y at the Democrats' first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress. The hearing focused on allegations that the White House has micromanaged the government's climate programs for years and has closely controlled what scientists were allowed to tell the public.
"It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change," said Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He also is a critic of the Bush administration's environmental policies, including its views on climate.
Climate change also was a leading topic in the Senate, where presidential contenders for 2008 lined up at a hearing called by Sen. Barbara Boxer, also a Democrat. They expounded, at times trying to outdo each other, on why they believed Congress must act to reduce heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases.
"This is a problem whose time has come," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, widely considered the early Democratic front-runner in the presidential race, proclaimed.
"This is an issue over the years whose time has come," echoed Republican Sen. John McCain.
Democratic Sen. Barack Obama said "for decades, far too many have ignored the warning" about climate change. "Will we look back at today and say this was the moment we took a stand?"
At the House hearing, two private advocacy groups produced a survey of 279 government climate scientists in which many said they had been subjected to political pressure aimed at minimizing the climate threat. Their complaints ranged from a challenge to using the phrase "global warming" to raising uncertainty on issues on which most scientists basically agree, to keeping scientists from talking to the media.
The survey and separate interviews with scientists have "brought to light numerous ways in which U.S. federal climate science has been filtered, suppressed and manipulated in the last five years," Francesca Grifo, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the committee.
Grifo's group, along with the Government Accountability Project, which helps whistle-blowers, produced the report.
Drew Shindell, a climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said climate scientists frequently have been dissuaded from talking to the media about their research, although NASA's restrictions have been eased.
Prior to the change, interview requests of climate scientists frequently were "routed through the White House" and then turned away or delayed, said Shindell. He described how a news release on his study forecasting a significant warming in Antarctica was "repeatedly delayed, altered and watered down" at the insistence of the White House.
Some Republican members of the committee questioned whether science and politics ever can be kept separate.
"I am no climate-change denier," said Rep. Tom Davis, the top Republican on the committee, but he questioned whether "the issue of politicizing science has itself become politicized."
"The mere convergence of politics and science does not itself denote interference," said Davis.
Administration officials were not called to testify. In the past the White House has said it has sought only to inject balance into reports on climate change. President George W. Bush has acknowledged misgivings about global warming, but he strongly opposes mandatory caps of greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that approach would be too costly for the economy.
Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado who was invited by Republican lawmakers, said "the reality is that science and politics are intermixed."
Pielke maintained that "scientific cherry-picking" can be found on both sides of the climate debate. He took a swipe at the background memorandum Waxman had distributed and maintained that it exaggerated the scientific consensus over the impact of climate change on hurricanes.
Waxman and Davis agreed the administration had not been forthcoming in providing documents to the committee that would shed additional light on allegations of political interference in climate science.
"We know that the White House possesses documents that contain evidence of an attempt by senior administration officials to mislead the public by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimize the potential danger," said Waxman.
At Boxer's Senate hearing, her predecessor as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Republican Sen. James Inhofe, had his own view of the science.
There is "no convincing scientific evidence" that human activity is causing global warming, declared Inhofe, who once called global warming a hoax. "We all know the Weather Channel would like to have people afraid all the time."
"I'll put you down as skeptical," replied Boxer.
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