Since taking office the Bush administration has made clear its distaste for regulating air and water pollution, even in the face of global warming. What is now coming out is how they took their political beliefs and forced them upon important government agencies charged with developing scientific analyses of these dangerous problems.
Today, the Inspector General reports that political appointees in the NASA press office altered the agency's findings on global warming. Yes, at the press office.
The world's most powerful country -- and its biggest polluter -- has some of the most talented and respected scientists anywhere, and yet
from the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."
Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases."
The arm of the White House under this overreaching executive can apparently extend into any agency, on any subject, and bend it to their political will. The reason we have career staff at government agencies is to handle such issues without political interference -- the exact opposite of what's happening now, as this story shows.
(h/t TPM)
The
news on global climate change keeps getting worse, yet it has not become major topic for presidential candidates.
Climate scientist Jim Hansen (of the Goddard/NASA Institute for Space Studies) and other climatoligists are telling the world that we have already exceeded the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that could be considered safe:
If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.
The scientists say that we need to take very serious measures very soon:
Present policies, with continued construction of coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, suggest that decision-makers do not appreciate the gravity of the situation. We must begin to move now toward the era beyond fossil fuels. Continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions, for just another decade, practically eliminates the possibility of near-term return of atmospheric composition beneath the tipping level for catastrophic effects.
While Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain all
talk about the need to do something to reduce emissions, none of the proposals they support (such as reducing emissions by 85% by 2050) come close to what Jim Hansen and other scientists are now telling us will be necessary. Even Al Gore didn't spend much time talking about global warming when he was running for president.
Common Blog
