Global warming skeptics believe that scientists are being overly alarmist in their projections. I think this position represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how science actually works.
Science, by its nature, is conservative. There is so much data crunching and theories and challenges and peer reviews….getting to a consensus on anything takes an awful long time. And by the time the data are refined to the point where one can draw conclusions, reality has moved far beyond the millions of individual data points that make up the picture.
With climate change, that can be deadly.
Continue reading ‘Is the Climate Beginning to Spiral Out of Control?’
The Associated Press is reporting that a large ice shelf almost the size of Manhattan plunged into the Arctic Ocean last month in yet another sign of warming global temperatures. The 19-square-mile Markham Ice Shelf is now adrift off Canada’s northern coast. Over the summer, the Arctic lost 82-square miles of ice cover, an area three times the size of Manhattan.
“The loss of these ice shelves means that rare ecosystems that depend on them are on the brink of extinction, said Warwick Vincent, director of Laval University’s Centre for Northern Studies and a researcher in the program ArcticNet.
“‘The Markham Ice Shelf had half the biomass for the entire Canadian Arctic Ice Shelf ecosystem as a habitat for cold, tolerant microbial life; algae that sit on top of the ice shelf and photosynthesis like plants would. Now that it’s disappeared, we’re looking at ecosystems on the verge of distinction,’ said Muller.”
Yikes! This can’t be good. Or can it?
It is, if you are Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Continue reading ‘Canada Announces More Arctic Oil Exploration as Huge Ice Sheet Falls into Sea; U.S. Presidential Race Sinks into Muck’
Two leading Florida newspapers have condemned the censorship of climate research at NASA, linking it to a larger pattern of deception and lies by the Bush Administration.
The agency’s Inspector General recently released a report saying that Bush political appointees within the Public Affairs Office misled the public for years about NASA’s global warming work. The report followed the publication of Mark Bowen’s book, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming, that exposed a government-wide effort to suppress climate science research that conflicted with Bush Administration policies.
Our view: Hiding the truth
Florida Today
“When it comes to lies and manipulation the Bush administration is in a league of its own. The most horrendous example is its distortion of the truth in the run up the to Iraq war, but its polices of deceit have infected many other branches of government including NASA.
“In the Bush administration, extreme ideology has always trumped science much to our nation’s great harm.”
Our position: The NASA press office hurt the program when it withheld material on warming
Orlando Sentinel
“The report from NASA’s inspector general blamed the agency’s headquarters press office. It didn’t find evidence that agency leaders or other Bush administration officials were involved. Yet if the manipulation was indeed limited to NASA press officers, they were following the same political playbook as others in the administration — starting with the president — who disputed or ignored evidence of global warming.”
The Bush Administration released a new report that predicts large and harmful environmental and health impacts of human-caused global warming in the United States. The summary report, which by law must be released every four years, was completed only after a court challenge from environmental groups.
The New York Times reports:
“The last such assessment, undertaken in the Clinton administration and published in 2000, was attacked by groups and industries opposing restrictions on greenhouse gases. References to it were deleted from some government reports by political appointees in the White House.
“Environmental groups sued to force the completion of a new study. In court, the White House contended that a series of more than 20 studies requested by President Bush in 2003 satisfied the 1990 law, but Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong of Federal District Court for the Northern District of California rejected that assertion last August and ordered a comprehensive assessment to be published by the end of May.”
NASA’s Office of Inspector General released a harsh report on Monday saying that political Bush appointees mislead the public about the space agency’s climate change research.
“Our investigation found that during the fall of 2004 through early 2006, the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public through those particular media over which the Office of Public Affairs had control (i.e., news releases and media access),” the report’s executive summary states.
The efforts included rewriting press releases and denying interviews with NASA employees, including climate scientist James Hansen. NASA Public Affairs officials involved denied any wrongdoing, but the OIG found that the evidence supported critics’ charges of censorship.
“We also concluded that the climate change editorial decisions were localized within the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs; we found no credible evidence suggesting that senior NASA or Administration officials directed the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs to minimize information relating to climate change. To the contrary, we found that once NASA leadership within the Office of the Administrator were made aware of the scope of the conflict between the Office of Public Affairs and scientists working on climate change, they aggressively implemented new policies with a view toward improved processes in editorial decision-making relating to scientific public affairs matters,” the report states.
Climate Findings Were Distorted, Probe Finds
Washington Post
NASA’s own watchdog: Agency misled on global warming
Associated Press
NASA Office Is Criticized on Climate Reports
New York Times
I posted the following review in March. I’ve made a change (in italics) in the sixth paragraph concerning Mike Griffin’s role in the controversy. The original piece did not give him full credit for changes he made in NASA’s policies.
I’m currently reading a very interesting book about NASA’s work on climate change. “Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth About Global Warming,” by Mark Bowen, is an eye-opening account of the Bush Administration’s handling of global warming science.
Bowen recounts how that the Administration was determined to distort or censor anything produced by government scientists about global warming that contradicted its official position that more study was required before mandatory carbon caps or other actions could be taken.
Although the book focuses on Dr. James Hansen, a noted climate scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, the story is much broader. Bowen says this effort was part of a larger, tightly coordinated campaign run out of the White House to censor government climate scientists in NASA, NOAA, EPA and every other agency that deals with climate change. This censorship involved the heavy editing of NASA press releases, the denial of permission to scientists to give interviews to media outlets, threats to people’s jobs, and other coercive measures.
Continue reading ‘Censoring Science at NASA’
Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher has decided that NASA - America’s beleaguered, cash-strapped space agency - needs another mission: protecting the world from catastrophic asteroid impacts.
Leonard David of LiveScience.com reports that the California representative plans to introduce the NEO Preparedness Act, which would require that NASA establish an Office of Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Object Preparedness.
The office would “prepare the United States for readiness to avoid and to mitigate collisions with potentially hazardous near-Earth objects in collaboration with other Agencies through the identification of situation- and decision-analysis factors and selection of procedures and systems.”
Continue reading ‘Rohrabacher to NASA: Save the Cheerleader - and the World’
I’m currently reading a very interesting book about NASA’s work on climate change. “Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth About Global Warming,” by Mark Bowen, is an eye-opening account of the Bush Administration’s handling of global warming science.
Bowen recounts how that the Administration was determined to distort or censor anything produced by government scientists about global warming that contradicted its official position that more study was required before mandatory carbon caps or other actions could be taken.
Although the book focuses on Dr. James Hansen, a noted climate scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center, the story is much broader. Bowen says this effort was part of a larger, tightly coordinated campaign run out of the White House to censor government climate scientists in NASA, NOAA, EPA and every other agency that deals with climate change. This censorship involved the heavy editing of NASA press releases, the denial of permission to scientists to give interviews to media outlets, threats to people’s jobs, and other coercive measures.
Continue reading ‘Censoring Science at NASA’
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin emerged from his ninth floor office over the last two weeks to give a series of major speeches and interviews. Griffin updated everyone on how things are going at the space agency (very well, surprisingly enough) and tried to clarify his position on global warming. On the latter, he may have created even more confusion.
Griffin’s first stop was the Goddard Memorial Symposium, where he blamed critics for undermining his agency’s efforts and demanded that everyone get in line behind the Bush Administration’s plans to send humans to live on the moon and eventually Mars.
“The rift and harsh rhetoric between proponents of robotic science and human spaceflight does not help our nation’s overall space effort one iota, but it does cause division that weakens us,” Griffin declared. “If we wish a better reality for tomorrow, we as a community must police this behavior; those who engage in it must be made to feel, and be, unwelcome in the community at large. My hope for today is that there will in the future be more respect for each others’ work.”
With that threat/exhortation delivered, Griffin was off to Houston for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. While there, he granted an interview to the editors of the Houston Chronicle in which he decried the unwillingness of certain people to listen to alternative viewpoints. Who, precisely? Scientists. Climate change scientists, to be exact.
Continue reading ‘Mike Griffin on Global Warming, Intolerance and Policing Free Speech’
