British news story on what I believe is one of the reports referred to in this thread here. (Sorry if I missed someone linking to this same story.) Spun off a thread about it here.
Just because there are still uncertainties in the science does not give one license to lie about what things are known and not known and how definitively. There are uncertainties regarding evolution but that doesn’t mean that a scientific report that puts evolution and creation “science” as equally plausible alternatives is acceptable.
Also, since when are the people at OMB and CEQ (whatever that is) experts on the state of the science of global warming? What is their training that gives them the authority to make these non-negotiable edits?
Oversight might include asking questions. (E.g., “is it really true that this can be stated this definitively?” or having the NAS weigh in if you really strongly disagree.) It involves making decisions on policy. It does not involve political appointees overruling scientists on issues of science.
The statement was “It ends a multi-month negotiating process that has regressed substantially with the last round of comments.” And, at this point, the White House said, “No further changes can be made.” So, they negotiated for a while, made essentially no progress, or actually “regressed” and then the White House said, “No more.”
That doesn’t sound like good-faith negotiations on the part of the White House. And, if one is familiar enough with the climate change field to know what is being talked about here (e.g., the story behind the Soon and Baliunas paper), it is quite apparent that the EPA scientists were correct in their assessment that this final non-negotiable position by the White House resulted in a severe and unacceptable distortion of the science.
First off, wrong, the established debate in this thread is erroneous. It is based on the idea that the President makes or influences policy. He does not. It is Congress and Congress alone that does this. The President is given policy and tasked with the orders to enforce it. As we see in San Francisco policy and law is not always enforced.
That’s one of my points and it’s just not going through your skull or something…
EVERY PRESIDENT AND CONGRESSMAN DOES THIS
There’s no way to get around it…complaining that Bush does it is rediculous. The infractions are so high that comparing which one is more unprecedented or not is impossible.
It is fact, not opinion. Bush has increased the Budget more than any President since Kennedy when he exploded the budget by about 1000% In the 1960s NASA was getting about 20billion a year.
By Clinton’s administration it was getting less than 13billion a year for most of the administration. 14-13 abouts. Most none of it allocated to manned space flight. Some 5 billion.
Now it will be back up to 20 billion a year by 2010 if Congress keeps the pay increase steady as Bush has called for. That is doing a lot.
Also Bush has moved NASA into a position to focus on manned space flight…and regardless of your thoughts about unmanned craft, NASA is about getting Man into Space…not robots.
Wrong again, NASA can do the work over the 10 year period it is looking at, with the budget as it is (I think it is now 15 billion). Remember current Manned Space Flight budget is about 5 billion dollars.
Bush is requesting a policy change, which looks to seem popular since NASA is already shifting policies…that is more money will from now on be allocated to Manned Space Flight. That is in itself a significant increase in funding, let alone the incrimental increase along the 5 year period.
Moving along in the argument, look at where the money goes.
As someone said, “It is not as if you are shooting money into space”.
That money is spent to give people Jobs, to give people money to spend on services and goods which pay other people in their fields. This is arguable for ALL government expenditures…but as Kennedy said:
…because that goal will serve to unite all that is best of mankind…
Again I must stress…you can’t lable your “Anti-Science” to a degree that makes it impossible to support Bush…which is what you are doing.
That’s like saying…“I will only observe this part of the experiment because it supports my views”…which is exactly what ALL Politicians do.
If you want a good debate…you have to realize that FUNDING Science is more important than how the Government makes policy based on research.
I’m not sure why you aren’t getting this.
What a politician does with the research is a moot point…if the research is funded at all is the most important point.
jshore: Are you familiar with the Space Interferometry Mission, and the Terrestrial Planet Finder? These are large, free-space telescope arrays that will be placed in the earth-sun Lagrange points and used to conduct vasts amounts of important science.
These programs will almost certainly require manned missions. We don’t have the capability to erect and operate large arrays like this robotically. And they’ll need maintenance - Hubble, which we both agree was one of the greatest scientific tools ever made, would not have existed without the shuttle. Even absent the repair mission to fix the screwed optics, the Hubble has been upgraded several times, always by people.
In an array of say, thirty telescopes, each more complex than Hubble, what are the odds that that array will fly perfectly without failure?
We need to learn how to work comfortably in space. Things that are very hard to do today become easy when people are involved. Look at what has happened with the Mars rovers so far - they’re learning huge amounts, but it’s also very frustrating in that they can’t do some things that we would really like to do. A geologist with a rock hammer could do more science on Mars in an afternoon than both rovers will manage over their entire lifespans.
Yesterday, one of the MER images showed a ‘thread’ on the ground. It’s really important to find out what that is, because we don’t know of a natural process that could make thread-like structures absent biology. But guess what? The rovers have no way of checking what it is. They can’t pick it up, they can’t zoom in farther than the micro-imager will allow, and it takes hours to make the simplest motions. Now, this thread is possibly parachute debris, but we don’t know. We have no way of knowing. So right now, the plan is move far away from the landing site, and look for more ‘threads’. But if the density of these things is low, we might never see another one.
Next message - Bush’s general science policy.
Sure we do. Volcanoes sometimes put out thin strands of glass. It’s called Pele’s hair.
Bush’s overall science funding
I just did a search for “Bush Science Policy”, and the first thing that popped up was the Bush administration’s funding request for the National Science Foundation: Bush Administration FY 2003 Request for National Science Foundation
Some of this increase is due to transfers of programs from other deparments, but 3.3% is new spending. And of special interest to you: funding in geosciences goes up over 13% next year.
So the Bush administration wants to increase NSF funding by 5%, when other domestic spending is relatively flat. Bush has already increased education funding by 48% over the last three years.
Let’s compare Bush’s record with Clinton’s. From this table from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, we find that during the period from 1993 to 2001, NSF funding went from 2.014 billion to 3.32 billion, a total increase of 1.3 billion dollars, or an average of 163 million dollars per year.
Now let’s look at Bush’s record: In his first budget, NSF funding increased by 305 million dollars. In his next, funding was increased by 401 million. By 2005, Bush will have increased NSF funding to 4.226 billion, a rate of increase over double that of the Clinton administration. (I don’t understand why these numbers differ from the larger number quoted at the start of the message).
That AAAS table is very interesting. Let’s compare Clinton to Bush:
Clinton’s first budget was 1993, and his last was 2001. So we’ll use that to average out Clinton’s spending, and we’ll use the last three years for Bush.
Basic Research
1993: 13.444 billion
2001: 21.376 billion
Average increase per year for Clinton: 991 million.
2003: 25.327 billion.
Average increase over Bush’s first two budgets: 1.9755 billion.
So… Bush has DOUBLED the annual increase for basic research over Clinton.
Total Non Defense Research
1993: 30.815 Billion
2001: 45.332 Billion
Average increase per year for Clinton: 1.815 Billion
2003: 54.05 billion
Average increase per year for Bush: 4.359 billion
So, Bush has more than doubled the annual increase in non-defense spending, as compared to Clinton.
Defense Related Research
1993: 42.114 billion
2001: 46.202 billion
Average increase per year for Clinton: 511 million
2003: 63.708 billion
Average increase per year for Bush: 8.753 billion
Bush has increased defense research at a rate SIXTEEN times greater than under Clinton.
In every area of science on that chart, Bush has at least doubled the rate of increase for science, as compared to the Clinton administration. And keep in mind that Clinton presided over an economic boom where the government was awash in money. Bush inherited a recession, brought in a tax cut, and is fighting a war. Even so, he’s spending more money on science than Clinton ever did.
Tell me again why Bush is ‘anti science’?
Here’s another interesting chart: Selected Trends in Non-Defense R&D
Look at the chart for non-health R&D. Notice that R&D spending took a BIG dive under Jimmy Carter, then stayed relatively flat under Reagan. It then took a big jump under the first Bush presidency, then went relatively flat again under Clinton. Then it began climbing again under Bush II. Under Clinton, basic science had a funding decrease outside of the National Institute of Health. Under Bush II, non-health related research is once again going up.
Moral of this chart: If you care about science, elect a Republican. (-:
I don’t see any evidence here that Bush is ‘anti science’. In fact, judging by money spent it looks like Bush is about twice as interested in promoting science as was Clinton.
Squink: Thanks for that. I guess the rather breathless article I read on this was wrong on that point. Geology isn’t my strong suit.
??? No, no, that’s not how our system works. It’s not even how our system is supposed to work. We don’t have a parliamentary system, we have a separation-of-powers system. The president is not answerable to Congress as Tony Blair is answerable to the House of Commons. The president has an independent constitutional office and an independent electoral mandate (such as it is . . .). Congress makes law but the president makes policy, and is expected to.
Sam,
To be honest, I don’t blame you. If I were you, trying to defend the indefensible, then I too might try to hijack this thread to talk about points unrelated to what it was clearly about.
But, just to make a few points on your “analysis”:
(1) Much of the increases are likely blips due to increased spending, both defense and non-defense, related to defense and homeland security arising from 9/11. (Well, the defense one will likely be more than just a blip.) As you are no doubt aware, the Bush Administration has been accused by some of your political friends of spending like a drunken sailor, and while (as CBPP has documented) some of this is due to exageration and misleading allocation of what is going to what by Heritage et al. (in order to wrongly make it look like it was in large part due to non-security/non-defense related spending), there has indeed been a large discretionary spending blip.
(2) It is never standard practice to compare spending increases over periods of time by dollar amounts (especially uncorrected for inflation). The better way to do this is to do it by year-over-year percentage increases. For example, if you divide the figure in 2001 by the figure in 1993 and then take it to the 1/8 power (because it was over 8 years), you will get the average multiplier from year to year. Subtract 1 from this, multiply by 100 and you have your average year-over-year percentage increase. Doing this, one then finds, for example, that basic research increased by an average of 6.0% per year under Clinton and 8.8% in the first two years of Bush…Far from the doubling that your misleading way of doing things comes up with. For non-defense research, the numbers are 4.9% under Clinton and 9.2% under Bush for two years.
(3) Since Bush has issued his FY2005 funding request and the AAAS estimates of it are on that page, we can get a better idea of what the rate is likely to be over a longer period of a Bush Presidency, where we don’t have the security funding blip and we have Heritage et al. beginning to breath down his neck. So, if you compare the FY2005 request to 2001, you now get that basic research increases 5.8% per year on average over those years, a tad less than the 6.0% under 8 years of Clinton. For non-defense research, the number is 6.0% which still puts it over Clinton’s 4.9% but not all that much.
(4) I remind you that spending is determined by Congress as well as the President. Certainly, the President gives his budget requests but the final amounts reflect a compromise. Under Clinton, Congress generally exercised tight control.; I don’t know how this panned out in the realm of science budgets. By contrast, Congress seems to pretty much role over and give Bush what he wants.
So, Sam, yes, Bush has shown a remarkable propensity to spend money, give tax cuts, and turn surplusses into deficits. But, the evidence is that over the long-haul, non-defense and basic research will likely fare similarly under Bush as they did under Clinton. I’ll grant you that defense research is likely to do better.
And, of course, this is all irrelevant to the point of this thread, since we all agreed near the beginning that the problem was not that Bush was shortchanging science funding but rather that he was supressing and distorting scientific information.
Agreed.
I’m sorry, I missed the part of the memo where they accused the White House of inserting faith based theories for climate change.
Ok, but if you ask questions still disagree, get another opinion, and still disagree, do you simply lay down and let the reprot go out even though you think it is wrong?
Well, who had bad faith is not determinable by that short memo. That the EPA disagreed strongly is quite easy to see. It is a biased judgement on your part to assume it was the White House which was not willing to budge.
Please link to something which will enlighten us. What exactly is it about inserting maybes and qualifiers which is a severe distortion of this particular debate. Sure, if they had inserted something like we have an alleged climate. I’d agree. But unless I’m mistaken, that is not what the changes amounted to.
Now for something completely different…
Easy Sam, didn’t Bush’s spending only start after the balanced budget law expire? That is, didn’t he only increase spending after he was able to borrow in an unlimited (and some have said unwise) fashion? Besides which, this thread has absolutely nothing to do with spending on science. Some people are contending that the current administration is using a heavy political stick to influence the science coming out of various government agencies. No one is complaining that the administration is short changing these agencies monetarily.
Since most of your post is basically just repeating your discredited claims from previous posts, I won’t bother to respond to it again. But, I did need to respond to this argument because it is just so inherently silly. The President does not make or influence policy? The hell he doesn’t. The President has a substantial latitude in influencing it…and within certain bounds…making it. And, a hypotechnical and completely simplistic argument about the roles of the legislative and executive branches is irrelevant. What has been presented here are documented instances of what this administration has done in areas of science policy. Noone, absolutely noone, in the EPA said that when they submitted their environmental report, it was Congress that “editted” it. And, noone is saying that it is Congress that was appointing scientists to the advisory committees. So would you quite trying to derail the debate with totally off-topic remarks? That may work well in high school debate but it ain’t going to get you anywhere in GD on the SDMB.
But, while we are on the subject, it is worth noting that the attack on science is not only coming from the Administration. In fact, the administration is tame compared to the complete idiot of a senator who heads the Subcommittee on Environment and Public Works (or something like that), Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma. The man is a nutcase who thinks the only people who put out “sound”, “non-political” science on global warming are those scientists (sparsely published in the peer-reviewed literature) associated with the George C. Marshal, Cato, or Western Fuels. If there was ever a reason why we need to get the Senate back into the hands of grownups, Sen. Inhofe is it!
I really think we’re on a tangent here, but…
A paper by an anonymous engineer circled around Washington after the Hubble was canceled. <<I don’t blame you for missing this news story, BTW>> From the Feb 7, NYT:
- Safety: "The documents also argue that missions to the space station might actually be riskier than going to the space telescope for several reasons. Because of the space station’s orbit in relation to the equator, the shuttle has to use more energy, increasing the chances that something will go wrong and that it will not make it into orbit. Moreover, one of the biggest dangers to the shuttle’s skin is micrometeorite impacts while it is in orbit. When it is at the telescope, unlike when it is docked to the station, the shuttle can orient itself backwards in its orbit, protecting its leading surfaces from such impacts.
As for a safe haven, that could be met by launching the Hubble mission just before a planned station mission, the report says. If there was trouble, a second shuttle could be dispatched to rescue the crew. Using an airlock system, astronauts could move from one shuttle to the other without going outside."
- Cost, from an op-ed piece no longer online, but available at Brad deLong’s blog:
"NASA’s deeper, less advertised worry is probably its budget. With many new objectives, the agency needs to trim as much fat as possible, and a Hubble repair mission costs about $500 million. But the Hubble long ago proved it was worth every cent… In 2002, more than 3,500 published scientific papers grew out of Hubble observations.
More to the point, scrapping the Hubble could be as expensive as saving it. Without servicing by the shuttle, it will inevitably fall to Earth, and NASA can’t allow a 24,000-pound telescope to land just anywhere. So the agency will have to design and build a robotic rocket that would attach itself to the Hubble and bring it safely down in the ocean. And here lies the fiscal absurdity: the price of that rocket is estimated by NASA at $300 million — and given that the Hubble wasn’t designed for automated docking, new technology would have to be developed, perhaps pushing the cost even higher. Add to this the $200 million in new gizmos already built for the Hubble and you get a woeful picture. By not spending $500 million to service the telescope (and add many more years to its life), we will probably have to spend the same amount to bring the telescope crashing down."
Emphasis added. Now, that last sentence isn’t quite accurate, IMHO. After all, $200 billion of that $500 billion is already spent.
Still, here’s the point: Servicing Hubble isn’t a huge expense: canceling it amounts to eliminating a $500 million line item and while adding another $300 line item on.
Anyway, I would not call the net cost of $200 million “a big investment”. Relative to the Martian Expedition, it is peanuts.
Come on, pervert, I know you are aware of the concept of an analogy. 
Yes…especially since in this case, there is no evidence that the people making these decisions even have the credentials to be able to make an assessment. Who the hell in OMB knows more about climate change than an NAS panel or the scientists in EPA for heaven’s sake?!? Your suggestion that they can be overruled is exactly the attitude that leads to ideology screwing up science. [A variation of this sometimes occurs in the industrial setting where I work and has been dubbed by one of my colleagues as “management by extreme desire”, a parody of the “management by fact” process that they are supposed to be using.]
Well, pervert, we all have to make judgements sometime. Yes, it could all be a huge plot by the horrible ideologues who work as scientists in the communist EPA to foist this on the unwitting public. If you want to buy into that theory, be my guest. But, don’t be surprised if the scientific community at large doesn’t agree. (Besides which, those of us quite familiar with the climate debate understand what studies and such the White House was actually trying to get inserted so we know where the truth lies.)
Yes, it is a distortion to imply that things that are known to a high degree of certainty are not. It is also a distortion to imply that things that are not known to a high degree of certainty are. (Remember Iraq?) Scientists tell you not only what they think they know but also how they know it and to what degree of certainty they know. Systematically distorting this is a distortion of the science.
Quite so. It is a tool used to compare several things. Your analogy attempted to suggest that there were no reasons to insert qualifications in the climate section of the EPA report.
Please let’s not over react. I did not make any such suggestion. I merely suggested that 2 or 3 sentences from one side of an argument is not definitive evidence that the argument was one sided either way. Want to talk about “evaluation by desire”
Cool. Then please point me to the site which states to a high degree of certainty that humans are warming the planet. I have looked throgh some of the IPCC site, and smell something odd in a few places. I’m certainly not saying that it is all bullshit. I am simply saying that it fails a few of the basic sniff tests. Effects which are very small require very good instruments to be “highly certain” that they are not noise. Remember the cold fusion nuetron emissions? I am also highly suspect of computer models to add much science to this debate. Given the immense complexity of the climate, are we sure that such models take enough factors into account? Or are we even “highly certain”?
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they do not. Was teh EPA report a peer reviewed paper?
Look, to be clear, again, I am not claiming that the EPA is some commie plot. Also, I am not defending the two studies you alluded to which the administration wanted to insert. This was not mentioned in any useful way in the memo we are discussing. All I am suggesting regarding the EPA report, is that the administration may have had serious objections to the characterizations used and the EPA may have felt those objections were not appropriate. I am simply saying that this may not be some henious attempt by the administration to sneak creation science into the political debate.
Do you have a good cite which contains the original climate section and the changes required by the administration? I’m sure it leaked somewhere.
jshore: I must admit, that was an amazing piece of spin. You took a bunch of hard data I offered that shows that by any measure Bush has supported science research to a much greater extent than Clinton, and you try to handwave it away by going through a tortuous calculation to try to come up with ‘percentage of total increase’ as a standard, which doesn’t make any more sense than showing increases in constant dollars, which in any event STILL shows Bush spending significantly more than Clinton. Then you make a wild-assed assumption about where the money is going, without offering any evidence that that is the case, and from all this you conclude that Bush “is no better than Clinton”. Which isn’t true. But even if it were, I don’t recall a lot of handwringing on your part over Clinton’s support for science.
I went through this same debate a few months ago with some HIV=AIDS deniers who popped up here. Like with HIV, there is a near-universal scientific consensus on the matter. There are some notable dissenters, and they have been addressed. The IPCC report cited strongly-worded statements by the NAS (National Academy of Sciences) and the AGU (American Geophysical Union, the largest society of earth scientists according the UCS). The EPA report in 2002 was the first in five years not to mention climate change, because those sections were excised by administrative urging.
Comparing something to the cold fusion things is exactly what the HIV people do when they want to make a point. As I’m sure jshore will point out, the Pons and Fleischmann data was never universally accepted, only a handful of groups were able to replicate it and then they all recanted. Pons and Fleischmann were widely criticized for going to the press and publicizing their discovery there first instead of in a peer-reviewed fashion. The reason we aren’t still talking about cold fusion is because of peer-review.
Do any of you wish to address the same aspects of abstinence-only education? How about pending legislation dictating that science used for policy must be exclusively reviewed by people in industry? How about stocking lead-industry advisors onto panels analyzing the harm of lead in drinking water? How about the appointment of politically-allied scientifically-naive people to the highest levels of executive branch science policy? How about application of political litmus tests to scientific appointments? These things are all unprecedented and could do permanent harm to the ability of the government to make policy based on the most sound, least biased science. Do we really need people like Joe McIlhaney on the Presidential Council for HIV/AIDS and W. David Hager on the FDA’s Reproductive Health Advisory Agency? Surely you can see how they may carry some kinds of bias into discussions on the best ways to prevent HIV transmission and the best techniques for reproductive health? W. David Hager recommends prayer as a treatment for PMS and eating disorders…
sam, did you catch the last bit of jshore’s rebuttal?
…and from pervert:
I appreciate all the time you spent on an evaluation of total budgeted dollars, but as the above posters note, it was just a well-researched hijack, addressing a point that doesn’t seem to have been in contention.
And to add an opinion to this thread: IMHO every dollar that Bush seems to want to spend to send human beings to Mars (cool though that sounds) ought to be spent on a Manhattan Project-like initiative to come up with cleaner, domestically-generated alternate energy sources. Those are science-research dollars that would also help the environment and help solve some of our foreign policy messes. But missions to Mars a) make for good press and national pride, and b) won’t tick off the administration’s fossil fuel buddies. (And to tie this back to the OP, I’m guessing that the administration’s science advisors, linked to the industries that would suffer most, would conclude that alternative energy sources aren’t that big a priority right now.)
-P
M4M said, “(I hasten to add that I am sympathetic to having industry-attached researchers on a panel setting lead standards. It’s the elimination of CDC people from the board that raises concerns.)”
The latter. I am concerned that if the administration is eliminating people from its panels that they fear will disagree with them. Replacing somebody from the CDC with an industry-supported researcher looks like you’re trying to stack the deck.
I was trying to say, however, that I did not have difficulties with a balanced panel.
Parthol: *IMHO every dollar that Bush seems to want to spend to send human beings to Mars (cool though that sounds) ought to be spent on a Manhattan Project-like initiative to come up with cleaner, domestically-generated alternate energy sources. *
The New Apollo Plan is a proposed ten-year, $300-billion project to do precisely that (plus generate jobs in the US). I think it sounds like it needs some tweaking, but is basically a good idea. The Europeans and Antipodeans are way ahead of us on renewables/conservation technology as it is; we should catch a piece of the action.
/hijack
pervert replied to me: *“What do you mean, [if the hypothetical agency findings in my hypothetical presidential administration are] ‘opposed to my agenda’?”
I mean simply opposed to your belief in the truth, and the science as presented does not convince you.*
Well, what are my scientific credentials in this hypothetical situation? Am I a president who also happens to be a climate scientist? Do I know more than the agency’s staff about this subject?
If not, I don’t see why my own personal “belief in the truth”, for which you haven’t suggested any particular factual basis or support, should trump the considered opinions of those who know more than I do, even if I am the Prez. As jshore pointed out, I can ask the NAS for a second opinion, if I’m really dubious about the original agency results.
*“In your EPA ‘downplaying global warming’ example, do you mean to suggest that the agency has been dishonest in reporting or interpreting the data?”
Not necessarily. They could be entirely honest in the facts, and simply be distorting the conclusions.*
? What’s the difference between “distorting the conclusions” and “being dishonest in interpreting the data”?
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?
Yup, if there is conclusive evidence of fraud, misconduct, or gross neglect in dealing with the relevant science, I don’t want those people to go on working for us.
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?
If I know that these people have put out a dishonest report, I’ll certainly say so.
If, on the other hand, I have no reason to think that anybody has done anything wrong, but their claims simply run counter to my personal “belief in the truth”, where the fuck do I get off interfering with their report? Why keep a dog and bark yourself? Let the pros do their job, that’s what we pay them for.
I am honestly asking what you would do if you honestly believed that the agency had it wrong.
There’s certainly nothing stopping from me from using my bully pulpit to say that I personally disagree with the agency’s conclusions. I might be a little worried about looking like a horse’s ass by proclaiming that I “honestly believed that the agency had it wrong” despite the fact that they know much more about the subject than I do, but hey, the President can proclaim personal opinions that make her look like a horse’s ass if she wants to. There are lots of precedents.
jshore simply did what was necessary to debunk your golly gosh “SIXTEEN TIMES greater” statement. And, as a number of people are trying to point out to you, the level of spending is pretty much irrelevant to this thread. Unless you’re trying to mount some kind of “it may be bad, but it could have been worse” kind of defense.