16 months in the making, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has finally release the report of its investigation into "Political Interference with Climate Change Science under the Bush Administration." I learned of it first on Daily Kos (just to annoy SDAI-Tech1), and as they opine, it doesn't actually contain anything we don't already know. It simply documents it thoroughly, based on examination of some "27,000 pages of documents from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Commerce Department" and "two investigative hearings, and deposed or interviewed key officials".

Political Interference with Climate Change Science under the Bush Administration (PDF)

More from the executive summary:

This report presents the findings of the Committee’s investigation. The evidence before the Committee leads to one inescapable conclusion: the Bush Administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming.

In 1998, the American Petroleum Institute developed an internal “Communications Action Plan” that stated: “Victory will be achieved when … average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science … [and] recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” The Bush Administration has acted as if the oil industry’s communications plan were its mission statement. White House officials and political appointees in the agencies censored congressional testimony on the causes and impacts of global warming, controlled media access to government climate scientists, and edited federal scientific reports to inject unwarranted uncertainty into discussions of climate change and to minimize the threat to the environment and the economy.

'Course, one can't in all fairness hold the Bush Administration solely responsible for the disinformation campaign. They had a huge amount of help from loyal Republicans all across this great land of ours.

Although the broad outlines are familiar, the level of documentary detail makes it even more horrifying. For example:

In September 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Max Mayfield, the Director of the National Hurricane Center, was scheduled to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee. On September 6, 2005, Tom Jones of Senator Ted Stevens’ Commerce Committee staff e-mailed Noel Turner in NOAA’s Office of Legislative Affairs. He wrote:

We’re going to work on smacking the shit out of this issue. At the hearing on the 14th we’re going to ask max mayfield about it. I’d love to have an answer from him that doesn’t contain any long words or flavor of equivocation. Something like, “mr chairman, the individuals who are implying that Katrina has something to do with global warming are just plain wrong. They don’t understand the science and they’re shamelessly trying to make political hay out of a national tragedy.”

Wow, not just leading the witness, but scripting the witness.

The documentation of how the Bush Administration edited climate change reports and papers is too long and intricate to quote, but it's unequivocal. Seems that in many cases outsiders got copies of various drafts of papers, and so it's possible to reconstruct how Bush appointees adulterated and watered-down the papers, changing "will" to "may"...changing "has been linked" to "has been indicated as potentially
linked"...replacing "demonstrated" with "indicates".

CEQ also inserted language suggesting possible benefits of climate change. For example, the June 2, 2003, draft read: “Identify ecological systems susceptible to abrupt environmental changes with potentially severe impacts on goods and services. CEQ replaced “severe” with “significant (positive or negative).” As a result, the draft stated: “Identify ecological systems susceptible to abrupt environmental changes with potentially significant (positive or negative) impacts on goods and services. This revision diluted the concerns raised by the original statement regarding the economic effects of global warming.

The last part of the report covers the lesser-known efforts of the Bush Administration to distort the science to support legal opinions they were using to fight petitions and lawsuits requesting that the EPA take action on CO2 emissions. I supose that there's a fine line between advocacy and actually falsifying the evidence, but they always pressed as close to that line as they thought they could get away with.

Enlightening.