Posted on 06/06/2007 2:15:51 PM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
NASA administrator Michael Griffin made headlines last week when he told a National Public Radio interviewer he wasn't sure global warming was a problem. "All I can really do is apologize to all you guys ... I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this," said Griffin.
The head of NASA told scientists and engineers that he regrets airing his personal views about global warming during a recent radio interview, according to a video of the meeting obtained by The Associated Press.
NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in the closed-door meeting Monday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that "unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it."
"All I can really do is apologize to all you guys ... I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this," he said.
Griffin made headlines last week when he told a National Public Radio interviewer he wasn't sure global warming was a problem.
"I have no doubt that ... a trend of global warming exists," Griffin said on NPR. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."
The radio interview angered some climate scientists, who called his remarks ignorant.
An international panel this year predicted that uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions could drive up global temperatures and trigger heat waves, devastating droughts and super storms. Observations by NASA satellites show evidence of rapidly melting glaciers and shrinking of critical marine plant life due to warmer seas.
Griffin reiterated that NASA's job was to provide scientific data on global warming and leave it up to policy makers to decide what to do with it.
Griffin told JPL workers he tried to separate his opinions during the NPR interview, but that it got "lost in the shuffle."
"Doing media interviews is an art. Their goal is usually to generate controversy because it sells interviews and papers and my goal is usually to avoid controversy," he said.
That’s interesting, given that Austin is pretty widely known to be a liberal loony-bin. Good news in that at least a part of that city is still sane.
Well, it ain’t no joke, it’s going to cost all of us a lot of money if this whole charade isn’t stopped.
His remarks weren't ignorant at all. He never claimed to be a climate expert, but he asked some very good questions about the assertion that we must solve the "problem".
Scientists are people too. Lots of cash is floating around for those who are willing to spout the GlobalWarmingTM mantra and people can get pretty vicious when it comes to protecting their rice bowls.
Sounded scripted to me; what I got out of it is that he wants to keep his job.
no he doesn’t... shouldn’t have apologized at all.
What insanity!
“personal views”
Each and every utterance from the believers has been no more than a personal view.
“Who are the Brain Police?” FZ
All is forgiven, just spend a few months in the Al Gore harmony hut for retraining
Genuine scientists know that the Sun is the source of climate change, and has been for the past 400,000 years. Climate change has been going on for millions of years. If Mars and other planets in our solar system are experiencing global warming, so is the Earth. The Earth has experienced and will continue to experience climate change. Unfortunately you cannot say that, especially on Marxist public radio.
BUMP!
Why hasn't he been fired yet?
As an aside, this whole episode reminds me of the old cautionary tale about the gardener hired to "take care of the garden". Eventually he felt entitled to take over the entire household...
Griffin couldn't have said it better: we provide the facts, the politicians, elected or otherwise, decide what to do with them...
He didn’t take anything back except to clarify that it is his own opinion and not his job to lobby for policy on this issue. But, how is it Hansen’s job to lobby for policy on this?
“There is a streak of fascism in the science community that gives one pause.”
The global warming movement is driven by politics. Politicians and the media are the storm troopers, scientists.
The radio interview angered some climate scientists, who called his remarks ignorant.Why, oh, why, doesn't the article name names? What Griffin said last week was remarkably enlightened.
I don't understand why people say it's funny. The taxes, loss of freedom, loss of jobs when the worldwide economic depression hits, and socialism imposed by force is no laughing matter.
And it's all over some BS theory that has yet to be proven and makes no sense if you look at how small our CO2 emissions really are compared to the total and the volume of the atmosphere. That's not even including the cause (sun) and the real greenhouse gas (water vapor).
Yes, very much so. I was in a PhD program in Ecology back in the '80s. I attended a briefing on a study of the correlation between air pollution and the disappearance of balsams in the Smokies. The conclusion of the study was they could find no such correlation. (We now know it was an insect infestation causing the problem.)
Immediately after the presentation, the forum shifted to how to impose restrictions on air emissions in order to protect the Smokies woodlands. I interrupted and asked for clarification ... why would we do that if we could find no correlation of air pollution and the destruction of the mountain forests? The response was that it was a good opportunity to use scientific research to change human behavior.
I dropped out of the program a couple of years later. The politics outweighed science everywhere I turned.
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