James Annan, tipped off by Tom Adams posting on the Japanese GoogleGroup "globalchange", reports that the whitehouse.gov search engine suppresses search results for the phrase "global warming"; Gristmill has picked it up UPDATE 2: Also RealClimate and Stoat.
UPDATE 3: Consensus in comments and other blogs is that this may just be a design issue with the search engine being case sensitive and also searching primarily by tag/label rather than fulltext. Along the way, we've noticed that the dKos search engine has some omissions as well.
UPDATE 4: "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
Google search reveals that the White House does discuss Global Warming, they just don't let anybody find it.
I first learned of this around 5 PM PST from a fellow Climate Project trainee, and it doesn't appear to have gotten wide coverage (yet), and I'm reluctant to make sure glad I didn't make a definitive statement without technical verification that it isn't just some kind of glitch (plus we really should James Anaan did get screen shots for proof after it gets fixed). I also believe we've found evidence before of WH search-results suppression... can anyone find a link to those diaries?
Here's the heart of the Annan post on James' Empty Blog:
I'm delighted to be able to exclusively reveal here that global warming has been abolished, by fiat of the Leader of the Free WorldTM.
Click here and you can see that "global warming" simply doesn't exist at all, except in this one [PDF] document (the only search result, at time of posting) which just happens to be fluffing the Baliunas/Soon dross.
The original Tom Adams post, "White House nearly eradicates global warming", includes technical details, of a sort:
As far as I can tell, they are
using some kind is electronic correction fluid, computer white out.
They just wipe it over a phase in a press conference and, shazam,
utterances of "global warming" by Press Secretary Tony Snow, other
administration figures, and the press are not found by the web site's
search function. They even wiped out President Bush's use of the
phrase "globe is warming" in a March 29, 2006 press conference.
Sounds like a Snow Job to me. Now for the politics of it, in Tom's words:
Unfortunately, this eradication of "global warming" may not eliminate
the heat, the political heat that I hope to see come to bear on this
adminstration for this blatant and stupid act of censorship. Turns
out that whitehouse.gov's electronic correction fluid does not work on
google. You can recover all the "global warming" utterances and the
single "globe is warming" one by doing a google advanced web search
and limit the search to only return results from the domain
www.whitehouse.gov.
Mr. Adams ends with a call to action:
Please help me get the word out on this. I just discovered this
yesterday and I am trying to catch the attention of higher profile
media any way I can think of.
Please use the comments for your suggested actions, and reports on actions you've taken. This can include messages sent to Barney, who will be happy to answer your questions: