Nevermind. Even better, perhaps:
Climate of dissent
Sunday, March 19, 2006
http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkzOTcmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTY4OTg1MzAmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNA==
James Hansen, a top NASA scientist and former Ridgewood resident, touched off a political ruckus in January when he told The New York Times that the Bush administration was trying to censor his public comments about global warming.
Hansen has been warning about the catastrophic potential of climate change for three decades, often against the wishes of Republican White Houses that dismissed the problem or advocated a slower approach to reining in greenhouse gases.
The censorship charges sparked similar complaints from other government scientists and prompted NASA's administrator to promise "scientific openness" at the agency. A 24-year-old press officer at NASA, who had been keeping tabs on Hansen, resigned after admitting that he lied on a resume about his college degree.
Hansen sat down with Record Staff Writer Alex Nussbaum earlier this month to discuss the politics of science, the Bush administration and why he thinks humanity is running out of time to prevent an ecological crisis.
THE RECORD: How have things changed since you went public with your censorship claims?
HANSEN: For the moment, I'm just ignoring that issue because NASA has now appointed a committee to decide on what communications policies should be, and they haven't finished deliberations. The NASA administrator has said everything right. He even said if you want to say something related to policy, that's OK as long as you say it's your own opinion, it's not NASA policy or position.
So I hope that NASA will be a good example. Some of the other agencies are even more strict, and in that there may have been some progress. In the case of NOAA [the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration], they have publicly taken a position that there's no relation between global warming and hurricane intensity and told their scientists they weren't supposed to dispute that, which is not a very good scientific approach. After I raised that issue, then they did change their position and took off their Web site the official position about the relationship. So that's progress.
In my more than 30 years of government, I've never seen such constraints on communication between scientists and the public. At EPA, for example, there's very strong constraint on communication, which I find objectionable because I feel that we're paid by the taxpayers, and we should be free to communicate. Responsible scientific opinions should not be decided by bureaucrats; they should be decided by scientists. As long as you make clear that you're not setting policy or attempting to set policy, then I don't think we should be so tightly constrained.
You said you were threatened with "dire consequences" if you publicly disputed White House policies. What do you think that meant?
That was said by one of the public affairs people. I'm sure that the new policy will not allow that sort of pressure. It was getting out of hand. In my opinion it was coming from the top. The inaccurate impression that was eventually left by The New York Times stories was that this was created by a 24-year-old. But the attempted constraints on me were really coming from his bosses. The highest levels in public affairs, the top two people, are both political appointees. It should be interesting to see how the approach will change with the new policies, which should be decided on in the next few weeks.
Your outspokenness on climate change has put you at odds with political superiors for decades. Why have you continued to speak out?
We're really near what I call the tipping point or point of no return. We've already had 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming, and there's another degree that's in the pipeline, without any further increase in greenhouse gases, because it takes the system time to respond because of the thermal inertia of the ocean. There's still more in the pipeline because of the infrastructure that exists – vehicles and power plants. Even if we decide that we should slow down the emissions, there's no way to stop them on a dime. So there's probably at least 1 degree Fahrenheit additional in the pipeline.
I think that's the highest that we dare let the global temperature go. That would make 3.5 degrees, and that's as warm as it has been in the last million years. If you follow a business-as-usual scenario with continuing to increase the emissions the way we have in recent years, the warming would be 5 degrees Fahrenheit on top of the 1.4, and that would be as warm as it has been since the middle Pliocene, which is 3 million years ago.
Three million years ago, the sea level was at least 25 meters [about 80 feet] higher, and there was no sea ice in the Arctic. Polar bears and seals and other wildlife there that depend on the ice would be pushed off the planet. There's a lot of other plant and animal life that would go extinct, especially the rich diversity of alpine species. They can try to migrate up the mountain as it gets warmer, but there's a limit. The area's getting smaller and smaller as you go up and the soils may not exist to allow things to migrate.
Adapting to a larger sea level change is going to be practically impossible in the coastal regions. It would be happening at a rate of a foot per decade, but you don't feel it as a gradual effect. You feel the effect at the time of nor'easters or hurricanes or other storms and that destroys infrastructure, and then you rebuild. But you're going to be forced to rebuild at a higher level and you're going to be continually moving. So a large sea level change is something that may be unthinkable.
I argue we should try to limit additional warming to 1 degree Celsius, which is 2 degrees Fahrenheit. There are still going to be impacts from that. But that would be in the range that has existed in the last million years, or near the top of the range. It's a lot more feasible to adapt to those terms.
What's this episode taught you about the intersection between science and politics?
The thing which caused the consternation was the statement at the end of my talk at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December, where I said that the difficulty [in addressing global warming] was related to the influence of special interests. The only way to overcome the special interests in a democracy is for the people to make their views and wishes known, but in order to do that the public needs to be accurately and honestly informed.
To be successful in science you need to present both sides of an argument without bias, and that hopefully is what I'm trying to do. This is obviously a very difficult problem. The United Nations has set up an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They worked seven years to produce a very thick document. But it's so thick that they have to produce a summary for policy makers. But the policy makers are involved in the writing of that summary, and that proves to be a sticky problem.
You grew up in Iowa and studied at the University of Iowa under legendary astrophysicist James Van Allen, discoverer of the radiation belt surrounding the Earth. Did that background prepare you for the public debates you've taken up?
The example I gave of Van Allen's influence on students was his demeanor. He was just calm. He didn't get flustered. When I went to NASA, I heard that his proposal for an experiment on a mission to Jupiter was not selected because NASA headquarters was not very happy with him; he criticized NASA repeatedly for its emphasis on putting men in space instead of automated spacecraft. When I mentioned that to him in a letter, he just said, "I know that my positions have not endeared me to people at NASA headquarters, but I take the position that I'm dealing with honorable men."
It's a good attitude.
" The United Nations has set up an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They worked seven years to produce a very thick document."
Here's the rest of the story -
Back in 2002 the US, along with a coalition of Third World, tossed out Robert T. Watson, head of the IPCC, and replaced him with Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer from India. Why did Watson get fired?
Patrick Michaels, one of America's premier climate scientists, explained that Watson told the asinine whopper that the earth would warm by 11 degrees.
In the dark of night, after the IPCC members reached consensus that there was little or no proof of so-called global warming, Watson inserted this lie into the IPCC report.
At the time, the UN also made 244 other temperature forecasts, all showing a cooling. But Watson manufactured this lie. Then Watson pointed to this fabricationand told the press that it "adds impetus for governments to live up to their commitments (under the Kyoto protocol) to reduce emmissions of greenhouse gases." And the propaganda press dutifully reported it
Watson was notorious with his carping against the United States and ignoring science in favor of looney left wing politics. He railed against capitalist free enterprise socities while embracing Soviet communist planned economies and government control of private property for the Marxist common good.
Hanson has firmly established himself in the camp of the left wing lunatics and should receive not one iota of credibility.