Bush Taken to Court for Failure to Issue Climate Report

Where is the latest national climate assessment from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program? The Associated Press has reported that three environmental groups, Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, got tired of waiting for President Bush to produce the document and sued on the grounds that the report should have been issued in November 2004 according to the requirements of the Global Change Research Act of 1990 which calls for a national assessment every four years and the last one was issued in 2000. Let’s hope the courts move quickly on this because as climate scientists such as James Hansen from NASA have been explaining time is quickly running out to take action that can prevent catastrophic climate change. It seems obvious from all the recent climate science data that if the report were issued and the scientific judgments in it were untainted by the censorship of Bush political appointees that it would indicate that much stronger measures than Bush’s global warming policy which relies on purely voluntary measures are needed to avoid placing the long-term prospects of civilized human life on the planet Earth in jeopardy.