January 30, 2006 - Jim Hansen is disloyal. Some might call him a traitor. He is, after all, on the Federal payroll and should toe the Administration line when he speaks in public. He hasn’t been doing that. Indeed, he has been one of the few voices calling for a change in Administration policies. Candidly, he gives the White House fits. They want him to shut up. He doesn’t fit into the mission that the White House thinks is shared by all the employees of government.

No, he hasn’t been speaking out about such hot button issues as foreign policy; the war in Iraq; or America’s approach to a democratically elected government in Palestine. He isn’t a foreign policy expert. He hasn’t been speaking out about the rapidly rising deficit and the need to balance the budget by eliminating tax breaks for the super rich. He is not an economist. Dr. James Hansen is a scientist; an expert in the study of our planet’s climate. He works for NASA and he takes seriously the agency’s mission statement when it says that an essential part of the NASA charge is to "to understand and protect our home planet."

Dr. Hansen is NASA’s top Director of the Agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Morningside Heights, New York. Hansen directs NASA’s computer simulation of the global climate. Since early December he has spoken out about the long term effects of greenhouse gas emissions, primarily CO2, resulting from our reliance on fossil fuels. He hasn’t followed the party line that trumpets that warnings about global warming are based on what they call “junk science”. That is why the White House wants Hansen silenced.

Mindful of the effects of leaks the Administration operatives have been careful to avoid creating documents that would reveal their effort to suppress Dr. Hansen’s public statements. George Deutsch, a recent White House appointee as a NASA public affairs officer, has been burning up the telephone lines to Goddard. He complained about Hansen and directed Leslie McCarthy, Goddard’s public affairs officer, to shut Hansen up telling her that it was their job to “make the President look good.” Goddard was told that there would be “dire consequences” should Dr. Hansen continue to speak out.

Dr. Hansen has been sounding the alarm about greenhouse gases and global warming since 1988. He joined NASA in 1967. This is not the first time he has bumped heads with Washington politicians with major conflicts with budget officials in the first Bush administration and policy disputes with Vice President Gore – a politician whose views on the dangers of greenhouse gases seem to be in line with Hansen’s findings.

Noting that 2005 was the warmest year the Earth has experienced for at least a century Hansen has shared his science with the public, because he says making scientific information public is part of his job. Dr. Hansen is finding that the Bush Administration is making the political climate in which scientists must work very warm indeed.