Once again, the Bush administration has carefully controlled and even banned government employees from talking about global warming. In this latest incident of suppression, two memorandums written late February put strict limitations on what US Fish and Wildlife Service employees were allowed to discuss at conferences in Norway and Russia. A third memorandum extends the policy to Canada and “any northern country”.

In short, representatives from the US whose job it is to conserve Arctic animals and plants are not allowed to discuss the number one threat to those species – global warming. After the memos were made public, the administration responded yesterday by claiming they were made to ensure US representatives “talk about only what’s on the agenda” of the meetings. The memos come just months after the Bush administration announced it would consider protecting declining populations of polar bears under the Endangered Species Act.

“The polar bear has created a 24/7 forum for the U.S. government to be grilled about what its position is on global warming, and it’s really put the Bush administration in a tight, tight corner,” said Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, whose group sued over the animals. “It’s crazy to say, ‘The polar bear is endangered but we’re not going to do anything about global warming.’ They realize that message is so counterintuitive it cannot be delivered by anyone but the most seasoned hack available.”

Because of the ban, experts have been relegated to simply discuss how to minimize dangerous interactions between humans and polar bears. In recent years, polar bears have been venturing closer to native villages as melting ice has changed their natural hunting patterns. Craig Perham, a biologist specializing in polar bears, was invited by the World Wildlife Fund to Siberia to help villagers minimize dangerous human-bear interactions. A memo on February 26th even made reference to Perham, saying he “understands the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to those issues.”

This has been but one incident in a long line of government control over scientific fact regarding global climate change. Last year, appointees at NASA kept journalists from interviewing climate scientists and discouraged news releases on global warming. In June, a high-ranking official admitted that the agency “inappropriately” denied a journalist’s request to interview James Hansen, an outspoken scientist at NASA critical of the Bush administration’s ideology on climate change. In September, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suppressed an internal agency email summarizing scientists’ consensus on a link between hurricanes and climate change. In December, two scientists from NOAA were forbidden to use the term “climate change” or to mention the city of Kyoto. In January, it was revealed that the Bush administration had systematically tampered with reports on global climate change to remove politically inconvenient truths.

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