Trying to Shut up Hansen

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Andrew Revkin has a story on the New York Times web site about restrictions NASA is trying to place on outspoken climate scientist James Hansen:

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.

(Hat tip Roger Pielke Jr.)

One Comment

  1. Further…

    In yesterday’s Science:
    Science 27 January 2006:
    Vol. 311. no. 5760, pp. 469 – 470
    DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5760.469b

    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5760/469b

    “Avoiding Climate Change
    The quote credited to me in the random samples item “Ice ages as history” (23 Dec. 2005, p. 1900) (“Anthropogenic climate change will basically produce another planet .…Earth won’t have another ice age until humans go extinct.”) was constructed from two statements that I made at the 6 December 2005 meeting of the American Geophysical Union: “business-as-usual scenarios will produce basically another planet” and “another ice age cannot occur unless humans become extinct.”

    The printed construction provides no hint of my conclusion that large climate change can be avoided via a scenario that includes action to improve energy efficiency and reduce non-CO2 climate forcings. These actions require strong policy leadership and international cooperation, but they have multiple practical benefits for the environment, human health, and economic development.

    I suggest (my talk is available at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1) that special interests have been a roadblock to this end, wielding undue influence over policy-makers. The public has the power to override special interests, but scientists need to communicate the full climate story to the public in a credible, understandable fashion.

    James E. Hansen
    Columbia University Earth Institute
    New York, NY 10025,USA”

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