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Conservative group sues NASA for climate scientist’s records
A conservative group is suing NASA for records related to the outside advocacy and compensation of James Hansen, a prominent advocate for strong action to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, the American Tradition Institute alleges NASA has shirked requests for records about Hansen’s compliance with ethics and disclosure obligations as they relate to payments for speeches and other work outside the government.
Hansen is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
“For over four months NASA has refused to comply with a specific request for records, obstructing the [Freedom of Information Act] process,” the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia states. “The public needs transparency from its government about climate science and about agency performance of its statutory duties, particularly involving ethics, with debate about transparency, climate-related science and related policies capturing sustained national attention.”
Chris Horner, the group’s attorney, is also a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He has long attacked the consensus view among climate scientists that human-induced global warming is under way.
“The goal of organizations like Horner’s is to spread disinformation
and, like the magician, to make sure you don’t focus on what’s really
going on, the state of the science, which continues to get stronger and
more alarming,” Romm said, citing an effort to “discredit individual
scientists.”
Hansen
has for decades spoken of the dangers of global warming. “He has been
right for longer on this subject maybe than anyone else,” Romm said.
The lawsuit notes Hansen’s receipt of environmental awards — such as the $100,000 Sophie prize last year — as well as speaking fees, and seeks to compel information about whether he received waivers for the outside work.
“Under federal statutes and NASA rules, employees may not privately benefit from their public office,” Horner said in a statement. “Outside income must be disclosed, certain activities avoided, and permission must be applied for before engaging in permissible outside employment or activities.”
Hansen and a NASA spokesman could not be reached for comment.
The American Tradition Institute has also sought correspondence and other information related to another prominent climate scientist, Michael Mann, from when he was at the University of Virginia.
Mann, now with Pennsylvania State University, is well-known for creating the “hockey stick” chart that reconstructs temperatures over the past millennium and shows a sharp uptick in the 20th century.
He is among the researchers whose emails with other scientists were made public with the hacking of messages in late 2009 from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the United Kingdom.
Climate skeptics have alleged the messages revealed efforts to squelch information that undercuts evidence of human-induced climate change. But multiple probes have found that the CRU-linked researchers did not try to manipulate or suppress data.
