Scientific censorship - the growing threat
February 12, 2006You’ve probably all heard about the after it was discovered he had falsified his credentials on his resume. The more important issue was the attempts to from discussing global warming and climate change.
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 E. 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. Dr. 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.
Much to my surprise, I found out the same thing was going on in Australia as well -
Dr Pearman says he fell out with his CSIRO superiors after joining the Australian Climate Group, an expert lobby group convened by the Insurance Australia Group and environment body WWF in late 2003. Dr Pearman, who headed the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research for 10 years until 2002, said he was admonished by his Canberra superiors for “making public expressions of what I believed were scientific views, on the basis that they were deemed to be political views”.
…
“I don’t think it is something that has been specific to (Australia). It’s a sign of the times that governments seem to want to get on with the job of making decisions based on the ideology they have presented in their elections, and they are more reluctant to seek open and fearless advice from scientists, from economists, from the judiciary, from groups … (who) might not agree with their position.”
This increasing evidence of scientific censorship worries me no end. It worries me even more when prominent scientific leaders believe that giving frank and fearless advice is an outmoded and naive practice. Its sad that some of our leaders of science have become so mired in politics, and so interested in securing their political power base, that they have forgotten what it truly means to be a scientist.
They should hang their heads in shame.
