Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming

  • Mark Bowen
Penguin Books: 2008. 336 pp. $25.95

Around the time George W. Bush became US president in 2001, and long before the recent awakening of his compatriots to the urgency of global warming, one of the world's pre-eminent climate scientists became convinced that a modest warming, perhaps as little as 1 °C above recent levels, might be dangerous.

The policy implications were clear: to avoid such a warming, emissions would need to be cut promptly. Having worked on global warming for about a quarter-century, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, embarked on what he thought to be the right path. Being a government scientist, he was determined to inform the US public and the Bush administration of the need for action.

Hansen proceeded by developing a scenario with his colleagues for reducing emissions enough to avoid dangerous warming, and he began to speak freely about the urgency of implementing it. But after a brief flicker of attention, the administration's interest in his scenario faded — mainly owing to the realization that it would entail curbing emissions from fossil fuel sources of greenhouse gas, as well as other sources. Hansen began to criticize the influence of special interests and the resulting US inaction on global warming. He even publicly discussed his electoral preference for new leadership, on his own private, unpaid time. In doing so, Hansen staked a claim to unfettered speech far beyond the usual scientist's model of announcing research findings. If there was ever a pure test of the rights of government scientists, this was it.

Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming is Mark Bowen's account of the struggle that ensued between Hansen and the Bush administration over a basic principle: a government scientist's right to speak freely to the press. Censoring Science intertwines three separate but closely related stories. The first narrates the step-by-step attempts of a low-ranking NASA press staffer and right-wing ideologue, along with other officials, to censor Hansen. The concatenation of detail is not initially gripping — a timeline of events would have been helpful — but as it accumulates, the case is ultimately compelling. Bowen's demonstration that censorship spread far beyond Hansen, affecting many climate scientists in NASA and in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is convincing and disturbing.

Bowen makes a strong argument that the censorship policy originated in the White House and was administered by staff in two of its offices, the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the latter directed by physicist John Marburger. Assuming Bowen is correct about the OSTP's role, what could Marburger have been thinking as he watched his subordinates try to censor scientists? Did he even know what they were up to? If not, why not? The book doesn't say. Bowen gives a clearer sense of the role of NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, who was apparently cowed by his supposed underlings as he watched them carry out White House orders. There are deep questions here about the moral responsibilities of government officials at all levels acting as passive facilitators of misdeeds. Bowen points toward these issues, but lets the reader be the judge.

The second story, Hansen's human journey and his relationship with his wife Anniek, his children and his grandchildren, is more subtle and less detailed, but it helps the reader understand the source of the personal strength that allowed Hansen to stand up to NASA leadership and the White House. Bowen tells us just barely enough to transmit a sense of the human being inside the scientist.

Finally, there is the story of Hansen the research scientist and his discovery of the importance of the greenhouse effect. Bowen provides a fascinating tour of Hansen's scientific mind and mental voyage over 30 years, including the basis for his prescient assertions about the future course of warming. But here the story swerves off course into a morass of condescension and inaccuracy. Rather than providing a slice of science history, Bowen feeds the reader hagiography, as if he feels the need to enhance Hansen's stature — a completely unnecessary exercise — by reducing that of other scientists.

For example, Bowen refers to legitimate scientific criticism of Hansen's findings as “potshots” and erroneously asserts that Hansen's initial paper on climate change considered the warming effect of non-carbon dioxide trace gases “for the very first time”. He also wrongly implies that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its Third Assessment, asserted that the signal of global warming could have been detected by the late 1970s. Bowen further mistakenly asserts that Michael MacCracken, then at the US Department of Energy, “took the lead” in a landmark 1983 US National Academy of Sciences report on the threat of warming and is to blame for its soothing tone. In reality, MacCracken coauthored one science chapter but wasn't even on the committee responsible for the overall report and its policy-relevant conclusions. Bowen's smug attitude toward scientists involved in the 'global cooling' warnings of the 1970s is particularly inappropriate. The key issue, aerosol forcing, was complex and uncertain then, and remains so today.

Despite these shortcomings, this book should be read by anyone interested in the fraught relationship of science to government. It provides an articulate reminder of what can happen when people who should know better stand by passively while others' rights are trampled.

Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University, Robertson Hall 448, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA. omichael@princeton.edu