Science through a Political Screen

Readers of After Gutenberg (Thanks, Mom) may recall Dr. Francesca Grifo testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Dr. Grifo testified that information from more than 120 scientists had been suppressed.

“Such suppression of the public service performed by government scientists,” observed one environmental advocate, “amounts to reckless endangerment of public health and welfare,” which is wording in a criminal charge.

“Hey, maybe somebody should write a book.”

Somebody has: Mark Bowen wrote Censoring Science, a book about the political attack upon James Hansen and Hansen’s decades-long battle to bring the truth about global warming to light.

“He,” said Pilz, referring to someone who had been a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House as chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (and who then left to work for Exxon), “was obviously passing it [a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet"] through a political screen. He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout.”

It was the testimony of this preeminent climatologist and leading NASA scientist “to a Senate committee in 1988 that first brought the threat of global warming to the world’s attention. In January 2006, news broke that the Bush administration had been attempting to censor Dr. Hansen—obscuring his message and suppressing the vast body of his scientific work, which unequivocally demonstrates the reality and immense danger of global warming.”

Speaking of suppressing the truth and reckless endangerment,
the Environmental Protection Agency “released a long-suppressed report (PDF). EPA officials during the administration of George W. Bush, had concluded — based on science — that the government should begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions because global warming posed serious risks to the country.”

See also CBS website Rewriting Science and the following video clip.

Related AG Posts

• A Shadow on American Democracy
• Censorship during the War on the Environment
• Who Let the Climate Scientists Out
• More Muzzling of Scientific Concern over Global Climate Change

Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming ASIN: 0525950141

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