Nothing here, keep moving......

The last three posts on Real Climate have dealt with how newspapers, by publishing fallacious (e.g. lying) op-eds, have distorted the climate debate. They have really come down hard on the Washington Post. This comes on top of the whoo hah about the Bush administrations "massaging" (scary quotes) of the climate debate by controlling access of the press to scientists at NASA, NOAA and other agencies.

Roger Pielke Jr. has claimed that tempest that Jim Hansen stirred up is over, history, shove it down the memory hole (about half way down in the comments):

Eli, you're sharing dated materials. Both NASA and NOAA obviously have had some problems. I am sure they will continue to do have issues on the PR front, but Jim Hansen has gone back to work satisfied with NASA's response, and since Lautenbacher's statement, no one in NOAA I have spoken to has complained. Those earlier news articles will be online forever, but reality will move on.

Evidently he has not spoken to a large number of people at NOAA including

Pieter Tans said

"that although he often "ignores the rules" the administration has instituted, when it comes to his colleagues, "some people feel intimidated -- I see that.

Christopher Milly, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said he had problems twice while drafting news releases on scientific papers describing how climate change would affect the nation's water supply.

(Conrad) Steffen studies the Greenland ice sheet, and when his work was cited last spring in a major international report on climate change in the Arctic, he and another NOAA lab director from Alaska received a call from Mahoney in which he told them not to give reporters their opinions on global warming.

Ronald Stouffer, a climate research scientist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, estimated his media requests have dropped in half because it took so long to get clearance to talk from NOAA headquarters. Thomas Delworth, one of Stouffer's colleagues, said the policy means Americans have only "a partial sense" of what government scientists have learned about climate change.

"American taxpayers are paying the bill, and they have a right to know what we're doing," he said.

Once more a large gulf opens.