NASA boss doubts global warming

More unadulterated comedy among the Climate Brown Shirts today as NASA administrator Michael Griffin says that global warming is not much of a problem. Of course, he's been lambasted by the increasingly less than scientifically reliable, money-for-opinion accepting, political hack James Hansen and a host of other snout-in-the-trough climate scientists for his views. Naturally, there are now calls for his resignation.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin continues to draw the ire of preeminent climate scientists inside and outside of NASA, as well as members of Congress, after apparently downplaying the need to combat global warming.

In an interview broadcast yesterday on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" program, Griffin was asked by NPR's Steve Inskeep whether he is concerned about global warming.

A soft question clearly meant to reinforce NPR's advocacy position on climate change. Didn't quite get the expected response, though.

"I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists," Griffin told Inskeep. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."

"To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change," Griffin said. "I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

Griffin's comments immediately drew stunned reaction from James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

Oh, to have been with Climate Brown Shirts like Hansen when they heard this one.

"It's an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement," Hansen told ABC News. "It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change."

Well, Hansen knows a thing or two about arrogant and ignorant statements himself, as a perusal of his public statements about being 'silenced' will show.

..."I was shocked by the statement and I think the administrator ought to resign. I don't see how he can be the effective leader of a science agency if he doesn't understand the threat of global warming," said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University atmospheric scientist and lead author of some of the latest reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The international body, made up of thousands of climate scientists is considered one of the most authoritative bodies on global warming.

Lead authors are those with their snouts deepest in the public pocket and with the strongest enviro-political convictions so one presumes they're going to take a dim view of any threat to ongoing research into the Climate Tooth Fairy.

Read the whole thing.