Bush to UN: 'We're Changing the Climate, So What?'

"In an extraordinarily secretive maneuver, the Bush administration has subtly altered its position on global warming, officially admitting that there is a crisis while still declining to offer policies to combat it," reports the Guardian. "A government report to the UN says that global warming exists, that it is man-made, and that it will transform the environment - all points that the current US government, while never actually denying, has been reluctant to accept. However, the report suggests that the country will have to accept the changes, rather than take any action to try to avert them." The new position was posted last week on the EPA's website, but no press release was issued, and its existence only became widely known on June 3. According to the New York Times, the EPA report predicts effects in the U.S. including "disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes." Conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh joined industry-backed global warming skeptics like TechCentralStation in calling on Bush to "Say it ain't so, George." Kalee Kreider, global warming campaign director of the National Environmental Trust, had a different take. "It's good they've done a 180-degree turn on the science. Given the audience, they pretty much had to," Kreider said. "But we're still waiting for a plan that mandates pollution cuts." Bush himself tried to have it both ways, dismissing the report issued under his own administration as something "put out by the bureaucracy."