For you local folks:

Neal Lane, White House science adviser to former President Bill Clinton from 1998 to 2001, will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Wednesday, Oct. 5 at 7 p.m. in Room 1B50 of the Eaton Humanities Building.

The free, public event is part of a year-long lecture series titled “Policy, Politics and Science in the White House: Conversations with Presidential Science Advisers,” sponsored by CU-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research.

Lane, who is a long-time Fellow Adjoint at JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and also served as chancellor of the CU-Colorado Springs campus from 1984-1986, will address the role of science in the presidential decision-making process. Following Lane’s remarks, center director Roger Pielke Jr., will interview Lane about topics like the current Bush administration’s alleged misuse of scientific information. The event will conclude with a question-and-answer session with the audience.

As presidential science adviser, Lane was the most senior member of the White House staff on matters of science and technology policy. Lane earned a reputation as an unusually effective advocate for science among policy-makers, especially within the White House.

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Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch have collaborated on another brilliant essay on climate policy. (Longtime Prometheus readers will recall their earlier essay on the danagers of overselling climate science, here.) We are happy to provide an English translation of their most recent collaboration below, which first appeared in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 21 September 2005. Your comments are encouraged. Read the whole thing.

The Sluggishness of Politics and Nature

Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch

Even before 11 September 2001, the American Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – of which little good has been spoken in the past days – published a list of the three most probable catastrophes threatening the US: a terrorist attack on the city of New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a direct hit by a hurricane on the city of New Orleans. The Houston Chronicle asserted in that the hurricane is the deadliest danger. There are not many similar examples of accurate predictions. And yet there was a criminal lack of precautions taken in New Orleans.

The disastrous results of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and in the surrounding states are a perfect example of a failed climate policy. The failure, however, does not lie in the Bush administration’s refusal to agree to the Kyoto Protocol, as German Environment Minister Trittin has claimed.

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This according to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin in today’s USA Today. Here is an excerpt:

“The space shuttle and International Space Station – nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades – were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday. In a meeting with USA TODAY’s editorial board, Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth. “It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,” Griffin said. “We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.” The shuttle has cost the lives of 14 astronauts since the first flight in 1982. Roger Pielke Jr., a space policy expert at the University of Colorado, estimates that NASA has spent about $150 billion on the program since its inception in 1971. The total cost of the space station by the time it’s finished – in 2010 or later – may exceed $100 billion, though other nations will bear some of that … Griffin has made clear in previous statements that he regards the shuttle and space station as misguided. He told the Senate earlier this year that the shuttle was “deeply flawed” and that the space station was not worth “the expense, the risk and the difficulty” of flying humans to space. But since he became NASA administrator, Griffin hasn’t been so blunt about the two programs. Asked Tuesday whether the shuttle had been a mistake, Griffin said, “My opinion is that it was. … It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible.” Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said, “Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we’re building in the orbit we’re building it in.”"

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Charles Meade, from the Rand Corporation, had a thoughtful op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this week. Here is the full text, reprinted here with permission:

Get proactive with disasters

Charles Meade

Imagine if the Army’s main strategy for protecting soldiers was to provide more ambulances, hospital beds, and doctors to treat the wounded – instead of relying on defensive measures such as fortifications, tanks, body armor and helmets to protect soldiers from being wounded in the first place.

The strategy of responding only after attacks instead of adequately preparing to defend against them sounds absurd. But it is exactly what the federal government, states and localities have done when it comes to protecting people from disasters such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornados and volcanoes.

Even if the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina had been far faster, bigger and better organized, the storm would inevitably have caused some death and severe property damage. But if more had been done earlier, New Orleans and other communities would have fared far better and many deaths would have been prevented.

In his Sept. 15 address from New Orleans, President Bush said: “This government will learn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.” Emergency response was clearly improved during Hurricane Rita. But a strategy based primarily on responding to a disaster after it hits is a losing strategy. We are far better off taking action to reduce and prevent disaster damage before it occurs.

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Today Michael Crichton is scheduled to testify before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. We’ll discuss when we learn more and if we deem it worth commenting on. Meantime, it seems clear that Michael Crichton tends to drive climate scientists to froth at the mouth. NASA’s Jim Hansen, cited in Crichton’s latest book, State of Fear, sent out by email a preemptive attack (PDF) on Crichton. Hansen picks the eve of Crichton’s Congressional testimony to take issue with Crichton’s characterization of his work in State of Fear. Here is an excerpt from Hansen’s fusillade:

“Michael Crichton’s latest fictional novel, “State of Fear”, designed to discredit concerns about global warming, purports to use the scientific method. The book is sprinkled with references to scientific papers, and Crichton intones in the introduction that his “footnotes are real”. But does Crichton really use the scientific method? Or is it something closer to scientific fraud? I have not read Crichton’s book … Crichton writes fiction and seems to make up things as he goes along. He doesn’t seem to have the foggiest notion about the science that he writes about. Perhaps that is o.k. for a science fiction writer. However, I recently heard that, in considering the global warming issue, a United States Senator is treating words from Crichton as if they had scientific or practical validity. If so, wow — Houston, we have a problem!”

For his testimony-eve efforts Hansen may have contributed to the impression among some that Crichton’s non-fictional arguments about the role of politics in climate science have some validity. Here is what Crichton said last year on science and politics:

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It is a canon of the academic enterprise that more and better knowledge is always a good thing. However, when it comes to actual processes of decision making, more knowledge does not always lead to better outcomes, and in fact may lead to worse outcomes. In a thoughtful column in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal, David Wessel takes on this interesting subject. Here is an excerpt:

“How about the service offered by LegalMetric LLC, a start-up founded by patent lawyer Greg Upchurch? Contemplating a patent-infringement case in Delaware? For $795, Mr. Upchurch will tell you which judges rule most swiftly and which tend to favor patent holders. Making a motion for summary judgment? Mr. Upchurch can tell you how the judge has ruled on similar motions versus his peers. These data always have been available in court files, but putting the pieces together was so expensive no one did it. Now, it’s on the U.S. federal judiciary’s Web site. Mr. Upchurch and his two employees download dockets, key information into a database and push a button so their software generates detailed reports. For lawyer and client, this knowledge can be very valuable. But does it increase the chances that the judge will come to a just decision? It is the sort of information that Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow labeled “socially useless but privately valuable.” It doesn’t help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure. It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie. Sure, if the product helps win cases, then both sides will buy it — just as both sides in high-stakes product-liability cases invest in jury-selection experts and software — and neither will have an unfair advantage. But does that make the society better off? The same question arises in the sophisticated software used to draw the boundaries of U.S. congressional districts so precisely that Republicans and Democrats know which party is almost certain to win. This has enhanced the power of incumbency: In 2004, 401 of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives sought re-election; all but seven won. It also has polarized the U.S. Congress, and made compromises scarce, because with safe districts, legislators have little reason to court the voters in the center. The advantage to individual lawmakers is clear; the value to society is not.”

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Fortune has a very interesting, and highly negative, article about the Bayh-Dole Act and its effects on universities. Here is an excerpt:

“That single law, named for its sponsors, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole, in essence transferred the title of all discoveries made with the help of federal research grants to the universities and small businesses where they were made. Prior to the law’s enactment, inventors could always petition the government for the patent rights to their own work, though the rules were different at each federal agency; some 20 different statutes governed patent policy. The law simplified the “technology transfer” process and, more important, changed the legal presumption about who ought to own and develop new ideas-private enterprise as opposed to Uncle Sam. The new provisions encouraged academic institutions to seek out the clever ideas hiding in the backs of their research cupboards and to pursue licenses with business. And it told them to share some of the take with the actual inventors. On the face of it, Bayh-Dole makes sense. Indeed, supporters say the law helped create the $43-billion-a-year biotech industry and has brought valuable drugs to market that otherwise would never have seen the light of day. What’s more, say many scholars, the law has created megaclusters of entrepreneurial companies-each an engine for high-paying, high-skilled jobs-all across the land. That all sounds wonderful. Except that Bayh-Dole’s impact wasn’t so much in the industry it helped create, but rather in its unintended consequence-a legal frenzy that’s diverting scientists from doing science.”

Dan Sarewitz and I have an op-ed on hurricanes, climate change and disasters in today’s Los Angeles Times. Here is the opening:

“LIKE A BAD horror movie in which the villain keeps coming back, Hurricane Rita, the 18th storm of the season, is spinning toward an inevitable rendezvous with the Gulf Coast. We’ve already seen more death and destruction than the last 35 hurricane seasons combined. And many people, including some European and U.S. politicians, are hoping that the carnage – represented most poignantly by the destruction in New Orleans – will help bring this country to its senses on dealing with global warming.

But understanding what this hurricane season is really telling us about why we’re so vulnerable to climate-related catastrophes means facing up to an unavoidable fact: Efforts to slow global warming will have no discernible effect on hurricanes for the foreseeable future. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adequately preparing for future disasters are essentially separate problems.”

Read the whole thing here.

In Bridges last July, I questioned the wisdom of science academies acting as political advocates. I argued that, “There are at least three reasons why political advocacy by science academies should be greeted with caution,” and these were the practical self-interest of scientists, the broader needs of policy making, and reasons of democratic accountability.

William Colglazier, Executive Officer of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Chief Operating Officer of its National Research Council provides a rebuttal in the current issue of Bridges. I appreciate that Mr. Colglazier chose to enage this issue. Here are a few excerpts from his rebuttal and my comments in response:

Colglazier: “In our view, the eleven academies statement was consistent with and supported by careful objective studies done by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) over the past 15 years …”

Response: Of course, my point is that there are any number of policies “consistent with” such “objective studies.” Settling on a subset of policy recommendations involves many considerations that go well beyond science. This is the essence of political advocacy, as science is poorly suited to reaching closure on what actions we should take in any given context, which is ultimately a question of values.

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My latest column in Bridges, the quarterly publication of Office of Science & Technology at the Embassy of Austria in Washington, DC, is now online. It is titled, “Making Sense of Trends in Disaster Losses,” and starts out like this:

“Record rainfall and over a thousand dead in Mumbai. Devastating floods in central Europe. A record hurricane season in the Atlantic, including more than $100 billion dollars in damage from Hurricane Katrina. The summer of 2005 seems to have witnessed more than its fair share of weather-related disasters. And, perhaps understandably, no weather-related disaster occurs without someone linking it to the issue of global warming… But as logical and enticing as it may seem to connect the ever-growing toll of disasters with global warming, the current state of science simply does not support making such a connection.”

Read the rest here. Comments welcomed.

If you are interested in science and technology policy, then the entire issue of Bridges is worth your attention.