Political Science

by BRYAN FARRELL

[posted online on February 13, 2006]

New York

When NASA's top climatologist, James E. Hansen, was silenced because his research on global warming was at odds with Bush Administration policies, he became a cause célèbre for browbeaten scientists fed up with the government stranglehold on their research.

It's fitting, then, that he was a last-minute addition to the recent Conference on Politics and Science, hosted by the journal Social Research at the New School, where leading scientists and policy experts discussed the politicization of science and the urgency to address the consequences of global climate change.

Hansen has largely ignored the media for the past fifteen years, slightly less than half his tenure at NASA. But after a presentation in December on global warming to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, he began to feel an even greater restraint on the public dissemination of his research.