George Bush All Over Again

Politicians editing scientific reports - do they really think their constituents are this stupid???

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/10 ... ate-report
Perry Officials Censored Climate Change Report
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality doesn't want you to know that climate change is causing sea level rise in Galveston Bay.
—By Kate Sheppard
Wed Oct. 12, 2011

Top environmental officials under Perry have gutted a recent report on sea level rise in Galveston Bay, removing all mentions of climate change. For the past decade, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which is run by Perry political appointees including famed global warming denier Bryan Shaw, has contracted with the Houston Advanced Research Center to produce regular reports on the state of the Bay. But when HARC submitted its most recent State of the Bay publication to the commission earlier this year, officials decided they couldn't accept a report that said climate change is caused by human activity and is causing the sea level to rise. Top officials at the commission proceeded to edit the paper to censor its references to human-induced climate change or future projections on how much the bay will rise.

John Anderson, the oceanographer at Rice University who wrote the chapter, provided Mother Jones with a copy of the edited document, complete with tracked changes from top TCEQ officials. You can see the cuts—which include how much sea level rise has increased over the years, as well as the statement that this rise "is one of the main impacts of global climate change"— here .

Anderson, whose complaints were first reported by the Houston Chronicle on Monday, says that the cuts to his paper were political and had nothing to do with science. The research underlying the study was peer-reviewed and is part of a decade-long study Anderson has conducted in partnership with other scientists. The Geological Society of America published the scientists' results in 2008 . "I was a bit astonished," Anderson tells Mother Jones. "Really this paper is just a review of papers we published previously. There's no denying the fact that sea level rise has significantly accelerated. The scientific community is not at all divided on that issue."

TCEQ even deleted a reference to the fact that the bay is currently rising by 3 millimeters a year—five times faster than the long-term average. The edited version that TCEQ sent back also killed a line noting that the bay's "future will be strongly regulated by the now rising sea," as well as the factual assertion that the disappearance of the wetlands is "due mainly to direct human intervention."

This should have some water lapping at his feet...Yes, by all means, we wouldn't anyone to acknowledge that the sea levels are rising... :bash :bash Effing idiots. Keep politicians out of science!

There are facts out there SS109, you just have to realize that detailed facts will change - sea level rise is not disputed; predictions of how much decades out are. Isn't it nice that the scientists are the ones who called out the mapmakers on being wrong on the ice cap?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... ate-change
Times Atlas is 'wrong on Greenland climate change'
Glaciologists say the ice cover is melting – but at nowhere near the 'misleading' 15% rate represented by cartographers
John Vidal, environment editor
Monday 19 September 2011

Leading scientists have accused the world's top cartographers of making a blunder in their representation of the effects of climate change in Greenland, prompting a robust defence by the map-makers' publisher.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... #more-8904
Speculative polar cartography
— group @ 5 October 2011
Guest commentary from Kevin Brown

The curious mismapping of Greenland’s ice sheet cover by the venerable Times Atlas recently has excited a lot of outraged commentary. But few people noted that this follows an old tradition of speculative cartography of the polar regions. ‘Modern’ mapmakers as early as the 16th century combined real facts and scientific knowledge with fundamental misinterpretations of that knowledge to create speculative mappings of the world’s unknown shores – and nowhere was this more prevalent than at the poles.

Some, like the maps above and the more contemporary Times Atlas’ map of Greenland, are derived from real scientific knowledge, but exhibit either a misunderstanding of geography or an erroneous hypothesis. These often lead to fictitious interpretations of factual data. Such errors do have ramifications. In the early days of polar exploration such maps often inspired to ill-fated nautical expeditions in search of pygmies, polar seas, and new lands. In modern times, such speculative mappings, both early and contemporary, have been used by some to disprove global warming, advocate for the continent of Atlantis, and prove that space aliens mapped the earth in antiquity.

It should therefore probably be always borne in mind that cartography has always been a blend of art and science – which of course is one of the reasons why it so fascinates us.