Another scientist being silenced?

Another top government scientist is claiming that the Bush administration is trying to silence him because his research doesn’t match the White House’s political views. James E. Hansen (in photo), director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that officials at NASA had ordered a review of his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists after he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming, The New York Times reported.
Dean Acosta from the NASA public affairs office said that there is no effort to silence Hansen; Acosta said that policy statements should be left to policymakers and appointed agency spokesmen. And Mary L. Cleave, deputy associated administrator of NASA’s Office of Earth Science, told The Washington Post that the restrictions on giving interviews were meant as “protection” to make sure the scientists weren’t misquoted.
That’s not how Hansen and others see it. “They’re trying to control what’s getting out to the public,” he said.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee

6 Comments

  1. Chris Bowman
    Posted January 30, 2006 at 1:21 pm | Permalink

    Of course the administration is trying to control what is going out in public. After all, most of us can’t add 2 + 2 and get 4 without someone perceived as being in authority telling us that is correct. From a purely intellectual point of view, remember “He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past.” — George Orwell. Who’s Big Brother?

  2. Ben Huie
    Posted January 30, 2006 at 2:35 pm | Permalink

    So what else is new. This has been going on throughout the Bush administration term.

    I noticed during the record-breaking hurricane season that government scientists claimed “cycles” (never mind that we went way outside the cyclical range) while other scientists noted that increased energy availability leads to increased severity of storms.

  3. Ben Huie
    Posted January 30, 2006 at 2:49 pm | Permalink

    http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/breaking_news/13747307.htm

    Even Bush’s buddy Tony Blair says the problem is severe.

    “In a foreword, Blair said it was clear that “the risks of climate change may well be greater than we thought.”"It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth from a world population that has increased six-fold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable,” he wrote.Over the next century, global warming is expected to raise ocean levels, intensify storms, spread disease to new areas and shift climate zones, possibly making farmlands drier and deserts wetter.”

    The experiment is progressing just as predicted.

  4. Rage
    Posted January 30, 2006 at 6:18 pm | Permalink

    Ben, I haven’t been as vocal on this as I should. You’re right: this has been the case from beginning. I think I’ve alluded enough to my appreciation of science to demonstrate this isn’t just a gratutious, partisan “me, too!”

    Yet Joe W. thinks we dislike Bush because we dislike Bush. Is that how HE thinks? I wonder.

  5. Rage
    Posted January 30, 2006 at 6:20 pm | Permalink

    Ya know, I have a bad habit of leaving out. :-) Oh well.

  6. Steven E.
    Posted January 31, 2006 at 11:32 am | Permalink

    Bush “likes the marketplace of ideas” so long as he is in complete control of said marketplace.

    To silence political opposition is reprehensible, but to silence scientists should be criminal.