Heavy Hand of Bush on EPA - Report Confirming Global Warming Scrubbed

Well, not exactly scrubbed, but the links were ham handedly broken. The report, issued as part of the required annual update on the joint Canadian-US Management Plan for Lake Erie, concluded that

There is now stronger evidence than ever of human-induced climate change. . . . Between 2004 and 2090, our climate is expected continue to become warmer. This will result in significant reductions in lake level, exposing new shorelines and creating tremendous opportunities for large-scale restoration of highly valued habitats.

The Report concludes that "human-induced" global warming will lead to a steep drop in water levels of Lake Erie over the next 64 years and cause the lake's surface area to shrink by up to 15 per cent. The annual update is required by the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the United States and Canada.

Although dated April 21, 2006, the "Lake Erie Lakewide Management Plan Report" (LaMP in bureaucrat-speak) was recently released to the website and linked from the EPA's Lake Erie Binational Site. Soon after (mostly Canadian) news reports on the climate change conclusions began surfacing, the link to the 2006 LaMP Update stopped working. Now, clicking on the link brings up an error page.

The Report itself, however, remains on the site, one just needed to manually type in the URL: http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/lakeerie/2006update/. This maneuver, although by now all too familiar to those paying attention, is nevertheless puzzling, as the prior LaMP updates contained similar language, and those links remain active (at least for now). The "human-induced climate change" stuff is in Section 11 of the LaMP Updates "Significant Ongoing and Emerging Issues". It's on page 7 of section 11 in the 2006 Update.

I guess the good news is that you know the wheels are falling off when they can't even effectively scrub websites anymore.