Huh. Well, I mean they have nothing to hide, right? Perhaps fish-related terrorist concerns are behind this attempt at imposing silence.
Luckily, 414 out of the 1400 scientists who were issued the survey responded anyway. Of course, under this set of circumstances, we can’t be assured 100% accurate results, but I think we can get a pretty decent sense of what’s going on.
Well, it’s good to know that altering official findings is one of those “tough decisions about protecting species” that FWS makes every day. It’s also comforting that they have managers and vaguely-defined higher-ups deciding which species are in danger of becoming extinct, rather than going with the completely fucking insane idea of putting that question into the hands of highly-educated scientists who specialize in that field.
So Hugh Vickery thinks it’s allright for Managers to come to * different scientific conclusions* than the Scientists in their employ? Holy shit. Instant Scientis, just add manager ID.
These are the people charged with saving our natural world? Oy Gevalt.
I personally don’t think all endangered species can (or should) be saved. I believe that scientists should report in a factual manner. This is disgusting.
If the decision makers weigh up all the different facts and priorities and choose to go ahead with a course of action that may cause the extinction of an endangered species, then they should be able to point to all the factors and justify their decision. Falsifying the information to make it appear that their decision is correct is a disgusting way of creating support of your decision and calls your ability to make the tough calls into question, IMO.
I’m reminded of a Sid Harris cartoon of a mathematician working at a blackboard with the Kremlin visible through the window in the background. A man in a suit hands is handing him a paper and saying, “Sorry, comrade, but the People’s Mathematics Commission has decided the answer must be 6.932.”
I’m still waiting for someone, anyone, to pass the Schultz law. So far, it’s failed in Massachusetts or Ohio.
"Any person who knowingly, willingly, and voluntarily falsifies, or knowingly, willingly, and voluntarily causes, entices, or compels another to falsify the results of a commercial or academic scientific experiment, shall be guilty of a felony in the first degree.
The mandatory sentence for this felony is death by beheading, either by axe or by guillotine"
First, biodiversity is going to go down an down. If you picture it as a pyramid, we will remove a block here, a block there. We will eventually have either a gravity-defying semi-pyramid with levitating blocks, or a jumbled mess. We are praying for levitation.
Soil erosion, climate change and overfarming will slowly but surely deplete natural resources, forests, and eventually, interfere with our ability to grow our own food. The human race will begin dying of starvation, and the wealthy will be able to sustain themselves for a time hydroponically, either until that stops working (can’t see why it couldn’t just go on working, though), or until the sun goes supernova, or until the climate changes so drastically that there is no surviving it.
Either way, most of the human race will die. We’ve killed the Earth we had. It’s over, it’s finished, and we will either turn it into a desert with intermittent oceans, or we will die of starvation/exposure and leave it to replenish its plant life with our corpses as fertilizer.
Apparently the administration’s penchant for changing or altering reports is not isolated to this. Discover magazine has been lambasting them for quite a while, and now this (which I found just by chance):
