Heckuva Job, Deutschie; another incompetent Bush appointee

Bush tries to muzzle NASA scientists
NASA's top climate scientist says White House trying to muzzle him
He tells of restrictions since lecture in S.F. when he said greenhouse gases must be cut
Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times
Sunday, January 29, 2006

New York -- The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Hansen said he will ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there has been no effort to silence Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," he said. "We promote openness, and we speak with the facts."

Acosta said the restrictions on Hansen apply to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel whom the public could perceive as speaking for the agency. He added that government scientists are free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policymakers and appointed spokesmen.

Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, is a leading authority on Earth's climate system. He directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute on Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.

He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled, and said he planned to vote for Sen. John Kerry.

But Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.

No paper trail

In several interviews with the New York Times in recent days, Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."

He said he is particularly incensed that the directives affecting his statements have come through informal telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.

Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there has been no official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up." But Einaudi added, "That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied."

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave Earth "a different planet." The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

After that speech and the release of data by Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Hansen said in interviews.

Among the restrictions, according to Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to the Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.

In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, McCarthy said Deutsch called NPR "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee, that might be Deutsch's priority.

But she added: "I'm a career civil servant and Jim Hansen is a scientist. That's not our job. That's not our mission. The inference was that Hansen was disloyal." Normally, McCarthy would not be free to describe such conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after Acosta, in NASA headquarters, told the Times that she would not face any retribution for doing so.

Acosta, Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Deutsch was asked about the conversations he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Acosta.

McCarthy, when told of the response, said: "Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?"

Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was telling the truth. Several colleagues of both McCarthy's and Hansen's said McCarthy's statements were consistent with what she told them when the conversations occurred.

"He's not trying to create a war over this," said Larry Travis, an astronomer who is Hansen's deputy at Goddard, "but really feels very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to inform the public, and this kind of attempted muzzling of the science community is really rather dangerous. If we just accept it, then we're contributing to the problem."

In an interview Friday, Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading independent scientific body, praised Hansen's scientific contributions and said he has always seemed to describe his public statements clearly as his personal views.

"He really is one of the most productive and creative scientists in the world," Cicerone said. "I've heard Hansen speak many times, and I've read many of his papers, starting in the late '70s. Every single time, in writing or when I've heard him speak, he's always clear that he's speaking for himself, not for NASA or the administration, whichever administration it's been."

The fight between Hansen and administration officials echoes other recent disputes. At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

When scientists' points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing.

Free to speak

One example is Indur Goklany, assistant director of science and technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For years, Goklany, an electrical engineer by training, has written in papers and books that it may be better not to force cuts in greenhouse gases, because the added prosperity from unfettered economic activity would allow countries to exploit benefits of warming and adapt to problems.

In an e-mail exchange Friday, Goklany said that in the Clinton administration, he was shifted to nonclimate-related work, but added that he had never had to stop his outside writing, as long as he identified the views as his own.

"One reason why I still continue to do the extracurricular stuff is because one doesn't have to get clearance for what I plan on saying or writing," he wrote.

Many people who work with Hansen said politics is not a factor in his dispute with the Bush administration.

"The thing that has always struck me about him is I don't think he's political at all," said Mark Hess, director of public affairs for the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., a position that also covers the Goddard Institute in New York.

"What he cares deeply about is being a scientist, his research, and I think he feels a true obligation to be able to talk about that in whatever fora are offered to him," Hess said.

Deutsch is a liar as well as incompetent
NASA public affairs official George C. Deutsch, who has been accused of exerting political pressure on agency scientists, resigned his position late Tuesday, the space agency said.

NASA Press Secretary Dean Acosta declined to say Wednesday why Deutsch left his job. But he said Deutsch, 24, claimed to be a journalism graduate from Texas A&M University, something the university denied.

University spokesman Lane Stephenson said: "Our registrar's office tells us he attended Texas A&M, but he did not receive a degree."

A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA
A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA
By Andrew C. Revkin
The New York Times
Wednesday 08 February 2006

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted.

Officials at NASA headquarters declined to discuss the reason for the resignation.

"Under NASA policy, it is inappropriate to discuss personnel matters," said Dean Acosta, the deputy assistant administrator for public affairs and Mr. Deutsch's boss.

The resignation came as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was preparing to review its policies for communicating science to the public. The review was ordered Friday by Michael D. Griffin, the NASA administrator, after a week in which many agency scientists and midlevel public affairs officials described to The New York Times instances in which they said political pressure was applied to limit or flavor discussions of topics uncomfortable to the Bush administration, particularly global warming.

"As we have stated in the past, NASA is in the process of revising our public affairs policies across the agency to ensure our commitment to open and full communications," the statement from Mr. Acosta said.

The statement said the resignation of Mr. Deutsch was "a separate matter."

Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé. No one has disputed those parts of the document.

According to his résumé, Mr. Deutsch received a "Bachelor of Arts in journalism, Class of 2003."

Yesterday, officials at Texas A&M said that was not the case.

"George Carlton Deutsch III did attend Texas A&M University but has not completed the requirements for a degree," said an e-mail message from Rita Presley, assistant to the registrar at the university, responding to a query from The Times.

Repeated calls and e-mail messages to Mr. Deutsch on Tuesday were not answered.

Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.

After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an interview: "It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated."

He posted a blog entry asserting this after he checked with the university's association of former students. He reported that the association said Mr. Deutsch received no degree.

A copy of Mr. Deutsch's résumé was provided to The Times by someone working in NASA headquarters who, along with many other NASA employees, said Mr. Deutsch played a small but significant role in an intensifying effort at the agency to exert political control over the flow of information to the public.

Such complaints came to the fore starting in late January, when James E. Hansen, the climate scientist, and several midlevel public affairs officers told The Times that political appointees, including Mr. Deutsch, were pressing to limit Dr. Hansen's speaking and interviews on the threats posed by global warming.

Yesterday, Dr. Hansen said that the questions about Mr. Deutsch's credentials were important, but were a distraction from the broader issue of political control of scientific information.

"He's only a bit player," Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Deutsch. " The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."

"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."