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Scientist Says NASA Monitors His Global Warming Claims

Posted on: Monday, 30 January 2006, 12:00 CST

By Andrew C. Revkin

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 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.

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.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," he said. "We promote openness, and we speak with the facts."

He said the restrictions on Hansen applied to all personnel at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration whom the public could perceive as speaking for the agency. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about coordination."

Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.

"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."

Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, is a leading authority on the Earth's climate system. He directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Manhattan.

Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long- term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. During previous administrations he has had other run-ins with politicians or their appointees, including Al Gore, the former vice president, and budget watchers in the first Bush administration.

In 2001, Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, would be an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.

Hansen fell out of favor with the current White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled.

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