On Wednesday, a libertarian think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed a lawsuit () against the White House over a video produced by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) linking climate change to incidents of cold winter weather.
Released in January 2014, when much of the country was enduring ice storms, snowstorms, and full-on blizzards, the video appeared to rebut the idea that bouts of cold weather suggested the planet wasn鈥檛 actually getting warmer.
鈥淚f you鈥檝e been hearing that extreme cold spells, like the one that we鈥檙e having in the United States now, disproves global warming, don鈥檛 believe it,鈥 John Holdren, President Obama鈥檚 science and technology adviser, tells viewers.
After explaining the difference between climate and weather, Holdren speaks briefly in the video about how global warming has been linked to frequent exchanges of warm and cold air between the poles and the midlatitudes. As temperatures in the polar regions increase at about twice the rate of the midlatitudes, he says, the polar vortex (a cold-core system that circles the polar regions) gets 鈥渨avier,鈥 delivering colder bodies of air to places like the United States and warmer bodies of air toward the Arctic and Antarctic.
鈥淚 believe the odds are that we can expect as a result of global warming to see more of this pattern of extreme cold in the midlatitudes and some extreme warm in the far north,鈥 Holdren says in the video.
The CEI begs to differ. In April 2014, it petitioned the White House to correct Holdren鈥檚 message, arguing that since many scientists disputed his claim, the video had violated the Data Quality Act, a law that requires federal agencies to provide the public with objective, reliable information. (CEI鈥檚 sources cited in its lawsuit include 聽and a blog post published by the , a libertarian think tank. Both of these articles, in turn, link back to peer-reviewed scientific journals.)
When the White House responded by saying that Holdren鈥檚 message was presented as an opinion and therefore is not subject to the DQA, the CEI filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking that the White House disclose all documents and email discussion related to Holdren鈥檚 claim. The White House鈥檚 refusal to disclose 47 additional pages of these exchanges, which it claimed contained 鈥減rivileged material,鈥 is the basis for the CEI鈥檚 new lawsuit.