Covering Up Climate Change

Many of you already know how bad it can get out in the world of businesses and corporations:  oil companies paying for junk science to try and discredit the scientific consensus behind climate change, ad campaigns launched against Al Gore, supposed “experts” who are paid by the corporations to publicly criticize climate change…scare tactics that are eerily similar to the tactics used by tobacco companies during the rise of the anti-smoking movement.

Well, you know it’s gotten really bad when that sort of manipulative lying comes not only from private corporations, but even from our own government.  The inspector general of NASA has recently come out with a damning report that states the political appointees that were in the press office of NASA from 2004 to 2006 deliberately distorted the news coming out of the scientists at NASA concerning climate change.

According to the New York Times, “Our investigation,” the report said, “found that during the fall of 2004 through early 2006, the NASA Headquarters Office of Public Affairs managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public.”

Wow.  Now you can’t even trust what comes out of the NASA press office.  I think it’s important to note that the scientists at NASA were staying true to their data and their principles, and that it was the political appointees in the press office that were mismanaging the information.

From the Washington Post:  “James E. Hansen, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has campaigned publicly for more stringent limits on greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, told The Post and the New York Times in September 2006 that he had been censored by NASA press officers, and several other agency climate scientists reported similar experiences.”

What’s sad to me is that I’m not sure it’s all too shocking.  The past seven years have yielded many stories similar to this, from lying about reasons to start a war with another nation, to lying about whether or not our own government tortures prisoners of war, to ignoring Congress and its demands to hold investigations into the unjust firings of eight US attorneys, and now, this.

Again, a quote from the New York Times:  “Global warming is the most serious environmental threat we face, but this report is more evidence that the Bush administration’s appointees have put political ideology ahead of science,” Mr. Lautenberg said in an e-mailed statement. “Our government’s response to global warming must be based on science, and the Bush administration’s manipulation of that information violates the public trust.”