Climate Expert Says NASA Bids to Muzzle Him
- From: "PEN Nearovi" <nearovi@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 30 Jan 2006 10:53:57 -0800
Climate Expert Says NASA Bids to Muzzle Him (2006-Jan-30)
By Reuters : NEW YORK - NASA's top climate scientist said the
Bush
administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a
lecture in
December calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse
gases, The New York
Times said Saturday. In an interview with the newspaper, James Hansen,
director of
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that officials at the
space agency's
headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his
lectures, papers,
postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from
journalists.
"They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to
the public," the Times quoted Hansen as
saying, adding that the scientist planned to ignore the new
restrictions. A NASA spokesman denied any effort to
silence Hansen, the Times said. "That's not the way we operate here at
NASA," said Dean Acosta, deputy
assistant administrator for public affairs. "We promote openness and we
speak with the facts." Rather, the
spokesman said the restrictions applied to any and all NASA personnel
who could be seen by the public as
speaking for the agency. Acosta added, however, that while government
scientists were free to discuss scientific
findings, policy statements should be left to policy makers and
appointed spokesmen, the Times said. The story
was posted on its Web site and will be published in Sunday's editions.
Hansen, a physicist who joined the space
agency in 1967, is an authority on climate who directs efforts to
simulate the global climate on computers at
Manhattan's Goddard Institute.
IOWA SPEECH
Since 1988 he has warned publicly about the long-term threat
from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by
carbon dioxide, that are a byproduct of burning coal, oil and other
fossil fuels, The Times said. It said he fell out
of favor with the White House in 2004 after a University of Iowa speech
ahead of the presidential election in
which he complained that government climate scientists were being
muzzled, adding that he planned to vote for
Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry. Hansen told the Times over the
course of several interviews that an effort
began in early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he
says are clear-cut dangers from further
delay in curbing carbon dioxide. Hansen said the recent efforts to
quiet him began after a lecture he gave on Dec.
6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San
Francisco in which he said that significant
emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies,
particularly in the case of motor vehicles.
Without leadership by the United States, he told The Times,
climate change would eventually leave the
earth "a different planet." Hansen said that NASA headquarters
officials repeatedly phoned public affairs
officers, who warned Hansen of "dire consequences" if such statements
continued. The officers confirmed the
warning to the Times. The Bush administration's policy is to use
voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the
growth of emissions, the paper said.[ Source: Reuters ]
.
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