Vice President Cheney has worked hard to cast doubt on the science of climate change. The vice president's office wanted my help censoring the congressional testimony from the Centers for Disease Control to eliminate any references to how climate change endangers human health. I refused.

The vice president's office later wanted me to water down congressional testimony on the strength of the science by not acknowledging that greenhouse gases "harm" the environment by causing climate change. Again I refused.

Having heard the words "the vice president's office is on the phone" many times over the past few years, I could not agree more when Sen. Joe Biden called them "the eight most dreaded words in the English language" for those trying to uphold our nation's laws and respect our Constitution.

Given my experience with the dangers of an unaccountable vice president, it sent shivers down my spine during the vice presidential debate when I heard Gov. Palin say she is "thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it, in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are." A bit more authority than our current vice president has wrestled away from the president and Congress?

A strong vice president is a great thing, but that strength should primarily come from being a trusted adviser to the president, not a separate power center somewhere between the executive branch and the legislative branch. Palin is fortunate her smile and wink won't remind voters of Vice President Cheney's smirk and grimace; maybe people won't notice that her dismissal of science and views on the power of the office are quite similar to Cheney's.

But similar they are. With Palin we would have a veep who wants to be vague about the connection between man's activities and climate, shifting focus to "cyclical temperature changes on our planet." While most everyone has accepted climate change is man-made, Palin is still waging the war against climate science as if she simply took a page out of Cheney's playbook.

In a recent interview, she tried to manufacture uncertainty about the causes of climate change and about the human role by stating there are legitimate "different sides of the argument as to who is to blame" and suggesting it could be just nature to blame.

No, it is not just nature.

Although the Office of the Vice President pleaded with us at the Environmental Protection Agency to avoid referencing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the end the EPA and the IPCC both concluded that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and most of the warming is "very likely" due to humans, likely leading to more intense hurricanes with "stronger peak winds" and "more heavy precipitation."

Why would the Office of the Vice President and Gov. Palin try to hide this truth? Under a recent Supreme Court case, acknowledging the danger would create a legal obligation that we do something about it. But it also would create a moral and political obligation. Would Americans just sit by as their government told them to expect worse hurricanes? No, they would demand action.

The clear harm caused by greenhouse gases is why eight years ago then-Gov. Bush also promised a cap on these gases. But after the elections this campaign promise unraveled. President Bush put Vice President Cheney in charge of the secret energy task force. Since climate and energy are two sides of the same coin, this put Cheney in charge of climate policy.

Over time this helped President Bush flip his stance to opposing meaningful action on greenhouse gases.

Is Gov. Palin preparing to play a similar role with Sen. McCain? She, like Cheney, would be in charge of energy policy. She, like Cheney, supports an expanded view of the powers of the vice president. She, like Cheney, is already distorting climate science to support her preconceived policy positions.

Do we really want another four years of dreading the words "the vice president's office is on the phone?" I don't.

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* JASON BURNETT was the associate deputy administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.