News & Views item - October  2004

 

 

"Bush vs. the Laureates" (October 21, 2004)

    In February of this year TFW published a News and Views "Pre-eminent US Scientists Protest Bush Administration's Misuse of Science" reporting the the US' Union of Concerned Scientists published a statement by over 60 Nobel Laureates, National Medal of Science recipients, and other leading US researchers calling for end to scientific abuses by the administration of President George W. Bush.

 

Despite repeated denials by members of the Bush administration, including those of John H. Marburger III, the president's science adviser, the criticisms have persisted. Now The New York Times in a three-thousand word feature by Andrew Revkin, "Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue" provides a follow up.

...complaints about the administration's approach to scientific information are coming even from within the government. Many career scientists and officials have expressed frustration and anger privately but were unwilling to be identified for fear of losing their jobs. But a few have stepped forward, including Dr. Hansen at NASA, who has been researching global warming and conveying its implications to Congress and the White House for two decades.

Dr. Hansen, who was invited to brief the Bush cabinet twice on climate and whose work has been cited by Mr. Bush, said he had decided to speak publicly about the situation because he was convinced global warming posed a serious threat and that further delays in addressing it would add to the risks.

"It's something that I've been worrying about for months," he said, describing his decision. "If I don't do something now I'll regret it.

"Under the Clinton-Gore administration, you did have occasions when Al Gore knew the answer he wanted, and he got annoyed if you presented something that wasn't consistent with that," Dr. Hansen said. "I got a little fed up with him, but it was not institutionalized the way it is now."

Under the Bush administration, he said, "they're picking and choosing information according to the answer that they want to get, and they've appointed so many people who are just focused on this that they really are having an impact on the day-to-day flow of information."

Disputes between scientists and the administration have erupted over stem cell policy, population control and Iraq's nuclear weapons research. But nowhere has the clash been more intense or sustained than in the area of climate change.

There the intensity of the disagreements has been stoked not only by disputes over claimed distortion or suppression of research findings, but on the other side by the enormous economic implications.

Several dozen interviews with administration officials and with scientists in and out of government, along with a variety of documents, show that the core of the clash is over instances in which scientists say that objective and relevant information is ignored or distorted in service of pre-established policy goals. Scientists were essentially locked out of important internal White House debates; candidates for advisory panels were asked about their politics as well as their scientific work; and the White House exerted broad control over how scientific findings were to be presented in public reports or news releases.

Revkin goes on to say that manipulation by the Bush administration of governmental scientific reports with matters concerned with climate science being especially manipulated.

Political appointees have regularly revised news releases on climate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, altering headlines and opening paragraphs to play down the continuing global warming trend.

The changes are often subtle, but they consistently shift the meaning of statements away from a sense that things are growing warmer in unusual ways.

The pattern has appeared in reports from other agencies as well.

Several sets of drafts and final press releases from NOAA on temperature trends were provided to The Times by government employees who said they were dismayed by the practice.

And Revkin concludes with one glaring example of scientific advisory panels being formed in the President's image.

Despite three years of charges that it is remaking scientific and medical advisory panels to favor the goals of industry or social conservatives, the White House has continued to ask some panel nominees not only about their political views, but explicitly whether they support Mr. Bush.

One recent candidate was Prof. Sharon L. Smith, an expert on Arctic marine ecology at the University of Miami.

On March 12, she received a call from the White House. She had been nominated to take a seat about to open up on the Arctic Research Commission, a panel of presidential appointees that helps shape research on issues in the far north, including the debate over oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The woman calling from the White House office of presidential personnel complimented her résumé, Dr. Smith recalled, then asked the first and - as it turned out - only question: "Do you support the president?"

"I was taking notes," Dr. Smith recalled. "I'm thinking I've lost my mind. I was in total shock. I'd never been asked that before."

She responded she was not a fan of Mr. Bush's economic and foreign policies. "That was the end of the interview," she said. "I was removed from consideration instantly."

Professor Marburger's defence of such actions was to tell Revkin, "I think you'd have to say that the question is not a litmus-test question. It's perfectly acceptable for the president to know if someone he's appointing to one of his advisory committees supports his policies or not.... I think people overestimate the power of government to affect science; science has so many self-correcting aspects that I'm not really worried about these things."

 

Who does he think he's kidding?

 

Postscript 041023: Bob Park has the following item in this week's What's New.

POLITICAL SCIENCE: SCIENTISTS ARE MORE PARTISAN THIS TIME.
    The New York Times wrote about it Tuesday, so I guess it's fair game.  I got an e-mail this week from a journalist in the UK, who begged me to give him the name of a Bush-Republican scientist he could interview.  I did, but it wasn't easy.