During a 2008 CBS 60 Minutes interview, Al Gore, who was launching a major global warming crisis advertising campaign at the time, responded to a question by Leslie Stahl about skeptics stating, “I think those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view.
They’re almost like the ones who still believe that the Moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the world is flat.” So wouldn’t you expect that some of those people who actually witnessed the Earth from orbit and walked on the Moon… those “flat-Earthers” … to know better than to question the scientific basis for his alarmist climate claims? Well, apparently, this just isn’t the case.
Seven Apollo astronauts, along with two former NASA Johnson Space Center directors and several former senior management-level technical experts, have recently lodged formal complaints to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Jr. regarding the dismal and embarrassing state of the agency’s climate science programs. These charges were presented in two separate letters that were hand-delivered, then publicly released.
The first letter, dated April 10, admonished the agency for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change, while neglecting basic empirical evidence that calls the theory into question. The group also charged that NASA in general, and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in particular, has failed to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change, and is relying too heavily upon complex climate models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions. It specifically asked that GISS, headed by Dr. James Hansen, be required to “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites.”
The second letter, dated May 11, took issue with formal statements by NASA Chief Scientist Dr. Waleed Abdalati, which contradicted a response he had made to the first letter that: “As an agency, NASA does not draw conclusions and issue ‘claims’ about research findings.” Yet only eight days later, Abdalati testified at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing that the sea level was projected to rise between 0.2 meters and 2 meters within the next 87 years. He said that the lower ranges were less likely, and that “…the highest values are based on warmest of the temperature scenarios commonly considered for the remainder of the 21stcentury.” He added: “The consequences of a 1 meter rise in sea level by the end of this century would be very significant in terms of human well-being and economics, and potentially global socio-political stability.”
