Jan

30

Bush is Censoring Information on Global Warmining from NASA

[From Irregular Times: News Unfit for Print]

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.

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