Storms of My Grandchildren (19 page)
Read Storms of My Grandchildren Online
Authors: James Hansen
It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of tracking these quantities. Indeed, continuation of life on this planet requires a rapid change of the trajectory of these quantities.
N
OW BACK TO the Keeling talk and its repercussions. There was no press release or press conference about the talk, but the American Geophysical Union meeting attracts a substantial number of reporters. BBC radio did an impromptu interview with me as I left the speaker’s platform. Bill Blakemore used a quote from my talk in an ABC News story the next day. The
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
, in articles about international climate negotiations, made note of my comment that 2005 was likely to be at least as warm as 1998, the previous warmest year in the period of instrumental data. The
International Herald Tribune
extracted several paragraphs from my talk, verbatim, making a short article under my byline.
Unbeknownst to me, this modest level of publicity was causing growing concern in the Office of Public Affairs at NASA headquarters. And the next week, on December 15, this festering consternation of NASA officials exploded into what the agency’s public affairs employees described as a “shitstorm.” The immediate cause of the explosion was the statement on ABC’s
Good Morning America
program that “NASA is announcing that this year, 2005, is tied for the hottest year ever.” ABC did not mention my name, but indeed I had provided our analysis of global temperature for the meteorological year (December through November) to Bill Blakemore the previous day.
The story of this storm reported in the press more than a month later, most prominently in a front-page article by Andrew Revkin in the January 29
New York Times
, focused on a twenty-four-year-old political appointee in the Office of Public Affairs. The impression left with the public was that this young man in the NASA press office had taken it upon himself to censor what I was allowed to say in public. Congress, despite available information to the contrary, decided to publicly accept this low-level maverick story, which NASA management foisted on it. As a result, fundamental problems for the functioning of our democracy were left unexamined.
In reality, the highest levels at NASA headquarters were involved in the censorship, and their clumsy attempts at silencing me were instigated in response to calls from the White House. The facts became clear only with the investigative reporting of Mark Bowen for his book
Censoring Science
, through a NASA Office of Inspector General investigation and report published several months after Bowen’s book, and by a penetrating ten-page summary, including new information, posted November 18, 2008, by Bowen on his blog Tipping Points. But I’d like to describe my view of the storm, including some information I learned through Bowen’s reporting, because there are broader implications that go far beyond the little tempest in NASA.
Of course by 2005 I was well aware that the NASA Office of Public Affairs had become an office of propaganda. In 2004 I learned that NASA press releases related to global warming were sent to the White House, where they were edited to appear less serious or discarded entirely. In connection with my University of Iowa talk in 2004, I had informed the
New York Times
and National Public Radio about this practice, as well as the fact that NASA’s head of public affairs, Glenn Mahone, had driven to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to verbally chew out the young contractors who had informed me about the role of the White House. I attributed the fact that both the
Times
and NPR did not report this story to their concern about the possibility of a lawsuit. Although there were witnesses to the “chewing out” administered by Mahone, there was no paper trail confirming that draft press releases were being passed to the White House.
In any case, on the morning of December 15, I was working hard in my apartment against a self-imposed deadline for my paper on dangerous anthropogenic climate change, which I wanted to submit for publication by the end of 2005.
So when Larry Travis, my deputy, and Leslie McCarthy, the NASA public affairs officer in New York, called me that morning to tell me that a “shitstorm” was under way at NASA headquarters, that I should expect an admonishing phone call from the associate administrator for science, and that strict procedures were to be implemented to prevent me from speaking with the media, my first reaction was to laugh and say, “What else is new?” then get back to work on my paper. But I soon realized that the situation was different this time. No longer would the Office of Public Affairs simply be failing to help publicize research results; now it would be clamping down on communication with an iron grip.
The first clampdown occurred that very afternoon. NASA headquarters ordered the removal of our global temperature analysis from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Web site. Although I am the NASA official in charge of the GISS Web site, the order did not come through me. Instead, the NASA Public Affairs Office directly instructed the GISS webmaster, who is a contract employee, to remove the analysis. The clout of public affairs employees was further demonstrated that day as they enlisted both the director of the Goddard Space Flight Center, Ed Weiler, and the NASA associate administrator for science, Mary Cleave, to personally review the page that I had written for the Web site to accompany our global temperature analysis. Both officials agreed that the write-up was good science and that our temperature analysis and its description should be put back on the GISS Web page. However, Public Affairs overruled the NASA associate administrator and kept our data analysis off the Web site until the next day.
On December 16, I was informed of the rules that I must henceforth live under. These rules had been laid out in a late-afternoon telephone call the previous day from NASA headquarters Public Affairs in Washington to Leslie McCarthy in New York.
As reported in Bowen’s book,
Censoring Science
, Leslie McCarthy was the only person on the New York end of the telephone line. Leslie does not work for NASA headquarters. She is an employee of the Goddard Space Flight Center’s Public Affairs Office in Greenbelt, Maryland, assigned to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the New York division of Goddard. She reported to Mark Hess, the head of Goddard Public Affairs. The call was scheduled to take place after normal work hours, and Leslie anticipated that it would be difficult. She requested that a representative of the Goddard Public Affairs Office be on the line during the conversation, but headquarters would not allow her to bring anyone from Greenbelt into the conversation.
Four people were on the Washington end of the line: David Mould, Dean Acosta, Jason Sharp, and George Deutsch—all political appointees of the Bush administration. They were in Dean Acosta’s office using his speakerphone. McCarthy was never informed of the presence of Sharp and Deutsch, who did not speak during the call. Partway through the conversation, the four were joined by Dwayne Brown, a NASA career public affairs officer.
David Mould, who had succeeded Glenn Mahone as head of public affairs for NASA, had been at the agency only six months; his title was assistant administrator for public affairs. As Bowen reports in
Censoring Science
, during George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, Mould held senior positions in public and media relations at the Southern Company of Atlanta, the second-largest holding company of coal-burning utilities in the United States and thus the second greatest emitter of carbon dioxide. Southern’s contributions to the Republican Party were exceeded that year only by Enron’s.
Dean Acosta was second in command to Mould and also the press secretary for the NASA administrator. Acosta had been at NASA since 2003, thus providing Public Affairs with an institutional familiarity and memory. Bowen suggests that this is the reason why Acosta received one of the phone calls from the White House on December 15 regarding the ABC report.
Jason Sharp was Mould’s assistant. George Deutsch was a twenty-four-year-old presidential appointee, who, according to his résumé, had a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Texas A&M University. He had worked as an intern in the “war room” of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign and had been hired by NASA on the recommendation of Acosta. Deutsch’s first supervisor, Dolores Beasley, told Mark Bowen that she had to correct Deutsch more than once for saying that his job at NASA was “to make the president look good.”
The phone conversation began with Dean Acosta expressing their great consternation about having been “blindsided” by the ABC report. But the primary purpose of the call was to describe new “rules of engagement.” These rules, they said, would apply to anyone with a NASA badge or funded by NASA, but they made clear that I was their primary concern. David Mould declared that under the new policy from NASA administrator Michael Griffin (Sean O’Keefe’s successor), no one was to take a direct call from the media without notifying the Public Affairs Office. Mould said that this rule was being put in place directly by the administrator, and the specific procedures would be spelled out by Mary Cleave. Mould said that they were “tired of Jim Hansen trying to run an independent press operation.” From then on, they wanted to know everything I was doing or planning to do, and said that Leslie must keep them informed, well ahead of time, of every item on my calendar that might attract media attention.
During the conversation Dwayne Brown entered the room and described two of the new rules of engagement, based on instructions he had just received from Mary Cleave. First, all content posted on our Web page would require prior approval. Even papers that had been accepted for publication in scientific journals could not be posted until they were explicitly approved by NASA headquarters. Second, all requests for interviews must be forwarded to headquarters, where Cleave and her deputy, Colleen Hartman, would have the “right of first refusal” on all interview requests. That is, they would be interviewed themselves, unless they deferred, in which case they would suggest the most appropriate person to be interviewed.
The following day Leslie McCarthy’s boss, Mark Hess, who was on travel at another Goddard division on Wallops Island, Virginia, received a request to call Dean Acosta. David Mould joined in the resulting conversation, in which they repeated to Hess the same instructions they had given Leslie McCarthy.
Hess and McCarthy had misgivings about the propriety of these new rules. They decided to delineate the rules on paper and ask Mould and Acosta to verify their accuracy. According to these rules, reporters would be allowed access to NASA scientists only through Public Affairs. All material on NASA Web sites required prior notification and approval of headquarters, including Public Affairs. Any activity, speech, or data release that might generate media attention must be reported to Public Affairs well ahead of time.
The teeth in the new rules were tested within days. National Public Radio requested an interview with me for its
On Point
program. Deutsch, as was his wont, scampered straight to the ninth floor, where the offices of the administrator and his senior managers, including Mould and Acosta, are located. Deutsch then informed McCarthy that “the ninth floor” did not want me to appear on NPR because it was “the most liberal news outlet in the country.” To guard against the possibility that I might agree to the interview, Dwayne Brown called McCarthy to say that there would be “dire consequences” if I appeared on the program. The request was diverted to Cleave and Hartman, but NPR staff decided not to go through with the interview, because they wanted to speak specifically with me.
I learned that another interview request, from the
Los Angeles Times
for information on our 2005 temperature analysis, had been diverted by Deutsch to a Goddard scientist who had no knowledge of global temperature data. So it was clear I could not just ignore what the Public Affairs Office was doing. I needed to fight back if I wanted to retain an ability to communicate with the outside world.
But, for the time being, I had to finish the “Dangerous” paper, which was finally submitted to the
Journal of Geophysical Research
on December 30. I included a letter to the editor apologizing for the paper’s great length. I noted that it could be broken into two or three papers, but that would only increase the total length. I requested that he consider publishing it as a single long paper, so as to retain its coherence.
I then grumpily began to complete mandatory annual government “training” exercises, which are meant as a reminder of regulations on NASA standards of conduct, ethics, equal opportunity, and so on. It was a waste of time, I thought, to keep repeating this every year. Then it dawned on me that words I was reading provided arguments that I could use for fighting the censors. The first line of NASA’s mission statement: “to understand and protect our home planet.” The last word in NASA’s core values: “integrity”—defined as honesty, ethical behavior, respect, candor. The first principles of government ethics: “Public service is a public trust.”
Stitching these principles together with the evidence for dangerous human-made climate change, I wrote a memo to higher levels of Goddard management arguing that we had to fight the Public Affairs restrictions. I concluded the memo by saying, “If NASA is to fulfill its mission of providing information that helps the public and policymakers understand and protect our home planet, if it is to uphold its public trust with integrity, it cannot knuckle under to political pressures.”