In a commentary on the upcoming movie, The Day After Tomorrow, Sandy Starr writes on Spiked-Online:

“So is this film the work of an inventive bunch of storytellers out to entertain, or the work of environmentalist crusaders out to debate science? The answer you get from the filmmakers depends on whether they stand to gain publicity from a scientific debate about the film (in which case, it’s serious), or whether you’re taking them to task over the film’s scientific accuracy (in which case, it’s just entertainment). You have to hand it to the marketing department – the blurring of fact and fiction is an ingenious promotional technique. But serious scientists wouldn’t fall for it – would they?”

The blurring of fact and fiction is indeed an ingenious promotional technique. But the movie’s producers aren’t the first to put this technique to work: its business as usual across the political spectrum on the issue of climate change.

Examples:

Left taking right to task here.

Right taking left to task here.

A better approach: Climate Change Fact or Fiction? It Doesn’t Matter.

Read our article from 2000 in The Atlantic Monthly, Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock.

Yesterday the U.S. General Accounting Office released a report titled “Federal Advisory Committees: Additional Guidance Could Help Agencies Better Ensure Independence and Balance”. According to the report, in 2003 there were 948 federal advisory committees with 62,497 members, though committees classified as “scientific and technical” had 7,910 members on about 400 committees. The report makes clear that such committees play an important role in policy formulation and thus their composition matters. My comment: Hence, they are of course be ripe targets for politicization.

The report discusses, and struggles, with this issue of “balance” and observes that different agencies see balance in different terms, e.g., in terms of expertise, ethnicity, geography, gender, and employment sector. Apparently no agency sought to ensure political balance (though there is some evidence of late that a few have sought to ensure political imbalance). Of course, including political balance as a criterion for appointment would stand in stark contrast to the “objective” or “unbiased” role that scientists on such committees are supposed to play.

Here are a few excerpts from the report:

(more…)

-From the Japan Times:

“The data also show that emissions in fiscal 2002 were 7.6 percent higher than in fiscal 1990, the base year under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which calls for emission cuts as a means of halting global warming. Japan, required to reduce its emissions by 6 percent from the 1990 level between 2008 and 2012 under the protocol, will now have to cut emissions by 13.6 percent of the fiscal 2002 figure. [Environment Minister Yuriko] Koike said Cabinet ministers who attended the meeting expressed concern that Japan faces an uphill battle in achieving its Kyoto Protocol requirements.”

-From the Financial Times:

“The European Commission is to start legal action against six European Union states for not submitting plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions. Margot Wallström, the environment commissioner, yesterday said her preliminary analysis of plans submitted was that many were too generous in allocations to companies. ‘Too many allowances and a resulting low price will create little incentive to change behaviour,’ she said.”

-From The Guardian:

“Leading Russian scientists told President Vladimir Putin yesterday that the Kyoto emissions treaty discriminates against Russia, would damage its economy and would not significantly reduce global warming, increasing the chance that the Kremlin will refuse to ratify the agreement…. Experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences submitted a report to the Kremlin containing their long-awaited assessment of the scientific virtues of the pact for Russia… They said the total benefit to Russia would be a small drop in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air over the next 10 years, but the total cost of the pact’s emission-reduction measures would be “tens of trillions of dollars over a hundred years”.

-From the aSydney Morning Herald:

“The [Australian] Federal Government has opposed the protocol and recently quashed moves to institute an alternative carbon trading system that would have reduced greenhouse emissions by forcing producers, and consumers, to pay a price for them.”

Lesson: Argue about Kyoto if you must, but it is what comes next that matters more.

Hang a shingle on the internet one month, appear in the Washington Times the next. My tongue-in-cheek posting from earlier this week titled “Generic News Story on Climate Change” was reprinted in full in Tuesday’s (May 18, 2004) Washington Times in John McCaslin’s “Inside the Beltway” column. McCaslin did get one thing wrong when he wrote that I had sent the posting to “environmentally minded editors.” But even so we do appreciate the publicity.

Today we are issuing our periodic newsletter Ogmius. In this issue I have an essay titled, “The Cherry Pick”. Here is an excerpt:

“Lawyers get paid considerable sums to do it. Journalists do it on a daily basis. According to their critics, President George Bush and his Administration do it routinely. I’m sure that I do it, and no doubt you do it as well. Everyone does it, so it must be OK, right?

‘It’ refers to the cherry pick — the careful selection of information to buttress a particular predetermined perspective while ignoring other information that does not. In other words, take the best and leave the rest. An obvious example of the cherry pick is the allegation that the Bush Administration emphasized those pieces of intelligence that supported its desire to invade Iraq. But if you look around, you’ll see it everywhere, embraced across ideological perspectives. And you’ll see it a lot in debate over highly politicized issues related to science and technology.”

Read the whole thing here.

Our newsletter can be found here in html and here in PDF. And you can subscribe here.

A reader of this blog points us to a new paper by Lee Davis (Copenhagen Business School) and Jerome Davis (Dalhousie University) that asks, “How Effective are Prizes as Incentives to Innovation?”

The paper is excellent and provides a valuable literature review.

This week the Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article (subscription required) which discusses the President’s Council on Bioethics and its chair Leon Kass. The article suggests that some “academic observers” believe that the Bioethics Council “is driven by conservative ideology and has rushed to alarmist conclusions about the social and human ramifications of medical research in areas like memory, aging, and embryo cloning.” One professor quoted in the article notes, “Leon [Kass] has been a technological pessimist from the get-go.”

But to ascribe a partisan impulse to technological pessimism overlooks the fact that even as some on the right challenge the teaching of evolution, much of the opposition to nuclear technology and agricultural biotechnology has come from the left. As the article notes,

“Some scholars also argue that it’s misleading to view the council simply in terms of a liberal-conservative political divide. Instead, they say, it’s more accurate to describe the council as taking up debates between supporters of technology and skeptics. The doubters include some on the left who worry about corporations’ controlling and marketing such powerful technologies.”

It would seem that there is much more at work here than left-right politics, and it suggests, perhaps, an interesting confluence of perspectives on technological innovation among groups who traditionally are opposed on many issues. I am unaware of any studies about the politics of technological pessimism, but it would seem that this issue is critical to understanding the potential for technological innovation to contribute to societal needs and limit the potential for harmful effects, both real and perceived, of new technologies.

The Chronicle article can be found here (subscription required).

David Dickson has a thought-provoking article titled “India’s new challenge on technology policy”, that makes the case that the last week’s surprising Indian election happened as it did, at least in part, as a consequence of Indian technology policies. Here is an excerpt:

“Last week’s surprise success of the Congress Party, headed by Sonia Gandhi, in India’s general election …[and] according to many commentators, the rejection of the incumbent government — headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — appears to reflect widespread disillusionment with the way that the country’s recent rapid economic and technological growth has been enjoyed unequally by different social groups.

It would, of course, be naïve to pretend that this is the whole story behind the election result. The success of the Congress Party in some of India’s largest cities, including Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, immediately challenges the argument that it is the votes of excluded rural communities that have brought the Congress Party — the dominant political party in India since it achieved independence in 1947 — back to power after a gap of eight years…

Despite all this, it would be equally naïve to believe that rejection of the BJP was a conventional protest vote against an incumbent government. There is considerable evidence to back the claim that many of those voting against the party and its political allies were expressing resentment at their exclusion from the country’s economic miracle of the past decade….

The outcome has important lessons for other developing countries. For it is a reminder that although technological innovation is a necessary condition for social and economic progress, it is not a sufficient condition. Equally important are accompanying policies to ensure that the benefits of successful innovation are widely shared and experienced.”

The same lesson has been drawn based on experience in developed countries with nuclear power, agricultural biotechnology, and other technological innovations. The whole essay is worth reading.

Instructions to editor: Please repeat the below every 3-4 weeks ad infinitum.

This week the journal [Science/Nature] published a study by a team of scientists led by a [university/government lab/international group] [challenging/confirming] that the earth is warming. The new study looks at [temperature/sea level/the arctic] and finds evidence of trends that [support/challenge] the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Scientist [A, B, C], a [participant in, reviewer of] the study observed that the study, [“should bring to a close debate over global warming,” “provides irrefutable evidence that global warming is [real/overstated] today,” “demonstrates the value of climate science”]. Scientist [D, E, F], who has long been [critical/supportive] of the theory of global warming rebutted that the study, [“underscores that changes in [temperature/sea level/the arctic] will likely be [modest/significant],” “ignores considerable literature inconvenient to their central hypothesis,” “commits a basic mistake”]. Scientist [A, B, C or D, E, F] has been criticized by [advocacy groups, reporters, scientific colleagues] for receiving funding from [industry groups, conservative think tanks]. It is unclear what the study means for U.S. participation the Kyoto Protocol, which the Bush Administration has refused to participate in. All agreed that more research is necessary.

According to a recent article in CFO Magazine, NASA has some serious issues accurately accounting for its expenditures over recent years, having made $565 billion in adjustments. Its auditor basically gave up on the audit. The article says,

“PricewaterhouseCoopers, the agency’s auditor, issued a disclaimed opinion on NASA’s 2003 financial statements. PwC complained that NASA couldn’t adequately document more than $565 billion — billion — in year-end adjustments to the financial-statement accounts, which NASA delivered to the auditors two months late. Because of “the lack of a sufficient audit trail to support that its financial statements are presented fairly,” concluded the auditors, “it was not possible to complete further audit procedures on NASA’s September 30, 2003, financial statements within the reporting deadline established by [the Office of Management and Budget].”

The PwC audit is actually available on the NASA IG website.

A Reuter’s story carried the following, “Shyam Sundar, a professor in accounting with Yale School of Management, described the event as ‘a big mess,’ after seeing the auditor’s report. ‘If NASA would have been a public company, the management would have been fired by now,’ he said.”

However, management of a public company would also include the company’s board of directors, who in this analogy would include congressional oversight committees. And in the CFO Magazine article a member of the staff of House Science Committee observed of the financial situation, “I think there’s a little numbness to it. It’s really hard to get congressmen fired up about a bad audit.”

The audit is likely a symptom some deeper cultural and institutional issues in NASA and, if space policy matters, then these issues are certainly worth getting fired up about.