Storms of My Grandchildren (20 page)

Of course Goddard management was not the problem. The problem was at NASA headquarters. The censors were at the right hand of the administrator, operating with his approval. Goddard could not do much to affect these higher levels. But the memo, and its attachments explaining the climate threat, would be useful for informing others about the situation.

However, such an exposé, no matter how compelling, does little to cure the cancer that afflicts communication of scientific information to the public. Neither political party, I will argue, has been willing to fix this problem, which is a threat to democracy and humanity.

When I met Gore, he feigned being miffed that I did not invite him to visit the GISS office. “What’s the matter, am I radioactive?”

“Well, yeah, you probably are,” I said, laughing. A visit by Al Gore to our laboratory might have sent my superiors into a tizzy, especially since I had not informed anyone about the meeting. And, despite ongoing difficulties with the Bush-Cheney administration, I did not want to be identified with either political party.

Lunch was at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. I agreed to one of his requests, to review critically the science in his slide show on global warming, and demurred on another, to be on a board overseeing a media campaign to inform the public about global warming. As we got up to leave, he introduced me to two people at a nearby table: Larry King and Norman Pearlstine, mentioning to them my current travails with Public Affairs censorship.

Larry King could have provided an opportunity to inform the public about climate change and the censorship issue. I told him that censorship was at least as bad at EPA and NOAA as at NASA, and that the practice would surely have a negative effect on national decision making. King was sympathetic, but upon hearing that the major impacts of current bad policy would occur several decades in the future, he declared, “Nobody cares about fifty years from now.”

Norman Pearlstine, who had just stepped down as editor in chief at Time Inc., and maintained close connections there, was more interested. He asked if I would be willing to go public, to describe what was happening on the record. I agreed, and said that I would provide a detailed description of the situation.

I spent the weekend writing a comprehensive discussion of the events of the past two years, the science, and the implications. I emphasized the danger of passing climate tipping points and the urgency of policy actions. I suggested that a reason for censoring me was that I had begun connecting the dots all the way from the science to needed policy actions, including a discussion of the reasons that these actions were not being taken.

Fortunately, Andy Revkin was both interested and a sharp investigator. It is not easy to get the approval of editors for an “accusatory” article. According to Revkin, the key factor was the willingness of career civil servants Leslie McCarthy and Larry Travis to go on the record with concrete information. McCarthy had detailed notes of correspondence with the NASA headquarters Public Affairs Office and provided specific quotes to Revkin.

Boehlert was an outstanding representative and one of the best friends that science has ever had in Congress. Thus on October 11, 2006, at a meeting of the League of Conservation Voters, where Boehlert and I were both speakers, my jaw surely dropped when I heard him declare that the affair at NASA had been entirely the work of a renegade twenty-four-year-old and that Administrator Griffin had fixed the problem comprehensively.

After Boehlert stepped down from the speaker’s platform, and as people were milling around, I approached him and said, “What you said isn’t right. The problem went all the way to the top, and it hasn’t been fixed.”

Boehlert put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I know, I know.” But he had just said the opposite to a room of several hundred people. Perhaps that’s the way it works in Washington. People learn to lie with a straight face. Even the good guys.

That was my immediate reaction, but such an interpretation is inconsistent with the fact that Boehlert, now retired, was and is universally respected, even loved, by colleagues and constituents. His service to the country and his integrity are above reproach. Boehlert was properly offended by the evidence of censorship of science, and he made clear to Administrator Griffin that the members of the House Committee on Science and Technology would not tolerate scientific muzzling or censorship and that they would be watching to make sure that NASA corrected any problems that existed.

As for me, I interpret Boehlert’s “I know, I know” and pat on the shoulder as being a general expression of support or sympathy. He probably did not hear exactly what I said.

Fortunately, at about the same time that Boehlert was expressing his opinion about the narrow responsibility for censorship, fourteen U.S. senators cosigned a letter to the NASA inspector general asking him to conduct an investigation into the allegations of “political interference” with scientists at NASA. Unfortunately, Inspector General Robert Cobb hardly seemed the ideal person for such an investigation.

Nevertheless, I was convinced that the members of the Inspector General’s Office who contacted me were genuinely interested in getting at the truth, and I believe that they did a good job of collecting information. They suggested that the investigation would probably take a few months. For some reason, it took almost two years. The inspector general was made aware of Bowen’s investigations and book in preparation. It did not surprise me that the inspector general’s report did not come out until June 2008, several months after Bowen’s book.

Bowen does not agree with the absolution of NASA administrator Michael Griffin or the absence of White House involvement, as he explained in a November 18, 2008, post on his blog, cross-posted on Daily Kos. Bowen points out that the instructions to Leslie McCarthy on December 15, 2005, were described as emanating from Griffin. Mary Cleave on that day told Dwayne Brown that Griffin had received one of the calls from the White House. Also, J. T. Jezierski, Griffin’s deputy chief of staff and White House liaison, told Bowen that on December 15 he had received an angry call from the White House and added that “the ‘sustained media presence…of Dr. Hansen’ was the dominant issue all that day and the next for every top official in public affairs and communications at the agency—himself, chief of staff Paul Morrell, strategic communications director Joe Davis, and David Mould—and that these officials also held discussions with Michael Griffin during those two days.”

Bowen suggested holding an inquiry that calls the senior players, including Griffin, to testify under oath and the threat of perjury but without fear of retribution. Perhaps there is merit in that. But I believe that the fundamental source of the problems is clear, and it could be readily fixed. Unless it is resolved, the problems will surely recur in the future, even if carefully camouflaged.

The key matter is hinted at in the inspector general’s report, which notes that the political appointees running the Office of Public Affairs had the “seemingly contradictory position” of being expected to ensure the “widest practicable dissemination” of research results that, in this case, were inconsistent with the administration’s policies. Most political appointees are smart enough not to say “my job is to make the president look good,” but they know what their job is. The report suggests no remedy for their contradictory position. Its main effect is to remind the appointees to avoid slipping up, by leaving paper trails, for example.

The NASA mission statement had been arrived at years earlier, under administrator Dan Goldin, with great fanfare. A committee was set up at headquarters, suggestions were sought, and there were iterations with all NASA employees. The resulting mission statement, almost everyone agreed, was inspiring.

But in the spring of 2006, a NASA colleague sent me an e-mail warning me that I had better stop using that statement as a rationalization for my actions because it no longer existed. Sure enough, when I checked the mission statement on the NASA Web site, the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” was gone. I checked with more than a score of people at headquarters, Goddard management, scientists, and people at other NASA centers, and nobody knew what had happened. It had just disappeared.