Count this as one of those stories you probably missed on Friday while you were out strolling under blue skies and America’s strangely prolonged bout of unseasonable weather: President Bush and his political appointees are exerting pressure on a top NASA scientist to prevent him from telling Americans the truth about global warming.
Dr. James Hansen is director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies for NASA. As such, it is his professional responsibility to follow NASA’s mission “to understand and protect our home planet” (those words come right from NASA’s mission statement).
Yet, around the time that climate data revealed that 2005 was the hottest year for planet Earth on record, Dr. Hansen said he began receiving intimidating telephone calls telling him to stop informing Americans of the growing problem of global warming, as documented by a mountain of scientific evidence. The calls warned him of “dire consequences” if he continued to talk about global warming. His interviews with the news media were cancelled, and Dr. Hansen was told that other officials, who knew enough to stay in compliance with the President’s orthodoxy.
George Deutsch, a public affairs officer for NASA, told Dr. Hansen that he could not talk to anyone at National Public Radio because NPR was part of the liberal media. Deutsch told one of Dr. Hansen’s colleagues, Leslie McCarthy, that it was his job to make the president look good. Of course, that’s not what any public affairs officer of the federal government is hired to do. They are hired to serve the American people by telling them the truth about what the government knows, not to serve the political agenda of the President.
It is no coincidence that Dr. Hansen, just like Galileo before him, has provoked the wrath of the authorities through his revelations of a more accurate picture of the Earth. There is something about the science of the Earth that is deeply disturbing to religious autocrats, and that goes as much for George W. Bush as for the medieval popes. Religious reactionaries prefer a faith-based vision of the Earth, rather than a reality-based understanding based on disciplined observations.
What are the Bush Republicans going to do to Dr. Hansen for trying to tell you about what’s really happening to the planet Earth’s climate? Are they going to put him under house arrest and threaten to burn him at the stake, like they did with Galileo?
There would be no point. It’s too late to suppress the story of global warming. We all can look around us and see what’s going on with our own eyes. With sunrise temperatures well above freezing across the northern United States day after day, we all know that something has gone terribly wrong with the climate, no matter how much President Bush and his court of corporate astrologers try to tell us that the Earth is flat.
Pingback: News for Greens
…I understand now is a critical point in it… Pity I don’t think we’re ready to respond to that…
This is just the tip of the iceberg, as far as “information control” (read “censorship”) is concerned. Note how Bush&Co. always downplay, ignore, or ridicule serious inquiries into the administration’s actions. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been watching for the last 6 years.
The critical point was some 30 years ago when Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb. Since then he’s been (supposedly) discredited by short-sighted people who don’t understand how exponential growth works. The planet can’t sustain 6 billion people, let alone the projected 10 billion by 2100. Anyone who even casts a casual glance at the world will see all the billions living in poverty (most of the population) or below and the imbalance of resources going toward the “rich.” The earth is now seriously out of balance environmentally, and this fact will be driving world politics in the future (and it won’t be pretty). Lack of potable water, the depletion of the ozone layer, the steady loss of topsoil, and the effects the changing weather patterns have on food production will become increasingly evident. As we’ve seen recently storms are getting much more severe, droughts and flooding abound, and extremes of heat and cold are noticeable all over the planet, but nobody’s listening or doing much about it.
There are very well-documented population-controlling events that have happened with alarming regularity in human history, Tom. We are currently experiencing a minor one now,unfortunately. We call them “wars”. Lest you think I am being sarcastic, let me assure you that I’m not. I only wish I were. The last big one cost the lives of well over 100,000,000 people worldwide, at last tally. we still find the remains of those who were listed as Missing In Action. And we still don’t have an accurate tally of the civilian population losses from WWII. I don’t think we could survive as a species if another one should occur. And, much as I fear it, I can see the events leading up to such a catastrophic event in play today in our current geopolitical environment. Joan Baez said it best:”If God is on our side, He’ll stop the next war.”