The Bush administration just released its report on the health effects of manmade global warming last week, and it only took four years and a court order to get it. This compilation of U.S. and international research discusses known global warming threats like rising sea levels eating away at coastlines, but it also highlights the way effects like heat wave deaths will affect poor communities the most.

A little history behind this assessment:

In 1990, a new law started requiring presidents to produce a summary of known information on global climate and the environment, the economy, and public health every four years. Since the last report came during the Clinton presidency in 2000, the Bush administration should have published one in 2004.

When it never came, environmental groups decided to prosecute:

"This administration has denied and suppressed the science of global warming at every turn," said Brendan Cummings, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. Administration officials were unavailable for comment on the ruling. When the suit was filed, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the government had chosen other means of complying with the law: a series of 21 mini-reports on various aspects of climate change, issued over a two-year period. The first of those documents, in May 2006, discussed temperature trends in the lower atmosphere but did not describe any potential effects on the environment. - San Francisco Chronicle

Last August, U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong ruled the mini-reports were not an acceptable substitution for a comprehensive global warming assessment and therefore ordered the White House to produce a full report by May 31 of this year.

Here's an interesting -- or dismaying, you decide -- side note. Shortly after Armstrong's ruling last fall, the White House also censored the congressional global warming statement of Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

What was cut? A detailed discussion of the ways in which global warming poses a public health risk that starts with this paragraph: "Scientific evidence supports the view that the earth’s climate is changing. A broad array of organizations (federal, state, local, multilateral, faith-based, private and nongovernmental) is working to address climate change. Despite this extensive activity, the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed. CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern."

The revised testimony jumps from a general background paragraph to "Public Health Preparedness for Climate Change". Gone are the sections on the specific ways climate change threatens public health, and which groups are most vulnerable. - Environmental Defense Fund

With all this foot dragging and information suppression, you can perhaps see why, apart from surprise over the administration's actual compliance with the court order, this report's conclusions were met with a great big So what else is new?

To be fair, though, it did contain some new information:

Most of the findings, ranging from the spread of warmth-loving pests to the inevitable loss of low-lying lands to rising seas, are not new. But the report included new projections of how the poor, elderly, and communities with lagging public health and public-works systems will face outsize health risks from warming. . . . Among the reports new conclusions on health: “An increased frequency and severity of heat waves is expected, leading to more illness and death, particularly among the young, elderly, frail, and poor.” It added that deaths from cold would decline, but said uncertainties on both projections made it impossible to characterize the overall risk. It gave high odds (essentially a two out of three chance) that Lyme disease and West Nile virus would likely have expanded ranges due to warming.

The report gave the same odds that some food- and water-borne diseases will also increase among susceptible populations, but said “major human epidemics” were unlikely as long as public-health systems remained effective. - New York Times

Even with these new projections, in light of a four-year delay I find the following statement a little hard to swallow:

White House associate science director Sharon Hays, in a teleconference with reporters, declined to characterize the findings as bad, but said it is an issue the administration takes seriously. - MSNBC

So seriously it wouldn't comply with federal law until forced by court order? Or so seriously it released this report on the way out of the White House, just in time to let the next president deal with the effects of global warming?

But then, I guess that's what elections are for; time to sweep out the corners and clean out the dusty old ideas to let the newer, cleaner ones in.

Further Reading:

• President Bush - Stop Muzzling Scientists
• Change Change and Health - Brace Yourselves