Analyzing Mark Bowen's 'Censoring Science'

Censoring Science is a book by Mark Bowen that expresses the political attack on Dr. James Hansen and the science that is global warming. The main issue that is prevalent throughout the early chapters of the book comes from the books own title, censoring science. What was beginning to happen was that global warming was becoming a reality, which many scientists at NASA, GISS, and the Goddard Space Flight Center were already noticing and accepting as scientific fact. But, The U.S. government was trying to stop or discredit this information when scientists like Jim Hansen tried to tell the media and get the word out to the rest of the world. When you look at what happened when President George W. Bush took office a lot of the reasons surface as to why
the federal government took the route.
The first thing that he did was, “Announced that he would abandon a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants, our greatest contributors to the greenhouse effect, and then swiftly pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, the first binding international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. As Christine Todd Whitman, then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, later put it, this ‘was the equivalent to flipping the bird, frankly, to the rest of the world.’” (Bowen, 1) This means that first of all Bush broke his campaign promise and then disrespected the rest of the world by backing out of an international agreement to help reduce our carbon footprint. Other than the obvious reasons why this information is important it is critical to note the core motivation for President Bush behind his actions because it is the same motivations that kept this central theme of anti-environmenal importance alive in his decisions that affected NASA and Jim Hansen. The main reason for these types of themes from Bush was because supporting global warming meant not supporting the oil and coal companies that helped him get elected, therefore it would just be bad business.
The administrative system at NASA headquarters was starting to shift. Soon political appointed public affairs positions were selected and began to take and give orders to NASA and GISS employees on the basis, “to make the president look good.” (Bowen, 17) These public affairs members included Dean Acosta, George Deutsch, David Mould and Dewayne Brown just to name a few of the more important characters. (Bowen,16-17)
They soon delegated to NASA, GISS, and Goddard that there were going to be new changes take place on how information was distributed and what was actually said to the media, especially the ideas and theories of Jim Hansen.
Their rules, in a nutshell, can all be summarized by a letter to Dead Acosta and David Mould from Mark Hess reviewing their rules that state, “1) NASA policy from the Administrator is that all calls or e-mails from the news media for interviews, comments or other information with NASA employees are to be immediately forwarded to the cognizant PAO for coordination with headquarters Public Affairs. No comments or interviews should be granted until they have been coordinated and approved by the NASA HQs science mission directorate and Public Affairs Office… 2) All content for the GISS webpage needs to be sent to Drs. Mary Cleave and Colleen Hartman, as well as HQ Public Affairs, for approval before posting…. 3) Dates of coming speeches, data releases, scientific meetings/conferences must be provided to the GISS PAO with enough advance notice to be able to keep HQ fully informed of any activities which may generate significant media coverage.” (Bowen,
41-42)
One of the things that resulted from this was that NASA scientists could no longer talk to the press first hand; something that they had been doing since 1958 which was the year the agency was created. (Bowen, 36) They also delayed the information of the yearly temperature data only because it was on course to tie as the warmest year in recorded history only because it would only help prove Jim Hansen and global warming as real and fast approaching. Many incidents like this presented themselves in the first few chapters and it was because of the administrative changes that took place at NASA. These people were truly choosing (or at least trying to) what science was going to be released to the public and what scientists were aloud to distribute it. They broke the “cardinal rule” which was basically “Don’t mess with science.” (Bowen 10-15)

References

Bowen, M. (2008). Censoring Science: New York: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.