House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) is demanding documents on the White House’s reported “suppression” of a climate change report, according to the Washington Post.
The Washington Post last week reported that White House officials stiff-armed the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research from releasing a written report on climate change to the House Intelligence Committee. The controversial submission identified anthropogenic climate change as “possibly catastrophic.”
As previously reported by the Post:
According to several senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal deliberations, Trump administration officials sought to cut several pages of the document on the grounds that its description of climate science did not mesh with the administration’s official stance. Critics of the testimony included William Happer, a National Security Council senior director who has touted the benefits of carbon dioxide and sought to establish a federal task force to challenge the scientific consensus that human activity is driving the planet’s rising temperatures.
A number of agencies, including the Office of Legislative Affairs, Office of Management and Budget, and National Security Council, took issue with the definitive assertions made in the document.
“Absent extensive mitigating factors or events, we see few plausible future scenarios where significant — possibly catastrophic — harm does not arise from the compounded effects of climate change,” the document stated, according to reports.
Trump administration officials reportedly attempted to cut a significant portion of the testimony, to no avail.
After State refused to make the changes, the legislative affairs office blocked the agency from entering the document into the record, but allowed bureau senior analyst Rod Schoonover to testify Wednesday before the committee.
On Tuesday, Schiff, seemingly exhausted by the lack of success on keeping the Russia investigation alive, demanded two agencies “provide documents detailing how White House officials sought to edit — and then suppress — written testimony saying that human activities are warming the planet and that the climate changes underway pose a grave national security threat,” according to reports.
The Washington Post reports:
In a letter to State Assistant Secretary Ellen McCarthy, who oversees the bureau, Schiff said members of his panel wanted to learn more details about the interactions between White House aides and the State Department. He also sent a similar letter to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which had sent its own analyst to Wednesday’s hearing along with the Office of Naval Intelligence.
“If these reports are accurate, I applaud your Bureau for standing by its analysts and the integrity of its analysts and the integrity of their work in the face of political pressure, but the Committee remains gravely concerned about the events surrounding Dr. Schoonover’s withheld written testimony,” he wrote McCarthy.
The Post’s original report asserted – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that burning fossil fuels is “warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade.” The statement appears to be pure conjecture. Despite popular belief, there is no “97 percent” consensus that climate change is purely “man-made” or “dangerous.”
The paper from which that “consensus” is derived was written by Australian global warming activist John Cook. He reportedly reviewed nearly 12,000 papers on the subject matter and determined that a clear “consensus” existed. However, his methods have been called into question over the years.
As Breitbart News previously reported:
But here the watch-the-pea-under-the-thimble game begins. The “consensus” which the Cook et al paper supports is so banal and trivial as to scarcely be worth stating, viz:
• that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas;
• that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent.
Since even the vast majority of sceptical scientists agree with this statement you might wonder why, when Cook et al released their findings they got so much attention in the global media. (And they really did. That tweet of @barackobama’s helped, of course. But you only have to recall how many occasions you’ve heard that “97 per cent” figure cited as unquestionable “proof” of the existence of man-made global warming to appreciate how effective this propaganda exercise was; and also to realise just how ineffective the world’s media generally is at subjecting such claims to any kind of rigorous analysis).
But this fudge, of course, was always part of the plan. We know this because John Cook’s internet home is an alarmist propaganda website called Skeptical Science. Unfortunately for Cook, a security lapse at his site in 2012 led to the disclosure of private email exchanges between Cook and his co-conspirators.
In only 41 of the nearly 12,000 reports Cook research conclusively stated that mankind played a significant role in the climate’s constantly changing cycles. That amounts to 0.3 percent.
Additionally, the U.S. government’s Global Historical Climate Network, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and National Climate Data Center have been busted in the past for “amplifying” and “adjusting” published temperature graphs in order to achieved politically-fueled results.