Tornado Alley (PROG)

[My Dime]

Questions for Drew Shindell

Political Heat
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON

Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone’s interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.

If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.

By NASA? Well, it’s a NASA decision following the directives from their political leaders. The money has been redirected into the manned space program, primarily.

Are you referring to President Bush and his plan to send Americans to Mars? The moon and Mars, yes. It’s fine to do it for national spirit or exploring the cosmos, but the problem is that it comes at the cost of observing and protecting our home planet.

Why is NASA involved in climate research in the first place? There is no federal agency whose primary mission is the climate, and that’s a problem, because climate doesn’t command the clout that it should in Washington. Since NASA is the primary agency for launching new scientific satellites, it has ended up collecting some of the most important data on climate change.

I take it you don’t ride along on the satellites. Like the guy in “Dr. Strangelove” who was riding on the bombs? No. I would volunteer to go up on the shuttle, but I don’t think they would take someone like me. My eyesight is really bad.

What do you make of the news of that female astronaut who reportedly planned to kill a romantic rival? Who knew that NASA would turn up in Congress one week and in the tabloids the next?

There are now several bills floating around Congress that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Is one better than the others? They are useful first steps. But they are just baby steps. In the long term, we have to reduce emissions much more than any of these bills envision. At the state level, California is a great example of what the rest of the country should be doing. They require that energy be used efficiently, and as a result their per capita energy use has stayed level for decades, despite the growth in their economy.

Why do you think the federal government has been so phobic about adopting energy-efficiency regulations? “Phobic” is the right word, because it’s irrational not to conserve when you think of all the advantages, such as keeping money in consumers’ pockets instead of sending it to Middle Eastern countries that hate us.

What do you consider the most immediate threat of global warming? More heat waves, more drought, rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes.

On the plus side, will New Yorkers one day be able to walk down Broadway in the dead of winter and get a tan? No, it’s not going to get sunnier. Same amount of sun. Just hotter.

The president acknowledged the problem of “global climate change” in his State of the Union address last month. What do you think of the phrase? I’m mostly O.K. with it. It’s a phrase scientists use all the time.

And “global warming”? A bad name. Global warming sounds cozy and comfortable.

So perhaps you should try a new coinage. “Climate meltdown” sounds a little more ominous.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/magazine/18WWLNQ4.t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=print