Philip Cooney: Green Guillotine Victim?

A greenie flap has resulted in the resignation of Philip Cooney from his prestigious position as chief of staff for the Council on Evironmental Quality, the White House's environmental arm.

Agence Presse France reports that Cooney resigned suddenly, and the White House is not attributing his departure to last week's media spit-up over allegations that Cooney toned down some dire global warming warnings in a CEQ report. From a NYTimes report, here's the sort of dire stuff Conney reportedly did:

In one instance in an October 2002 draft of a regularly published summary of government climate research, "Our Changing Planet," Mr. Cooney amplified the sense of uncertainty by adding the word "extremely" to this sentence: "The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult."

In a section on the need for research into how warming might change water availability and flooding, he crossed out a paragraph describing the projected reduction of mountain glaciers and snowpack. His note in the margins explained that this was "straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings."

Cooney's biggest offense may be that he was formerly an oil industry lobbyist. As such, he would be used to overwrought environmental allegations with weak or missing scientific foundations. After all, is thinking that shrinking glaciers may not be the result of human petrochemical use all that radical? Consider this:

He may not look like a revolutionary, but Ulrich Joerin, a wiry Swiss scientist in his late twenties, is part of a small group of climatologists who are in the process of radically changing the image of the Swiss mountain world. He and a colleague are standing in front of the Tschierva Glacier in Engadin, Switzerland at 2,200 meters (7,217 feet). "A few thousand years ago, there were no glaciers here at all," he says. "Back then we would have been standing in the middle of a forest." He digs into the ground with his mountain boot until something dark appears: an old tree trunk, covered in ice, polished by water and almost black with humidity. "And here is the proof," says Joerin.

The tree trunk in the ice is part of a huge climatic puzzle that Joerin is analyzing for his doctoral thesis for the Institute for Geological Science at the University of Bern. And he is coming to an astonishing conclusion. The fact that the Alpine glaciers are melting right now appears to be part of regular cycle in which snow and ice have been coming and going for thousands of years.

The glaciers, according to the new hypothesis, have shrunk down to almost nothing at least ten times since the last ice age 10,000 years ago. "At the time of the Roman Empire, for example, the glacier tongue was about 300 meters higher than today," says Joerin. Indeed, Hannibal probably never saw a single big chunk of ice when he was crossing the Alps with his army.

The most dramatic change in the landscape occurred some 7,000 years ago. At the time, the entire mountain range was practically glacier-free -- and probably not due to a lack of snow, but because the sun melted the ice. The timber line was higher then as well.

The scientists' conclusion puts the vanishing glaciers of the past 150 years into an entirely new context: "Over of the past 10,000 years, fifty percent of the time, the glaciers were smaller than today," Joerin states in an essay written together with his doctoral advisor Christian Schluechter. They call it the "Green Alps" theory.

Source: Spiegel. H/T Greenie Watch

Such hard, physical evidence goes against the global warming mantra. If Cooney was indeed forced out for raising legitimate doubts and questioning overzealous statements, he wasn't the first -- and he won't be the last -- to lose his head to the Green Guillotine.

Update: Headline on today's OCRegister story says it all:

Former oil lobbyist leaves White House