Abuse of Science (warning: political thread)

[peeplj]

According to a report signed by scientists including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents, the Bush administration has distorted scientific conclusions, undermined advisory panels, and supressed study conclusions to fit current administration policy.

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environmen ... lease.html

This, if true, is not good.

--James

[Jeferson]

Let's sit back and see if the "faulty intelligence" line will fly this time.

Jef

[jim stone]

This is coming from the Union of
Concerned Scientists, which has a long partisan record.
Also Henry Waxman, democrat; it's an election year, you know.
Doesn't mean it isn't true, but antenna up, lads. Best

[Chuck_Clark]

According to a report signed by scientists including Nobel laureates, leading medical experts, former federal agency directors and university chairs and presidents, the Bush administration has distorted scientific conclusions, undermined advisory panels, and supressed study conclusions to fit current administration policy.
--James

James

Are you trying to provoke the Bushies, or do you just get a kick out of restating the obvious? Take global warming, for example. Virtually every responsible scientist whose training allows understanding of the concept* accepts the theory - except of course for the 'government of the people, by the oil industry and for the stockholders'.

* I generally find it instructional that 'scientists' speaking out against accepted theories on behalf of the religio-industrial complex are almost always trained in disciplines which have nothing to do with their subject. e.g. the local chiropractor who always holds forth on pseudo-geological arguments in favor of {snicker} "creation science".

[peeplj]

This was not meant to provoke anybody.

I am undecided if their allegations are true; however, what they accuse the administration of is most sobering.

That's why I wrote the "this, if true, is not good" in the original post.

This deserves serious investigation, either to clear President Bush's name, or as the start of criminal proceedings. No matter how it turns out, this should be taken extremely seriously and investigated with all possible speed and fairness.

--James

[Rando7]

Just read the headlines on their home page and consider the source.

[Bretton]

I usually don't comment much on these threads, and I reworked this one a few times before posting...I finally just edited it down the bare minimum:

Republicans are evil.



P.S. This is not a response provoked by this thread...just a general suspicion that's been building for about 34 years.

[fiddling_tenor]

I'm not a big fan of Bush, but this statement is so full of generalities, it's meaningless. It's all smoke and mirrors. Where's the data?

[Jerry Freeman]

Regarding the "consider the source" rebuttal,

I appreciate Jim's tempering his cautionary remark with "doesn't mean it isn't true."

Although the Union of Concerned Scientists is a source I take with a grain of salt, I do believe there's something here.

I would invite those who are inclined to defend the administration's policies, to take a closer look at this, including looking carefully at some of the sources the Union of Concerned Scientists is citing.

One I'm familiar with is Russell Train, a lifelong Republican who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Nixon and Ford. There's an increasing drumbeat of critical commentary by longstanding conservatives who are alarmed about various aspects of how this administration conducts its activities.

As I said, I do believe there's something here.

Best wishes,
Jerry

[chas]

James

Are you trying to provoke the Bushies, or do you just get a kick out of restating the obvious? Take global warming, for example. Virtually every responsible scientist whose training allows understanding of the concept* accepts the theory - except of course for the 'government of the people, by the oil industry and for the stockholders'.

* I generally find it instructional that 'scientists' speaking out against accepted theories on behalf of the religio-industrial complex are almost always trained in disciplines which have nothing to do with their subject. e.g. the local chiropractor who always holds forth on pseudo-geological arguments in favor of {snicker} "creation science".

*This is patently false. There are many environmental scientists who don't accept the party line that most of the global warming observed is anthropomorphic. Some are crackpots, but there are a large number who say "We just don't understand." The truth is we don't. Climatologists have come up with models that explain the data. But then they had models that explained the data ten years ago, then found out a few new things that caused those models to break down, and they've been iterating. They don't understand carbon fixing in the ocean within an order of magnitude; in fact, the role of the oceans (2/3 of the earth) isn't well understood. The first satellite monitoring the output of the sun was launched in late 1995, which means we have less than one solar cycle's worth of data, and certainly no long-term (hundreds of years) data. Without long-term data on the sun's output, we really don't know much. The amount we've learned in the last decade is great, and there's more evidence than ever for anthropomorphic global warming, but there are also more data that don't fit.

I'm not a Bushie, and I am concerned about the way this administration is treating science. But I was also concerned about the way the Clinton administration treated it.

[U2]

Just read the headlines on their home page and consider the source.

I'm confused. You mean to insinuate that credentialed people can be partisan? Now there's a concept someone should talk about on the O'Reilly factor! Perhaps they could get Dr. Condoleeza Rice.

[bradhurley]

The Bush administration's practice of politicizing science has been well documented in the journal Science over the past several months, with news reports, letters to the editor, and editorials. The administration has been repopulating scientific advisory boards with people whose views are aligned with those of the administration, and there have been several letters to the editor and news stories documenting this process. Some people claim this is nothing new, that all administrations pick their scientific advisors so they hear what they want to hear, but I've also read accounts that no previous administration has ever done it to the extent that the Bush administration has.

[bradhurley]

The amount we've learned in the last decade is great, and there's more evidence than ever for anthropomorphic global warming, but there are also more data that don't fit.

While I agree generally that there's a lot we don't know about global warming, I think the picture is a little less cloudy than the one you paint. Greenhouse gases leave a telltale "fingerprint" on the climate; the patterns of temperature change by latitude and altitude, for example, are different from those you would expect from an external forcing such as changes in solar activity. The evidence to date strongly suggests that greenhouse gases are the main cause of the warming in the late 20th century. There's no reason to believe that greenhouse gases won't continue to have a strong influence on climate in the decades ahead, and nobody disputes the fact that the concentrations of most greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing.

Regarding solar variability, yes it's true that we don't have a long satellite record, but there are proxy data that can be used to estimate past changes in solar activity, and those can be correlated with past climate change. The studies done on these data suggest that solar variability does play a role in climate change, but that greenhouse gases have been the dominant influence in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I agree that there's a lot of uncertainty to contend with. Nobody has the answers, nobody knows what the future will bring. We could discover some previously unknown natural long-term cycle tomorrow. But the evidence that greenhouse gases are altering the climate is quite strong, and there's little reason to doubt that the climate will change fairly significantly over the next several centuries. Some of those changes are already well underway -- check out all the changes happening in Alaska, for example, or at Glacier National Park in Montana, where the area covered by mountain glaciers has declined by 73 percent since 1850.

[missy]

The "politic - ation" of science isn't the problem, it's the "public - ation" of science that is!

I remember when you "published" an article not just to see your name in print (although that's always great) but so that your fellow scientists could read the report, digest it, critique it, try to prove or disprove your hypothesis, and later publish their own report.
Now, "scientists" don't publish first - they hold a press conference, invite the WHO, CSPI and any other "group" that will give them supposed credibility (you do NOT want to get me started on the CSPI!). Then they may publish, but they don't put all the data in there (conveniently) while the media has a frenzy on the latest nasty chemical-de-jour. Later, you MAY have a retraction published, but does the media ever cover THAT??

Hypothesis / Experimentation / Data / Conclusion / Proving or DISPROVING of hypothesis. The Scientific Theory. Something sorely lacking in "science" today.

[antstastegood]

I'm not going to dignify this thread with a response.

Oops.