Is Bush's Administration Anti-Science?

Great Debates
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Safety reasons were the ones given. Soon after though, it was proposed that the 2 shuttles be prepared for the Hubble mission, with the 2nd one to be used as backup.

Man vs. Robots
The problem with manned spaceflight is that its a lot more expensive than robotic exploration. Still, we have the teams in place to service the Hubble and extend its life. There is a case to be made for using these teams, along with the $200 million of Hubble modules already built.

Proposing a manned trip to Mars is a far more expensive and ambitious proposal.

edwino is correct though that we’re going off on a tangent here…

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The_Broken_Column:

A word of advice.

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[Moderator Hat: ON]

The_Broken_Column said:

Wow, you are completely breaking the rules.

You want to toss around direct insults, take it to the Pit. But don’t do it here in Great Debates.

David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator

[Moderator Hat: OFF]

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The reason why Space Flight is important in the discussion of Bush being anti-science, is that it is evidence that Bush is not anti-science.

Those who are opposing Bush, claim that Bush is anti-science, they say he clouds facts and supports only that which supports his agenda. This is true, as with all administrations, whether he does it more than anyone else or not, is a moot point.

The fact is these same anti-Bush people, Jshore in particular, will not allow evidence that Bush is pro-science to be put forth. In a sense, jshore is leading a hypocrit’s brigade, a fight to claim Bush is anti-science, supporting their fight by denying the facts.

The fact is, Bush has done more for NASA in this past year (thanks to the focusing event of the Collumbia disaster), than any president since John F. Kennedy.

Now whether or not you agree with me that manned space flight is useful, maybe you should agree with a Geologist working on the Mars Rovers right now.

Wendy Calvin at the Mackay School of Mines. Ask her via email whether or not machines can do all the work that a human could do on another world.

I just got through talking with my friends that are also in the Geosciences and it’s bafoonery…a machine can do analysis but a human must still receive the information. Putting a man on Mars or the Moon or where ever would be a great benefit to Geological research of these worlds. That’s from Geologists and Geoscience students, not from some Physicist. (Since when did a physicist become a voice of reason about the study of planets?)

The point is as others have seemed to grasp, is anyone who supports NASA as much as Bush has, is not “Anti-Science”. Don’t be blaming Bush for not wanting to see stem-cell research in its former sense, or only listening to specific reports about the environment for his policy agendas. This is what every politician has done and it will never stop.

But if you want to claim that Bush is manipulating the facts, then maybe you yourselves should not manipulate the facts, and admit that Bush is pro-science in other areas.

Whether you agree with that science is not the point. However, any scientist who says, “This science is better than that science” is in my opinion, no better than any religious person claiming their religion is better than another’s.

I suggest you take that advice, it’s good advice, comming from someone you probably find inferior I suspect you must be infuriated.

Anyways, here’s the link to Windy Calvin’s bio, you can either find her contact there or esle where on the site.

http://mines.unr.edu/able/wcalvin.html

Again, I urge you to stop trying to claim that Manned Exploration of Space is pointless. If we don’t do it now, it only means someone else will get the glory later on.

Do you think that future generations 1000 years from now, will care what we do today? No, they will only care about what shaped their society. And barring any natural disaster, their society will be a space-faring one. They will remember those who went first. If you want that to be the Chinese, the Russians, or the Europeans be my guest.

But I personally wouldn’t mind America being labled as the leader in Space Exploration to such an extent that we shall be remembered for the remainder of Human historical capacity (that is, so long as people can read and write). We may have been the first to put a man on the Moon…but it will be the next step that earns recognition for all time.

Continued presence on an extra-terrestrial body.

It is that effort, that focuses all sciences into one agenda.

It requires the best of all fields.

Astro-Physics
Geology
Geophysics
Hydrology
Biology
Minerology
Metalurgy
Aerospace
Physics
Chemistry
Robotics

Need I go on? Every field of Science benefits from the Space Program. Until you other scientists who are not affiliated with NASA or another Space Agency realize this, you will only be hurting Science in general.

The idea of “Fix our Earth first” is moronic.

It doesn’t need fixing. Man does not have the power to manipulate nature to a great extent (though we may feel cocky enough that we do). The reality is either Mother nature embraces us, or obliterates us. We better hope we have some homes off this Earth when she decides to follow her nature and begin a new Ice Age…or when she crosses a path with a killer meteorite.

These are all a bit of tid-bits from the FACTS that I have to offer. If you don’t like these facts, I suppose you can find some moronic scientist to agree with you.

But again, until Scientists over-come their petty grudges of other Sciences…or rather, of applications, they will only hurt themselves.

I do challenge anyone here. To find me what effort Man has undertaken, that has united as much of the branches of Sciences together, as Manned Space Flight has.

What other effort has done so much for the progress of humanity?

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Right. But having a second shuttle standing by for every shuttle mission, would have created more safety concerns no? And would that not also have increased the costs, lowered the number of missions, etc.?

My only point was that it seems unfair to criticize the death of Hubble as an unreasonable tranfer of money from robot space science to manned space flight, when it would have required a big investment in manned space flight to save the Hubble.

Also agreed.

From another post:

I’m not sure I understand this. Are you saying that you support industry input for regulations, but not on science which might lead to such regulation? Or are you simply worried that the President is firing scientists without a good reason?

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TBC: Those who are opposing Bush, claim that Bush is anti-science, they say he clouds facts and supports only that which supports his agenda. This is true […]

Well then, it sounds like he is anti-science, by your own admission. Clouding facts and cherry-picking the data you like are cardinal sins in the methodology of modern science, and it’s anti-scientific to indulge in them.

[…], as with all administrations, whether he does it more than anyone else or not, is a moot point.

I don’t see why we should think it doesn’t matter that Bush’s administration is much more irresponsible in its treatment of science than previous administrations have been. Just because it’s a common failing across the political spectrum to try to tweak science for political purposes doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be especially concerned when that failing is especially prevalent.

*The point is as others have seemed to grasp, is anyone who supports NASA as much as Bush has, is not “Anti-Science”. *

You seem to be suggesting that as long as Bush supports at least some projects that at least some scientists favor, it’s not fair to describe his general outlook or approach as “anti-science”. I disagree. IMO, distorting and manipulating science for political ends is inherently anti-scientific, even if in the process you bestow some political favors on particular science projects.

Do you think that future generations 1000 years from now, will care what we do today? No, they will only care about what shaped their society.

And you don’t think that today’s policies about any scientific issues other than space exploration are going to have effects on “shaping their society”? How ya figure?

*It doesn’t need fixing. Man does not have the power to manipulate nature to a great extent (though we may feel cocky enough that we do). The reality is either Mother nature embraces us, or obliterates us. *

:rolleyes: Golly, and some people accuse liberals of getting all mystical and new-agey and holistically touchy-feely about environmental issues. Move over, Gaia and Deep Ecology and German Romanticism and the Sustainability Movement: here comes the new conservative eco-holism, the perfect excuse for policy quiescence!

“Forget about atmospheric studies and ice probes and CO2 measurements and Ekman layer modeling and all that uptight quantitative linear-thinking jazz, dude! Let go of your positivist experimentalist science-geek attitude and just accept the pre-determined truth that Man does not have the power to manipulate nature to a great extent! All that really matters is whether the great Nature Mother chooses to embrace or obliterate us! Ommmmmm…”

Sheesh doggy dips, I can remember when conservatives boasted of being rational and basing policy on facts and science. What with all this postmodern relativism in cherry-picking data and these weird eco-fatalism beliefs, a Maharshi Vedic Institute lecture on yogic levitation begins to look positively hard-headed by comparison.

*I do challenge anyone here. To find me what effort Man has undertaken, that has united as much of the branches of Sciences together, as Manned Space Flight has.

What other effort has done so much for the progress of humanity?*

Huh, that’s an easy one: the development of numeracy/literacy in late 4th-millennium-BCE Mesopotamia. Nothing before or since (at least, since the evolution of our present species) has been so crucial to making the accumulation of knowledge and science possible.

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No, it is not a moot point. It is a present, serious concern held by a large group of exceedingly well-respected scientists. Their report is credible, highly detailed, and completely current. The issue is a present one, and will not be moot even after Bush’s reelection is defeated: after, there is his legacy to evaluate for posterity.

There is abundant evidence that the degree to which the Bush administrations distorts information–science, intelligence–for political gain greatly exceeds that of any previous administration.

Do you even know what a “moot point” is?

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Well, let’s not gush too much here. The UCS is certainly not a neutral party. Also, I note that some details are not that “highly”. Specifically, they don’t include much about how the individuals in the “unprecedented” section know what they know. They are quite proud that the individuals were involved with government. But they do not claim that any of them are currently involved with such agencies. Did they simply find former agency scientists, show them their own report and then ellicit comments? Is that really credible evidence that the current administration’s actions are very unprecedented?

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Well, these people know it because they are following the news, hearing it both on and off the record from people currently working there, and in the case of the controversy involving the global warming section of the environmental report, we have a freakin’ internal document from the EPA reproduced in the appendix of the UCS report.

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United the branches of science? Manned spaceflight? More like united the aerospace industry…

I think I should know. I’m in Houston. I am getting a PhD in molecular genetics and an MD. Every year they talk about all of these collaborations with our medical and graduate school (which is a top 20 school) and the JSC 30 miles away. I have been at school since 1997, and I have yet to hear one good lecture on actual science coming from this; I have yet to meet one graduate student, postdoc, or primary investigator actively involved in any kind of science in the manned space program; I have yet to see a poster or read a publication from these collaborations. In short, I don’t see it, so I assume it doesn’t exist. Our extensive library carries 10 journals devoted to space and space science – 3 are review journals, 1 is a law journal, 1 is a policy journal, and 4 are astrophysics and planetary geology journals. The 1 journal on manned spaceflight hasn’t been published in 5 years.

I have said it before, I will say it again. There is very little science in manned spaceflight. I judge science the way a scientist judges science – by peer reviewed literature published. And I really, honestly cannot tell you the last time I saw anything come out of the manned space program in any top-tier journal. It isn’t like I haven’t
been looking, either.

The Human Genome Project (and the other Genome Projects) has united more branches of science than manned spaceflight. Here we have physics, chemistry, biochemistry, materials science, molecular biology, genetics, and all natures of statistics and computer science all working together. The work has furthered our knowledge in thousands of different areas, all of which is published in dozens of well-respected
journals almost entirely devoted to genome sequencing. Unlike manned spaceflight, which has led to a few findings on microgravity and little else.

The Bush administration has been great at promising money to politically expedient problems, especially when they help out his buddies in the aerospace industry. Throwing money at a problem isn’t science, though. This administration has as much to do with the science behind manned spaceflight as it has to do with the science behind national missile defense. Or for that matter, anthrax vaccines.

Not one person here has argued that this president has sought to slash science budgets. The NIH budget has not been reduced after Clinton oversaw its doubling. I would say that Bush is only too happy to throw money at the sciences. That’s not what we are debating.

When we say anti-science, we are trying to analyze how this administration deals with raw data when it comes to making policy. And there is an abundance of evidence that this president is far worse in politicizing data in order to justify his particular visions. What scientists are up in arms about is that they have attempted to give the best data to this administration in the hopes that it would be used to make coherent policy. This policy would be based on sound science. The EPA and the CDC are not charged with doing the research for the most part. They are charged with analyzing all of the findings of all of the academic and industry scientists, reaching a consensus, and crafting policies based on this. This administration doesn’t like these findings, because they point to global warming and the fact that abstinence-only education is a piss-poor way to go about it. So they ignore it. So we are getting policy based not on data, and that is what we are mad about.

Yes, we should be exploring. But this does not equate to science.

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OK. But the section on the “unprecedentedness” of the claims does not say any of this. They simply say that the people quoted worked for multiple administrations. They leave the slight impression that these people have some knowledge about what is going on in the Bush administration.

I’m certainly not trying to dismiss the report or engage in any ad hominem argument. I simply would like to see more unbiased information. I did not participate earlier in this thread for this very reason. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has chosen not to respond to this and Senetor Waxman’s report. This means that I cannot even find opposing biased information. I am left with biased information from only 1 side of this issue. That means I would have to go over the reports in question in great detail. Something I am not willing to do.

In the mean time, my only point is that we should not accept either the UCS or Waxman’s report uncritically, nor should we accept them as unbiased sources.

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It was established within the first few posts in this thread that the sense of the argument that he was “anti-science” was the sense in which he was distorting and cherry-picking scientific results, stacking committees dealing with scientific issues that have policy implications, etc. We agreed within those posts that we weren’t talking about funding for science…where my vague impression is that Bush’s record is probably fairly unremarkable, either in the good or bad direction.

So, no, this is not a moot point. It is the point of this thread. And, even if Bush is unambiguously good in regards to funding of science, that does not mean that it doesn’t matter that he systematically distorts its results. After all, while science is good for science’s sake, it also finds application in our lives. By distorting the results to fit his agenda, he is misusing the science…I.e., he is undermining its practical utility and setting a very dangerous precedent.

That is not fact; it is opinion. And, I doubt it is even an opinion held by a very wide section of the scientific community.

The question is not whether it is useful. The question is whether it is hundreds of billions of dollars worth of useful. I mean, you could just give that money to me and I can guarantee I’d do useful things with it. But, I think a more rational approach would be to consider alternative uses.

Also, it should be pointed out that what Bush has provided is a hugely expensive vision and very little funding. Even if one thought the vision was wonderful, one might ask where the money is actually going to come from. I have lots of huge visions in my head and if I am not constrained to pay for them, I can pretty much go hog-wild.

Of course, if we don’t think the vision is so hot, you might wonder why we really care so much if it is adequately funded or not. The reason is that we worry that this might be a dangerous combination…a hugely expensive vision of dubious scientific utility and no explanation of where the money will come from…because one likely scenario is that the money will be squeezed from more scientifically justifiable things. And, the cancellation of Hubble is not a real positive sign in that regard.

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Well, what do you consider unbiased? When I point to editorials in Science and Nature, I am told these people have biases too. When we give quotes even from people in previous Republican administrations, these are also questioned.

And, at some point if credible enough charges are made, they should be answered. That is what Nature said in their editorial following the Waxman report. And, even after this report, the administration has so far given no substantive defense. If the prosecution has given its case and then the defense rests without presenting any counterevidence, are we obligated to find for the defendant on the grounds that perhaps the defendant does have a credible rebuttal to the prosecution’s very compelling evidence even though he refused to present it?

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Well, if the choice is between having no manned space program at all and having manned flights to service the Hubble, I might have to think about it. But, given that we will be continuing to pump billions into the manned programs, I figure we might as well do something really scientifically-useful and cost-effective with some of the money. After all, the launch of the Hubble is often touted as one of the few true important scientific achievements of the shuttle program. And, while Bob Park argues that the Hubble succeeded not because of the shuttle but in spite of the constraints that a shuttle-launched system imposed on it, the fact remains (whether he is correct or not) that the Hubble is now dependent on the shuttle for its servicing.

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Not by me. I might have mentioned that they were editorials and as such not exactly evidence, but I don’t think I dismissed them.

Well, of course. Everything is questioned. That’s the nature of political debate. Or have I missed something.

Well, not certainly not in court. But then in court the judge and jury are required to hear every word of testimony. I have to admit that I have not read every word of either the Waxman or UCS report. We went of a couple small things in the Waman report in another thread. I have read the “unprecedentedness” section of the UCS report since there was a claim in the OP that significant evidence of unprecedented behavior was made. I have also read the EPA internel memo that you mentioned (thanks for the mention BTW) since I had heard of it before but had never seen it.

Now, having admitted all that, all I am saying is that none of the things I have read seem conclusive or overly alarming. At least not to the point claimed. Some of it “seems” to suggest the the Bush administration is engaging in questionable activities. But very little of it rises to the level of “squashing science”, or “anti science”. Also, the evidence is clearly put out by organizations with political biases. Certainly some less biased organizations have found good information in them. But I would feel more comfortable with a more balanced interpretation of some of the incidents pointed to in those reports.

I’m probably blabbering somewhat. Let me summarize.

I probably come closest to agreeing with jshore’s characterization of Science’s editorial. There are some odd things suggested in these reports. But I am inclined to hold off running for the hills just yet.
Just to clarify your objections, could some of you please tell me what you would do if you became president and found that one agency or another had been consistently opposed to your agenda? For instance, if you became president and found that the EPA had been downplaying the possibility of Global Warming, what would you do? I’m just curious.

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pervert: Just to clarify your objections, could some of you please tell me what you would do if you became president and found that one agency or another had been consistently opposed to your agenda? For instance, if you became president and found that the EPA had been downplaying the possibility of Global Warming, what would you do? I’m just curious.

What do you mean, “opposed to my agenda”? If I’m an honest and responsible president, my agenda is to make good decisions to solve problems, right? And on science-policy issues, that means making decisions that are intelligently informed by the relevant science, right?

So seems to me that my first priority has to be to ensure that my agencies are being honest with me about the science. In your EPA “downplaying global warming” example, do you mean to suggest that the agency has been dishonest in reporting or interpreting the data? In that case, heads are gonna roll.

Or do you mean that the agency’s reports about global warming are simply not as pessimistic as my eco-lobbyist campaign contributors would like them to be? In that case, sorry, tree-huggers; these are the results, they were properly researched and arrived at, like them or lump them.

Don’t bother objecting that no real president would have integrity about such issues. “They all do it” is no excuse for any wrongdoing, and it most certainly doesn’t excuse what appears to be an unprecedented level of manipulation and distortion of scientific research on the part of this administration.

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Actually, I would say that what you described here in this particular paragraph is part of what we’re mad about but not the worst part. This was more the point made by the Nature editorial in their last paragraph…i.e., that the Bush Administration policy is ideology-driven and not making good use of the science. Thus, it is hard to justify what they are doing on the basis of the science in the fields.

This is bad, in my view, but this isn’t what the UCS study or the Waxman Report is all about. Rather, they are about when the administration has gone so far as to try to manipulate the science. E.g., they didn’t like the EPA scientists’ summary on global warming in that environmental report so they rewrote it in such a way that the EPA scientists (and I am sure, from what we know of the rewrite, any respected group of scientists in the field) felt it no longer properly represented the state of the peer-reviewed science in the field and decided to drop the chapter from the report altogether. Likewise, they wanted a scientific advisory committee to tell them things more to their liking so they appointed people with dubious credentials who they knew would be sympathetic to their point of view and got rid of scientists with stellar credentials whose point-of-view they worried might not align with theirs. Or, they have asked committee nominees questions that are completely inappropriate and unprecedented for such non-political scientific appointments, such as whether or not they supported the president in the last election. This is quite clearly in violation of the law, as Donald Kennedy pointed out in his Science editorial. Etc., etc.

It’s not just that they ignore finding that they don’t like. They in fact try to stack the deck or rewrite the report so that they get the findings that they like! (In this regard, I suppose they are just following the advice of the Wall Street Journal editorial page that has criticized Bush on global warming for allowing the release of reports (such as the global warming one that Bush derisively called “the report prepared by the bureaucracy”) that had science in it that clearly was in conflict with Bush’s do-nothing policy on global warming. The advice from the WSJ was not of course that he needed to get the policy in line with the science but rather that he needed to get the science in line with the policy…And, this indeed seems to be what they decided to do in regards to the chapter on global warming in this more recent general report on the state of the environment.)

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What kimstu said. Of course, if I felt that the EPA scientists were not well-representing the true state of the science in the field and I could really come up with some coherent reasons to believe this, I might ask for a second opinion from a highly-respected non-partisan organization like the National Academy of Sciences. That is what it is there for. [In fact, this is what Bush did, to his credit, when he first came into office. But, he appears not to like the answer he got. And, as I noted above, the Bush Administration approach overall on global warming has been a mish-mash…(1) More or less accept the science but emphasize the uncertainties and propose policy measures that don’t really do anything. (2) Refer derisively to a report that the EPA releases on the subject that you don’t like (“the report prepared by the bureaucracy”). (3) Make dramatic non-negotiable changes to a report that the EPA will release that change the whole scientific tone, forcing the EPA to cut the whole section on global warming in order to maintain any scientific credibilty. I would say that all three of these responses are poor, but it is (3) that is clearly over the line.]

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I believe you mean the Nature editorial (which appeared after the Waxman report). The Science editorial appearing several months before that report unambiguously stated that what was going on was unacceptable…indeed unlawful… and had to stop.

So, how long are you willing to give the Bush Administration to respond to this report?

In what way did you find the interpretation to be unbalanced? Or are you saying you are just not sure whether to trust their interpretation?

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I mean simply opposed to your belief in the truth, and the science as presented does not convince you.

Absolutely. And in the case of Global Warming, the science is far from definitive. There is good evidence for this and that, and there are many polls of scientists (most of whom make their money through grants to study global warming), but there is not a definitive study which says that this or that activity by man has caused the earth to warm. Not in the same sense that there is definitive evidence for gravity. I’m not saying that it is definately untrue, simply that there is evidence on both sides.

Given that, there is room for argument and counter argument. Usually this leads to better and better science. In government, however, this sometimes leads to entrenched positions by one group or another. That’s the political aspect of government policy. I’m sorry, but there simply is no definitive science on most public policies.

Not necessarily. They could be entirely honest in the facts, and simply be distorting the conclusions. It may not require any dishonesty at all.

Quite. So, if you are convinced that the EPA has mislead you and the nation for a while, you might fire people. Did I get that right? What if those people you want to fire put together a paper wich contains claims you object to before you can fire them? Might you change, or discredit that report?

No, that’s not what I meant. I am honestly asking what you would do if you honestly believed that the agency had it wrong.

OK.

Of course not. That previous administrations did something is no excuse. It is however counter evidence that this administrations actions are unprecedented. If I ever mention that previous administrations do such things, that is the only context that I would do so.

If I can be clear for a moment. I don’t believe that the president should be dictating science. Neither should the legislature. However, the president is responsible for overseeing most of the agencies we are talking about. That means he should make staffing decisions, and have some editorial imput into reports. Did the current administration take such powers to new levels? Maybe. Did he do so to the extent that science as we know it is in danger? Almost certainly not. So, the situation lies somewhere in the middle. It does not help find that truth to assume that “scientific” agencies should be allowed to do whatever they want with no oversight.

So, explain to me what proper oversight activities by the president would look like, and maybe we can come to some understanding about how bad this president’s actions were.

jshoreJust a few points.

1)I’m not so sure that the changes were so totally dramatic. Although clearly the EPA did.

  1. I disagree that they were completely non negotiatable. Didn’t the memo refer to months of negotiation? Did not the White House pull rank only after that amount of negotiation?

3)I really don’t expect the administration to respond to either report. Not in the point by point way that we would like. I’m not so much waiting for it as lamenting that we may never get it.

4)Right. I am unsure whether to trust their interpretation. Many of the specific claims seem overblown to me. As I said, I have not read the whole report. But I have glanced at a few specific items. They all have the “odor” of partisanship.