The climate change whistleblower Rick Piltz has died. Piltz resigned from the U.S. Global Change Research Program in 2005 and provided documents which revealed how the George W. Bush administration was editing government climate reports to downplay the threat of climate change. Just days after the story broke in The New York Times, Philip Cooney, the White House official who made the edits, resigned to return to his former job as an oil industry lobbyist. Piltz later started the Climate Science Watch blog at the Government Accountability Project. This is Piltz speaking in a video made by GAP.

Rick Piltz: “Working with GAP in late 2005, I started the Climate Science Watch project watchdogging the federal government on how it’s dealing with the climate change problem. You need people on the inside who will say, 'Yes, this is what we were told.' They all need a watchdog.”