Texas agency censors scientific report to remove references to reality

The latest bit of climate controversy has kicked off in Texas, a state with a governor, RIck Perry, who has suggested that climate scientists have manipulated data. At issue is a report on the future of Galveston Bay, on Texas' Gulf coast. The report was commissioned by the state's Commission on Environmental Quality, and prepared by a private consulting firm. The TCEQ, however, had issues with the report's contents when it came to topics related to climate change, and tried to edit the report. Now, the scientists who prepared the report are asking that their names be removed from it.

The report was being prepared by the Houston Advanced Research Center, which contracts the work out to research scientists. One of the chapters of the report focuses on the impact of sea level rise. Studies in the peer-reviewed literature suggest that, after thousands of years of relative stability, the rate of sea level rise has been accelerating during the last century, and it's expected to continue to rise as temperatures get warmer. That obviously has implications for low-lying coastal areas like Galveston, and the report touches on some of these.

That didn't go over well with some people at the TCEQ, who edited the report to remove all references to sea level rise (replacing "rise" with "change") and made other alterations to diminish its significance. The author of that chapter, Rice University's John Anderson, was appalled, and refused to approve the edits (he provided a copy of them to Mother Jones, which has posted them online).

After the Houston Chronicle picked up the story, word of the problems spread among the authors, and every single scientist on the report has now asked that their names be removed from it. In response to queries about deleting basic facts (sea levels have risen) from the report, a TCEQ spokesperson was quoted as saying, "Information was included in a report that we disagree with."

It's tempting to trace this disagreement with reality upwards, as the head of the TCEQ has apparently termed climate science a fraud; he was appointed by governor Rick Perry, who has also accused scientists of unethically manipulating data. At this point, however, there's no indication that any orders for censorship were handed down. It's equally likely that the mid-level employees at the TCEQ, aware of their superiors' biases, made an independent attempt to force the report to reflect them.