On the coffee table – ‘Censoring Science’

If you want to know just how far BushCo has gone in collaboration with Big Oil and Big Coal in general, and folks like ExxonMobil and Peabody in particular, to censor sound science on anthropogenic global warming and its degree of certainty, this is THE book to read.

If you want to understand how this censoring, while it starts with the attacks on James Hanson, goes far beyond that, throughout NASA and onto the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this book has the details.

If you want to see how this attack came out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the degree a paper/e-mail/phone log trail was left, this book will connect the dots.

If you aren’t familiar with the major players in global warming denialism, how they stole pages from Big Tobacco’s cancer denialism (ironic that global warming denialist Richard Lindzen, a smoker, denies the tobacco-cancer link, too), and how “global warming denialism” has been respun into “global warming skepticism,” you need to read this book.

And … it will connect the dots on the stellar scientific research of Dr. James Hansen, who should have been at Stockholm last December with Al Gore and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change head Rajendra K. Pachauri as the third Nobelist, a voice sounding the alarm on global warming for 20 years.

Author Mark Bowen, with a Ph.D. in physics himself, knows the value of free scientific discourse. That, along with the career and achievements of Hansen himself, intertwine in this book.

How bad is the attack on science? NASA’s mission statement used to include the phrase, ‘To understand and protect our home planet.” In late 2006, that phrase was removed, about the time NASA Administrator Michael Griffin started machete-whacking the budget for Earth science.