How our government keeps us blind

No wonder so many people remain uninformed and unconvinced.

A Federal District Judge has "busted" Bush's White House for withholding a report on global warming that was supposed to have been revised, reassessed and released to the public two years ago. Even so, the punishment amounted to less than a slap on the wrist.

The Bush administration violated federal law by missing deadlines to produce a study on the impact of global warming, now as much as two years overdue, and must issue a summary by March, a federal judge ruled. Judge Saundra B. Armstrong of Federal District Court in Oakland, Calif., said the United States government “unlawfully withheld action” required under the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to update a research plan and scientific assessment of climate change. The law mandates that the research plan be revised every three years and the assessment every four years; the last research plan was in 2003 and the last assessment was published in 2000.

Uncertainty, Science and the Press

I rely on RealClimate to untangle much of the confusion around reports of global warming and climate change. This confusion - as described in this classic case concerning the melting of the Greenland ice cap - is often generated by the biases and ignorance inherent in press coverage.

As my preceding article explained, there is alway uncertainty in forecasting, and there is definitely uncertainty in any attempt to predict the weather - whether it be for the next decade or this afternoon. But misinterpretation of scientific findings introduces even more uncertainty in the minds of citizens, who read or hear conflicting reports and then decide not to trust any of them.

A deep core sample of the ice in Greenland found the "oldest pure DNA ever" and the reports published in Science magazine included some mentions of historic ice cap melting some 125,000 years ago when the sea level was some 6 meters above what it is today. Some press accounts of the Science article interpreted those mentions as meaning that forecasts of the impact of current Greenland meltoff were overblown, exaggerated.

RealClimate provides a more accurate explanation of the original study, which is consistent with the IPCC findings regarding the ice cap. So we're back to considering the possibility that a Greenland meltoff, combined with similar melting of the Antarctic ice cap, the melting of many smaller mountain glaciers around the world and the expansion of the ocean itself due to warming may - MAY - still result in at least a 6 meter rise in sea level.