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Defend Science Commentary
James Hansen, Global
Warming, and the Bush Science Police
“In my 30 years on
government, I’ve never seen control to the degree that its occurring
now. I think that it is just very harmful to the way a democracy works.”
- from James Hansen’s interview with the New York Times
James Hansen, the top climate scientist with NASA, has come under
intense pressure from high Bush administration officials threatening
him and essentially telling him to shut up and be loyal to the
President. They are demanding that he stop telling the truth about the
grave dangers of global warming, and the urgent need for global action.
Hansen has courageously refused to bow down to the threats and has
continued to speak out.
Hansen is one of the most important climate scientists in the United
States. He has played an important role in developing the scientific
understanding that global warming is real and that human activity is
playing a decisive role in pushing it forward. He has also been an
important voice raising the question of the importance of global
warming to the public and to the government - and he has clashed with
previous presidential administrations over these questions. He warns of
the degree of suppression of climate science under the Bush
administration: “In my 30 years of experience in government, I’ve never
seen control to the degree that its occurring now.”
The Bush administration has consistently denied the scientific
consensus about global warming, has actively harassed, suppressed, and
distorted the work of climate scientists. This is part of what can only
be called its criminal role in blocking, opposing, and sabotaging all
international efforts to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions,
including most recently doing everything they could to prevent the most
recent talks in Canada this December from taking any real action.
The scientific consensus on global warming has become very clear, and
Hansen is a major and articulate proponent. His talk at the American
Geophysical Union (AGU)
convention in December 2005 was part of what triggered the latest, most
intense attempt by the Bush administration to muzzle him. He said near
the beginning of that talk:
“I present multiple lines
of evidence indicating that the Earth’s climate is nearing, but has not
passed, a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to avoid
climate change with far-reaching consequences. The changes include not
only loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for
wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale due
to worldwide rising seas. Sea level will increase slowly at first, as
losses at the fringes of Greenland and Antarctica due to accelerating
ice streams are nearly balanced by increased snowfall and ice sheet
thickening in the ice sheet interiors. But as Greenland and West
Antarctic ice is softened and lubricated by melt-water as buttressing
ice shelves disappear due to a warming ocean, the balance will tip
toward ice loss, thus bringing multiple feedbacks into play and causing
rapid disintegration. The earth’s history suggest that with warming of
2-3 degrees C the new equilibrium sea level will include not only most
of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica but a portion of East
Antarctica, raising sea level of the order of 25 meters (80 feet).”
In that talk he hit hard at what he called “business-as-usual” - the
policy of continuing to burn ever more and more fossil fuel and taking
no serious measures to even attempt to reduce the amounts of dangerous
emissions. He said : “If we follow a business-as-usual scenario, we
will be creating a hammer hitting the earth faster and harder than it
has ever been hit. Except perhaps when the earth was hit by the
asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.”
The “hammer” - the rise in global temperatures which is coming if the
emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, are not
checked - is a rise which is extremely sudden in terms of changes of
this kind in the entire 4.5 billion year history of the planet. This
kind of rapid change will hammer all plant and animal life, with many
many species dying out, and human society would face many different
kinds of disaster. Hansen argues that this decade is decisive in
avoiding that kind of catastrophe - that significant cuts in greenhouse
gas emissions must be made now. He also makes that point that in the
long run the cuts have to be really deep to stabilize the atmosphere -
perhaps as much as 60-80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions..
After his speech at the AGU convention (and after the release of data
by Hansen and his co-workers that indicated 2005 would probably be the
hottest year since records have been kept), top NASA officials
threatened “dire consequences”, “if such things come out in the future,
things that they (headquarters) had not approved.” The officials said
that Hansen’s supervisors could stand in for him in press interviews.
In a 1/29/06 interview with the NYT, Hansen refused to go along with
the threats and intimidation by the science police. He said:
“I think what is on the
line is the future of the planet, and what we hand over to our children
and grandchildren. I think that’s the big issue, and as far as I’m
concerned, personal effects are small in comparison to that.”
* * * * *
For James Hansen to speak out in the firm and clear way he has, in the
face of intense efforts to throttle him by NASA headquarters, is very
important. It makes a big difference in terms of what happens with
global warming. He must be supported. And he must also be emulated. The
planet is at stake, and it will make a great deal of difference if many
more voices come forward to speak the truth at this critical time.
Conclusions must be drawn from all this. There is a logic operating on
the part of the Bush administration. The more firmly established the
science of global warming has become, the more it is clear that there
is an urgent need for a global response to reduce emissions of
greenhouse gases, the more frenzied have been the administration’s
attacks and attempts to suppress the science. And the story of global
warming, as important as it is, is only one piece of an overall assault
on science and scientific thinking that has many critical and urgent
parts: the attack on evolution, the blocking of federal funds for stem
cell research, the Bush administration’s efforts to replace science
with fundamentalist morality in AIDS prevention. And on and on.
This is an extraordinary and unprecedented situation. The stakes are
very high indeed. This must be confronted and the assault on science
defeated.
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