MURRAY: Politicized science costs us all - Washington Times
Consider one of the cases that supposedly drove the need for these new guidelines - that of NASA scientist James Hansen. He and the previous administration had completely divergent views on what policies should be followed to fight global warming. This led to Mr. Hanson to complain about being gagged by NASA's public relations machine, despite the fact that he managed to give more than 1,000 interviews during the Bush presidency.
What do the guidelines say about this situation? They say that scientists must be free to give interviews on the scientific and technological aspects of their work. That's it. There is no freedom given to scientists to discuss policy aspects of their work, nor should there be. Scientific policy is for policymakers to decide. NASA is within its rights to keep Mr. Hansen from commenting on "cap-and-trade" while he is on its payroll. (For the record, he rightly opposes it, while this administration supports it.)
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1 comment:
I have no problem with government scientists saying what they think, even if I disagree with it. The constitution guarantees freedom of speech and the constitution is the final word.
One advantage of scientists speaking their minds is that it makes whatever prejudices they may have obvious to the public. That is a good thing. For example, Hansen's public acts and speaking reveal that he is an eco fanatic (good to know).
The more serious issue is that the feds should not be employing scientists who are so biased that it prevents them from actually following the scientific method (i.e. they become post normal scientists rather than true scientists). These guys need to be fired.
Whatever these fed scientists do on the job needs to be totally transparent, no secrets.
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