July 27th, 2009:

via Revealed: The Secret Evidence of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide | CommonDreams.org.

Photos from US spy satellites declassified by the Obama White House provide the first graphic images of how the polar ice sheets are retreating in the summer. The effects on the world’s weather, environments and wildlife could be devastating.

(snip) The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanize Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Satellite images of polar ice sheets taken in July 2006 and July 2007 showing the retreating ice during the summer. (Photograph: Public Domain)

The point of this story is not the devastation to the world and its wildlife from accelerated global warming. The point is Bush censored scientific data. Bush hid the photos of the retreating ice, for one reason, because by 2007  public opinion of him and the Republican Party was very low. By July of 2007, when the “after” picture was taken of the Port of Barrow, the presidential campaign was kicking off. The issue of a climate emergency would have been devastating to the conservative candidates. The blame would have rested on Bush’s shoulders. If Bush could reach the radical base with falsified scientific claims that global warming doesn’t exist, that it is the invention of those damned liberals, it would help galvanize the base and more importantly usher in piles of new donations to conservative candidates.

There are other factors, more important ones, here as well. Bush censored science for some greedy  reasons. He had to quash the growing numbers of people believing that there was a climate emergency, or at least plant some seed of doubt. I think the campaign that Al Gore started back in 2005 (approximation) was a very big concern with the administration. Bush had to change the conversation from the urgency of a climate remedy that Gore was preaching, to questions of whether or not global warming existed at all. It was just a matter of changing the conversation, something with which the Republicans are very familiar.

Cheney and Bush had engineered an invasion of Iraq to ultimately have the multinational oil giants like Chevron-Mobile and BP sign Product Sharing Agreements, or agreements similar to those, with the new government in Iraq thereby giving them the lion’s share of oil revenue for decades to come. The massive new oil fields in Iraq have never been tapped and it is estimated that the amount of oil beneath Iraq is second only to Saudi Arabia. These agreements could leech up to two thirds of the revenue for the next forty to fifty years.Cheney and Bush were not about to see all that potential profit disappear.

If America had gone totally green and weened ourselves away from foreign oil by 2003, before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the second and third world countries would still have been stuck on oil and too poor to change. Bush knew that the invasion of Iraq would have happened anyway, green or not, because his interests were to have American and British multinational corporations control the flow of new oil to second and third world countries- even if every American family drove an electric car. The invasion was going to happen no matter what, so they went on a campaign damning Saddam Hussein as friend to Al-Qaeda and the architect of 9/11 in order to sell the invasion of Iraq to as many Americans as possible. Bush only needed to convince his base and then utilize the right-wing echo machine (Limbaugh, Fox) to spread the word.

So, if scientific data on global warming had been supported, and if public opinion suddenly rose against CO2 emissions to the point that the auto industry worldwide began a race to re-invent the electric car, the oil industry would have been devastated. The right wing’s money base would have been devastated. Oil prices would have plummeted. Bush and the right-wing nut-jobs challenged the data with out-and-out lies and were successful in planting doubt in many Americans’ minds. There was much reporting on the subject of scientific censorship. This snippet is from About.com, (App.) 2007.

A report titled “Investigation Reveals Widespread Suppression of Federal Climate Research”, released last January by two leading nonprofits, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Government Accountability Project (GAP), found that nearly half of 279 federal climate scientists who responded to a survey reported being pressured to delete references to “global warming” or “climate change” from scientific papers or reports, while many said they were prevented from talking to the media or had their work on the topic edited.

The truth has been out there all along. It’s hard to believe that stories of this magnitude get buried under the weight of Sarah Palin and some police officer . Much has been said about the censorship over the course of the Bush administration, but nothing was done. Obama seems to want to get the truth out now. You know, it is never too late.