The Bush White House Speaks with Forked Tongue About Global Warming
George Bush and his administration have continuously denied global warming even existed until the evidence was so overwhelming it became their pink elephant in the room. The Bush Administration went as far as revising scientific reports and muzzling scientists from talking about the subject, after first appointing agency heads whose job was to silence any talk about the problem. (See 4/18/07) Now, forced by world wide concern and overwhelming evidence Mr. Bush does a 180 degree turn in order to be politically correct. Yet, as captain of the ship he apparently didn’t let his 1st mate know about the change. The Seattle PI has the following leads to stories in the same newspaper: "Bush Presents a Global Emissions Plan" and "NASA Chief Discounts Issue of Global Warming." It appears that Mr. Bush’s appointee to NASA was singing the old party line, while his chief had decided to stop lying and get on board the bandwagon, at least in talk, but not action.
It turns out Mr. Bush, bending to enormous world wide pressure, proposed for the first time to
"Set a long term global goal" for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, like his "leave no child behind" program it’s all talk with no firm measures to do anything more then he has done o far, which is absolutely nothing. At least he has been forced to admit for the first time there is a problem and something needs to be done about it. Unfortunately, while Mr. Bush was pounding his chest over his having had a born again experience, his head of NASA was, at the very same time, preaching the old Bush administration party line saying about global warming "I’m not sure that it is fair to say that is a problem we must wrestle with" and discounted the global warming issue. A former scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research said about these remarks that they showed the head of the agency was either "totally clueless" or "a deep anti global warming ideologue." So how did the White house handle these conflicting statements? They said the agency head was "speaking about his own personal views" and tried to distance the White house from the remarks. I still read in the local newspaper letters to the editor from people who in a George Orwell kind of haze repeat the long standing propaganda of the Bush administration that global warming doesn’t exist, but if it did, it is not man made. Amazing how people can ignore the photographic evidence of melting ice fields, drought and the other clear evidence proving we have a serious problem. But, then these are the same people who voted for George Bush.