Dr. Hansen of the Goddard Institute "It's getting hot in here"

This is a New York Times article that I found interesting. After my last post it seems that Republicans are not interested in the rest of the world unless it is economic. An environmental stand is not made by the party on the right. It is just not a priority. This issue is important to me. It is the reason why I lean left. This issue weighs the most. I feel validated when former president Clinton says this is his greatest concern. I want to say "right on" when Tom Friedman calls for a think tank of great minds to come together to try and solve our energy crisis. We Americans are great people. We have tremendous freedoms. With that freedom we have responsibility. What is truly important to you? What can you do for the counrty? Better yet, what can you do for the earth?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: January 29, 2006

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 E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.
Dr. Hansen said he would 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 was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."
He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.
Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about coordination."
Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.
"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."
Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in 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.
In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.
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 Senator John Kerry.
But Dr. 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.
In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. 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 was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.
Dr. Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up." But Dr. Einaudi added, "That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied."
The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. 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 the 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 Dr. 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 Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.
Among the restrictions, according to Dr. 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.
Mr. Acosta said the calls and meetings with Goddard press officers were not to introduce restrictions, but to review existing rules. He said Dr. Hansen had continued to speak frequently with the news media.
But Dr. Hansen and some of his colleagues said interviews were canceled as a result.
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 Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.
Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. 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, Ms. McCarthy would not be free to describe such conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after Mr. Acosta, at NASA headquarters, told The Times that she would not face any retribution for doing so.
Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.
Ms. 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?"
Mr. Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was telling the truth. Several colleagues of both Ms. McCarthy and Dr. Hansen said Ms. 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 D. Travis, an astronomer who is Dr. Hansen's deputy at Goddard, "but really feels very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to inform the public."
Dr. Travis said he walked into Ms. McCarthy's office in mid-December at the end of one of the calls from Mr. Deutsch demanding that Dr. Hansen be better controlled.
In an interview on Friday, Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading independent scientific body, praised Dr. Hansen's scientific contributions and said he had 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," Dr. Cicerone said. "I've heard Hansen speak many times and I've read many of his papers, starting in the late 70's. 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 Dr. 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.
Where 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.
One example is Indur M. Goklany, assistant director of science and technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For years, Dr. 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 on Friday, Dr. 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," he wrote, "is because one doesn't have to get clearance for what I plan on saying or writing."

What do the official parties think about the environment?

I was wondering what the political parties think about the environment. I had some assumptions, I confess. But I wanted to know what the diffrent parties would say about it. What would be their official stance on the environment? I don't know what republicans think about the environment. Maybe they have it as a priority. Or if not maybe they mention it.

Here are links to four main party websites

Democrats
http://www.democrats.org/a/national/clean_environment/

Green party
http://www.gp.org/platform/2004/ecology.html#771441

Republican ... page 51
http://www.gop.com/media/2004platform.pdf

Libertarian
http://www.lp.org/issues/environment.shtml

music

mp3 blogs
http://materialcultures.org/gifted/
http://leafandlime.hobix.com/
http://www.3hive.com/
http://www.fluxblog.org/
I like.

Wake up! we live on the same earth don't we!?

Here is yet another Tom Friedman artical. I want to be a part of this revolution. We need to wake up! Is the easiest way the best way? Is the cheapest way the best way? It's like we got a large chunk of money and we are spending it all on fast food. We are gratfied with ease but it is gone and we are fat with heath problems. Okay, not the best analogy. We are not looking forward we are looking back. Mr Cheney said that conservation is a "personal virtue". Wake up! we live on the same earth don't we!? "I feel like I'm taking carzy pills" Mugatu. Someone please tell me why we living this way. Is there a good argument against this green idea? It seems the only defence to this is to imasculate the issue. If anyone reading disagrees with me, please respond with a reason i can understand.
Anyway the artical is a good read. I hope you like it.


The New York Times
The New 'Sputnik' Challenges: They All Run on Oil
January 20, 2006
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I came to Detroit looking for the hottest new American cars. Instead, I found Sputnik.
You remember Sputnik - the little satellite the Soviets launched in 1957. The Eisenhower administration was so stunned it put the U.S. into a crash program to train more scientists and engineers so America could catch up with the Russians in the space race.Well, for anyone paying attention, our generation's Sputnik showed up at the annual Detroit auto show this week. It's not a satellite. It's a car. It's called the Geely 7151 CK sedan. It seats a family of five, gets good mileage and will cost around $10,000 when it goes on sale in 2008.
It's made in China.
That doesn't get your attention? Well, there's another Sputnik that just went up: Iran. It's going to make a nuclear bomb, no matter what the U.N. or U.S. says, because at $60-a-barrel oil, Tehran's mullahs are rich enough to buy off or tell off the rest of the world. That doesn't worry you? Well, there's a quieter Sputnik orbiting Earth. It's called climate change - a k a Katrina and melting glaciers.What am I saying here? I am saying that our era doesn't have a single Sputnik to grab our attention and crystallize the threat to our security and way of life in one little steel ball - the way our parents' era did. But that doesn't mean such threats don't exist. They do, and they have a single common denominator: the way we use and consume energy today, particularly oil.
Friends, we are in the midst of an energy crisis - but this is not your grandfather's energy crisis. No, this is something so much bigger, for four reasons.
First, we are in a war against a radical, violent stream of Islam that is fueled and funded by our own energy purchases. We are financing both sides in the war on terrorism: the U.S. Army with our tax dollars, and Islamist charities, madrasas and terrorist organizations through our oil purchases.
Second, the world has gotten flat, and three billion new players from India, China and the former Soviet Union just walked onto the field with their version of the American dream: a house, a car, a toaster and a refrigerator. If we don't quickly move to renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, we will warm up, smoke up and choke up this planet far faster than at any time in the history of the world. Katrina will look like a day at the beach.
Third, because of the above, green energy-saving technologies and designs - for cars, planes, homes, appliances or office buildings - will be one of the biggest industries of the 21st century. Tell your kids. China is already rushing down this path because it can't breathe and can't grow if it doesn't reduce its energy consumption. Will we dominate the green industry, or will we all be driving cars from China, Japan and Europe?
Finally, if we continue to depend on oil, we are going to undermine the whole democratic trend that was unleashed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because oil will remain at $60 a barrel and will fuel the worst regimes in the world - like Iran - to do the worst things for the world. Indeed, this $60-a-barrel boom in the hands of criminal regimes, and just plain criminals, will, if sustained, pose a bigger threat to democracies than communism or Islamism. It will be a black tide that turns back the democratic wave everywhere, including in Iraq.The one thing we can do now to cope with all four of these trends is to create a tax that fixes the pump price at $3.50 to $4 a gallon - no matter where the OPEC price goes. Because if consumers know that the price of oil is never coming down, they will change their behavior. And when consumers change their behavior in a big way, G.M., Ford and DaimlerChrysler will change their cars in a big way, and it is cars and trucks that consume a vast majority of the world's oil.
The more Detroit goes green, the faster it will be propelled down the innovation curve, making it more likely that Detroit - and not Toyota or Honda or the Chinese - will dominate the green technologies of the 21st century. A permanent gasoline tax will also make solar, wind and biofuels so competitive with oil that it will drive their innovations as well.
George Bush may think he is preserving the American way of life by rejecting a gasoline tax. But if he does not act now - starting with his State of the Union speech - he will be seen as the man who presided over the decline of our way of life. He will be the American president who ignored the Sputniks of our day.

More about this: http://copsandkids.blogspot.com/2006/01/i-will-show-to-you-my-greeness.html

C-SPAN I love C-SPAN

There is a program(Washington Journal) that goes through the morning news papers and gives you a really thorough explanation on what is currently happening. This show could get boring but you have the Fast Forward option on the internet. Sometimes the real news is boring. Maybe that is a good way to gage your news source. If it is boring you are getting the facts. Of course I am over stating. There is a big problem with the way people get there information. Things seem to get over simplified.

http://www.c-span.org/homepage.asp?Cat=Series&Code=WJE&ShowVidNum=9&Rot_Cat_CD=WJ&Rot_HT=206&Rot_WD=&ShowVidDays=100&ShowVidDesc=&ArchiveDays=30

Wood fired

Art

Here, i have some art.
You are looking at Sagger fired ceramics. They are 6" x 3"

small stories together make America

This American Life is really great. If you don't know, go to listen to a episode.
http://www.thislife.org/pages/archives/archivemain.html#06

More Tom Friedman

I was looking for funny Dave chapelle clips on the internet, and I found this great interview with Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd. Why this came up, I have no idea. You can see Dave chapelle in the search menu. Most of the things tom says really resonates with me. We as a country and the community I live in, seem so short sighted. The beginning is kind of boring because of the introductions. Tom feels like a true moderate. Maureen claims she is but her words and demeanor contradict that. I just got that feeeling form the interview. Be that as it may, she has some important things to say.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2500886262659788792&q=chapelle+dave&time=3700000

diabetes just one more thing to think about.

http://www.c-span.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=diabetes&image1.x=21&image1.y=13

the link will look like this.

N.R. Kleinfield and Marc Santora, New York Times Metropolitan reporters, discuss diabetes and public health policy.

watch another interview from c-span. C-span feels like the only source where i can trust the information.

The cost of the war in iraq

this was an interesting interview talking about the cost of the war. she thinks the war will cost 1 to 2 trillion dollars.
http://www.c-span.org/homepage.asp?Cat=Current_Event&Code=Iraq&ShowVidNum=30&Rot_Cat_CD=US_Iraq&Rot_HT=&Rot_WD=&ShowVidDays=365&ShowVidDesc=&ArchiveDays=30
the link has just come up. i don't know how long it will be there on the linked page. click on the link that looks like this:

Linda Bilmes,
Harvard University,
Kennedy School Of
Government, Professor

You should be able to watch the interview.

I look just like the guy in this photo. Come to think of it, the girl looks just like my wife.

Just words

this is gian. i have a blog that talks about my engagement. i just thought you should know. www.copsandkids.blogspot.com
this blog is ment for reading articals and listening to interviews. i would like to post art here to.