The theory of human-caused global warming is being treated as religious dogma, NASA's administrator said.

In an interview with SciGuy blogger Eric Berger, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin who last May questioned whether addressing the alleged global warming problem required all that much urgency, warned that dissent from the global warming theory is almost treated as heresy.

When asked by Berger if he was surprised by the widespread, heated response to his comments, Griffen said he was.

"I thought I was talking about technical topic, which I find actually very interesting from a technical point of view," he told Berger."I didn't realize it had approached the status where you can't express any sort of a contrary opinion or a comment without it being treated almost as a religious issue. So that's one mistake.

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"The second one was, of course, that it actually doesn't have anything to do with what we do at NASA. By making comments along those lines all I really did is embroil my agency in a controversy in fight that we don't have a dog."

Asked if he had talked to NASA's top climate scientist James Hansen, an outspoken global warming advocate, Griffen said he hadn't, adding that "Jim has never seen fit to contact me. Jim's done some great work. I have no criticism of it. You could make an argument that a critical mass of climate modeling, of raising climate modeling to become a centerpiece of the earth Science program, is due to Jim's efforts over the last 30 years. Without that you don't know how to interpret the data which we bring back," Berger explained.

"What we know is that the earth's temperature has increased by 0.8 degrees Centigrade, plus or minus, in 100 years. And we have pretty good confidence that a good fraction of that is anthropogenic [human caused]." He warned however that "exactly how much, and exactly what human activities are doing that, much less certainty. And that's with 100 years of work. So you have to construct theoretical models, and run them on a computer, and anchor those models with data. And the data has got to cover a long period of time with a broad spectrum of observations because they're all interrelated.

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