House hearings on climate change censorship

Congressional hearings are to take place tomorrow on "Shaping the Message, Distorting the Science: Media Strategies to Influence Public Policy." The hearings will be convened by the House Committee on Science and Technology Investigations & Oversight Subcommittee. Witnesses will include Dr. James J. McCarthy, professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard and a board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists; Sheldon Rampton of SourceWatch and co-author of “Trust Us, We’re Experts!”; Tarek Maassarani of Government Accountability Project and author, “Redacting the Science of Climate Change”; and Jeff Kueter, president of George C. Marshall Institute. The hearings are to be broadcast at the committee's website (and also I presume C-Span).

This is the second major congressional hearing in about a week on this subject. Last week Henry Waxman's Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings focusing on apparent efforts to muzzle climate scientists by the Bush administration, with James Hansen of NASA and Philip Cooney, former chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality as the principal witnesses. Cooney resigned his post in June 2005 "after reports surfaced about his editing of federal climate reports. He now works for Exxon Mobil Corp.," according to Energy and Environmental Daily. Hansen gained headlines last year after he complained of government efforts to obstruct him and other NASA scientists from publicly disclosing their findings on climate change.