In case you missed it, there were a couple of items over the weekend that offered chilling takes on the looming environmental crisis caused by climate change. The WaPo explained we’re approaching a “tipping point.”
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
This “tipping point” scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.
Unfortunately, the “policymakers” currently in charge of our federal government aren’t so keen on the idea. Indeed, we have experts who are anxious, almost desperate, to help inform the public about the serious challenge, but the Bush administration is doing what it can to silence those voices.
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.
How bad is the situation? When the Post wanted to speak with Hansen about his concerns, NASA officials tried to discourage the paper — and agreed to allow the interview to go forward only if a NASA spokesperson was allowed to listen in on the conversation.
Mary Cleave, deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Earth Science, said the agency insists on monitoring interviews with scientists to ensure they are not misquoted. “People could see it as a constraint,” Cleave said. “As a manager, I might see it as protection.”
Right. “Protection” is very much on their minds, but I don’t think it’s Hansen’s protection they have in mind.
By the way, if Hansen’s name sounds at all familiar to you, it may be because in October 2004, Hansen put his career on the line by giving a public lecture telling the public what he’s seen: an administration that has ignored the evidence.
Many academic scientists, including dozens of Nobel laureates, have been criticizing the administration over its handling of climate change and other complex scientific issues. But Dr. Hansen, first in an interview with The New York Times a week ago and again in his planned lecture today, is the only leading scientist to speak out so publicly while still in the employ of the government. […]
In a draft of the talk, a copy of which Dr. Hansen provided to The Times yesterday, he wrote that President Bush’s climate policy, which puts off consideration of binding cuts in such emissions until 2012, was likely to be too little too late.
Actions to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions “are not only feasible but make sense for other reasons, including our economic well-being and national security,” Dr. Hansen wrote. “Delay of another decade, I argue, is a colossal risk.”
Hansen, as an extension of his frustration, also endorsed John Kerry’s presidential campaign. No wonder the Bush gang wants to listen to his conversations.