Ifill, Hari Sreenivasan, Jim Lehrer
xfdhe PBS-NEWSHOUR-00
<Show: PBS NEWSHOUR>
<Date: March 10, 2010>
<Time: 18:00:00>
<Tran: 031000cb.112>
<Type: SHOW>
<Head: PBS NewsHour For March 10, 2010 - Part 2>
<Sect: News; International>
<Byline: Ray Suarez, Jeffrey Brown, Kwame Holman, Judy Woodruff,
Gwen Ifill, Hari Sreenivasan, Jim Lehrer>
<Guest: Richard Kirsch, Mike Tuffin, Carrie Johnson>
<High: The U.S. defense secretary and the Iranian president trade
barbs in overlapping visits to Afghanistan. Terrorist charges are brought against
an American woman who calls herself Jihad Jane. The Obama administration
escalates its criticism of the health insurance industry. What challenges
face Haiti's government as its president visits Washington? Why is climate
science under fire? Hundreds of World War II pilots, all of them women,
are honored in Washington.>
<Spec: World War II; Women; Military; Robert Gates; Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad; Iran; Afghanistan; War; Terrorism; Health and Medicine; Policies; Barack
Obama; Democratic Party; Haiti; Earthquakes; Disasters>
Medicare's cost increases, it's been 4.5 percent. Private insurance, it's been 7.5 percent. That's the average for the last decade. In other words, they do a much worse job than the government of controlling health care costs.I want to go back to something before, because it's really important. Mike said that the reason that people -- they're losing members, losing people they insure, is because people don't want insurance.
We heard an interesting story from a small business person today, a guy named Dan Sherry from Illinois. His business was growing fast, a small business. He makes trophies. He missed one payment, didn't get the bill out, and the insurance company came back to him and said, we're only going to renew your insurance if we now -- we do medical, your whole medical history.
It turns out, because he has got blood pressure, they won't insure him. Their job is to deny people care when they most need it. That's what their administrative costs are from. That's how they make money.
MIKE TUFFIN: Jim, we spend more per capita in this country on health care than any country in the world, by far. This idea that we're in business to deny care is laughable.
It is -- people in the individual market, there's an assessment of risk on the front end, because people purchase coverage in the individual market when they anticipate needing health care services. Over 90 percent of our business is conducted in what's known as a guarantee-issue environment. You apply, you get insurance. We need to fix the remaining 10 percent.
JIM LEHRER: We're going to leave it there, but not the subject, obviously.
Thank you both very much.
GWEN IFILL: Still to come on the NewsHour : the challenges facing Haiti's president; charges and rebuttals on climate change; and the flying women of World War II.
But, first, this is pledge week on public television. And we're taking a short break now, so your public television station can ask for your support. That support helps keep programs like ours on the air.
(BREAK)
GWEN IFILL: Now: Haiti's leader comes to the United States two months after the earthquake -- on his agenda, more aid for his hard-hit nation.
Ray Suarez has our story.
(APPLAUSE)
RAY SUAREZ: The White House was the critical stop on President Rene Preval's Washington tour, and he won a renewed commitment from President Obama.
BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: As you declared during last month's national day of mourning, it is time to wipe away the tears. It is time for Haiti to rebuild. And to you and to the Haitian people, I say today, as you embark on the heavy work ahead, you will continue to have a steady and reliable partner in the United States of America.
RAY SUAREZ: Like much of the Haitian capital, Preval's own White House lies in ruins, crushed by the January 12 quake that killed an estimated 230,000 and left more than 1.2 million homeless.
Mr. Obama lent some perspective:
BARACK OBAMA: It's as if the United States, in a terrible incident, lost nearly eight million people, or it's as if one-third of our country, 100 million Americans, suddenly had no home, no food, or water.
RAY SUAREZ: Preval thanked Americans for their public and private efforts and asked for continued assistance.
RENE PREVAL, Haitian President (through translator): We must deal with the need of rebuilding Haiti, thanks to an effective decentralization policy, namely, offering health care, education, jobs to all Haitians, men and women, regardless of where they live in the country, in order to prevent migratory flows towards the big cities.
RAY SUAREZ: The U.S. government has already delivered $700 million in assistance. Nearly half of U.S. households have given money to other aid efforts. And there's a United Nations meeting later this month, where aid pledges from an earlier post-quake conference in Montreal will be solidified.
On the ground in Haiti, eight weeks on from the quake, the rainy season has come early, adding to the misery. Already-cramped camps, turned into a squalid mess, are ripe for festering disease and a possible second catastrophe.
MAN (through translator): Look, we don't have any other place to go.
RAY SUAREZ: Hundreds of thousands displaced by the January quake live in the sprawling tent and tarp cities around the capital, Port-au-Prince. Though officials say nearly half have received some type of shelter, they face a future as uncertain as Haiti itself.
In the Champ de Mars camp outside the shattered presidential palace, aid workers recently registered the displaced, and tried to persuade the weary homeless to move elsewhere.
VLACKOV ABRAMOSKIEV, Supervisor, International Organization for Migration: This means that preparing maybe their home sites, cleaning the rubble, maybe preparing some other safer places, because rainy season is coming, and it's really not safe for the people to stay there.
RAY SUAREZ: President Preval himself will soon be moving on, after a fashion. His term ends next February, and he is not seeking reelection.
In the year left to him, ensuring parliamentary elections later this year, canceled because of the quake, is a priority, and rebuilding a government that had 13 of its 15 ministries flattened is a monumental task.
Meantime, the U.S. military is steadily withdrawing forces it deployed to Haiti. At the peak, 20,000 U.S. personnel were there. Eight thousand remain, and that number will shrink further. Their departure has raised concerns.
ALISON THOMPSON, Nurse: It is big trouble. The 82nd Airborne have been amazing. They have been giving food, shelter, medical, everything. But they are all pulling out. We had 400 of our guys pull out five days ago.
We have got 60 left, but 30 are going in the next few days. Soon, we are going to have no security here. And that's the most important thing, is the U.S. presence in Haiti. It's going to be shocking when they leave, just security, for a start, on top of everything else.
RAY SUAREZ: Despite those fears, the United Nations says its peacekeeping force, in Haiti before the quake, will ensure security going forward.
JIM LEHRER: Next: climate science and climate scientists under scrutiny.
The United Nations today announced the launch of an independent review of the science behind landmark reports on global warming that were issued by an international panel. That comes after a growing backlash following news of some mistakes.
Jeffrey Brown has our report.
MAN: The Peace Prize laureate for 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
(APPLAUSE)
JEFFREY BROWN: After years of study and debate, an understanding of climate change, that the Earth is warming and that humans are contributing, received the imprimatur of the Nobel Peace Prize.
AL GORE, Former Vice President of the United States: I want to thank the Nobel Committee. And it is even more significant because I have the honor of sharing it with the IPCC.
JEFFREY BROWN: The prize was shared by former Vice President Al Gore, who had given the issue a major public voice, and a little-known U.N. group charged with pulling together the science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
It was a heady moment. And, two years later, on the eve of the Copenhagen talks, expectations were high.
CONNIE HEDEGAARD, Former President, United Nations Climate Change Conference: The science has never been clearer. The solutions have never been more abundant. Political will has never been stronger.
JEFFREY BROWN: But that's not how it turned out. Instead, Copenhagen concluded without a binding framework, leaving climate policy in limbo.
YVO DE BOER, Former Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: An impressive accord, but not an accord that is legally binding, not an accord that, at this moment, pins down industrialized countries to individual targets.
JEFFREY BROWN: And there was more, as the U.N. panel and scientists have found themselves on the defensive. In November came the revelations known as climategate, when illegally hacked e-mails sent by several prominent British researchers opened them to charges they were concealing contrary data and evading some public scrutiny.
More recently, the blogosphere has been alive with damning blasts at what critics see as shoddy work, poor sourcing and other problems in the IPCC's 2007 report -- among the examples, a statement that glaciers in the Himalayas will melt entirely by 2035, far faster than scientists have claimed, and which turned out to come from a popular science magazine, rather than a peer-reviewed paper, and a sentence saying that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation. That turned out to be linked to a report by the World Wildlife Fund, an advocacy group.
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER, Climate Scientist, Stanford University: I mean, I'm embarrassed by it. That -- that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2035, that's ridiculous. It should not have been there.
JEFFREY BROWN: Stephen Schneider, a climate scientist at Stanford, worked on the last IPCC report.
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: The unfortunate part of this real error about the date of melting is, it has detracted from the correct conclusion, which is that Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly, and that has tremendous social importance, in terms of the risk of floods now and drought later.
So, the basic relevance in the science is right. The absolute date is ridiculous. And it was just a glitch that everybody missed.
JEFFREY BROWN: Schneider points out that the IPCC reports pull together the work of hundreds of volunteer scientists, who sift through thousands of studies, weighing the evidence for climate change.
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: It's a series of refinements and approximations that get better and better. When the temple of high science is found to have made an error or two, people say, oh, my God, we can't trust them.
But take a look at the error rate. The IPCC, which has been attacked for making errors -- correct, there were errors, absolutely right. I'm involved in the IPCC, and we're not proud of a few errors. But how many? Three? How many conclusions? A thousand? Tell me any other human institution dealing with complexity that has a 1 percent error rate.
JEFFREY BROWN: In other words, Schneider and most of his colleagues say, the consensus holds. Errors? Yes. But a change in the conclusion on warming and its causes? No way.
Still, the errors did create a giant opening to skeptics of the science of warming and of the IPCC process.
PATRICK MICHAELS, Climatologist, Cato Institute: Individually, they care not particularly serious, but it is the mechanism that they imply that is very serious.
JEFFREY BROWN: One is Patrick Michaels, a climatologist with the Cato institute and senior fellow at George Mason University. He says the revelations confirm what he's long claimed: that IPCC reports reach precooked conclusions.
PATRICK MICHAELS: The problem with the Himalayan glaciers was that it was such an obvious error that the -- the climatologist who was listed as the first author for that particular chapter would have clearly picked it up if his eyes saw the number. So, we can only assume that his eyes didn't see the number. And that is very telling. It shows that the process, IPCC process, was allowed to get very, very fast and very, very loose.
JEFFREY BROWN: For Michaels, what's needed is more transparency. And the place for that is on the Internet, where information flows, studies are put forward, and facts are checked by all kinds of people, obviating the need for a group like the IPCC.
PATRICK MICHAELS: I don't see why we need it. I don't see why we needed a fourth assessment report. I mean, the purpose of the IPCC was to provide the background for a framework convention on climate change. It morphed into a totally different purpose, so far as I can tell, which was to -- to cheerlead for policies on change. And don't tell me that they were not doing that.
JEFFREY BROWN: Even scientists who back the U.N. panel and the overall findings of its reports are calling for more openness and say many researchers haven't dealt with these problems adequately.
Judith Curry is a climate scientist at Georgia Tech who contributed to an early IPCC report.
JUDITH CURRY, Climate Scientist, Georgia Institute of Technology: I don't we're learning, the scientific community, is learning the right lessons. I mean, the reaction from the scientific community has been mostly, you know, nothing to see here, let's move on, it doesn't really affect the science.
And they were basically appealing to their own authority, but they didn't realize that that wasn't going to work, when it was really the trust. People were not really questioning the expertise of the scientists, but they were questioning whether they really could trust this whole process and what had gone on, in light of some of these revelations.
JEFFREY BROWN: And there are signs that public trust has eroded. Several recent polls show a drop in the public's belief that climate change is real and should be a top political priority.
To help shore up that trust, the U.N. has just announced it will appoint an independent board of scientists to review the work of the IPCC. Several other reviews here and abroad are also under way.
MAN: Yeas are 219. Nays are 212.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
JEFFREY BROWN: In the meantime, prospects for passing climate change legislation in the U.S. have dimmed. The House passed an energy bill last summer that included national reductions in carbon emissions. But that bill stalled in the Senate, and less ambitious measures are now being considered.
GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight: honoring the military's first flying women.
Congressional correspondent Kwame Holman reports.
KWAME HOLMAN: They were the fly girls of World War II, covering 60 million miles of operation flights in 78 different types of military aircraft, from the fastest fighters to the heaviest bombers.
And, today, more than six decades later, the Women Airforce Service Pilots, WASP for short, were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. It's the nation's highest civilian award given by the Congress.
Deanie Parrish of Waco, Texas, was chosen to receive the medal on behalf of all WASPs.
DEANIE PARRISH, Women Airforce Service Pilots: Every single one of these ladies deserves to be standing where I am standing. Over 65 years ago, we each served our country without any expectations of recognition or glory. And we did it without comprising values that we were taught as we grew up: honor, integrity, patriotism, service, faith, and commitment.
KWAME HOLMAN: The legislation to honor the WASP was co-sponsored by Susan Davis and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the House, and Barbara Mikulski and Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Senate.
SEN. BARBARA MIKULSKI (D), Maryland: The greatest generation that saved democracy and Western civilization wasn't limited to one gender.
You gave all that you could to save the and United States of America and the world, who was at war.
SEN. KAY BAILEY HUTCHISON (R), Texas: Today, we right a wrong and acknowledge our debt to these great patriots, women who are so worthy of this award and this recognition.
KWAME HOLMAN: Of 1,102 women who served as WASPs during World War II, fewer than 300 are alive today. The feeling among those present at this morning's ceremony inside the Capitol's Emancipation Hall was that the honor was worth the wait.
Eighty-seven-year-old Shirley Kruse of Pompano Beach, Florida, was stationed at Bainbridge, Georgia, during the war.
SHIRLEY KRUSE, Women Airforce Service Pilots: I think it was the tribute to what we have done.
And I think, when we were -- we were serving as WASPs, we were never in it for the glory. We were never, ever thinking that it would turn out to be as wonderful as it is. To receive such an honor is just unimaginable. So, for me, it's been one of the highlights of my life.
KWAME HOLMAN: Ninety-year-old Dawn Seymour of Rochester, New York, was one of a small number of WASPs who completed training on the four- engine B-17 bomber. She participated in yesterday's wreath-laying ceremony at the Air Force Memorial to honor the 38 WASPs who died during service.
DAWN SEYMOUR, Women Airforce Service Pilots: Oh, I'm feeling --I'm feeling happiness. I'm feeling loss of dear friends who passed on early who aren't here today, and to the 38 whose service, of course, we recognized yesterday. So, we have -- we're closing a circle of history. And I -- I think we're in good hands.
KWAME HOLMAN: Eighty-seven-year-old Maggie Gee of Berkeley, California, was one of only two Chinese-American women to enter the flight training program.
MAGGIE GEE, Women Airforce Service Pilots: This award is something at the end of our lives. How can we ask for anything nicer, though? You know, all of us have -- we -- when we were young, we were flyers. Then we went on and had our different phases of life.
I, fortunately, became a scientist, and had a very exciting life there. So -- but just to get together again, and to see so many of us, it's -- it's the whipping cream on top of ice cream.
KWAME HOLMAN: And, while it wasn't until 1977 that the WASP were granted military status, and another 33 years to get to this day, there were no hard feelings over the delayed recognition.
DAWN SEYMOUR: No, this is right. The time is right. And the day was perfect, as you know. And my heart is -- is happy. I am -- I am pleased that this has happened in my lifetime and I'm alive to enjoy it.
KWAME HOLMAN: And, for some, the fact that more Americans finally will learn about the WASP matters as much as the award itself.
DEANIE PARRISH: That's all I ever wanted. The medal is fine, but this is so much more important than getting a medal: educating America.
KWAME HOLMAN: A history lesson and a Congressional Gold Medal that both were a long time coming.
JIM LEHRER: And, again, the other major developments of this day.
Defense Secretary Gates suggested U.S. troops might start leaving Afghanistan ahead of the July 2011 schedule. Vice President Biden reaffirmed U.S. support for a Palestinian state. And President Obama promised continued earthquake aid to Haiti, after meeting with Haiti's president at the White House.
The NewsHour is always online, of course.
Hari Sreenivasan, in our newsroom, previews what's there -- Hari.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Which areas of the country are benefiting most from government stimulus money? Dante Chinni of the Patchwork Nation project crunches the numbers on the Rundown blog.
We get three views on how the Haitian government can speed its recovery. There's a look at the debate over including the payday loan industry in the financial reform legislation, and a profile of Jean Harman, another of the World War II pilots honored today. That's from our colleagues at PBS station KTEH in California. Find a link in the Public Media box on our home page.
All that and more is on our Web site, NewsHour.PBS.org -- Gwen.
GWEN IFILL: And that's the NewsHour for tonight. I'm Gwen Ifill.
JIM LEHRER: And I'm Jim Lehrer.
We will see you online and again here tomorrow evening. Thank you, and good night.
END
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