[Mb-civic] Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

January 29, 2006
Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has 
tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month 
calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked 
to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's 
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials 
at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his 
coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and 
requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is 
to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the 
space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's 
not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote 
openness and we speak with the facts."

He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National 
Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that 
government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that 
policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed 
spokesmen.

Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review 
interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a 
sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any 
individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about 
coordination."

Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such 
procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent 
findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.

"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, 
"because public concern is probably the only thing capable of 
overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."

Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, 
directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the 
Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term 
threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that 
are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. 
He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various 
administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush 
administration and Vice President Al Gore.

In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick 
Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House 
officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, 
which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first 
step than curbing carbon dioxide.

He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech 
at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he 
complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled 
and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.

But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made 
since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he 
says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon 
dioxide.

In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. 
Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly 
because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to 
understand and protect our home planet."

He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come 
through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, 
leaving no significant trails of documents.

Dr. Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no 
official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up." But Dr. Einaudi added, 
"That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied."

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of 
calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the 
American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that 
significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, 
particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership 
by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth 
"a different planet."

The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but 
not reverse, the growth of emissions.

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 
showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, 
officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned 
public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that 
there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, 
those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft 
memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors 
could stand in for him in any news media interviews.

Mr. Acosta said the calls and meetings with Goddard press officers 
were not to introduce restrictions, but to review existing rules. He said 
Dr. Hansen had continued to speak frequently with the news media.

But Dr. Hansen and some of his colleagues said interviews were 
canceled as a result.

In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer 
at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National 
Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public 
affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy 
said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the 
country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job 
was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House 
appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority.

But she added: "I'm a career civil servant and Jim Hansen is a 
scientist. That's not our job. That's not our mission. The inference was 
that Hansen was disloyal."

Normally, Ms. McCarthy would not be free to describe such 
conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after 
Mr. Acosta, at NASA headquarters, told The Times that she would not 
face any retribution for doing so.

Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was 
asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the 
sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.

Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: "Why am I going to go 
out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a 
dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?"

Mr. Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was 
telling the truth. Several colleagues of both Ms. McCarthy and Dr. 
Hansen said Ms. McCarthy's statements were consistent with what she 
told them when the conversations occurred.

"He's not trying to create a war over this," said Larry D. Travis, an 
astronomer who is Dr. Hansen's deputy at Goddard, "but really feels 
very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to 
inform the public."

Dr. Travis said he walked into Ms. McCarthy's office in mid-December 
at the end of one of the calls from Mr. Deutsch demanding that Dr. 
Hansen be better controlled.

In an interview on Friday, Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist 
and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's 
leading independent scientific body, praised Dr. Hansen's scientific 
contributions and said he had always seemed to describe his public 
statements clearly as his personal views.

"He really is one of the most productive and creative scientists in the 
world," Dr. Cicerone said. "I've heard Hansen speak many times and 
I've read many of his papers, starting in the late 70's. Every single 
time, in writing or when I've heard him speak, he's always clear that 
he's speaking for himself, not for NASA or the administration, 
whichever administration it's been."

The fight between Dr. Hansen and administration officials echoes 
other recent disputes. At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic 
and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who 
routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if 
the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and 
then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

Where scientists' points of view on climate policy align with those of 
the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on 
extracurricular lectures or writing.

One example is Indur M. Goklany, assistant director of science and 
technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For 
years, Dr. Goklany, an electrical engineer by training, has written in 
papers and books that it may be better not to force cuts in greenhouse 
gases because the added prosperity from unfettered economic activity 
would allow countries to exploit benefits of warming and adapt to 
problems.

In an e-mail exchange on Friday, Dr. Goklany said that in the Clinton 
administration he was shifted to nonclimate-related work, but added 
that he had never had to stop his outside writing, as long as he 
identified the views as his own.

"One reason why I still continue to do the extracurricular stuff," he 
wrote, "is because one doesn't have to get clearance for what I plan on 
saying or writing."

    * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
    *

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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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