One man’s muzzle is another’s megaphone, it seems. The world’s most quoted climate alarmist, James Hansen, doyen of the increasingly alarmist – and debunked – NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is again claiming that someone named George Bush is muzzling him.

He said it about President George H. W. Bush, and then again about George W. Bush.

Then, as now, his complaining is absurd on its face: the only thing he’s been told is to leave policy to the policy people, and speak as NASA only about the work he does for NASA. Meanwhile, he continues to collect Heinz-Kerry lucre, has apparently been underwritten by George Soros, and otherwise uses his taxpayer-funded perch as an ideological activist. As Amy Ridenour points out on NewsBusters, google “James Hansen” and “censored” and you get 37,900 results. Oh, those wretched Bushies!

Roy Spencer notes here that he, too, was a NASA career employee with an expertise and interest in the climate-change field, and that he experienced what clearly constitutes “muzzling,” at least when you’re an alarmist. Spencer’s experience came under the Clinton-Gore administration which — as I establish in my book – had a demonstrated record of running people out of government who challenged the alarmist dogma. I discussed the case of Princeton physicist William Happer; Sherwood Idso also has tales to tell, but these tales are like Roy Spencer’s the wrong kind, so no one’s interested. Google “Roy Spencer” and “censored,” and you only get 600 or so results.

We already know the New York Times and Washington Post have blamed George W. Bush for Congress’s inability to muster the nerve to act on their (and Hansen’s) doomsday rhetoric, and adopt the agenda they profess to demand. Come January, they will quietly begin to write that of course the U.S. signed Kyoto but the Senate never wanted to vote on it. The line that the president is mean for not signing something that he can’t sign will no longer be an attractive line of argument with no Bush in the White House. They will begin to say, given that the U.S. of course has been performing better than Europe maybe such legislation isn’t necessary; Congress is justified to slap on some of the scaled back mandates and pork on some unrelated measure instead.

But the question is: what will James Hansen do for attention come January?