Scientists Say They're Being Gagged,White House monitors

[cal04]

Scientists Say They're Being Gagged By Bush ,White House monitors their media contact

Scientists doing climate research for the federal government say the Bush administration has made it hard for them to speak forthrightly to the public about global warming. The result, the researchers say, is a danger that Americans are not getting the full story on how the climate is changing. Employees and contractors working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with a U.S. Geological Survey scientist working at an NOAA lab, said in interviews that over the past year administration officials have chastised them for speaking on policy questions; removed references to global warming from their reports, news releases and conference Web sites; investigated news leaks; and sometimes urged them to stop speaking to the media altogether.

Their accounts indicate that the ideological battle over climate-change research, which first came to light at NASA, is being fought in other federal science agencies as well. These scientists -- working nationwide in research centers in such places as Princeton, N.J., and Boulder, Colo. -- say they are required to clear all media requests with administration officials, something they did not have to do until the summer of 2004. Before then, climate researchers -- unlike staff members in the Justice or State departments, which have long-standing policies restricting access to reporters -- were relatively free to discuss their findings without strict agency oversight.


"There has been a change in how we're expected to interact with the press," said Pieter Tans, who measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming and has worked at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder for two decades. He said that although he often "ignores the rules" the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some people feel intimidated -- I see that." Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation's water supply. Once in 2002, Milly said, Interior officials declined to issue a news release on grounds that it would cause "great problems with the department." In November 2005, they agreed to issue a release on a different climate-related paper, Milly said, but "purged key words from the releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate' and 'climate change.' ''


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The assertion that climate scientists are being censored first surfaced in January when James Hansen, who directs NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the New York Times and the Washington Post that the administration sought to muzzle him after he gave a lecture in December calling for cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. (NASA Administrator Michael Griffin issued new rules recently that make clear that its scientists are free to talk to members of the media about their scientific findings, including personal interpretations.) Two weeks later, Hansen suggested to an audience at the New School University in New York that his counterparts at NOAA were experiencing even more severe censorship. "It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States," he told the crowd.

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http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0416-03.htm

[Trillo]

1. Part of keeping people confused.

First, set out the lies to contradict the truth, the propaganda multiplies.

Then, assasinate the truth, so there is none in the public debate.

All that's left is lies.

[Rex]

2. To late, we doomed the ecosystem long ago.

Now Bush and crew want to give it a lethal injection, without an audience. Censorship from our gummit? NO WAY. :eyes:

[cassiepriam]

3. Maybe that is why BushCo is so intent on blowing up the planet...

to save us from a slow lingering death due to the destruction of the ecosystem.

[peacetalksforall]

4. It is one thing to create dis-reality in the PNAC world and include

corporation media. It seems like it is another to try to bring the scientists in on it, even the ones paid by us.

Even if ours are silenced, U.S. PNAC dis-reality manufacturers can't rule the scientists in other countries, I would think. However, I still wonder about all the dead bio-scinetists who died before their average life expectancy.

Who knows. Who knew that a PNAC-baron dictatorship would creep up on us this quickly bringing with them their attempts on using a little bit of nazism, a little bit of medeival torture, a lot of black-out, a lof of facism, some communism, a log of invaders and marauders - all forms of something that we should have learned from - something that we could have evolved away from.

[lovuian]

5. Finally the dam is springing leaks!!!

when is it going to bust!!!