Just to follow up on Squink’s post, Elizabeth Blackburn, one of those dismissed, will probably end up winning a Nobel for her discovery of telomeres and how they replicate to maintain integrity of chromosome ends.
pervert: 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.
Not really true; in addition to government funding targeted to particular specializations, there’s also funding allotted to “basic research” in each of the sciences, for which any researcher may compete.
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.
? It’s not the job of a peer-review panel to “seek out” projects on which to bestow unsolicited funding; researchers submit grant applications and the panel reviews them.
Politicians cannot “interfere” in a process that they control from the begining.
That sounds like a somewhat disingenuous attempt to minimize the problem by implying that all forms of political involvement in science are equally bad. I don’t agree; I think that there are definite differences in degrees and kinds of political interference with science, and that some are definitely worse than others.
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?
Um, all climate studies measure natural (i.e., non-anthropogenic) influences on climate. That’s the only way that they can tell whether and to what extent anthropogenic influences are also present.
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?
“Termite methane releases”? Are you talking about the fact that termites are a significant source of atmospheric methane emissions? What do you mean, “what happened to the research” about it? You sound as though you think the topic has been covered up somehow. On the contrary, even an elementary discussion of global warming (such as this one from the National Safety Council) refers to it.
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 [trust] them.
I think perhaps you’re mixing up the often quite politicized environmental groups that are most alarmist about global warming with the scientific researchers who are actually publishing findings about it. I mean, if you don’t feel you can trust organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, the IPCC, etc., to provide a reasonable approximation of the true state of scientific knowledge on climate science, then whom would you trust?
*Waxman seems to indicate that there were two memos. The UCS report certainly implied that one contained both complaints. *
A PDF version of the internal EPA memo of 29 April 2003 describing the changes made by the Administration to the EPA’s draft Report on the Environment is allegedly available here. I can’t open it on my present machine, but maybe it will help answer your questions.
Little inconsistencies like that disturb me.
Maybe I’ve spent too much time debunking alien abductions. […] I’m too much of a skeptic I suppose.
Well, it’s certainly true that knocking down alien-abduction anecdotes is a much simpler task than understanding and evaluating something as complicated as scientific studies of climate change and possible political distortions of them. I agree with you that you are to be commended for your skeptical outlook (despite your modest attempts to disparage it). But at some point you’re going to have to move beyond mere skepticism and superficial scrutiny of sources for their possible political bias, and actually engage with the data.
In fact, note that the internal memo shown in the UCS report is divided into an “issue paper” and an “option paper”. One of the statements quoted is from the “issue paper” and the other is from the “option paper”. And, the Waxman report apparently interpretted these are two memos rather than one memo containing two different papers…Shocking stuff indeed!! 
In fact, I think the panels usually act sort of like journal editors and send the proposals they receive out to other scientists for reviewing and then make their decisions based on those reviews. At least, that is my impression of how the process works for NSF grants.
jshore: In fact, I think the panels usually act sort of like journal editors and send the proposals they receive out to other scientists for reviewing and then make their decisions based on those reviews. At least, that is my impression of how the process works for NSF grants.
Your impression’s correct. I’ve reviewed several grant proposals for the NSF in history of science/science studies areas, and that’s exactly what they do.
On the peer-review front, there’s the rather odd actions of the treasury department in warning publishers and writers that they may face criminal prosecution for editing works from Iran or other “enemy” nations:Editing of the Enemy
While not strictly an anti-science issue, the decision goes a long ways towards chilling international scholarship.
Quite. But the report as a whole was about the EPA perfomrance over the last several decades. Surely it was not limited to simply new information.
Well, it is also over what words were chosen and exactly how bad they are. I agree that scientists should choose words. Are there none at the CEQ? If the administration wanted to insert words and ideas from the NAS study into the report are they still as guilty as Waxman and the UCS claim?
I think I did say that it was my fault. If I did not make that clear, then let me do so now. I was under the impression that the report we have been discussing was some sort of annual or semi annual thing which traditionally included climate data. I was under this impression from misreading the accusations about the unprecedented nature of the edits that the administration wanted.
Right. But it is a bias in favor of having government paid scientists judging science.
Because the private sector is IMHO far less homogenic than the federal government.
Absolutely. That’s why I prefaced with saying that it was my own bias. I did not mean to suggest that it was a fact.
Well, “plenty” is a value judgement. It implies that enough is being done in this area. If you look at the NAS reports, for instance, it calls for more work in this area as well as others.
Agreed. However, this has not stopped the UCS and others from proclaiming that “models show this” or “odels show that”. Very often they do so without including "but we don’t know how clouds would change this. That’s the issue I’m talking about.
I don’t think I ever did say this. I think I linked to the NAS study favorably. I have not looked at studies from the other organizations. And finally, I’m not sure I would include the editors at Science or Nature in a list of research producers to believe or disbelieve. I certainly did not make the claim that they were suspect.
I have no idea what your talking about here. I have never said that Global Warming is a myth. I have never said that CO2 is a boon from the industrial age.
Ok, now who is claiming a conspiricy?
pervert: Because the private sector is IMHO far less homogenic than the federal government.
Huh? In the first place, what does “homogenic” mean? Is it the same thing as “homogenous”? “Homogenized”? The only definition I can find for “homogenic” is some technical medical definition.
In the second place, why do you consider that the private sector is “far less whatever-the-word-is” than the public sector? And why would that make it preferable to have only the private sector funding scientific research, rather than both the public and private sectors?
pervert: *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.
[…]
I think I linked to the NAS study favorably. I have not looked at studies from the other organizations. And finally, I’m not sure I would include the editors at Science or Nature in a list of research producers to believe or disbelieve. I certainly did not make the claim that they were suspect.*
Sigh. I think your real problem here, pervert, is that you don’t have a clear idea of what criteria you want to use to evaluate the scientific reliability of assertions about climate science, so you are left flailing around in a morass of general skepticism and fruitless mistrust.
You say that you are no expert on the scientific content of this stuff, but when you see criticisms from people who are experts on it, you complain that maybe it’s just political bias that’s affecting their perspective. You admit that your own bias is affecting your views, but you seem unsure how to overcome your bias in order to reach an assessment that you can feel more confident about. You object in principle to government funding of scientific research, without being able to point to anything that these government-funded scientists are actually doing wrong; instead, you muddle around asking hypothetical questions about what we ought to do if we thought scientists were doing something wrong.
Unfortunately, it seems to me, you’ll never be able satisfactorily to resolve your queries about whether the Bush Administration is actually being irresponsible in its dealings with science, because you don’t really know what constitutes “responsible science” in this context. And you’re unwilling to take anybody else’s word on the matter because they might have a liberal bias.
Fair enough. There is nothing dishonorable in admitting that you can’t come to a definite conclusion about something because you’re not competent to decide it on your own, and you don’t feel you can rely on the impartiality of those who are competent. But if that’s where you’re at, then continuing to ask questions about the subject just so you can fruitlessly nitpick the answers without resolving any of your doubts is pretty much just a waste of everyone’s time.
I am not honestly sure what the makeup of CEQ is and did look it up on the web to try to find out. No definitive answer on whether there are any scientists on staff there or not. However, what I think is clear is that such an organization is set up more for the purpose of implementing the administration’s policy (and not really doing basic science) and is much more closely tied to the administration. Now, all of the executive branch is technically under the President’s control but I think it is important to maintain some sort of walls, even if they are a bit amorphous (e.g., there are obviously some political appointees at EPA) between the politics and the science. This has seemed to work well in the past which is why people like Train, who served under Nixon and Ford, are so concerned about the way the White House has tried to usurp these roles. [Of course, you notice analogies here to what some are charging happened with intelligence in Iraq, where the White House again is charged with trying to take more in-house the intelligence operation so that they could bend the analysis more to their liking.]
Well, I’ll give you two ways in which the private sector is not more homogeneous:
(1) They are definitely biased toward pro-materialist point-of-view. I.e., there is a bias toward those things whose value is quantifiable and easily sold in the market (e.g., the exploitation of natural resources).
(2) They are biased toward the current technology/industries. E.g., the fossil fuel companies have a lot more money to spend than the small renewable energy industries.
Well, I didn’t mean it in a value judgement way but more in the sense that there is a lot and I haven’t seen any compelling evidence presented that it is systematically being underfunded. As you note, the NAS calls for increased funding for lots of aspects of the science.
Note: It is not a conspiracy theory to claim that right-wing organizations and the fossil fuel industry might have certain strong biases concerning climate change. It is simply common sense (and a matter of public record). Likewise, it is not a conspiracy theory to claim that Greenpeace and Sierra Club etc. might also have certain strong biases. Where it becomes a conspiracy theory in my view is when people start to claim that lots of organizations that work very hard to maintain neutrality on scientific issues (or even oil companies like Shell and BP who might be expected to have strong biases the other way) have been co-opted.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear that you are not claiming that the scientific concensus on the issue is wrong.
Of course that was supposed to be “not less homogeneous.”
pervert
As a scientist (in training) in a federally funded institution, let me just say that at least in the biomedical sciences, private sector research tends to be much more homogenous than publically funded research. The majority of private sector research tends to focus on the end-point of a process: drug design and product development. The majority of the pipeline feeding the process is publically funded – those developing the techniques, those researching the enzymatic pathways which get targeted by drugs, and so forth. In order to stay profitable, drug companies have really downsized their basic research budgets over the past few decades.
A few questions:
Can you agree that the vast majority of scientists have come down on the side of man-made climate change? Given the data presented in this thread, can you agree that if a consensus view were to be written by scientists, it would probably state that climate change is an issue we should care about? Do you see that there are hundreds of scientists willing to stake a professional reputation on this? We are talking about hundreds of scientists throughout academia, the EPA, the IPCC, and the AGU who have put their names and careers behind statements that say that humanity is changing the climate. Do you really think that there would be so little dissent if the major motivation here was political?
Even if you think Bush happens to be right on the climate change front, you are left with a whole host of other issues which the Bush administration has done the exact same things: sex education, farm safety, Missouri river management, national missile defense, stem cells, mercury levels, lead levels, forest management, WMDs, abortion and breast cancer, and power plant emissions. We have a long list of places where the administration has meddled, changed, suppressed, or ignored data simply because it hasn’t fit their worldview. There are dozens of other groups of scientists who have dealt with this administration and have had experiences which closely mirror the climate change scientists. So after you have picked apart the climate change stuff, are you going to start with those?
OK, I’ve cause much more of a stir than I intended. I will not address each and every issue raised. If I miss one which any of you think is so important that it warrents a continuation of this hijack pleas bring it up again, and I will try to address it.
I am not claiming some large bias on the part of everyone who believes in global warming. I believe I used the word “proponent” which my dictionary defines as "a person who pleads for a cause or propounds an idea ". I certainly may have misused the word. If so, I appologize.
I am also not claiming widespread liberal bias in government science. Neither am I proposing that we shut down publically funded science. I am not even proposing that privately funded science should be larger than the publically funnded kind. I merely mentioned that the idea that government science is totally free of bias is a slight liberal bias by my friend.
Remember, we are not talking about a scientific study here. We are talking about an EPA report on the environment. Especially "*How clean are our nation’s air, water, and land? How healthy are its people and ecosystems? How can we measure the success of policies and programs to protect health and the environment?
This report provides the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) response to these questions, with the aim of sparking a broader dialogue and discussion about how to answer them in the future. The report has two key purposes:
To describe what EPA knows—and doesn’t know—about the current state of the environment at the national level, and how the environment is changing.
To identify measures that can be used to track the status of and trends in the environment and human health, and to define the challenges to improving those measures.*
More specifically, we are talking about edits to one small part of that report.
Please keep this context in mind as I continue. I am only proposing some alternative explanations for the accusations made in the memo included in the appendix of the UCS report.
Is it totally impossible that the piece of the report contained some inappropriate bias? If so, then stop right now, my alternate explanation is moot.
Is there any good reason to question the doomsday nature of some global warming proponents? If not then stop now, my alternative is moot.
If you are still with me, please read to the end of this post before responding. there is a mollification paragraph at the end.
The EPA was asked to put together a “Report on the Environment” with the purposes stated above. They did so and included a small section on global climate change. The Bush administration saw it and did not feel it met the goals of the report. Accordingly, they suggested some changes. The EPA representitives responsible baulked. A multi month negotiation ensued during which the EPA representitives refused to include any mention of uncertainty in Global Warming predictions. Finally, the WhiteHouse made some edits and attempted to enforce them. The EPA then decided to delete the section entirely rather than live with the edits.
Now, do I think this is more likely what happened than the scenarios portrayed by Waxman, the UCS, or the Science editors? No, not really. I am simply proposing that the sky may not be falling concerning the state of science, the free exchange of ideas, and our civilization as we know it. If this last proposal is so radically offensive, well, then I’ll cop to that.
I think I should answer this. I do not think my standard is that impossible to meet. I am not asking for video with Bush jumping up and down shouting “Damn science! Damn science!” (for your enjoyment, imagine him doing so with cartoonish gyrations of the arms and knees). All I would like is more trustworthy information as to what exacty transpired between the whitehouse and the EPA. I don’t need any sort of evidence of the administration’s intentions. I think actions can be used as a valid debating tool fo those. However, I would very much like to see the section of the EPA report before and after the edits. I find it difficult to believe that such a comparison does not exist. If the edits asked for by the administration are so intollerable, why has someone not come forward with the actual evidence of it. Surely the side by side comparison of what the EPA wanted to say and what the administration tried to force them to say will be enough to outrage the people.
Jshore: I’m back from Jasper, and in retaliation for your last message, I’m going to have to tell you that there was about three feet of powder snow, the temperature was 4 degrees C, and there was virtually no wait at al in the lift lines. And, we happened to be there during the ‘Miss Nude Snow Bunny’ festival.
Okay, maybe not. It WAS 4C, but there wasn’t much snow this year and it was a little icy in spots. And no nude snow bunnies. But a great time was had by all, including my 6 year old daughter who took to yelling, “wa-hoo!” as she raced down the slopes.
Back to Bush’s spending on science: What annoyed me about your dismissal of it as spin was that I actually went to considerable effort to make it as fair as I could. For instance, I averaged out Clinton’s entire 8 years, when I could have chosen his first two years to match Bush’s - which would have made Bush look better, since Clinton’s science spending went up in his second term.
There are some other interesting charts on the AAAS page. For instance, someone above said that it’s no surprise that Bush raised spending on science when he raised spending on everything. Well, here’s a chart of science spending as a percentage of discretionary outlays, which gives us a sense of the relative importance science has against other budget items. Notice that spending on science stayed flat for most of Clinton’s first term, then took a big dip in 1999 and stayed low until 2002. Under Bush’s first two budgets, it went back up substantially.
I also mentioned that constant dollars vs real dollars wasn’t that big a difference in this period, since inflation was very low, and the magnitude of the increases under Bush was large enough that the data would still show big increases over Clinton in constant dollars. Well, here’s the same chart I posted before except this time in constant dollars. It shows the same thing. Total R&D spending started off at 89.272 billion. It went down in Clinton’s first budget, and continued going down every year until 1997. It wasn’t until 2000 that R&D spending made it back up to the level that Bush I had funded. Under Bush II, federal R&D spending has taken a dramatic climb upwards.
pervert: I merely mentioned that the idea that government science is totally free of bias is a slight liberal bias by my friend.
:rolleyes: Please point out where in this thread anybody asserted that government science is “totally free of bias”.
Sam Stone, you do realize that the original criticism has nothing to do with how much the Bush adminsitration spends, but rather on what the administration does with the information when it gets it. Frankly, it’s pretty clear the Bush admin is pouring tons of money into projects which are skewed to justify its policies, and is not really interested in paying attention to science where the result are at odds with their political agenda. It is also clear that the degree to which Bush & co do this is unprecendented. No one in this forum has produced a credible argument to rebut any specific point in the scientists’ document mentioned in the OP.
The amount of money spent is completely irrelevant to this argument.
Knorf: I addressed this before. You have decided that the amount of spending is irrelevant simply because it doesn’t support the thesis that Bush is anti-science. Does anyone doubt that if the Bush administration was cutting science funding, that fact would be a big issue in the debate? Like it or not, the absolute money being spent on science is a relevant data point that you just can’t hand-wave away.
Now, is the rest of your claim true? Is Bush distorting science funding? It’s possible. Lord knows I was not very happy with the stem cell decision. But the thing is, ALL administrations do this to some degree. If Gore had been elected, he might have diverted a lot of research funding to the EPA and cut funding for NASA as Clinton did. That’s also a diversion.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone But the thing is, ALL administrations do this to some degree.[/quote]
But none have done it to the extent that Bush administration does it. Did you read the original report?
Non sequitur. Speculation about what Gore might or might not have done is not germane to the argument.
When jshore said this “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.” Perhaps I took it too farm but I read it as government science has no biases without politician’s interference.