U.S. Edits Global Warming Reports: "A White House official repeatedly adjusts language in climate change reports already vetted by government scientists, watering down the impact of emissions on global warming, according to The New York Times."
(Via Wired News.)
It is clear the current administration does not trust science and is not willing to set policy based on science. Apparently, science is not good enough. We got to the moon on science, but it is no longer good enough.
The problem of course is that science tries to understand a complex world through structured application of hypothesis, prediction, test, evaluate and adjust as necessary. Given our limited comprehension of the complexities, our abilities to accurately predict is limited. As a result, scientists make mistakes. The idea, however, is that you learn from your mistakes and do better next time.
The administration apparently seems to think that any mistake means that science is wrong and can be ignored.
In the realm of global warming and global change through human activities, there are enough complexities to generate mistakes. And while the scientific community generally agrees that the observed global warming is the result of human activities, there are enough equivocal data to question that hypothesis. Questioning a hypothesis is just good science.
But now apply policy to the hypothesis. Do you use the equivocal data to throw out the hypothesis and do nothing, do you use it to say that more study is needed, or do you think about the consequences to humanity if the hypothesis (which has good data to support it) is true.
The administration is firmly in the first two camps and unwilling to consider the third option.
And so we fiddle.
3:18:23 PM 
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