Washington Post: Scientists being told what they can say or not say...
 

Scientists Say They're Being Gagged by Bush
By Juliet Eilperin
The Washington Post

Sunday 16 April 2006

White House monitors their media contacts.


Washington - Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing.

Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether. Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well.

These scientists - working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo. - say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, climate researchers - unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters - were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.

"There has been a change in how we're expected to interact with the press," said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He said that although he often "ignores the rules" the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some people feel intimidated - I see that."

Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation's water supply.

Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause "great problems with the department." In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.' ''

Administration officials said they are following long-standing policies that were not enforced in the past. Kent Laborde, a NOAA public affairs officer who flew to Boulder last month to monitor an interview Tans did with a film crew from the BBC, said he was helping facilitate meetings between scientists and journalists.

"We've always had the policy, it just hasn't been enforced," Laborde said. "It's important that the leadership knows something is coming out in the media, because it has a huge impact. The leadership needs to know the tenor or the tone of what we expect to be printed or broadcast."

Several times, however, agency officials have tried to alter what these scientists tell the media. When Tans was helping to organize the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference near Boulder last fall, his lab director told him participants could not use the term "climate change" in conference paper's titles and abstracts. Tans and others disregarded that advice.

None of the scientists said political appointees had influenced their research on climate change or disciplined them for questioning the administration. Several researchers have received bigger budgets in recent years because President Bush has focused on studying global warming rather than curbing greenhouse gases. NOAA's budget for climate research and services is now $250 million, up from $241 million in 2004.

The assertion that climate scientists are being censored first surfaced in January when James Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the New York Times and the Washington Post that the administration sought to muzzle him after he gave a lecture in December calling for cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. (NASA Administrator Michael Griffin issued new rules recently that make clear that its scientists are free to talk to members of the media about their scientific findings, including personal interpretations.)

Two weeks later, Hansen suggested to an audience at the New School University in New York that his counterparts at NOAA were experiencing even more severe censorship. "It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States," he told the crowd.

NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher responded by sending an agency-wide e-mail that said he is "a strong believer in open, peer-reviewed science as well as the right and duty of scientists to seek the truth and to provide the best scientific advice possible."

"I encourage our scientists to speak freely and openly," he added. "We ask only that you specify when you are communicating personal views and when you are characterizing your work as part of your specific contribution to NOAA's mission."

NOAA scientists, however, cite repeated instances in which the administration played down the threat of climate change in their documents and news releases. Although Bush and his top advisers have said that Earth is warming and human activity has contributed to this, they have questioned some predictions and caution that mandatory limits on carbon dioxide could damage the nation's economy.

In 2002, NOAA agreed to draft a report with Australian researchers aimed at helping reef managers deal with widespread coral bleaching that stems from higher sea temperatures. A March 2004 draft report had several references to global warming, including "Mass bleaching ... affects reefs at regional to global scales, and has incontrovertibly linked to increases in sea temperature associated with global change."

A later version, dated July 2005, drops those references and several others mentioning climate change.

NOAA has yet to release the coral bleaching report. James Mahoney, assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, said he decided in late 2004 to delay the report because "its scientific basis was so inadequate." Now that it is revised, he said, he is waiting for the Australian Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to approve it. "I just did not think it was ready for prime time," Mahoney said. "It was not just about climate change - there were a lot of things."

On other occasions, Mahoney and other NOAA officials have told researchers not to give their opinions on policy matters. Konrad Steffen directs the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a joint NOAA-university institute with a $40 million annual budget. Steffen studies the Greenland ice sheet, and when his work was cited last spring in a major international report on climate change in the Arctic, he and another NOAA lab director from Alaska received a call from Mahoney in which he told them not to give reporters their opinions on global warming.

Steffen said that he told him that although Mahoney has considerable leverage as "the person in command for all research money in NOAA ... I was not backing down."

Mahoney said he had "no recollection" of the conversation, which took place in a conference call. "It's virtually inconceivable that I would have called him about this," Mahoney said, though he added: "For those who are government employees, our position is they should not typically render a policy view."

The need for clearance from Washington, several NOAA scientists said, amounts to a "pocket veto" allowing administration officials to block interviews by not giving permission in time for journalists' deadlines.

Ronald Stouffer, a climate research scientist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, estimated his media requests have dropped in half because it took so long to get clearance to talk from NOAA headquarters. Thomas Delworth, one of Stouffer's colleagues, said the policy means Americans have only "a partial sense" of what government scientists have learned about climate change.

"American taxpayers are paying the bill, and they have a right to know what we're doing," he said.

thats a lot of reading. :Oh crap

interesting read

the bush administration withholding evidence? never!

Loooooooooooooooooong post :(

And the list rolls on chshkt - if it's not that, there are 56,000 other loads of crap they are involved in.

The current Admin would not know a true fact if they personally witnessed it.

It's only a matter of time before the shit hits and old problems, lies and deception which were swepted under the carpet, jump up and bite massive lumps of ass.

a link and smaller caption would help - but the post is interesting and will only show more of the corruption if it is true

I went to the washington post and did a search on Juliet Eilperin and global warming and couldnt find the article - so I would really like to see where you got that from

:1orglaugh...:love2suck

bushgagging.com

they know what's best for us. now sit down and get back to work. nothing to see here.

i dont doubt some of this takes place , but it always amuses me when theres a news report about people not being able to speak to the press..

Correct me if im wrong but , how did the report get out if they are being silenced by bush? he obviously isnt doing a very good job keeping them quiet :)

Nobody cares about global warming anyway

Only 1007 days left

The temperature of the planet has changed by what, 1 degree over 100 years? Less? That doesn't seem like much in the grand scheme of things. I mean, this planet has had an ice age, and other radical events. Surely the difference in temperature has varied by greater than 1 degree over a period of 100 years before without the intervention of humans?

lol 1 degree per 100year would be catastrophic in < 100 thousand years

either way it should be rather obvious that whatever "natural" climate changes that took place in the past , we are putting things in the air that must do something in addition to the natural changes..

i think we will be finding some new answers here shorty.. the japanese just finished drilling in antarctica and got the first ever million year old ice samples.. once they pop those open and test the air bubbles , they will have air from a million years ago to compare, i think that will give us a bit more understanding..

Really stupid:disgust

Actually its pretty scary how the government edits their scientific papers. They had a whole 20/20 special on it or 60 minutes lol I cant remember which. But then we are all going to hell in a handbasket! lol

I remember discussing this years ago with a few people. One worked for a conservative think tank, one worked for the press on the hill and 2 others worked for the government. It seemed pretty common knowledge then.

Where can I get this clock :1orglaugh

new dukedollars site lol!!!

The article raises interesting questions about the role of scientists in setting policy.

Are scientists elected to office? Where is their accountability?

The comparison to Nazi Germany is absurd.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...l/14306512.htm
Posted on Sun, Apr. 09, 2006

Why we need to worry about global warming
WITH CLIMATE-RELATED CHANGES OCCURING FASTER THAN EXPECTED SCIENTISTS SAY WE HAVE 10 YEARS TO SLASH CARBON FUEL USE - OR ELSE
Ross Gelbspan
In 1995, a panel of the world's leading climate scientists declared that unless humanity cuts its use of coal and oil by 70 percent over the next hundred years, the world will suffer significant disruptions from global warming toward the end of this century.

Just six years later, that same body, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), declared that warming had ``already affected physical and biological systems'' in many areas of the world. The news that at least some damage was happening faster than predicted was alarming; the United Nations' top environmental official said it ``should sound alarm bells in every national capital.''

Today, all bets are off.

In January, the famed British ecologist James Lovelock declared that we have already passed the ``point of no return.'' Others, including NASA'S James Hansen, one of the world's pre-eminent climate scientists, think we still have about a 10-year grace period in which to make major changes.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, also sees a 10-year timeline and says dramatic cuts in carbon fuel use must be made ``if humanity is to survive.'' And British climate expert Peter Cox says: ``The scientific agenda has moved from improving predictions to thinking about . . . the chances of something awful happening.''

Although the IPCC no longer says exactly when we have to hit a 70 percent reduction of oil and coal to prevent disaster -- those scientists now say as soon as possible -- it's clearly a lot sooner than the end of the century, as they originally thought. To judge how big a change that would be, you need only consider that the current Kyoto Protocol calls for emissions cuts of a mere 8 percent by 2012, and that applies only to industrial countries.

A 70 percent reduction, in practical terms, means for instance that all next-generation cars worldwide would need to be hybrids, and the generation after that would need to run on fuel cells or use other technology. It also means we would need to virtually abandon coal and eventually gas and oil as fuels to produce electricity.

What's truly alarming -- aside from the totally unexpected speed of climate-related changes -- is the fact that most U.S. government and opinion leaders in the press are just beginning to accept the reality of global warming. Most still think we have far more time to begin to wean the world off oil and coal.

Even environmental groups are unwilling to sound the alarm clearly -- in good part because they work in Washington, where most change is a matter of slow negotiation, but also because they're afraid of being marginalized. It is, after all, hard to tell Americans just how much change is needed when they're only now understanding that change is needed at all.

Why the new urgency? Planetary changes that were supposed to occur toward the end of the century, according to scientific computer models, are actually happening today.

For example, the Greenland ice sheet, one of the largest glaciers on the planet, is melting from above and losing its stability as meltwater from the surface trickles down and lubricates the bedrock on which the ice sheet sits. Should that ice sheet slide into the ocean, it would raise sea levels on the order of 20 feet. The rate of sea level rise has already doubled in the past decade as a result of melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of warming oceans.

In addition, the proportion of severely destructive hurricanes that have reached category 4 and 5 intensity has doubled in the past 30 years, fueled by rising surface water temperatures.

And oceans are becoming acidified from the fallout of our fossil-fuel emissions. The pH level of the world's oceans has changed more in the past 100 years than it did in the previous 10,000 years.

Those troubling signals are made all the more disturbing by the fact that climate change does not necessarily follow a linear, incremental trajectory. As the climate system crosses invisible thresholds, it is capable of large-scale, unpredictable leaps.

``The concern is that there are tipping points out there that could be passed before we're halfway through the century,'' said Tim Lenton, an earth-systems modeler at Britain's University of East Anglia.

And then there is the problem of ``feedback loops,'' which means that small changes caused by warming can trigger other, much larger changes.

For example, the Siberian and Alaskan tundras, which for centuries absorbed carbon dioxide and methane, are now thawing and releasing those gases back into the atmosphere. A rapid release of greenhouse gases from these regions could trigger a spike in warming.

Scientists also recently detected a weakening of the flow of ocean currents in the Atlantic basin because of an infusion of freshwater from melting sea ice and glaciers. At a certain point, they say, the change in salinity and water density could change the direction of ocean currents, leading to much more severe winters in northern Europe and North America.

In the face of these changes, the Bush administration has turned its back on the challenge. The environmental movement seems to have gone into hibernation. And the press remains largely in denial. We are, as the British paper the Independent put it, ``sleepwalking into an apocalypse.''

President Bush has long been antagonistic toward the climate issue -- witness his decision to withdraw from the Kyoto talks in 2001 -- but the government's denial of real trouble has continued despite scientists' growing urgency. At the end of 2004, the United States used its diplomatic leverage to prevent delegates at that December's round of Kyoto talks from formulating action plans to drastically speed up changes to reduce carbon emissions.

Recently, the administration tried to silence NASA's Hansen -- and now requires contacts between many government climate scientists and the press to be monitored by government ``minders.'' And although the president in January called for us to overcome our ``addiction to oil,'' he followed up by promoting minimal auto-efficiency standards for certain light trucks and exempting most SUVs and small trucks from stricter standards altogether.

The mainstream press is doing better than it was a few years ago. At that time, the press consistently cast the issue of global warming as a debate -- thanks to the public-relations experts of big coal and big oil who insisted journalists ``balance'' the findings of the IPCC with pronouncements of a handful of dissident researchers, most of whom were on the payroll of the fossil-fuel industry.

Today at least some press titans such as Time magazine and ABC News are taking note of scientists' new urgency. (Time's recent cover on global warming warned: ``Be worried. Be very worried.'')

Still, most of the media seem reluctant to put the true magnitude of the challenge squarely in front of readers and viewers. (It might help if the media made the connection between global warming and the escalating number of floods, droughts and severe storms that occupy ever-larger portions of news budgets.)

By contrast, European media coverage of climate change has been far less qualified. As a result, Tony Blair has committed Britain to cuts of 60 percent in 50 years. Germany has vowed to cut its emissions 50 percent in the next 50 years. And French President Jacques Chirac recently called on the entire industrial world to cut emissions 75 percent in 45 years.

Many large environmental groups in the United States, meanwhile, still tell members they can help by, among other things, buying compact fluorescent bulbs, carpooling more and keeping tires properly inflated. But unlike many other environmental problems, climate change cannot be solved by lifestyle changes. Efficiencies can cut emissions by up to 30 percent -- not the 70 percent reduction required by nature to keep this Earth hospitable to civilization.

Those environmental groups that do promote more large-scale changes -- for instance, capturing carbon dioxide from power plants and burying it underground -- still fail to acknowledge the limitation of those measures.

What is needed -- yesterday -- is a project to transform the world's energy diet from oil and coal to a mix of wind, solar, tidal power, small-scale hydro and, eventually, clean hydrogen fuels.

There are ways to accomplish that, but they require unprecedented global coordination.

One such plan was presented in my book ``Boiling Point'' after it was refined by a group of energy-company executives, economists and energy-policy specialists who met several years ago at Harvard Medical School. It would cut emissions by the 70 percent required by nature while simultaneously creating millions of jobs around the world.

That plan would:

hahaha8226; Redirect energy subsidies in industrial nations. The United States spends more than $20 billion a year to subsidize coal and oil; industrial countries overall spend about $200 billion. If those subsidies were put behind renewable energy sources, oil companies and others would follow the money and use it to become aggressive developers of fuel cells, wind farms and solar systems.

hahaha8226; Create a fund of about $300 billion a year to transfer clean energy to poor countries. Virtually all developing countries -- including China with its extremely air-polluted cities -- would love to go solar; virtually none can afford it. The fund could be financed by a small tax on international currency transactions, which total more than $1.5 trillion every day. A tax of a quarter-penny-per-dollar on those transactions would yield about $300 billion a year. Alternatively, financing could come from a carbon tax in industrial countries or a tax on international airline travel.

hahaha8226; Establish a mandatory fossil-fuel efficiency standard that rises 5 percent per year. Starting at its current baseline, each country would produce the same amount of goods next year with 5 percent less carbon fuel or produce 5 percent more with the same amount of carbon fuel -- until the 70 percent reduction was attained.

Nations would initially meet the goal through low-cost efficiency measures. When those efficiencies were exhausted, countries would draw more and more energy from non-carbon sources. That would create the mass markets for renewables that would lower their costs and make them economically competitive with coal and oil.

This plan is one model. There may be better approaches. The point is we need to start thinking big, and fast.

Look out the window. Time's up.

http://www.heatisonline.org/contents...25&method=full
Lovelock: The Point of No Return is Behind Us

It's not about scientists setting policy.

Scientists report findings - it never was up to *anyone* to mess with their findings (unless they may wish to contest them with any valid evidence). That includes any government.

It also sure as hell is not up to any government to decide what elements of the work of others will be known - or change the slant.

It also has nothing to do with the US admin on statements about global warming - they are unqualified to even discuss it and do fuck all about it anyways.

its because Bush can't understand science

haha the comment was tongue in cheek. But I mean seriously, global warming? lol. I just got back from driving all day in my SUV.

Publishing scientific data Bush doesn't agree with lets the terrorists win.

Sure... Thank god you are there to shed light on the made-up situation ... :1orglaugh

probably the INUITS also have tinfoil hats .... WTF they know about global warming ...:1orglaugh :1orglaugh