No global warming and gulags on Mars

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The scientific and policy communities in Washington and elsewhere are acting as though NASA Administrator Mike Griffin’s now notorious interview with NPR yesterday morning was the first time his logic has seemed a bit goofy. Come on, people. The symptoms have been around for years. Here’s Griffin in 2005, just a few months after taking office, rationalizing spending hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars to fund the building of space camps on the Moon and Mars:

Now, you know, in the sense that a chicken is just an egg’s way of laying another egg, one of our purposes is to survive and thrive and spread humankind. I think that’s worth doing. There will be another mass-extinction event. If we humans want to survive for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, we must ultimately populate other planets….

I’m talking about that one day, I don’t know when that day is, but there will be more human beings who live off the Earth than on it. We may well have people living on the moon. We may have people living on the moons of Jupiter and other planets. We may have people making habitats on asteroids….

And here’s the best part:

To me it’s important because I like the United States, and because I know — I don’t know the date — but I know that humans will colonize the solar system and one day go beyond. And it is important for me that humans who carry — I’ll characterize it as Western values — are there with them. You know, I think we know the kind of society we would get if you, for example, carry Soviet values. That means you want a gulag on Mars. Is that what you’re looking for?

It’s worth remembering that Griffin was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April of 2005. So not one U.S. senator voted against his nomination. Why are his views on global warming just coming to light now?