I thought at first that this was some kind of April Fools joke, but...

From the New York Times:

Climate Maverick to Quit NASA
James E. Hansen, the climate scientist who issued the clearest warning of the 20th century about the dangers of global warming, will retire from NASA this week, giving himself more freedom to pursue political and legal efforts to limit greenhouse gases.

His departure, after a 46-year career at the space agency�s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, will deprive federally sponsored climate research of its best-known public figure.

At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted from tar sands.

�As a government employee, you can�t testify against the government,� he said in an interview.

Dr. Hansen had already become an activist in recent years, taking vacation time from NASA to appear at climate protests and allowing himself to be arrested or cited a half-dozen times.

But those activities, going well beyond the usual role of government scientists, had raised eyebrows at NASA headquarters in Washington. �It was becoming clear that there were people in NASA who would be much happier if the �sideshow� would exit,� Dr. Hansen said in an e-mail.

The article cites the usual crowd. A bit more:

�He�s done the most important science on the most important question that there ever was,� said Bill McKibben, a climate activist who has worked closely with Dr. Hansen.

Around the time Dr. Hansen switched his research focus, in the 1970s, a sharp rise in global temperatures began. He labored in obscurity over the next decade, but on a blistering June day in 1988 he was called before a Congressional committee and testified that human-induced global warming had begun.

Speaking to reporters afterward in his flat Midwestern accent, he uttered a sentence that would appear in news reports across the land: �It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.�

Guilt by omission. What the article fails to mention is that the 1988 Congressional testimony was about as pure a piece of theater as you can get. From this June 23, 2008 article by Chris Horner at National Review Online:

Stagecraft
As Ed Craig notes below, the �muzzled� James Hansen is unloading today through the media and in Capitol Hill testimony about how people who disagree with him need to be tried for crimes against humanity.

First, this bodes ill for Gore producer Laurie David. Second, his legal counsel is proving as sound as his science advocacy.

Today�s unhinged exhibition occurs in the context of commemorating Hansen�s testimony 20 years ago, which kicked off the modern global-warming alarmist movement ten years into the warming spell � on the heels of 30 years of cooling � and ten years before that warming peaked.

And Ed is right to look to Hollywood for parallels, since the Left media has openly celebrated Hansen�s dog-and-pony show as well-managed �stagecraft� � a story I chronicle in my forthcoming book, �Red Hot Lies� (a volume that surely guarantees my own trial for enviro-war crimes).

Specifically, the PBS series Frontline aired a special in April 2007 that lifted the curtain on the sort of illusions that politicians and their abettors employed to kick off the campaign.

From the Frontline transcript (Sen. Tim Wirth was in collusion with Sen. Gore):

Sen. TIMOTHY WIRTH (D-CO), 1987-1993: We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify.

DEBORAH AMOS: On Capitol Hill, Sen. Timothy Wirth was one of the few politicians already concerned about global warming, and he was not above using a little stagecraft for Hansen�s testimony.

TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.

DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?

TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn�t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.

I rest my case. Theater and not Science. Power grab, looking for easy funding for shoddy research.