The Bush White House has once again (see here and here) edited a climate change document to delete references to adverse effects, to question certainty and to directly challenge scientific warnings.

In a fax copy of the edited EPA document (attached), made public by the Environmental Defense Fund, editors at the White House Office of Management and Budget inserted the word “may” in place of “will,” promoted research into the “benefits” of global warming and dismissed warnings of devastating storms with the question: “Is this relevant to the U.S.”

Amnesia about Katrina notwithstanding, the memo’s editors also insist that no amount of storm-driven flooding will ever affect American drinking water because “we have a regulatory structure in place to ensure quality.”

The edits and comments range from the dishonest (changing “will” to “may”) to the dunder-headed. For example, in response to an EPA paragraph that reads: “Abrupt climate changes are an important consideration because, if triggered, they could occur so quickly and unexpectedly that human or natural systems would have difficulty adapting to them,” the White House editors interjected, “If referring to changes that take decades, one would think that human systems could adapt.”

Given that the White House has been caught doing this kind of thing twice before, it appears that certain Americans are woefully slow to adapt.