which it refers.

Media reports also do not refer to the fact that there has been no recorded change in temperature in the earth’s atmosphere from one to five miles above the surface – the area that was predicted by the various climate change models to heat up first.

As a result of initial media reports, President Bush has stated in a Reuters report on June 4 that the report in no way signals a change in his previous stance in favor of using sound science to guide environmental policy.

“When the United Nations made startling predictions about huge increases in global temperature,” said Randall, “they were forced to scale back their predictions because the claims did not match scientific fact. The President is wisely letting science and not emotion guide a policy that can severely affect the global economy.”

The John P. McGovern, MD Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs is a project of The National Center for Public Policy Research, a non-partisan, non-profit education foundation. For more information, contact Tom Randall at 773-857-5086 or [email protected].