Administration Ordered To Release Overdue Global-Warming Plan

The Bush administration must release a climate-change research plan and scientific assessment report that are as much as two years overdue, a federal judge ruled, rejecting a White House claim that compliance with a law requiring the studies is discretionary.

U.S. District Judge Saundra Armstrong in Oakland, Calif., said Tuesday that the administration violated a 1990 law requiring the government to produce the research plans every three years and the assessments every four years. She ordered a summary of the plan to be produced by March and the assessment by May.

The administration "unlawfully withheld action" required under the Global Change Research Act of 1990, said Armstrong. The last research plan was in 2003, and the last assessment was published in 2000. Greenpeace International and two other environmental groups sued in November seeking a court order to produce the reports.

"This administration has denied and suppressed the science of global warming at every turn," Brendan Cummings, an attorney arguing the case for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. Mr. Cummings called the ruling "a stern rebuke of the administration's head-in-the-sand approach to global warming."

Kristin Scuderi, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said officials are reviewing the ruling. "In general, however, the administration is complying with the law through the production of 21 synthesis and assessment documents and beginning to prepare a new research plan," Ms. Scuderi said.

The synthesis and assessment documents are reports about climate change from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. The first reports were issued last year.

President Bush, citing economic reasons, in March 2001 rejected the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty among industrial nations requiring cuts in carbon dioxide emissions and other gases linked to global warming.

China surpassed America last year as the top producer of carbon dioxide, according to an estimate published in June by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, a research group for the Dutch government and international organizations.