Priorities

One learns something from what gets mentioned first when an issue is under discussion. So in the course of what worked out very well for the White House -- a Good Friday news dump of a fairly bleak Second International Panel on Climate Change report, Sharon Hays from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy chose to put this into her opening statement at the press briefing --

I think there's a couple of additional facts to note, in terms of this projection of this range of future impacts, including the fact that not all projected impacts are negative.

In addition, the briefing mentions the word "adaptation" 16 times and "mitigation" not at all; the former mentions coming in a mix of questions and answers. In this context, adaptation means dealing with the consequences of global warming and mitigation means trying to prevent some or all of the occurrence of global warming. Guess which one George W. Bush is keener on?