If we pretend it isn't happening, maybe it won't happen

If you haven't followed global warming stories for the last fifteen years or so, you might not know James Hansen. He's basically the single most important scientist studying the problem, the one brought the issue to the public with his 1988 testimony before Congress. He also works for NASA, which means, by extension, that he works for the President, at least under Bush's warped view that the entire federal government is his personal fiefdom. So it should be no surprise, I guess, that the Bush's little toadies have been trying to shut him up.

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.

As I said, this should come as no surprise. As Chris Mooney has argued fairly comprehensively, the modern Republican party has a definite pattern of ignoring or distorting inconvenient scientific facts. But it's worth remembering that this was not always the case. James Hansen has been at NASA since the 1960s, under five Republican presidents; this is the first to try to quiet him. He first testified to Congress about global warming when Reagan was in office. (And as we saw earlier this week, past EPA chiefs even under Republicans used to have less of a problem facing reality.)

Today it is 52 degrees, in New York in January. This is not normal. But god forbid we actually put any time, effort, or money into figuring out what to do about it before the consequences become totally catastrophic. No, let's spend our official time and effort suppressing politically inconvenient truths.

I hereby issue the following standing bet of $10: just as those who opposed the war in Iraq continue to be marginalized in debate even though most people now recognize it was a mistake, so those who have been warning about global warming all along will be shunted aside as unserious and impractical when the problem finally gets bad enough to force our collective attention. Kind of the premature anti-fascist problem. Any takers?

Tags:global warming,news and politics ,greenhouse,science,bush