The shameless attempt to deny the American public the truth about climate impacts continue. As the AP reports:

Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.

Specific scientific references to potential health risks were removed after Julie L. Gerberding submitted a draft of her prepared remarks to the White House Office of Management and Budget for review.

Instead, Gerberding’s prepared testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee included few details on what effects climate change could have on the spread of disease….

A CDC official familiar with both versions said Gerberding’s draft “was eviscerated.”

Wouldn’t want the public knowing the health impacts of its do-nothing climate policy.

If you’d like to see the original testimony, here it is, courtesy of Climate Science Watch. Compare that to the eviscerated version here. Stunning and petty at the same time.

Must our long national climate nightmare continue for another 15 months?

I am writing a reply to this hit-piece in Slate, “Save the Earth in Six Hard Questions: What Al Gore doesn’t understand about climate change.” [link fixed]

You can probably imagine what I’m going to say, but I’d love any thoughts or ideas for links you have (hopefully today).

Global warming makes wildfires more likely and more destructive — as many scientific studies have concluded. Why? Global warming leads to more intense droughts, hotter weather, earlier snowmelt (hence less humid late summers and early autumns), and more tree infestations (like the pine beetle). That means wildfires are a dangerous amplifying feedback, whereby global warming causes more wildfires, which release carbon dioxide, thereby accelerating global warming.

The climate-wildfire link should be a special concern in this country where, since 2000, wildfires have burned an area larger than the state of Idaho.

I write this as my San Diego relatives wait anxiously in their hotel room to find out if their Rancho Santa Fe home has been destroyed. This is a beautiful home that I lived in for a month when I moved to the area in the mid-1980s to study at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Can we say that the brutal San Diego wildfires were directly caused by global warming? Princeton’s Michael Oppenheimer put it this way on NBC Nightly News Tuesday:

The weather we’ve seen this fall may or may not be due to the global warming trend, but it’s certainly a clear picture of what the future is going to look like if we don’t act quickly to cut emissions of the greenhouse gases.

Thomas Swetnam, University of Arizona climate scientist, who coauthored a major study on the subject (see below) said in 2006:

We’re showing warming and earlier springs tying in with large forest fire frequencies. Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But it’s not 50 to 100 years away–it’s happening now in forest ecosystems through fire.

I researched wildfires for my book — hence the “Hell” in Hell and High Water — and my view is closer to Swetnam’s for several reasons.

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Amusing, if harsh….