shame, smithsonian, shame on you

The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering the U.S. Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum. Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered "to show that global warming could go either way," Sullivan said.

really? back to this whole idea that there is any debate about humans causing global warming? believe it or not, there is not two sides to this issue. it's here. we caused it. now we gotta deal. it's a sad day when an institution like the smithsonain thinks it has to fudge the scientific facts cause they may get their funding pulled by a congress and president indebted to the energy lobby. if you don't take my word for it (and you really shouldn't since my idea of science was and is mr. wizard), here's what dr. naomi oreskes of ucal said (quite well, methinks) on this phony debate:

So why does it seem as if there is major scientific disagreement? Because a few noisy skeptics -- most of whom are not even scientists -- have generated a lot of chatter in the mass media. At the National Press Club recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen dismissed the consensus as "religious belief." To be sure, no scientific conclusion can ever be proven, absolutely, but it is no more a "belief" to say that Earth is heating up than it is to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information or that quarks are the basic building blocks of subatomic matter. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best available science, and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.
The chatter of skeptics is distracting us from the real issue: how best to respond to the threats that global warming presents.

and while the only power point presentation i did not fall asleep in (that's really why it deserved an oscar) was a good jumpstart, news like this self-censorship at the smithsonain of all places does not bode well...