Hockey Stick Goes to Washington - The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars - page 77

As was later revealed, Cooney had tried to influence the administration's stance on the science
behind climate change through unilateral editing of various government reports. Internal White House
memos leaked to the New York Times in June 2005 indicated that Cooney “who once led the oil
industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports
in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming.” 12 The extent of this
editing went well beyond an incident, previously leaked by the New York Times in 2003, in which
Cooney had been caught editing the EPA's State of the Environment report to delete, for example,
conclusions about the likely role of human activity in observed warming that had been documented in
a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report—a report that the Bush administration, skeptical of the
conclusions of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report, had itself commissioned.
According to the documents obtained by the New York Times , Cooney—presumably with the
tacit approval of the administration—had been making unilateral, undisclosed edits to numerous
government climate change reports during 2002 and 2003, as revealed by his handwritten notes and
edits of the original documents. His removal of important passages and addition of his own caveats
had the net effect of weakening the conclusions expressed. These changes in many cases were made in
the final versions of the reports, after supervisors and even senior Bush administration officials had
already signed off. Andrew Revkin of the Times noted, for example, that Cooney crossed out a whole
paragraph describing the effect climate change could have on the depletion of freshwater resources in
the western United States, writing in the margins that the discussion was “straying from research
strategy into speculative findings/musings”—as if he were somehow in a better position than the
scientists who wrote the report to draw such fine distinctions. Other changes were more subtle, but
they had the same net effect of watering down the conclusions, for example, inserting “significant and
fundamental” before the word “uncertainties” in one report, and adding “extremely” before “difficult”
in another. 13 Two days after the New York Times broke the story detailing these instances, Cooney
announced his resignation. But no matter—in less than a week he would be welcomed back to the
industry from whence he had come, courtesy of ExxonMobil. 14 Despite his hasty exit, Cooney had
arguably already accomplished the task expected of him, to help execute from within the White House
the strategy that had been laid out in the 2002 Luntz memo: To sow doubt in the science of climate
change.
The Hockey Stick Enters the Fray
The hockey stick did not escape Cooney's controversial edits. In attempting to water down the EPA's
2003 State of the Environment report, Cooney, among other things, had deleted a plot showing the
hockey stick. In fact, he deleted all reference to our work. In its place, he added a reference to a
controversial study by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas financed by Cooney's former employer, the
American Petroleum Institute. 15 In an April 21, 2003, memo to Vice President Dick Cheney's office
(eventually obtained in 2007 through a congressional investigation of administration misconduct 16 ),
Cooney readily betrayed his agenda:
Soon-Baliunas contradicts a dogmatic view … in the climate science community that the
past century was the warmest in the past millennium and signals human induced “global