(Cross-posted on Someone Took In These Pants...)
It started when Dr. James Hansen, the lead scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, came out to news organizations to say that he was being silenced from presenting some of his findings on global warming. Now, more is being revealed about the Bush administration's attempts to muffle other scientists who try to present findings on global warming.
Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.
Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.
[snip]
Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation's water supply.
Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause "great problems with the department." In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.' ''
The response from administration officials has generally been of the variety of, "We don't want scientists expressing policy views." And to some extent that's a legitimate concern. Only problem is, we're not just talking about "policy views," but scientific findings.
- Former oil industry lobbyist and then Chief of Staff for Bush's Council on Environmental Quality Phillip Cooney significantly edited scientific reports to soften their findings on the severity and causes of global warming, even though he had no scientific training.
- The purging of key words like "global warming" from USGS hyrdrologist Milly's climate-related paper, as noted above.
- Also from the article linked above, Boulder, CO-area NOAA scientist Pieter Tans's directors telling him the term "climate change" could not be used in papers or abstracts for a conference on carbon dioxide he helped to organize last fall.
- Warnings issued to Dr. Hansen after a speech last December in which he released data showing 2005 was measured as the Earth's warmest year on record (from the first article linked above).
These aren't scientists trying to say, "We should do this," or "We should do that." These are scientists trying to say, "The data show this, etc." That they are being censured for statements relating to scientific findings reveals two hallmark themes of the Bush administration: 1. Its war on science when that science doesn't fit its purpose (closely related to ignoring intelligence when it doesn't serve the purpose of building support for a war), and 2. The overall conservative tactic of trying to dictate what are facts and what aren't, i.e. a subjective, solipsistic view of statements about reality.
But even if these scientists are giving policy recommendations, might we want to listen to what they have to say? Isn't it ironic that Bush muffles policy views of leading scientists who have been studying Earth's climate for decades and yet consults with a fiction writer who has written a debunked book on global warming? True, the primary purpose of scientists is to research the natural world, not give policy views. Yet given their expertise on the issue, they are in a good position to give sound policy recommendations based on their findings, provided the findings aren't edited. If science shows overwhelmingly that greenhouse gases are contributing to climate change, then the logical policy conclusion is to aim to reduce these emissions.
Of course, like the war in Iraq, with global warming and the Bush administration, the evidence gets built around the policy. And, also like the war in Iraq, the policy is formed with oil in mind.