There is some pretty dismaying stuff going on in government these days.
I like to call it the "secret squirrel" syndrome. You've heard the old axiom, "What you don't know won't hurt you?"
Well in the cases I'm about to write about, what you don't know just might kill you.
And the fact that the government doesn't want us to know this stuff is more than a bit unsettling.
There are plenty of examples.
Recently, NASA did this study where they talked to airline pilots about near-misses in the air, runway incursions and other general mayhem that occurs during takeoffs, flights and landings.
There are records of these things kept by the Federal Aviation Administration. But there are only records if there are reports.
The NASA study wanted to look at the frequency of unreported incidents.
NASA figured, lots of really dangerous things happen that never get reported.
NASA commissions this giant, multi-million dollar study in which pilots are questioned anonymously about near-misses.
The results were jarring.
Pilots told the researchers bad things happen all the time. But when the government got hold of the data, what do you supposed they did?
Warn the public?
No. They tried to sweep it under the rug. The results of the study still have not been made public.
The fact that the study was conducted and the fact that it came out poorly has been leaked, but that's about it.
Apparently, the prevailing government wisdom went something like this: "Gee, if we tell people about this study, they might not want to fly as much. That might hurt the airline industry. Let's just not tell anybody about it."
Nice.
Another recent bit of government secret squirrelry (yeah, I know, I made up that word) came from the Centers for Disease Control.
According to the Associated Press, which says it has the documents, the White House "significantly edited" testimony set to be give to the U.S. Senate.
The testimony was by Dr. Julie Gerberding. She's the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
She was to testify on the effect of climate change on public health.
She had 12 pages of testimony, but, according to the AP, when the White House got done with it, it was six pages.
Missing was all the stuff she wanted to say about health problems that might occur because of global warming.
Also missing was Gerberding's conclusion: '.... the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed. CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern.'
Apparently, our government doesn't want us to know such things or they want to downplay them so we don't worry about them.
I really don't get it. It's as if they think if they don't tell us about it, well, it just didn't or won't happen.
But it really makes no sense when it comes to climate change.
Heck, W himself says he believes that the earth is warming and that greenhouse gases might be part of the problem.
And that's good because the only people who don't believe the earth is warming are members of the flat earth society. (Ptolemy took a lot of grief in the second century when he noticed that mountains seemed to rise out of the sea when you sailed toward them.)
But, seriously, why shield us from such things?
You want to read some alarming stuff about climate change?
That's where a team British scientists, in a paper published this week, say that fossil records show mass extinctions of species are linked to warming. They go on to note that based on climate projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Earth is on course to reach extinction-level warming in about 100 years.
"We could be in the temperature zone in which mass extinctions have occurred by the end of this century, [or] more likely in the next century," said Peter Mayhew, the study's co-author and an ecologist at the University of York.
By "mass" the researchers are talking about 20 to 30 percent of species will be at risk.
"The issue here is that we are creating the climate change, and we are creating the climate change at an unprecedented rate. So clearly we are creating the events for a climate-related mass extinction that wouldn't otherwise be happening," Mayhew said.
Of course, other scientists say these guys are flawed.
Nationalgeographic.com talked to Richard A. Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Muller has published papers noting a link between changes in climate an changes in biodiversity. He thinks global warming will devastate the environment but stops short of linking human-made global warming to a loss of biodiversity.
"You can't make wild predictions if you can't justify them," Muller said. "If global warming continues at the current pace, I think we will have a tragic future. I think there will be great disruption, but whether humans affect biodiversity in a negative way, I don't think anyone ever really knows."
Well, heck. As long as it's just environmental devastation and a "tragic future" and not "mass extinctions," what have we got to worry about?
And these aren't even the fringy guys studying climate change.
The fringy guys say stuff like this:
"It will be a dark time," says scientist James Lovelock. "But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting."
Lovelock was talking about the late 21st century for a story in the Nov. 1 Rolling Stone.
Reporter Jeff Goddel writes, "In Lovelock's view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. ... With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes - Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin."
Alrighty then.
And our government feels the need to shield us from six pages of testimony on public health as it relates to climate change?
Are they kidding?
Um, let's see, environmental devastation, mass extinctions, basically the end of civilization as we know it. Nah, no public health issues there.
The head-in-the-sand, "no news is good news" crowd in the White House is really looking silly these days.
