On May 31st, Steve Inskeep interviewed NASA Administrator Michael Griffin on NPR who claimed that global warming was no big deal since the “climate has always changed”. He entirely misses the point. The point is not with whether Earth’s climate has changed in the past. The point is with the fact that there is a scientific consensus that this change, which is detrimental to our species, is being accelerated by the policies and attitudes of government officials like Griffin.

As NASA Watch states, this change is proceeding at a “rate unprecedented in the geologic record; and our civilization is adapted to an extremely narrow range of climate conditions. Mike Griffin is simply wrong when he states that some other climate could be more ‘optimal’ - climate has been remarkably stable for the last 8000 years, and most societies around the globe are adapted to that static condition.” One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist (irony) to know that our species, or the majority of species on our planet, would either become extinct or suffer serious loses due to extreme changes on either side of the teeter-totter. Animals have been disappearing at an alarming rate for years, yet Griffin thinks it’s arrogant to take measures towards the preservation of life.

Griffin is another willfully ignorant Republican nominee of George W. Bush. He shifted funding at NASA from science to spaceflight, and has held several high-profile political appointments, including chief operating officer of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to invest in companies developing technologies that serve “national security interests”. In a related story from March, we reported that appointees at NASA had been keeping journalists from interviewing climate scientists critical of the Bush administration’s policies and discouraged news releases on global warming. And here I thought conservatives cared about conservation.