Over the past few months I’ve posted several diaries chronicling the exploits of House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) with reference to global warming. Chairman Boehlert has been publicly adamant that nothing should get in the way of the science, even rebuking members of his own party. Clearly he still has some semblance of a spine and does not regulary read the Republican playbook.
Now, he has gone after NASA in its efforts to control the agency’s lead climate scientist. James E. Hansen is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr.Hansen has long been a vocal advocate of curtailing the emissions leading to global warming.
But then, Dr.Hansen did something, that was perhaps too much for insiders to bear.
But during the last two years, citing growing evidence of dangerous climate shifts ahead, he occasionally criticized the administration’s approach to the climate problem, and in October 2004 he said in a lecture that he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.
Sirens blaring and lights flashing from coast to coast! So, apparently, attempts at proper restraint ensued.
The climate scientist, James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, and several other National Aeronautics and Space Administration employees said Bush administration appointees at headquarters had demanded to review his lectures and publications in advance. Moreover, senior agency officials were to have had the right to stand in for him in interviews with reporters.
And now, Chairman Boehlert has made his rebuke of Bushco via letter, as he has done on several occasions in the recent past.
“Good science cannot long persist in an atmosphere of intimidation,” the chairman, Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York, said in a letter to NASA’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin.
“Political figures ought to be reviewing their public statements to make sure they are consistent with the best available science,” Mr. Boehlert said. “Scientists should not be reviewing their statements to make sure they are consistent with the current political orthodoxy.”
I applaud you, Chairman Boehlert.
