Citing that he wanted to become more involved in the political and legal fight of the climate change movement, Dr. James Hansen, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) climate scientist most known for alerting the U.S. government to the dangers of human-caused global warming and climate change, announced this week he’s leaving his job at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in Manhattan in NYC after 46 years.
Hansen told the New York Times his departure from the government agency on Wednesday will allow him to take on a more active role in lawsuits challenging both federal and state governments for failing to limit emissions, and join the fight against the Keystone XL tar sands project.
“As a government employee, you can’t testify against the government,” Hansen said.
News of Hansen’s departure from NASA has some environmentalist groups celebrating all he has achieved.
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate action group, 350.org — named for the scientific number 350 parts per million that Hansen warned was the safe upper limit for carbon in the atmosphere — called Hansen the “patron saint” of the organization and hero for the global climate justice movement that has formed in recent years.
“As much as for his science,” McKibben wrote, “we respect him for his courage. He’s always been willing to speak the truth bluntly, from the day in 1988 when he told Congress that the time had come ‘to stop waffling so much and say the planet was warming,’ to all he’s done to bring attention to damaging projects like Keystone XL — even to the point of risking arrest to do so.”
Similarly, Jim Romm at Climate Progress, wrote that “Hansen is our country’s top climatologist. He has been one of our most tireless public servants for decades and has been right about the dangers posed by climate change longer than almost anyone else. We ignore him at our grave peril.”
Censored?
While Hansen’s job at NASA didn’t appear to stop him from vocalizing his discontent about a lack of clean-energy policies, Hansen says that in 2005, officials at NASA’s headquarters mandated the public affairs staff to review every lecture, paper and posting on the GISS website and monitor requests for interviews from journalists.
The mandate reportedly followed after Hansen alerted the media that the Bush administration tried to stop him from speaking out about greenhouse gas emissions and their relationship to global warming.
“They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,” Hansen said in 2005.
But like most controversies, a spokesperson for NASA, Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs for NASA, said that there was no effort to silence Hansen, but that the review of materials and interview requests was company policy applied to all NASA personnel.
“This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming,” he said. “It’s about coordination … That’s not the way we operate here at NASA,” Acosta said. “We promote openness and we speak with the facts.”
Still, Hansen remained firm that he was being censored, and added that the process of going through the public affairs officers had already prevented the public from fully understanding recent findings.
“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.”
Mint Press requested a statement from NASA about Hansen’s latest remarks, but our request was not returned before deadline.
Future role
At age 72, Hansen remains a champion for the environment, and is only willing to back programs and legislation that he believes will actually help. For example, in 2009, Hansen criticized a climate bill in 2009 backed by many environmentalists groups, under the premise that the bill would cost billions of dollars but not effectively limit emissions.
In recent years, Hansen has become involved with grassroots fights against individual fossil fuel projects. He was arrested in 2009 for the first time at a coal protest, and was cited again that year for sleeping overnight in a tent on the Boston Common with students attempting to pressure the Massachusetts state legislature into passing climate legislation.
“At my age,” he said, “I am not worried about having an arrest record.”