WASHINGTON — President Bush is widely considered one of the world's most prominent skeptics of global warming. But to hear White House officials tell it, the world's view of him is wrong.
In recent days, White House officials have made a special effort to argue that Bush has always been concerned about climate change. Moreover, they say, he has long acknowledged that human activity may be a significant factor.
"Perhaps folks have not taken notice of the fact that this is an administration that's been keenly committed both to environmentalism and conservationism from the start," White House spokesman Tony Snow said last week.
Indeed, the climate around global warming in Washington is getting hotter. Members of both parties are scrambling to get ahead of each other -- and ahead of public demands -- to take measures against the threat.
Apparently concerned that Bush was not perceived as being on the global warming bandwagon, White House officials released an unusual open letter Wednesday contending that "climate change has been a top priority since the president's first year in office."
"Beginning in June 2001, President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem," said the letter, signed by John Marburger, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
But the record isn't quite so clear.
The letter cites a June 2001 speech by Bush, quoting him as saying that "we know the surface temperature of the Earth is warming.... There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming.... And the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the increase is due in large part to human activity."
But the parts of the speech excised or ignored by the letter give a somewhat different impression. For instance, the citation deletes a sentence that asserts that "concentration of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have increased substantially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution" -- a time frame suggesting that the contemporary world may have played only a small role.
Moreover, Bush's mention of the National Academy of Sciences was quickly followed by a sentence that cast doubt on the notion of human contribution to climate change. "Yet the academy's report tells us that we do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming," Bush said at the time.
