The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibition on Arctic climate change, fearing that it would anger Congress and the Bush administration, a former museum administrator said. The official text of the exhibition was rewritten to minimize and add uncertainty about the relationship between global warming and people, said the former official, Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the National Museum of Natural History. Officials omitted scientists' interpretations of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, Mr. Sullivan said. In addition, graphs were altered “to show that global warming could go either way,” he said. Museum officials denied that political concerns had influenced the exhibition, saying the changes were made to increase objectivity.
Because that's what museums are supposed to do: Ignore the scientific consensus, offer only the raw data, and let visitors piece it all together. Maybe the dinosaur exhibits should just be piles of bones, and we museum-goers should have to assemble them ourselves -- all the better to liberate us from the terrible yoke of actual expertise and well-founded conclusions.
