Global warming censorship - that is exactly what the Bush administration has been practicing for the past years, the latest NASA internal investigation revealed. According to the space agency, political appointees in NASA’s public affairs office have kept scientific information from reaching the media.
In a report released on Monday, NASA’s inspector general accused politics of presenting information on global warming between 2004 and 2006 “in a manner that reduced, marginalized or mischaracterized climate-change science made available to the general public.”
That however shouldn’t be news to us, as the Bush administration has always been more than reticent on the subject, and in constant denial. Moreover, NASA’s lead climate scientist James Hansen has launched a series of allegations according to which public affairs officials prevented him from taking part in a National Public Radio interview in December 2005.
The 48-page report confirmed that the Bush administration has been in constant denial and trying to minimize the importance of global warming.
Furthermore, as we all know, the last report on climate change was in 2000, under the Clinton administration, and only a court order forced the Bush administration to issue one just now, three years too late.
NASA’s report came as a result of 14 U.S. senators’ request to investigate allegations of political interference in the work of various NASA scientists.
The response to the investigation: total silence from the White House, and denial from the political appointees, who claimed that news releases that didn’t make it to the public were in fact poorly written or hardly comprehensible for the public.
It is well known that the Bush administration takes more of an economic approach on global warming, rather than an objective one, and that greenhouse emissions regulation is not something they support. As it appears, science became nothing more than an instrument in politics’ hands, as they choose to shed some light only when it doesn’t interfere with their interests.