It turns out NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's resemblance to Alfred E. Neumann is not just skin deep.They share a common attitude: What, me worry?
From the Washington Post:
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin says while global warming is changing Earth's climate, he's not convinced that is "a problem we must wrestle with."The NASA chief -- whose agency has come under fire in Congress for cutting several programs designed to monitor climate change -- also says it's "rather arrogant" for people to take the position that today's climate is the optimal one.
More after the jump.
"I guess I would ask which human beings -- where and when -- are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings," he said during a taped interview aired by National Public Radio this morning.Griffin's comments come just months after the pre-eminent international organization on climate change released a series of reports concluding that global warming will have serious consequences for life on the planet, and he quickly came under sharp attack from some prominent climate researchers and legislators.
In addition, President Bush today called for the 15 nations that emit the greatest amounts of greenhouse gases to negotiate a common plan to address global warming, just days before he leaves for Germany for a meeting with leaders of the major industrial powers where climate change global warming prominent on the agenda.
James Hansen, NASA's top official on climate change, said, "It was a shocking statement because of the level of ignorance it indicated with regard to the current situation. He seemed unaware that 170 nations agreed that climate change is a serious problem with enormous repercussions, and that many people will suffer if it not addressed."
Hansen also said that the comments help explain why the NASA's earth science budget has been so severely cut.
Do you think anyone in New Orleans would say our changing climate isn't a problem?
Just perfect that on the same day President Bush tries to pretend he cares about climate change, his boy at NASA reveals what the administration really thinks.
In a piece from the May 28, 2007, edition of the Nation, titled "Who are the Merchants of Fear?", Cockburn says: "No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics with the growing legions of scientists now born again to the "truth" that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the earth's warming trend. . .
"The world's best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak
Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel.
"The foot soldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by devotees of the fearmongers' catechism. The IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime
qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.
"To identify either government-funded climate modelers or their political shock troops at the IPCC with scientific objectivity is as unrealistic as detecting the same in a craniologist financed by Lombroso studying a murderer's head in a nineteenth-century prison. The craniologist's calipers were adjusted by the usual incentives of stipends and professional ego to find in the skull of that murderer
ridges, bumps and depressions, each meticulously equated with an ungovernable passion or a mental derangement. . .
"Man-made-global-warming theory is fed by pseudo quantitative predictions from climate careerists working primarily off the megacomputer General Circulation Models, whose home ports include the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Department of Commerce's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.
"These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. They are as unlikely to develop models refuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the IPCC to say the weather is getting a little bit warmer but there's no great cause for alarm. Threat inflation is their business. Think of the culture that engendered the nonexistent missile gap of the late 1950s and you'll get some sense of the political, economic and bureaucratic forces at work today stoking panic at the specter of man-made global warming and the nuclear plants
needed to fight it. . ."
The entire article can be found at TheNation.com. You may have to register.
Cockburn's first article in the series, "Is Global Warming a Sin?", can be found there as well.
Naturally, Cockburn has gotten a lot comments charging him with heresy of a sort. In the latest edition of The Nation, June 11, 2007, edition, Cockburn answers some of his critics in a piece titled, "The Greenhousers Strike Back, and Strike Out". It can also be found at TheNation.com.
I think Alexander Cockburn is on to something. Thus, the NASA Administrator may be correct that the problem may not be so bad that we need to do something about it. Yep, all those US government agencies, international organizations, and Al Gore might be wrong.
In America today, if you don't like the work of thousands of scientists, there's no need to critique the actual science. Question their motives! Claim it's a liberal conspiracy! Say it's all bullshit! Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly will have you on as a guest and you'll make lots of money.
The influence of anthropogenic CO2 on climate is not determined by what magazine you write for or what political party you support -- it's determined by science.
While Conspiracy-Theory Cockburn must have busted his thesaurus coming up with all these colorful words, that does not affect science any more than the latest evangelist speech on creationism will suddenly determine the truth or falsity of evolution. These are not political questions -- they are scientific questions.
We live in this Jiminy Cricket society where people think that if you just wish upon a star, your beliefs will magically come true. You can defy gravity, you can make our oil supply last forever, you can make global warming disappear just by wishing it away.
We need to wake up and smell the f***ing coffee.
If you want to know the truth of a scientific question, ask scientists, not pundits. They won't all agree, but at least their discussion will be based on certain ground rules designed to systematically distinguish fact from fantasy.
Name one climatologist who supports the conventional wisdom that anthropogenic co2 has caused global warming.
If you don't want to name a climatologist, name some other "scientist". Let's avoid the computer modellers.
I warn you. I will fact-check you and the named scientist.
I'm like Alexander Cockburn. I'm not a scientist either, but a thinking person who doesn't believe all the shit he hears. That's what I think is going on: a hell of a lot of unthinking folks, who don't know shit, heard something about global warming, and jumped on the bandwagon because it coincided with their prejudices.
No, I'm not a right winger. I've never heard or watched a Limbaugh or O'Reilly program. I know of them, but share none of their views, as far as I know. If Limbaugh and O'Reilly think that global warming is overblown, while they may be right, I suspect that neither has evaluated the underlying data and science as I have.
Name one climatologist? How about the entire [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change www.ipcc.ch]? You think they just all made this stuff up so they could get a trip to Geneva?
Please, please diversify your reading list, and focus on sources with academic credibility. Conspiracy theories sound so good until you actually delve into the facts.
By the way, this guy's advanced degrees are in business, engineering, and aerospace engineering. Not environmental science. Would he fly in a plane designed by an envirnmental engineer or a climate expert? I'd bet no. He should know better then to pretend to be an expert on this.
Scientists who say man makes a significant contribution to harmful global warming consitute 98% of all published (peer-reviewed) environmental scientists. At least 1% of the rest work for Exxon or for "think tanks" funded by Exxon.
Alexander Cockburn's piece and The Nation is not peer reviewed, and for a reason. It would not pass peer review.
Attention "environmental president:" 10 animals headed for extinction in 10 years.