Soul Integration and Re-Creation

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly 900 scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency have experienced political interference in their work in the last five years, the Union of Concerned Scientists reported on Wednesday.

The nonprofit environmental organization said its investigation of EPA was in line with previous probes of other U.S. agencies which found "significant administration manipulation of federal science."

A government spokesman denied this, and said scientific findings were balanced with policy concerns.

"Our investigation found an agency in crisis," said Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency. "Distorting science to accommodate a narrow political agenda threatens our environment, our health and our democracy itself."

The report included interviews with current and former staff members, analysis of government documents and a questionnaire sent to 5,419 EPA scientists, which generated 1,586 responses.

Of those responses, 889 scientists or 60 percent, said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in the last five years; 394 said they experienced frequent or occasional "statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists' findings."

More than one-fifth, or 285, said they had experienced "selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome," the report said.

Nearly 100 scientists said the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was the main offender.

"OMB and the White House have, in some cases, compromised the integrity of EPA rules and policies; their influence, largely hidden from the public and driven by industry lobbying, has decreased the stringency of proposed regulations for nonscientific, political reasons," one scientist wrote in response to the investigation.

A spokesman for EPA, Jonathan Shradar, denied these allegations.

"Certainly OMB plays a policy role," Shradar said by telephone. "It's important that there is inter-agency cooperation. There's not interference against the scientific work that they're doing, that's still highly respected and taken into account."

U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who chairs the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called on EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson to respond to questions about the report at a committee hearing in May.

The EPA has come under fire recently for its standard for ground-level ozone, which critics claim is too high. The agency is also in a court fight with 18 U.S. states over its failure to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new cars and trucks, more than a year after the Supreme Court ruled EPA had the power to do so.

(Editing by David Wiessler)

By Bruce Nichols

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Satellite data show that changes in the sun are contributing to global warming but to a smaller extent than human activity, a space scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington told a group of petroleum geologists on Wednesday.

"The sun is playing a role that you can detect, but it's not the dominant role," Judith Lean told a crowded session at the 2008 convention of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in San Antonio.

Climate-change skeptics have suggested that solar cycles may be more responsible than human activity for increasing global temperature. But Lean said her findings showed "the sun is a factor of 10 less than the anthropogenic."

Scientists at the forum listed causes for climate change including alterations in the atmosphere's makeup, changes in forests or ice covering the land, volcanoes, man-made greenhouse gases, solar cycles and factors yet undiscovered.

"We're not in an either-or world," said Kurt Cuffey, geography department chairman at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's all of these thrown together."

The AAPG, whose members work in the oil industry, has an official position backing more study of climate change. AAPG also says human fossil fuel use should be more efficient and greenhouse gases should be cut, but only at reasonable cost.

Eric Barron, geosciences dean at the University of Texas, argued that causal factors in climate change may be interacting in ways not yet imagined. For example, whether carbon dioxide buildup is a cause or effect of temperature rise depends on whether one is talking 30 years or a million years, he said.

In the short run, human activity is putting more carbon dioxide into the air, but in the long run, the impact might be mitigated or made worse by climate responses not yet understood or predicted, he said.

Lean said small changes do not occur in isolation but as part of a larger, ever-changing climate system, and that makes forecasting difficult.

"You've got to be careful, because everything's changing," she said.

Barron called for deeper study of the geologic record to better calibrate computer models predicting the future.

"If you do that, you might find we have even more to worry about," Barron said, adding that the Earth's geologic history has an important climate story to tell. "It shows the climate is very sensitive to small changes," he said.

(Additional reporting by Jim Forsyth; Editing by David Gregorio)