Former Vice President Al Gore testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 21, 2007, before a joint hearing of the House Energy and Commerce, and Science and Technology subcommittees on climate change. Letters of support are in the foreground. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook)
About 30 teenagers, part of a school trip watching in a nearby overspill room, were typically restless and bored-looking before Mr Gore began speaking, but then listened to him intently.
There was a half-hour delay before his appearance - the kind of procedural wrangling between Democrats and Republicans that exasperates him, given his stress on time running out and the need to put political differences aside.
Mr Gore said he had recently returned from the UK, where there was a consensus among Labour and the Conservatives on the need to tackle global warming and the debate was on how best to do this. He contrasted this with the US, and the questions from the committee confirmed this: Democrats in agreement with him while Republicans questioned the science, the need for more regulations and the costs.
Bush appointees 'watered down greenhouse science' (click on)
Suzanne Goldenberg and James Randerson in Washington
Tuesday March 20, 2007
The Guardian
The Bush administration ran a systematic campaign to play down the dangers of climate change, demanding hundreds of politically motivated changes to scientific reports and muzzling a pre-eminent expert on global warming, Congress was told yesterday.
The testimony to the house committee on oversight and government reform painted the administration as determined to maintain its line on climate change even when it clashed with the findings of scientific experts. James Hansen, who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York, said in prepared testimony: "The effect of the filtering of climate change science during the current administration has been to make the reality of climate change less certain than the facts indicate, and to reduce concern about the relation of climate change to human-made greenhouse gas emissions."
