THE Bush administration's plan to tackle climate change is badly defined, underfunded and scientifically ill-informed. That's the view of one of the country's leading scientific organisations, which has reviewed the government's latest proposals.
The US began its climate change research programme more than a decade ago, under George Bush's father's administration. The current administration has now abandoned the Kyoto treaty, claiming more research is needed into global warming, and has merged the programme it inherited into a new Climate Change Science Program.
The administration has asked for comments on a draft of the plan before finalising it at the end of April. And a 17-member panel of the National Research Council that examined the draft did not hold back. "The draft plan lacks most of the basic elements of a strategic plan," it reported last week. The proposals "overlooked a lot of existing science as a way of claiming more ...
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