Is Bush's Administration Anti-Science?

[Knorf]

@jshore

I have little doubt that my fellow posters here, across the poltical spectrum, would have a near-unanimous verdict on which category your post fell into.

You got that right. Broken Column’s logical contortions to support his ill-conceived point have gone well beyond being funny. Now they’re just pathetic.

The thick-headedness of the following statement is truly spectacular:

[quote=The_Broken_Column]
None of the listed offices deals with public-policy MAKING, only the process of making public policy (indrectly related to the Executive) or the implementation of policy (directly related to the executive).

[quote]

Broken Column in the past has seemed way too smart for me to accept that this is the best he can do. I can only conclude that his loyalty to the GOP and G.W.Bush is so extreme and near-sighted that he can’t stop and think about how ridiculous his arguments have become.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@jshore

A little hint for you: Excessive gloating is probably not looked at too kindly by others on the SDMB but it usually forgiven if the person has really made some pretty smart compelling arguments. If the person does this after making ridiculous silly arguments, it is really not looked well upon at all. I have little doubt that my fellow posters here, across the poltical spectrum, would have a near-unanimous verdict on which category your post fell into.

T_B_C’s braggadocio puts me in mind of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

[jshore]

@pervert

Ok, jshore I typed up a long detailed response to you post and then deleted it. I’d rather focus on 2 points. I should say first, that I cited the wrong website in that post. I was really asking about uncertainties in the surface temperature measurements which are hard to find from there.

Specifically, This nasa cite suggests in part

This is mentioned in the IPCC report (pdf sorry) on page 163 as

I am not suggesting that either cite is the correct one. Only that there may be legitimate questions. I am only arguing that inserting verbiage as to the legitimaticy of these questions is not as odd a thing as you make it out to be.

Again, I think you are asking the wrong question here. Noone is debating whether everything in the climate science field is known for certain. It is not. (I do have some quibbles with your statements about, but I will try to address them in a separate post on the technical issues.) Rather, the question is who should decide what the current state of the science is, the scientists working in the EPA or the political ideologues working at the White House. Here is a relevant quote from the UCS report (pp. 6 and 7):

The EPA’s decision to delete any mention of global warming from its report drew widespread criticism. Many scientists and public offi cials—Republicans and Democrats alike—were moved to decry the administration’s political manipulation in this case. Notably, the incident drew the ire of Russell Train, who served as EPA administrator under Presidents Nixon and Ford. In a letter to the New York Times, Train stated that the Bush administration’s actions undermined the independence of the EPA and were virtually unprecedented for the degree of their political manipulation of the agency’s research. As Train put it, the “interest of the American people lies in having full disclosures of the facts.” Train also noted that, “In all my time at the EPA, I don’t recall any regulatory decision that was driven by political considerations. More to the present point, never once, to my best recollection, did either the Nixon or Ford White House ever try to tell me how to make a decision.”

By the way, you can read Train’s letter to the NY Times here.

@pervert

Secondly, I do understand how serious a charge has been leveled at the administration. That’s why I would have preffered much better evidence than I’ve seen so far.

To be honest, I am not sure exactly what you are looking for and suspect you are setting the bar impossibly high. For example, we have a memo from scientists within the EPA stating that the White House has made these non-negotiable final edits to the report and that these edits misrepresented the science in the report. [We even have a little bit of info from the memo at qualitatively desribing the edits.] It would certainly be more compelling evidence if there was a memo from the White House stating: “These are the edits we are making to the report. We don’t care if you feel they misrepresent the science because we are not interested in getting the science right as much as keeping to our ideological agenda.” However, I would also argue that this is a ridiculously high standard to expect such a memo to exist.

And, we are not even talking about a standard for coming to a final conclusion here. What we are really talking about is a standard so that “the ball is in the administration’s court”, i.e., it is incumbent on the administration to seriously answer these charges.

Finally, I’m sorry, but science was politicized a long time ago with the aid of scientists, BTW. And your right. It is a tragedy.

Well, scientists are human beings and imperfect. However, there have been various “checks” in the process to prevent the science as a whole from becoming very politicized. And, one of those things is to keep a “wall” of sorts between the civil service scientist and the political appointees with an understanding that those who are making policy should be using the science as the basis of policy rather than trying to influence the science (other than, obviously, setting funding priorities and such). Another is the use of the National Academy of Sciences to weigh in on scientific issues. And, the use of scientific advisory committees whose members are appointed based on their scientific credentials and not political litmus tests. This administration seems to be interested in getting around these protections.

By the way, are there things that you are referring to in particular when you make this claim?

[jshore]

@pervert

I would like to point out that we have not been arguing about the 2 studies which the administration wanted mentioned in the report. If you have a good description of those as inappropriate, I’d be interested in hearing it.

One of the papers referred to is the Soon and Baliunas paper published in the journal Climate Research. Here is a New York Times article about what ensued. Unfortunately, one would have to pay to access it, but here is an excerpt that I posted (at a time when access was still free) in a previous thread on global warming:

But the Soon-Baliunas paper published in the journal Climate Research this year, has been heavily criticized by many scientists, including several of the journal editors. The editors said last week that whether or not the conclusions were correct, the analysis was deeply flawed.

The publisher of the journal, Dr. Otto Kinne, and an editor who recently became editor in chief, Dr. Hans von Storch, both said that in retrospect the paper should not have been published as written. Dr. Kinne defended the journal and its process of peer review, but distanced himself from the paper.

“I have not stood behind the paper by Soon and Baliunas,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Indeed: the reviewers failed to detect methodological flaws.”

Dr. von Storch, who was not involved in overseeing the paper, resigned last week, saying he disagreed with the peer-review policies.

So, basically, you have a paper whose publication caused the editor-in-chief of the journal (and, I have heard, other editors at the journal) to resign over the publisher’s editorial policies. [Apparently, one of the policies in question is a policy whereby you can choose which editor the paper goes to, and thus choose one who might be sympathetic to you and likely to send it to sympathetic referees.] And, while the publisher stood by the editorial policies of the journal, he admitted that they had failed in the case of this particular paper.

Here in fact is a long article on the whole controversy and here is the Soon-Baliunas paper itself.

By the way, Soon and Baliunas have a rather interesting history, having written a “paper” sent in the infamous Oregon Petition mass-mailing. Here is the story on this from Physicist Robert Park in his What’s New Column recently:

2. POLITICAL CLIMATE: WHAT’S RIGHT FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?
   One of the purported abuses cited in the minority staff report involved the insertion into an EPA report of a reference to a paper by Soon and Baliunas that denies globl warming (WN 1 Aug 03). To appreciate its significance, we need to go back to March of 1998. We all got a petition card in the mail urging the government to reject the Kyoto accord (WN 13 Mar 98). The cover letter was signed by “Frederick Seitz, Past President, National Academy of Sciences.” Enclosed was what seemed to be a reprint of a journal article, in the style and font of Proceedings of the NAS. But it had not been published in PNAS, or anywhere else. The reprint was a fake. Two of the four authors of this non- article were Soon and Baliunas. The other authors, both named Robinson, were from the tiny Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in Cave Junction, OR. The article claimed that the environmental effects of increased CO2 are all beneficial. There was also a copy of Wall Street Journal op-ed by the Robinsons (father and son) that described increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere as “a wonderful and unexpected gift of the industrial revolution.” There was no indication of who had paid for the mailing. It was a dark episode in the annals of scientific discourse.

[pervert]

@jshore

Again, I think you are asking the wrong question here. Noone is debating whether everything in the climate science field is known for certain. It is not.

Cool. Some of your earlier posts made me doubt this.

Rather, the question is who should decide what the current state of the science is, the scientists working in the EPA or the political ideologues working at the White House.

Agreed. However, if the relevant science is not definitive and the EPA want to publish a report saying that the US government believes it to be definitive, what would you do?

On this note, I think I owe everyone a slight retraction. I have been arguing about Global Warming from my own perspective. I have not delved too deeply into the administration’s perspective. That is, the objections I have raised were not intended to be my interpretation of the administration’s position.

Having said that, I did look into the White House’s position. They appear to agree substantially with you, jshore that it is real phenomena and possibly of human origin. I found This cite from the whitehouse indicating that they agree with an NAS study. As in “*My Cabinet-level working group has met regularly for the last 10 weeks to review the most recent, most accurate, and most comprehensive science. They have heard from scientists offering a wide spectrum of views. They have reviewed the facts, and they have listened to many theories and suppositions. The working group asked the highly-respected National Academy of Sciences to provide us the most up-to-date information about what is known and about what is not known on the science of climate change. *”

and

“First, we know the surface temperature of the earth is warming. It has risen by .6 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. There was a warming trend from the 1890s to the 1940s. Cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s. And then sharply rising temperatures from the 1970s to today.”

and finally,

"*There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming. Greenhouse gases trap heat, and thus warm the earth because they prevent a significant proportion of infrared radiation from escaping into space. Concentration of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have increased substantially since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And the National Academy of Sciences indicate that the increase is due in large part to human activity.

 Yet, the Academy's report tells us that we do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming.  We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future.  We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it. *"

Now, let’s look at the leaked memo from the EPA which says in part:

“Natural variability is used to mask scientific consensus that most of the recent temperature increase is likely due to human activities”

Finally, just in case the speech mis characterized the NAS reoport, I found This summary of an NAS report (although I admit I have no idea if it is the one reffered to in the speech.) It says in part “*The IPCC’s conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue. The stated degree of confidence in the IPCC assessment is higher today than it was 10, or even 5 years ago, but uncertainty remains because of (1) the level of natural variability inherent in the climate system on time scales of decades to centuries, (2) the questionable ability of models to accurately simulate natural variability on those long time scales, and (3) the degree of confidence that can be placed on reconstructions of global mean temperature over the past millennium based on proxy evidence. Despite the uncertainties, there is general agreement that the observed warming is real and particularly strong within the past 20 years. Whether it is consistent with the change that would be expected in response to human activities is dependent upon what assumptions one makes about the time history of atmospheric concentrations of the various forcing agents, particularly aerosols. *”
So, what do we have. We have a part of an EPA report over which the EPA and the WhitHouse (via the Council on Environmental Quality CEQ and Office of Management and Budget OMB) disagreed. They negotiated over it for months with little change. Finally the WhiteHouse made edits and said that “no further changes may be made”. The authours of the memo (of whom we know nothing) cried foul in part for the reason quoted above (in addition to others). these disagreements amounted to (in the opinion of the memo’s author) changes which caused the Report On the Environment ROE to “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change.”

I have not mentioned the two studies that the administration wanted referenced (I still do not have a good link describing them, only a criptic mention by jshore).

I should also point out, that the report in question is meant to “identif[y] indicators that can be used to measure EPA progress in protecting human health and the environment.” The section which was under contention was a small part of it. Also it should be noted that neither the report nor the section under contention was a “peer reviewed” study of any kind (to my knowledge. If you know different, please let me know). So, even at its worse, this complaint is not the same as the EPA measuring some phenomena and the administration demanding that the number be changed. That is, we are not talking about disregarding the scientific method for other means of knowledge (which you certainly meant to imply with your creaionism and HIV does nto cause aids jibes). We are talking about summaries and characterizations.

So, what happened here? Did the big bad administration demand irrational changes to a scientific paper while the noble scientists defended reason? Did the (did you use the word pinko, jshore)buerocratic government agency attempt to mislead the public while the Bush administration insist on reason?

I don’t know.

Given that the only news we have of the incident comes from critics of the administration, we should at the least take them with a grain of salt. Given that the only news we have of the incident come to us in a packages designed (by strong critics of the administration) to discredit the administration’s oversight of scientific agencies, perhaps another grain of salt is in order. But, given that absolutely no other alternative explanation (except the first one I made up) is postulated at all by the people presenting the incident, I’d say, we have to take it with a shaker of salt.

Now, having said all that, I’d like to point out one other part of the memo in question. “Conclusions of the NRC (2001) are discarded, that multiple studies indicate recent warming is unusual.” Taken at face value, this seems odd. If the studies were mentioned as in (this study said such and such), I can’t see why all mention of them should be removed. Even if the language was more glowing such as “these studies prove we were right and you were wrong, neener, neener.” It seems a more appropriate course would have been to simply mention then and tone down the characterization, or interpretation of them.

I’m still hoping that someone will dig up a copy of the unreleased section of the report. If we found such a paper with the edits and without them, we could discuss them more rationally. Until then, all we have are political attacks. Personally, I’m not inclined to accept such things without a good deal of critical thinking. But, each to his own, I suppose.

[pervert]

@jshore

By the way, Soon and Baliunas have a rather interesting history, having written a “paper” sent in the infamous Oregon Petition mass-mailing. Here is the story on this from Physicist Robert Park in his What’s New Column recently:

jshore, "seemed to be a reprint ", “in the style and font”? Did the letter claim to be from the PNAS or not? Was teh cover letter fraudulently signed or not? And “We all got a petition”? Who the heck is that?

As to the study itself, Ok. I’ll grant that it seems quite inappropriate. Do you have a reference to the page of the Waxman report which claims that this was one of the studies refered to in the memo? IOW how do we know this?

Assuming it was one of the studies refered to, we can add it to the things I think are odd about the incident.

BTW, do you have a pointer to last years ROE? I was under the impression that the section which was removed had been included in years past. But then I found this. “EPA announced the release of the EPA “Draft Report on the Environment” — an unprecedented effort by the Agency to present the first-ever national picture of U.S. environmental quality and human health. Whitman commissioned the report in November 2001.”

Is it possible that we are talking about a one time report anyway? This may not be a scientific report which usually contains global climate information which the administration perverted to distort the truth. This may, in fact, be a political document describing the activities of the EPA which contained global climate information that the politicians wanted to edit.

Is that even possible? Could the political attacks have mischaracterized the report so badly?

[Loopydude]

All I can add to this debate is this:

Being afraid to work on embryonal stem cells because of political reasons is a big pain in the ass. I have been wasting my time on MSCs, and P19 cells are cool, but not relevant enough, because they’re not human. The current administration has, so far as I can tell, everything to do with this. I’m in industry damnit, and we still won’t work on them vigorously, because our colaborators won’t touch it anymore. An entire field of cutting-edge research has withered here in the States because of Bush’s pandering to the religious right. It’s assinine, and I resent it deeply. I don’t care how much he spends or doesn’t spend. His policies are hostile to an important area of study that I am professionally involved in, and know to be of great potential if the many technical and safety hurdles we know we must face can be surmounted. We can’t realize that potential without doing the work, period. Private funding, even when adequate, can’t erase the poisonous atomosphere presidential censure creates. His influence has been nothing short of destructive. He brings with him a plague on science, from my perspective.

Some have argued above that he’s good for spending. Big effing deal, I say. If he creates a climate in the highest levels of government that is hostile to the free exchange of ideas based upon sound research and ethics, for no other reason than because these ideas are incompatible with narrow ideologies (be they conservative, liberal, or whatever), he’s no better than a Soviet premier, in my estimation. Attempting to manipulate human knowledge in this manner, as other political systems have taught us, is corrosive to society as a whole. Have we learned nothing?

[Loopydude]

All I can add to this debate is this:

Being afraid to work on embryonal stem cells because of politics is a big pain in the ass. I have been wasting my time on MSCs, and P19 cells are cool, but not relevant enough, because they’re not human. The extant human lines have their problems, which I won’t get into here. The current administration has, so far as I can tell, everything to do with this issue. I’m in industry damnit, and we still won’t work on them, because our colaborators won’t touch it anymore. An entire field of cutting-edge research has withered here in the States because of Bush’s pandering to the religious right. It’s assinine, and I resent it deeply. I don’t care how much he spends or doesn’t spend. His policies are hostile to an important area of study that I am professionally involved in, and know to be of great potential if the many technical and safety hurdles we know we must face can be surmounted. We can’t realize that potential without doing the work, period. Private funding, even when adequate, can’t erase the poisonous atomosphere presidential censure creates. His influence has been nothing short of destructive. He brings with him a plague on science, from my perspective.

Some have argued above that he’s good for general funding. Big effing deal, I say. If he creates a climate in the highest levels of government that is hostile to the free exchange of ideas based upon sound research and ethics, for no other reason than because these ideas are incompatible with narrow ideologies (be they conservative, liberal, or whatever), he’s no better than a Soviet premier, in my estimation. Attempting to manipulate human knowledge in this manner, as other political systems have taught us, is corrosive to society as a whole. Have we learned nothing from the mistakes of others?

[pervert]

OK, not to get us of on yet another tangent, But I agree completely with your first paragraph.

I think you second goes a little far, however. I’m sorry, but banning stem cell research is not the same thing as “hostile to the free exchange of ideas.” It is wrong headed, certainly. But it is nothing like the old style Soviet system.

It is, however, a nasty side effect of relying so heavily on government for scientific funding. (which is sort of what I meant by my earlier remark about science already being politicized)

[jshore]

@pervert

BTW, do you have a pointer to last years ROE? I was under the impression that the section which was removed had been included in years past. But then I found this. “EPA announced the release of the EPA “Draft Report on the Environment” — an unprecedented effort by the Agency to present the first-ever national picture of U.S. environmental quality and human health. Whitman commissioned the report in November 2001.”

Is it possible that we are talking about a one time report anyway? This may not be a scientific report which usually contains global climate information which the administration perverted to distort the truth. This may, in fact, be a political document describing the activities of the EPA which contained global climate information that the politicians wanted to edit.

Is that even possible? Could the political attacks have mischaracterized the report so badly?

Well, I don’t see why it has been “mischaracterized”. Can you point to evidence of that? Maybe you misinterpretted what it was. And, I don’t think it was meant to be a “one time report”…It was the first time they had done such a report (although I wonder exactly what is meant by this…perhaps other administrations had done something similar yet different?) purporting to summarize the total environmental picture but I believe they didn’t want it to be the last.

And, note these sections from your link:

Using the most sophisticated science ever, we have developed a comprehensive roadmap to ensure that all Americans have cleaner air, purer water and better protected land. This report is an important tool that will be useful for generations to come.”

The report uses available scientific data, gathered from more than 30 other federal agencies, departments, states, tribes and non-governmental organizations, to answer questions that the EPA and its collaborators have identified as indicators of the nation’s environmental quality and human health. It establishes scientific, consensus-based benchmarks to measure EPA’s progress. This is the first time that EPA has developed a comprehensive report about the nation’s environment, and it will be used as a baseline for future evaluations.

…

“The President has asked each federal agency to be more accountable to the American public. In presenting this report, we are providing a picture of what we know - and equally important what we don’t know - about the condition of our nation’s environmental and human health. We have made much progress over the past 30 years, but there is still more to be done. This draft report is a stepping stone toward helping EPA identify future data and research needs, and we are already putting that knowledge to work,” said Whitman.

That’s a lot of uses of words like “science”, “research”, and “data”, yes?

[jshore]

@pervert

On this note, I think I owe everyone a slight retraction. I have been arguing about Global Warming from my own perspective. I have not delved too deeply into the administration’s perspective. That is, the objections I have raised were not intended to be my interpretation of the administration’s position.

Having said that, I did look into the White House’s position. They appear to agree substantially with you, jshore that it is real phenomena and possibly of human origin. I found This cite from the whitehouse indicating that they agree with an NAS study. As in “*My Cabinet-level working group has met regularly for the last 10 weeks to review the most recent, most accurate, and most comprehensive science. They have heard from scientists offering a wide spectrum of views. They have reviewed the facts, and they have listened to many theories and suppositions. The working group asked the highly-respected National Academy of Sciences to provide us the most up-to-date information about what is known and about what is not known on the science of climate change. *”

Like I said discussing the Bush Administration approach to this issue:

@jshore

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.)

and

@jshore

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.

Unfortunately, the direction of travel has been bad in the sense that the chronological order of these events that I refer to was, I believe, (1), (2), (3) [at any rate, (3) was after (1) and (2)]. What is worrisome is the idea that the Administration may actually be listening to the advice of those on the WSJ editorial page or their ilk.

[jshore]

@pervert

jshore, "seemed to be a reprint ", “in the style and font”? Did the letter claim to be from the PNAS or not? Was teh cover letter fraudulently signed or not?

It was not an outright fraud but it was misleading enough that the NAS took the highly unusual step of issuing a statement saying something like the paper in question had not been published in any NAS proceeding (and I think may have gone on to add that its views were not in agreement with recent NAS studies). The paper itself was a quite a work of one-sided presentation and half-truths at best.

And “We all got a petition”? Who the heck is that?

That “What’s New” column is written for a professional physicist audience. It was apparently a mass mailing to professors (and even grad students maybe) in lots of science departments.

As to the study itself, Ok. I’ll grant that it seems quite inappropriate. Do you have a reference to the page of the Waxman report which claims that this was one of the studies refered to in the memo? IOW how do we know this?

I was pretty sure I knew what paper they were referring to from context. But, in case there was any doubt, the actual reference is in footnote 12 on p. 6 of the UCS report.

[jshore]

@pervert

It is, however, a nasty side effect of relying so heavily on government for scientific funding. (which is sort of what I meant by my earlier remark about science already being politicized)

Well, I don’t see how it is necessarily a result of the science relying on government funding. (And, not any more political than it might be if the private sector provided most of the funding.) I believe that most of that government funding is awarded in a peer-reviewed process. It is only when politicians start to meddle in the process, either by making politically-motivated decisions such as the stem cell one or by earmarking lots of money to pork-barrel research projects that it becomes a real problem.

[jshore]

@pervert

Is it possible that we are talking about a one time report anyway? This may not be a scientific report which usually contains global climate information which the administration perverted to distort the truth. This may, in fact, be a political document describing the activities of the EPA which contained global climate information that the politicians wanted to edit.

Is that even possible? Could the political attacks have mischaracterized the report so badly?

Actually, part of the confusion here is there seems to be two separate reports, one annual one on pollution from which the section on global warming was removed when it had contained it in previous years and the other one (which we have mainly discussed here) being this new comprehensive report on the state of the environment which originally included a section on global warming that was removed by the EPA because they felt that it no longer correctly represented the science after the White House made those non-negotiable final edits. Here is the story from pages 17 and 18 of the Waxman report:

The Bush Administration has also suppressed scientific evidence on global warming. In September 2002, the section on global warming was removed from an annual report on the state of air pollution. Then, in June 2003, the Administration published a supposedly “comprehensive” report on the environment without any information on climate change. According to EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, the Draft Report on the Environment used “the most sophisticated science ever” and represented “a comprehensive roadmap to ensure that all Americans have cleaner air, purer water and better protected land.” However, this report contained no information on global warming. Instead, the document stated, “This report does not attempt to address the complexities of this issue.”

Politics, not the complexities of science, led to the deletion of the section on global warming. The New York Times reported that when an earlier draft of the report containing a section on global warming was sent to the White House, the President’s advisors demanded major revisions. Specifically, the White House opposed mention of research demonstrating sharp increases in global temperature over the past decade compared to the previous millennium. The White House even objected to the reference to a National Academy of Sciences report on the human contribution to global warming that the White House itself had requested and that had been endorsed by President Bush in speeches that year. Administration officials replaced these sections with a reference to a study funded by the American Petroleum Institute questioning climate change evidence.

The White House even sought to replace the scientifically indisputable statement that “[c]limate change has global consequences for human health and the environment” with a statement about the “complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components.”

An internal EPA memorandum circulated during the editing process noted that after these changes, the section “no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change.” Another memo stated that by accepting the White House changes, “E.P.A. will take responsibility and severe criticism from the science and environmental communities for poorly representing the science.”

In the end, EPA officials chose to eliminate the section on global warming entirely.

[pervert]

@jshore

Well, I don’t see why it has been “mischaracterized”. Can you point to evidence of that?

The attacks all left me with the impression that the changes asked for by the Bush administration were wholly unprecedented. Part of the way they did this was to indicate that the changes were incompatible with other “chapters” of the ROE. I should have recognized that they did not mean other volumes, or other previous years. I suppose it is my fault for not looking at the report in the first place.

That’s a lot of uses of words like “science”, “research”, and “data”, yes?

Quite. But I was also left with the impression that scientific data was being perverted or changed. I thought I was being too defensive of the administration by concentrating on the insertion of modifying words into the text. But when I look at the report (extrapolating from the ozone section) we are talking about a page or a little more of text. In that little space if you did not use modifying words to indicate some level of uncertainty, you’d be misleading the public IMHO. The bottom line is that we are not talking about a comprehensive report on global warming into which the administration wanted to insert a “maybe” for every claiim. Which is also the impression I was left with after some of the rhetoric.

Unfortunately, the direction of travel has been bad in the sense that the chronological order of these events that I refer to was, I believe, (1), (2), (3) [at any rate, (3) was after (1) and (2)]. What is worrisome is the idea that the Administration may actually be listening to the advice of those on the WSJ editorial page or their ilk.

If I may jest for a moment, here we have a good example of the difficulty of predicting global climate. Limited measurements of a complex phenomena show a trend which is then followed uncritically.

Well, I don’t see how it is necessarily a result of the science relying on government funding.

Well, and seperate does not always imply unequal does it? The fact of the matter, however, is that funds are allocated for various types of research and only scientists who wish to do research in those areas get funds.

I believe that most of that government funding is awarded in a peer-reviewed process. It is only when politicians start to meddle in the process, either by making politically-motivated decisions such as the stem cell one or by earmarking lots of money to pork-barrel research projects that it becomes a real problem.

If I may be serious for a second, This, my friend, is your liberal bias coming to the fore. There is no noble difference between someone trained in science and the rest of us. There is no reason why a panel of scientists tasked with funding research will avoid giving money to projects that interest them and seek out projects which they do not like. Ideally, yes, they will evaluate all projects that come accross their desks completely impartially. However, reality is never ideal. How do the projects get to their desk? Which staffers decide which proposals will be looked at? Does the panel have NO political leanings?

Mind you, I’m certainly not saying that all government science is completely politically driven. I’m simply suggesting that government science builds a certain level of “political correctness” if you will into the process. Politicians cannot “interfere” in a process that they control from the begining.

If I may show my bias for a moment:
Look at the state of Climate Science. How many research projects are funded which are measuring natural influences on climate versus how many which look at man made influences? How long did it take to include accurate models of clouds into the computer models used for predictions? Do you know what every happened to the research about termite methane releases?

Again, I am not claiming that global warming is a myth. Merely that the sources proclaiming it are so one sided, and seem so politicaly motivated, that I do not turst them. My own bias to be sure.

[pervert]

@jshore

one annual one on pollution from which the section on global warming was removed when it had contained it in previous years

Do you know what this was called? I tried googling “epa annual air quality report” with little luck. I’d rather not get into the specifics of this one without looking at it. Once bitten and all that.

Here is the story from pages 17 and 18 of the Waxman report:

Note the juxtaposioning of “the White House opposed mention of research demonstrating sharp increases in global temperature over the past decade compared to the previous millennium. The White House even objected to the reference to a National Academy of Sciences report on the human contribution to global warming that the White House itself had requested and that had been endorsed by President Bush in speeches that year.” Intended to leave the impression that the white house wanted to delete references to the NAS study. did they instead want simply to include some of the uncertainties mentioned in the NAS study while the EPA did not want to?

Also, I question the replacement claim in the next paragraph where Waxman says that the WhiteHouse wants to “replace the scientifically indisputable statement that “[c]limate change has global consequences for human health and the environment” with a statement about the “complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components.”” The point, of course, being that the Whitehouse wanted to replace an indisputable claim with a disputable one. But notice that the first claim is a complete claim. It could very easily be a whole sentence. The replacement is not. What is the rest of the sentence the whitehouse wanted to include? Would it really have been scientfically disputable?

The last paragraph is most troubling. Waxman seems to indicate that there were two memos. The UCS report certainly implied that one contained both complaints. Little inconsistencies like that disturb me.

Maybe I’ve spent too much time debunking alien abductions. It is certainly possible that these problems have very innocent explanations. I’m too much of a skeptic I suppose.

[jshore]

@pervert

Ok, jshore I typed up a long detailed response to you post and then deleted it. I’d rather focus on 2 points. I should say first, that I cited the wrong website in that post. I was really asking about uncertainties in the surface temperature measurements which are hard to find from there.

Specifically, This nasa cite suggests in part

This is mentioned in the IPCC report (pdf sorry) on page 163 as

I am not suggesting that either cite is the correct one. Only that there may be legitimate questions.

Okay, now to address a few technical points here:

(1) Note that the NASA site is a story on the work of one NASA scientist, namely one of the scientists involved with analysing the temperature data from the satellites and thus it presumably does reflect only the views of that researcher. [I wasn’t exactly sure if you were saying these two sites were in disagreement or what. I guess they do tell a slightly different story on the radiosonde data although I think it is mainly a difference in emphasis as the IPCC report from what I read says that the radiosonde data does not seem to be showing as rapid a temperature increase as the surface since the late 1970s but does, in the longer run, when looked over the period from the late 1950s to the present.]

(2) The discrepancy between surface measurements and the satellite and radiosonde measurements is certainly a puzzle (although more on late-breaking developments below!) but it does not mean one should not believe the surface measurements are real. In fact, there are lots of issues with radiosonde and the satellite measurements plus it might just really be a fact that the surface is warming faster than the lower troposphere as a whole although this is admittedly in conflict with what the models suggest should happen. There was an NAS study devoted to reconciling these measurements back in 2000 and here is some of what they had to say:

In the opinion of the panel, the warming trend in global-mean surface temperature observations during the past 20 years is undoubtedly real and is substantially greater than the average rate of warming during the twentieth century. The disparity between surface and upper air trends in no way invalidates the conclusion that surface temperature has been rising. The recent corrections in the MSU processing algorithms (referred to above) bring the global temperature trend derived from the satellite data into slightly closer alignment with surface temperature trends, but a substantial disparity remains. The various kinds of evidence examined by the panel suggest that the troposphere actually may have warmed much less rapidly than the surface from 1979 into the late 1990s, due both to natural causes (e.g., the sequence of volcanic eruptions that occurred within this particular 20-year period) and human activities (e.g., the cooling of the upper part of the troposphere resulting from ozone depletion in the stratosphere). Regardless of whether the disparity is real, the panel cautions that temperature trends based on data for such short periods of record, with arbitrary start and end points, are not necessarily indicative of the long-term behavior of the climate system.

Now, to the late-breaking news (which admittedly doesn’t directly impact the issue of the presentation in that report since it broke after its release). [Disclaimer: This is the interpretation of a complicated story by someone outside of the field!] First, by way of background, it is important to understand that the satellite data is not as wonderful as one might expect. These satellites were not designed for this purpose of looking at longterm temperature trends and the data that they produce has to be massaged and corrected in various ways. For example, the original analysis actually showed a slight cooling, but soon after they were published, another paper appeared that noted that the data had to be corrected for the orbital decay of the satellites with time and this turned the cooling into a warming. The authors agreed that this correction was needed but then found another correction that needed to be made that decreased this warming somewhat I believe. And, so on. In the end though, starting with the original massaged data from that one group and making various corrections, the result seemed to be a warming less than the surface temperatures showed.

But, in the fall of last year, Science published a paper in which another group went back to the original satellite data and re-analyzed it. They got a warming which was actually a bit stronger than the surface warming, which is exactly what the models say there ought to be. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that this new group is right and the original group is wrong. As far as I know, they are still trying to reconcile the two disperate interpretations of the satellite data. However, what it does mean is that the question has shifted from “Why does the satellite data show less warming than the surface observations?” to “Does the satellite data really show less warming than the surface observations?”

An additional paper and a comment and response that have appeared in Science on this issue (and also touching on the issue of, “What does the radiosonde data really say and how reliable is it?”) can be found here and here.

[Since I have a subscription to Science, I am unable to tell which of these links it will let non-subscribers access. For the two full papers, I linked to the abstract rather than the full text since I thought the abstracts were available to all but I am not sure on this.]

[Squink]

Bush Ejects Two From Bioethics Council
Changes Renew Criticism That the President Puts Politics Ahead of Science:

President Bush yesterday dismissed two members of his handpicked Council on Bioethics – a scientist and a moral philosopher who had been among the more outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cells.

In their places he appointed three new members, including a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out precisely against the research that the dismissed members supported, and another who has written about the immorality of abortion and the “threats of biotechnology.”

[jshore]

Thanks, Squink for the news. I was hoping that things would improve now that these reports had exposed the Administration’s shenanagins to the light of day. But, maybe I was too optimistic. (At least the new people he picked, while all apparently supporting his point of view, are said to be well-qualified which is an improvement over some of the other cases cited.)

@pervert

But when I look at the report (extrapolating from the ozone section) we are talking about a page or a little more of text. In that little space if you did not use modifying words to indicate some level of uncertainty, you’d be misleading the public IMHO. The bottom line is that we are not talking about a comprehensive report on global warming into which the administration wanted to insert a “maybe” for every claiim. Which is also the impression I was left with after some of the rhetoric.

(1) We don’t know how long the section that was left out was. The ozone section might be somewhat of a guide…although this is an older issue which there may be less to say about now.

(2) Again, the argument isn’t over whether there need to be modifying words but rather who should choose the words. If you used the wrong modifying words, you would also be misleading the public.

(3) You seem to make vague claims that the reports are leaving you with the wrong impression on things. I think you need to either back these up or admit that the fault lies with you.

This, my friend, is your liberal bias coming to the fore. There is no noble difference between someone trained in science and the rest of us. There is no reason why a panel of scientists tasked with funding research will avoid giving money to projects that interest them and seek out projects which they do not like. Ideally, yes, they will evaluate all projects that come accross their desks completely impartially. However, reality is never ideal. How do the projects get to their desk? Which staffers decide which proposals will be looked at? Does the panel have NO political leanings?

I don’t know why this is a “liberal bias.” Rather it is a bias in favor of having scientists judging science. I’m not claiming that scientists are always impartial but certainly they are in a better position to evaluate the quality of scientific research proposals than politicians are. [And, underlying your whole critique here seems to be a completely unproven implication that there is a liberal bias coming out of all this.]

I’ll grant that the world is not perfect. But, I fail to see, for example, how a world in which the private sector funded almost all of the research would be superior in eliminating biases compared to a world where the federal government funds a large amount of research and the private sector funds a large amount of research.

If I may show my bias for a moment:
Look at the state of Climate Science. How many research projects are funded which are measuring natural influences on climate versus how many which look at man made influences? How long did it take to include accurate models of clouds into the computer models used for predictions? Do you know what every happened to the research about termite methane releases?

There seems to be lots if innuendo here that I have never seen facts to support. I haven’t seen a detailed breakdown of the funding. But, I know for a fact that there is plenty of research on natural influences on climate. For one thing, all the paleoclimate stuff (including the Antarctic ice core drilling, which I believe set some sort of drilling depth record and can’t be cheap) is looking at natural variability in the climate. And, the cloud issue is truly a difficult problem. I imagine that the trouble they have had coming up with accurate models likely has more to do with the difficulty of the problem than for lack of trying.

Again, I am not claiming that global warming is a myth. Merely that the sources proclaiming it are so one sided, and seem so politicaly motivated, that I do not turst them. My own bias to be sure.

Yes…and it is worse than just a “bias”…It borders on a conspiracy theory. You seem to be making a stronger claim just than that one shouldn’t believe, say, what Greenpeace and Sierra Club and UCS publish on their websites about climate change. Rather, you seem to be claiming that the IPCC, the NAS, the councils of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU), and the editors of Science and Nature are suspect. And, that somehow British Petroleum and Shell have either gotten in on things or been so intimidated by the environmentalists that they are co-opted too.

After this, who are we left with to trust? I’ll tell you who. It is a small coterie of scientists, at least the most vocal of who are almost to a person associated in one way or another with the fossil fuel (esp. coal) industry and/or conservative/libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute and the George C. Marshall Fund. Sen. Inhofe can say with a straight face that he is promoting “sound” and “non-political” science while basically just spouting the views of this group. But, I don’t think that most informed people can take him very seriously on this point.

[jshore]

By the way, my apologies for leaving the EPA’s scientists out of that list of those expounding what, for lack of a better term, is often called the “consensus view” on global warming.

@pervert

Do you know what this was called? I tried googling “epa annual air quality report” with little luck. I’d rather not get into the specifics of this one without looking at it. Once bitten and all that.

I don’t.

Note the juxtaposioning of “the White House opposed mention of research demonstrating sharp increases in global temperature over the past decade compared to the previous millennium. The White House even objected to the reference to a National Academy of Sciences report on the human contribution to global warming that the White House itself had requested and that had been endorsed by President Bush in speeches that year.” Intended to leave the impression that the white house wanted to delete references to the NAS study. did they instead want simply to include some of the uncertainties mentioned in the NAS study while the EPA did not want to?

I don’t know. If true, this is certainly a point the White House could make in their own defense, yes?

Also, I question the replacement claim in the next paragraph where Waxman says that the WhiteHouse wants to “replace the scientifically indisputable statement that “[c]limate change has global consequences for human health and the environment” with a statement about the “complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components.”” The point, of course, being that the Whitehouse wanted to replace an indisputable claim with a disputable one. But notice that the first claim is a complete claim. It could very easily be a whole sentence. The replacement is not. What is the rest of the sentence the whitehouse wanted to include? Would it really have been scientfically disputable?

We nitpick much, do we not? This claim is also easy enough for the White House to refute if it is deceptive. Hell, as far as I know, the White House would not be violating any law if they released documents showing exactly what their edits were. That would certainly clear things up, would it not?

The last paragraph is most troubling. Waxman seems to indicate that there were two memos. The UCS report certainly implied that one contained both complaints. Little inconsistencies like that disturb me.

Well, you have the one memo in the UCS report for you to look at with your very own eyes. I leave it as an exercise to you to see if it contains both complaints or not. Or, maybe Waxman interpretted a different page of the same memo as a different memo? I don’t know. But, if this is your idea of the most troubling thing you can find, I’d submit that you are troubled very easily.

Again, the White House could easily confirm or allay your troubles. You are acting as if we are trying to read allegations concerning some far off place (like Iraq) where it might be difficult for the accusations being made to be defended against.

If the White House has as compelling defenses as you are hypothesizing they might, then by all means, they should present them to us. In this case, they might even expose Waxman and UCS as being deceptive. And, UCS, while certainly having an advocacy agenda has always relied quite a bit on a reputation for being accurate with facts and science, so this would be a perfect opportunity for the White House to discredit an organization of high credibility whose advocacy runs counter to their own ideology. Looks like a golden opportunity if ever there was one!