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Tuesday, President Bush turned aside a call by his staunchest world ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for "clear and immediate action" to address global warming.

The president rewarded Blair's steadfastness with the administration's standard stall: "We want to know more about it," Bush replied. That the official hesitance is nothing more than a stall seemed all the more evident by Wednesday.

This White House still hesitates to accept what the overwhelming number of climate change scientists hypothesize - that the Earth is warming relatively rapidly, that this climate change can cause catastrophic environmental shifts globally, that the effect is linked to greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that the former "climate team leader" for the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group lobbying in Washington for the oil industry, has been editing government climate reports "in ways that play down links" between global warming and greenhouse gas emissions.

What is Philip Cooney, a former oil industry lobbyist, doing editing those government reports? Well, Cooney now is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

That sounds scientific, but Cooney is no scientist. He's a lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, The Times reports. Actually, he seems well-qualified for his new job, and more's the pity.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality "helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues." Since the administration's policies track energy industry interests so closely that differences cannot be seen with the naked eye, Cooney seems a perfect fit.

He just had to move his office from K Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.

There, he has been busily toning down reports on climate research that already had been approved by government scientists, according to the newspaper.

The Times obtained drafts of reports with Cooney's handwritten changes from the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group representing Rick Piltz, a onetime "senior associate in the office that coordinates government climate research." He resigned in March.

When Bush says he's waiting to learn more about climate change, he leaves little doubt he's waiting for the research to be "fixed around the policy" - a strategy Blair should be familiar with, post-Iraq.