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| Stockard Channing as | Abbey (Abigail Ann) Bartlet M.D. | First Lady |
| Dulé Hill as | Charlie (Charles) Young | Personal Aide to the President |
| Allison Janney as | C.J. (Claudia Jean) Cregg | Press Secretary |
| Joshua Malina as | Will (William) Bailey | Deputy Communications Director |
| Janel Moloney as | Donna (Donnatella) Moss | Assistant to Deputy Chief of Staff |
| Richard Schiff as | Toby (Tobias Zachary) Ziegler | Communications Director |
| John Spencer as | Leo Thomas McGarry | Chief of Staff |
| Bradley Whitford as | Josh (Joshua) Lyman | Deputy Chief of Staff |
| and Martin Sheen as |
Jed (Josiah Edward) Bartlet | President of the United States |
| Special Guest Star Mary-Louise Parker as |
Amy (Amelia) Gardner | FLOTUS' Chief of Staff |
| Guest Starring | ||
| Jeff Perry as | Burt Ganz | Whistle-Blower |
| Elisabeth Moss as | Zoey Patricia Bartlet | Bartlets' youngest daughter |
| Trent Ford as | Jean Paul FULL NAME | Zoey's Boyfriend |
| Amanda Carlin as | Hillary Toobin | Hydroclimatologist |
| Benjamin Brown as | Mike Wayne | Associate Counsel |
| Nathan Anderson as | Matthew "Matt" Lambert | Heidi Choat's Date |
| Andrea Savage as | Heidi Choat | at DAR event |
| Helen Slayton-Hughes as | Marion Cotesworth-Haye | of Marblehead / DAR member |
| Co-Starring | ||
| Devika Parikh as | Bonnie | Communications' Aide |
| Kim Webster as | Ginger | Assistant to Communications' Director |
| Steven Hack as | Hendricks | Paul (first name) / in Leo's meeting |
| Gregory Linington as | Don Novak | Kierney-Passaic Lawyer |
| Eric Lemler as | Nat | Intern |
| Ivan Allen as | Reporter | Roger Salier |
| Christopher Carroll as | Thomas | (last name) / Marion Cotesworth-Haye's Secretary |
| Robert Noble as | Steward | |
| Michael J. London as | Usher |
It's not likely you're going to hear a strong pro-life argument on the show. I have trouble getting to it; I really do. But it's possible that what you will hear on the show is that not all people who are pro-life can fit into this mean-spirited shoebox that we tend to ... - Aaron Sorkin
"A Few Good Stories"
by Paris Barclay
February 13, 2001
The Advocate
It is an urban legend that Alaska has warmed so much, so fast. No matter how much the Alaskans try to debunk it, it lives on, most recently in the fevered imagination of West Wing scriptwriters.Last summer, The New York Times ran a story quoting unnamed "federal sources" who said Alaska had warmed seven degrees in 30 years. Then it ran an editorial denouncing the U.S. government's apparent indifference to this calamity.
The Alaskan Climate Research Center (ACRC) contacted the paper and gave it data showing no such warming had taken place. The mean temperature rose about 2.4F (about 0.4C per decade) in the 1971-2000 period. The entire increase occurred in one jump in 1976-77, probably due to a circulation realignment in the Pacific Ocean. A temperature index formed using data from Fairbanks, Anchorage, Nome and Barrow (the "FANB" index) shows, if anything, a slight cooling trend since 1979.
The Times was never able to identify a source for its claim, and it printed a retraction, sort of. It did find a scientist who figured that if you look in the right places and pick an earlier start and end date you could get a mean increase of maybe 5.4 degrees over a 30 year span. In its retraction, the Times' fudged the point a bit, saying Alaska's mean temperature went up 5.4 degrees, rather than seven, over the past 30 years.
The ACRC responded again saying that no, this is still wrong. It posted a map showing the record of all their weather stations for the 1971-2000 interval. In the accompanying text it states: "There is not a single first-class weather station in all of Alaska, which reported 5F temperature increase for the last three decades." The highest increase, 4.2 degrees, was at Barrow. One of the lowest (1.7F) was at nearby Kotzebue.
The Times dropped the story, but it has now resurfaced on the West Wing, where earnest White House staffers will no doubt run with it for a few weeks, hoping to bludgeon the oil industry and kill a few thousand jobs in oil-producing states like, say, Alaska. Once they've moved past this plot line, the seven-degree-warming-in-30-years claim will surely pop up again somewhere, but hopefully not in the real West Wing.
"Prime time fiction"
by Ross McKitrick
April 16, 2003
National Post