As if things couldn’t get any more rocky for the Smithsonian Institution, it is the subject of yet another controversy. The AP reports that an ex-Smithsonian official says the institution toned down an exhibit on the effects of climate change in the Arctic out of fear that the exhibit would draw the ire of Congress and the Bush administration.
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.
Before the conspiracy theorists out there go nuts, the AP report indicates that neither the administration nor Congress exerted any undue pressure on the Smithsonian.
Sullivan said that to his knowledge, no one in the Bush administration pressured the Smithsonian, whose $1.1 billion budget is mostly taxpayer-funded. Rather, he said, Smithsonian leaders acted on their own. “The obsession with getting the next allocation and appropriation was so intense that anything that might upset the Congress or the White House was being looked at very carefully,” he said.
This is not the first time the Smithsonian has been affected by outside pressures. Its exhibits on the bombing of Hiroshima and oil drilling in Alaska were both subjects of controversy and subsequently altered in some form. This exhibit, entitled “Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely,” was on display from April to November 2006 at the National Museum of Natural History.
Despite the well documented disinformation campaign that existed to downplay the climate change issue, the impact of human activity on the climate is a well-settled scientific question at this point. We find it deeply troubling that the museum would bow to such political pressure, even it it was somewhat invented. The NMNH is, in part, designed to be a scientific repository. If an institution charged with scientific preservation fails to put established science over politics, then what purpose does it serve?
UPDATE: The Smithsonian Institution has issued a press release denouncing the Associated Press story as false, and claiming the story was based on an erroneous allegation made by a former Smithsonian employee who was neither a scientist nor a curator.
For decades, the Smithsonian has been conducting research on the impact of climate change on biological communities over millions of years,” said Cristián Samper, Acting Secretary. “Therefore, we would never alter an exhibition on global climate change that would contradict our own knowledge and research, and that of other leading scientists around the world.” Samper said at no time did anyone from the Congress or the White House comment on the exhibition.
Additionally, the Smithsonian claims that there was no internal pressure to make alterations to the exhibitions.
DCist makes every effort to ensure that facts presented on this site are accurate, though obviously we rely heavily on news organizations like the Associated Press. We realize that the conversation this post started has moved into an “is climate change for real?” debate, and hope the conversation continues despite this controversy.
Photo of the National Museum of Natural History by Maxedaperture
