Too hot to handle

Recent efforts to censor Jim Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist, are only the latest. As his message grows more urgent, we ignore him at our peril.

By Bill McKibben | February 5, 2006

JIM HANSEN, the director of NASA'S Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is a dangerous man. Not a brash man or a rebel-I remember interviewing him many years ago, and when I asked him what he did to relax, he replied, ''mow my lawn." He's spent his whole career on the NASA payroll, but never looked up at the beckoning stars, at least professionally. Instead, from a floor of offices above Tom's Diner, of ''Seinfeld" fame, on New York's Upper West Side, he's fixed an unwavering gaze on our home planet and the narrow envelope of atmosphere that surrounds it.

It's in that process that he's acquired the data, including one of the most comprehensive and accurate temperature records for the entire globe, that makes him so unsafe-data he's repeatedly tried to spread to the world, but always against resistance, mostly from politicians but also from scientists.

The latest dust-up came last week, when The New York Times reported that the public affairs staff at NASA was trying to censor Hansen's contacts with journalists-not to mention postings on his website, his lectures, and his future papers-after he told the American Geophysical Union, in a speech on Dec. 6, that 2005 had been the warmest year on record. Not that they acted out of any untoward motive, NASA officials insist, just to make sure that he wasn't misquoted.

Hansen has had to deliver unpopular news before, and he's always persisted-and this time, as usual, he managed to turn the gag order into a megaphone. In fact, if you follow the thread of the controversies that have marked Hansen's career, you can understand how the idea of global warming first came to light, how it's been resisted, and why we seem now to be entering into the most dangerous era of all, when theory turns ever more quickly into reality.