Since Bush political appointees started running NASA, the agency’s record on science has become something of an embarrassment. But the humiliation somehow manages to get worse.
NASA administrator Michael Griffin is drawing the ire of his agency’s preeminent climate scientists after apparently downplaying the need to combat global warming.
In a pretaped interview to be broadcast this morning on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” program, Griffin is asked by NPR’s Steve Inskeep whether he is concerned about global warming.
“I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists,” Griffin told Inskeep. “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”
“To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change,” Griffin said. “I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”
Let me get this straight. The earth is warming due to human activity. We can take steps to protect the crisis from getting worse. Climate change has the capacity to undermine life on earth as we know it. And Bush’s man at NASA wants a national audience to believe it’s supposed to be this way? Is this some kind of joke?
James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told ABC News, “It’s an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement. It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change…. It’s unbelievable. I thought he had been misquoted. It’s so unbelievable.”
Alas, Griffin means it.
The more I read Griffin’s remarks, the more astounded I am. To hear him tell it, we shouldn’t just ignore global climate change, it would also be “arrogant” to confront the catastrophe.
In some ways, this is different from the usual far-right tack — though it’s equally dumb. Bush administration officials and their allies generally prefer to argue that all of the science is wrong and global warming is a “myth.” Griffin apparently prefers a different approach: the science might very well be right, but let’s not do anything about it.
Chris Mooney sets the record straight.
Our global society is set up for — adapted to — the current climate. But now we’re moving in the direction of raising the sea level considerably — even as much of the global population is coastal — and melting large amounts of ice, while also altering the occurrence of phenomena, such as droughts, that could have a dramatic impact on food and water supplies.
How can anyone think this is not a tremendous societal risk, even if there might be some people — in, say, Buffalo, New York — who may actually have more pleasant weather under global warming? […]
[Let’s also] not forget the big picture. Michael Griffin said something obtuse in one press interview. But the Bush administration has more or less acted, for seven years, as if it agrees with him.
The mind reels.