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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Did the Bush White House try to block a new Web site devoted to educating the public about climate change?
Jun 5, 2004 | Even after grapefruit-sized hail and monster tornadoes assault major cities in the Northern Hemisphere in the film "The Day After Tomorrow," Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, still can't get the ballooning crisis of global warming through the thick skull of the vice president.
"I think we're on the verge of a major climate shift! You need to start thinking about large-scale evacuations! If we don't act now it's going to be too late!" implores Hall. To which the veep responds coolly, "That is not amusing, professor. Have you lost your mind?"
Subtle is not how you'd characterize Roland Emmerich's cinematic portrait of a fierce struggle between warrior scientists from NOAA and the oppressive powers that be -- powers personified by a vice president who happens to be the spitting image of his real-life counterpart, Dick Cheney.
In an amusing case of life imitating art (we use the term loosely here), Bush administration officials stalled the release of a Web site on abrupt climate change that had been developed by a team at NOAA's paleoclimate program to coincide with the release of the film, according to insiders who worked on the project. The site had been developed to make years of paleoclimate research on abrupt climate shifts accessible to "The Day After Tomorrow" viewers to help them make sense of the fact and fiction behind the movie's misleading science.
"We thought this movie presented an incredible education opportunity to create a public dialogue that would demystify these widely misunderstood problems and showcase some of the things we do here at NOAA to help observe the earth system," said Mark McCaffrey, a NOAA science communications specialist and lead author of the site.
After all, a blockbuster thriller starring a NOAA scientist that grosses $86 million in U.S. theaters on opening weekend is not the kind of pop-culture glory that comes often to the world of paleoclimatology.
But the White House apparently didn't share McCaffrey's enthusiasm. After he got permission from high up the chain of command at NOAA to go live with the Web site, McCaffrey then got word that the site was "indefinitely on hold -- with no further explanation," he said. Several staffers at NOAA who spoke on condition of anonymity said the embargo came directly from the White House.
Bob Hopkins, communications director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to which NOAA typically reports, however, told Muckraker that his office had no part in stalling the launch of the Web site. "If there was a holdup, it wasn't coming from this office," he said.
Whatever realm of authority imposed the delay, it had a change of heart. As a media storm gathered around the film and NOAA was hit with repeated inquiries about the abrupt climate change Web site rumored to be in development, the agency finally got the green light from above.
