« January 2006 »

Stern Report on Climate Change

No chance yet to look this over, but the UK Stern Report on Climate Change has released its report, available here. This will surely be discussed a great deal. We’d welcome comments from anyone who has had a chance to look at it.

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth

No doubt we’ll be discussing the SOTU in days to come, but for now on a different subject, Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment organized a congressional briefing last week on what science is and is not, according to a story in the New York Times today.

So now, when scientific questions pervade legislation on issues like climate change and stem cell research, there is growing concern that Congressional misunderstanding can produce misguided policy. To fight such misunderstanding, Mr. Boehlert and others sponsored the Jan. 23 briefing, organized by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard. Capitol Hill has briefings by the dozen every year in which industry, academic and activist groups address diverse topics related to science. Some criticize these briefings as little more than showboating. But Mr. Boehlert, like many others, thinks they are "absolutely" useful. And the briefing was unusual in that its subject was not avian flu, the budget for NASA or any other relatively narrow issue, but rather "how science works."

Harvard’s Sheila Jasanoff, a widely read and respected scholar of science studies, took a less positive view of the session, one that I largely share:

Not everyone thought defining science was even possible, in such a short session. "It makes me extremely tired that they are going to do this again," said Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who has written widely on how science policy is made. "There is no easily graspable definition."

Some interesting quotes from the New York Times article:

The worth of any scientific finding, Dr. [Donald] Kennedy [editor of Science] told the crowd, is not the prominence of the researchers responsible, the prestige of their institutions or the authority of their funding agencies, but whether other researchers achieve the same results. Dr. Kennedy did not refer explicitly to a scandal that is roiling science, and Science — the discovery that highly praised cloning experiments in South Korea survived the magazine's peer review process to win publication, only to be declared fraudulent. But he said: "Peer review is not a process that guarantees truth. If it were, no one would ever repeat experiments." Replication, he said, "is the ultimate test of truth in science."

I am sure this will be seized upon by the opponents still beating that dead horse involved in the “hockey stick” debate, with one side claiming that other studies have found the same results as the controversial earlier study and the other side claiming that study has yet to be fully replicated. Both sides are probably right.

The following excerpt caused me to raise an eyebrow and is pretty telling about science in politics:

Dr. [Harvey V.] Fineberg [president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences] spoke of the way scientific knowledge was turned into information useful to society, a process that he said the National Academy encouraged through its regular production of reports on topics as diverse as national security and arsenic in drinking water. The academy's reports are influential, he said, because of its reputation for integrity, because of its avoidance of conflict of interest, because researchers who produce its findings are volunteers and because "nothing is kept back."

Now if an official from just about any other organization such as tobacco companies, big oil, environmental groups, etc. stated that their group had no conflicts of interest, it would pass the laugh test. For some reason, scientists get a free pass, even in the face of ample evidence to the contrary, which we’ve documented here in abundance.

If Congress wants to learn about how science works, it should of course talk to scientists, but it should also talk to people whose expertise lies in how science works. When might we see a congressional briefing starring Shelia Jasanoff?

Boehlert on Hansen

From Spaceref.com:

Rep. Boehlert Responds to Accusations Concerning NASA's "Silencing" of Climate Scientist

PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Monday, January 30, 2006
Source: House Science Committee

WASHINGTON - House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) sent the attached letter today to Dr. Michael Griffin, Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), in response to articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post this weekend concerning NASA's treatment of Dr. James Hansen, Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

January 30, 2006

Dr. Michael Griffin
Administrator
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Washington DC 20546

Dear Dr. Griffin:

I am writing in response to several recent news articles indicating that officials at NASA may be trying to "silence" Dr. James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

It ought to go without saying that government scientists must be free to describe their scientific conclusions and the implications of those conclusions to their fellow scientists, policymakers and the general public. Any effort to censor federal scientists biases public discussions of scientific issues, increases distrust of the government and makes it difficult for the government to attract the best scientists. And when it comes to an issue like climate change, a subject of ongoing public debate with immense ramifications, the government ought to be bending over backward to make sure that its scientists are able to discuss their work and what it means.

Good science cannot long persist in an atmosphere of intimidation. Political figures ought to be reviewing their public statements to make sure they are consistent with the best available science; scientists should not be reviewing their statements to make sure they are consistent with the current political orthodoxy.

NASA is clearly doing something wrong, given the sense of intimidation felt by Dr. Hansen and others who work with him. Even if this sense is a result of a misinterpretation of NASA policies - and more seems to be at play here - the problem still must be corrected. I will be following this matter closely to ensure that the right staff and policies are in place at NASA to encourage open discussion of critical scientific issues. I assume you share that goal.

Our staff is already setting up meetings to pursue this issue and I appreciate NASA's responsiveness to our inquiries thus far. I would ask that you swiftly provide to the Committee, in writing, a clear statement of NASA's policies governing the activities of its scientists.

NASA is one of the nation's leading scientific institutions. I look forward to working with you to keep it that way, and to ensure that the entire nation gets the full benefit of NASA sciences.

Sincerely

[Signed]

Sherwood Boehlert
Chairman

Dangerous Climate Change

The UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs has released online a new book (here in PDF, 16 MB) titled, “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,” which is a collection a papers presented at a meeting of the same title early last year. We commented on the meeting last year here and here.

I have just read Rajendra Pachauri’s (head of the IPCC) introductory chapter which was based on remarks that he gave at the conference. Not much new in it, but I thought that the following passage from Dr. Pachauri’s chapter provides a telling indication of how a narrow focus on human-GHG-caused climate change tends to warp the thinking of otherwise smart people about issues that involve much more than just human caused climate change:

In Mauritius, a couple of weeks ago, there was the major UN conference involving the small island developing states. In discussions with several people there, I heard an expression of fear based on the question: suppose a tsunami such as that of December 26 were to take place in 2080 and suppose the sea level was a foot higher, can you estimate what the extent of damage would be under those circumstances? Hence, I think when we talk about dangerous it is not merely dangers that are posed by climate change per se, but the overlay of climate change impacts on the possibility of natural disasters that could take place in any event.

So by 2080 society is going to experience changes probably far greater than from 1930 to 2005 and he is talking about the difference in impacts between a 25 foot and 26 foot wall of water? In this case, he probably would have been on solid ground by saying that patterns of coastal development over the next 75 years are far, far more important than an extra 12 inches of sea level rise, rather than trying to link climate change to tsunami impacts. But as we've argued ad repeatium here, this is the kind of thinking that necessarily results from Article 2 of the FCCC.

I’d welcome comments from anyone who has read parts of the book. I am sure that it is a pretty accurate preview of what we should expectin IPCC AR4 next year.

Let Jim Hansen Speak

The Bush Administration once again demonstrates its unbelievable clumsiness when it comes to handling the politics of global warming. In a story carried on the website of the New York Times, Andy Revkin writes,

James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

What is it that the Bush Administration is trying to keep Jim Hansen from saying?

According to the NYT article,

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet." The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

Here is why the Administration’s actions are, from a political standpoint, incredibly stupid.

1. Many, many government scientists routinely engage in political advocacy on the climate issue. Revkin points to this in his article when he identifies a government scientist who expresses views less critical of the Administration’s stance on climate change, but who apparently does not have the same restrictions.

2. Clearly, Jim Hansen is being singled out because of his stature and visibility. But that same stature results in a front page New York Times story when he complains about his treatment.

3. Jim Hansen’s statements about “policy” are really just political exhortations, and not really about policy in any significant degree. The climate issue is in gridlock and it is inconceivable that (yet another) prominent scientist witnessing to his political values is going to change these dynamics, even if it offers some short term discomfort for the Bush Administration.

4. Jim Hansen’s statements had their 15 minutes of attention and were largely old news – the Bush Administration has turned a non-story into renewed focus on their approach to climate.

5. Finally, we want scientists to engage in policy discussions. Note to the Bush Administration – you are funding about $2 billion of research focused on improving policy. If scientists don’t talk about policy, then they are wasting the public’s money.

6. From a crass political standpoint, when scientists of the stature of Jim Hansen make overtly political statements absent any substantive or meaningful discussion of policy, they make themselves look bad. Had the Administration given Jim Hansen enough rope, he may very well have undercut his own authority by looking like just another scientist trying to couch his political views in science.

Let’s be clear: the Administration has every right to control what its political appointees say. They even are in the right when they insist that scientists clearly differentiate their own views from official government policies, particularly when the scientist is speaking from an official setting using government resources. This is especially important when the speaker is very prominent.

I am sure that the reaction of the Administration will be that this is either manufactured (read the whole NYT story) or it is the result of an over-aggressive political appointee (echoes of the defense used to explain why a prospective scientific advisory board member was asked who he voted for).

Two final points – this case helps to underscore how absurd it is to try to separate science and policy. The IPCC has a formal mandate to be “policy relevant, but policy neutral”. If the Bush Administration was smart and really wanted to silence scientists, it would ask why IPCC rules aren’t good enough for NASA scientists. Keeping science and policy separate makes no sense for the IPCC or U.S. government scientists.

And lastly, understanding this experience requires no need to fall back on a simple-minded “war on science”. This is just bad politics by the Bush Administration, which reflects on a policy failure shared by all.

How Science becomes Politics

Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R) provides a great example of how politicians hand off hot-button political issues to scientists, and couch that transfer in science (hat tip, Matt Nisbet).

The Washington Post reported yesterday,

After remaining mostly silent on a bill that was killed last year by a Republican-led filibuster threat, Ehrlich (R) is pushing a plan to spend $20 million next year on stem cell research. But Ehrlich is not committing himself on the question that has stirred the most controversy: whether the money should be used primarily for work on stem cells derived from human embryos or from less controversial adult stem cells Although the move has drawn some criticism, Ehrlich argued in an interview that he is acting prudently, given the evolving nature of the science. "I wasn't that good of a biology student. I'm not going to make that decision," Ehrlich said. "The point here is that the decision should be a function of the science. These are fundamentally science questions, not political questions." The governor would leave it to a state-founded technology corporation to decide whether to provide grants for work on adult stem cells or work on embryonic stems cells, which many scientists say holds greater promise but some in his party consider tantamount to abortion. Ehrlich, who has supported stem cell research since his days in Congress, said that his public silence last year masked a behind-the-scenes effort to develop an alternate approach that would both bolster the state's biotechnology sector and depoliticize a difficult issue for Republicans. "The strong pro-life members know the administration does not share their views on this issue, but we wanted to try to lower the temperature on the politics," he said. "I wanted to try to keep everyone's eye on the ball, and I believe this approach accomplishes that goal.”

Now he made claim to not know a lot about biology, but he clearly knows politics. A passage later in the story illustrates the absurdity of claiming that decisions about stem cell research are scientific not political,

Some advocates of the research say Ehrlich's plan has merit and view it as more likely to withstand opposition in the Senate. "As long as there's no preference for adult, that's fine," said Robert Johnson, a lobbyist for Maryland Families for Stem Cell Research, a coalition formed during last year's debate that has primarily supported embryonic work. But the governor's posture drew criticism yesterday from sponsors of the stem cell bills. In an interview, Sen. Paula C. Hollinger (D-Baltimore County) was adamant that money be spent on work on embryonic stem cells, which is controversial because it involves the destruction of human embryos. Hollinger's bill would restrict research funded with state money to embryos discarded at fertility clinics and establish other rules for funding the science. "The only reason we're doing this bill is that the president has refused to allow the research to be done," Hollinger said, referring to a 2001 executive order by President Bush that set limits on the embryonic stem cell research that can be funded with federal money.

If the relevant scientific community here wants to avoid becoming the political battleground for this particular debate, then it would be wise to bounce the issue right back up to the Governor saying, “We know a lot about biology, but we know that a decision about funding stem cell research is politics not science.”

Hypotheses about IPCC and Peer Review

The IPCC is the 800 pound gorilla in the climate debate. It has been the locus of legitimate and credible climate science (salience is another matter, but I digress). It is increasingly coming under criticism in a number of dimensions for some very good reasons. In this post I’d like to suggest a few hypotheses about how the IPCC has indirectly contributed to the politicization of climate science in ways we’ve not discussed here. These are for discussion, and I’d welcome evidence for/against and other sorts of examples.

Laundering Grey Literature

The IPCC has a requirement that its assessments be based on peer reviewed literature. It has not always held itself to this standard, particularly in its Working Groups II and III. I have noticed recently a number of peer-reviewed papers that reference so-called “grey literature” (e.g., agency, company, NGO reports) which hasn’t itself been peer reviewed. Then the peer-reviewed study that cites the grey literature is subsequently cited in another publication to refer to the information in the original non-peer reviewed source. This is a way to give the veneer of peer review to a non-peer-reviewed study. Here is an example of this dynamic.

Fun with Deadlines

The IPCC sets a deadline for when papers must be accepted in order to be considered in a particular assessment report. This guarantees that the assessment won’t have to be continually updated, but it also means that the assessment is automatically out-of-date in some case where new findings have been released. Because editors and journals have considerable discretion in when they publish what papers, the IPCC’s deadline can set the stage for some mischief in the publication process as papers with a particular slant are published before the deadline and other published after. I don’t have any data on this, but it’d be interesting to compare the time-to-publication of key papers cited in IPCC reports with a journal’s standard practices. This issue came to mind as I read this comment from RealClimate,

There are several more papers "in the mill" which we are not at liberty to discuss right now [Ed.- Embargoed, see below], which insure that the weight of peer-reviewed studies available for consideration in the next IPCC report will point towards a strengthening, not a weakening, of the IPCC '01 conclusions regarding the anomalous nature of recent hemispheric and global warmth in a long-term context.

Maybe it is just inartful language, but claims to “insure” previously found results do not make me comfortable about the agendas of climate scientists.

Embargoes as Silencers

This one is not about the IPCC, but Science and Nature. I was recently at a science talk at NCAR and a number of leading scientists refused to discuss their work because it would potentially be under “embargo” with Science or Nature, if accepted. My understanding is that embargoes refer to releasing papers accepted for publication to the media in advance of the artificial deadlines set by Science and Nature to generate news-worthiness. They do not apply to scientists talking among themselves in scientific settings. So when scientists use potential embargoes as a way to silence discussion and debate on their work, it reduces the internal vetting of scientific ideas and makes the leading journals the only place where debate can occur. Since Science and Nature are highly selective is what they allow as far as intellectual exchanges following up papers they publish, the entire process of scientific debate and learning is arguably slowed down. Meantime, this allows findings supporting one view or another to gain much greater standing in political debate than they might otherwise have.

Comments? Other observations?

Two Interesting Articles

This post describes two papers that discuss different aspects of climate science, policy and politics. I don’t agree with everything argued in them, but they are thoughtful pieces of scholarship that challenge us to think. They are both worth a look.

In the journal Science Technology & Human Values Reiner Grundman has an interesting paper that makes the compelling argument that scientific consensus is neither necessary for sufficient for political action on climate change. He argues that the absence of a consensus did not limit progress on the ozone issue and the presence of a consensus has not forced progress on the climate issue. Instead, he argues the importance of political leadership. Here is the abstract:

Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol. 31, No. 1, 73-101 (2006) DOI: 10.1177/0162243905280024 © 2006 SAGE Publications

Ozone and Climate: Scientific Consensus and Leadership
Reiner Grundmann

Aston University

This article compares the cases of ozone layer protection and climate change. In both cases, scientific expertise has played a comparatively important role in the policy process. The author argues that against conventional assumptions, scientific consensus is not necessary to achieve ambitious political goals. However, the architects of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change operated under such assumptions. The author argues that this is problematic both from a theoretical viewpoint and from empirical evidence. Contrary to conventional assumptions, ambitious political regulations in the ozone case were agreed under scientific uncertainty, whereas the negotiations on climate change were much more modest albeit based on a large scientific consensus. On the basis of a media analysis, the author shows that the creation of a climate of expectation plus pressure from leader countries is crucial for success.

A second paper is by our Myanna Lashen also the journal Science technology & Human Values (here in PDF), and grapples with the contradictory impulse for more democratic decision making and the practical reality of the role of information limits and political power that shapes the ability of the public to weigh competing knowledge claims. She argues,

this study demonstrates that exposure to countervailing opinions does not necessarily result in a more informed, participatory, and critically aware citizenry, a necessary basis for legitimate policy making in policy arenas in which only probabilistic knowledge is possible. This study of U.S. climate politics highlights problematic aspects of how governments, international bodies, and political and vested interest groups have chosen to deploy science. It shows that these actors deploy science and the “symbols of science” (Toumey 1996) in ways that constrain public debate and critical, balanced understanding of the strengths and limitations of scientific knowledge.

Here is Lahsen’s conclusion,

As shown by countless social studies of science, science is intimately and inextricably interlinked with politics, and no transcendent definitions exist by which to distinguish true science from “pseudoscience.” Even peer-reviewed science produced by means of the scientific method of hypothesis, experimentation, and falsification is liable to error. But it is nevertheless a particularly rigorous basis for the production of knowledge, and it can and should enjoy greater consideration relative to claims that not only are produced by less rigorous methods but also are paid by, and designed to benefit, financial and political elites over the general good. As responsible citizens, we must learn how to recognize the difference and to define the general good by means of truly participatory processes.

Like all of her work, this piece is complex and rich in detail, and challenges you to think about the complexities and inconsistencies present in the real world of human action.

The Elephant in the Floodplain

Yesterday the Government Accounting Office released a statement by David M. Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, on the challenges for the National Flood Insurance Program (PDF), before the Chairman, Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate. The report notes the tremendous impact of the hurricanes of 2005 for the program, and goes over some of the basic challenges facing the NFIP, like the fact that the program is by design not actuarially sound. However, the report does not address what is the most fundamental flaw in the program: it is built upon a vision of climate science that does not square with reality.

As we discusses in depth here last week, policy makers almost always have to simplify their world in order to make policies. Such simplifications are often practically useful if they lead to desired outcomes. But if a policy is based on a fundamentally incorrect notion of how the world works, the policy may fail or even lead to outcomes opposite of those intended. Such is the case with the NFIP. The NFIP is at its core based on the notion that climate is stationary and unchanging. It does not recognize climate variability or change. As such it produces maps of flood risk that are used to guide implementation of the program that are based on a completely incorrect vision of how the world works. Comptroller Walker’s testimony yesterday observed,

Accurate flood maps that identify the areas at greatest risk of flooding are the foundation of the NFIP. Flood maps must be periodically updated to assess and map changes in the boundaries of floodplains that result from community growth, development, erosion, and other factors that affect the boundaries of areas at risk of flooding. FEMA has embarked on a multiyear effort to update the nation’s flood maps at a cost in excess of $1 billion. The maps are principally used by (1) the approximately 20,000 communities participating in the NFIP to adopt and enforce the program’s minimum building standards for new construction within the maps’ identified flood plains; (2) FEMA to develop accurate flood insurance policy rates based on flood risk; and (3) federal regulated mortgage lenders to identify those property owners who are statutorily required to purchase federal flood insurance.

No mention there of climate variability or change. Here is what I said in a 1999 paper (PDF) about flood risk and how perceptions of flood risk are the number one fallacy policy makers hold about floods:

The concept and terminology of the ‘100-year floodplain’ was formally adopted by the federal government as a standard for all public agencies in 1977 under Executive Order 11988. In 1982 FEMA reviewed the policy and found that it was being used in the agencies and, lacking a better alternative, concluded that the policy should be retained (FIFMTF, 1992, p. 8-3). However, despite the FEMA review, use of the concept of the 100-year flood is encumbered by a number of logical and practical difficulties (cf. Lord, 1994).

First, there is general confusion among users of the term about what it means. Some use the term to refer to a flood that occurs every 100 years, as did the Midwestern mayor who stated that ‘after the 1965 flood, they told us this wouldn’t happen again for another 100 years’ (IFMRC, 1994, p. 59). Public confusion is widespread: A farmer suffering through Midwest flooding for the second time in three years complained that ‘Two years ago was supposed to be a 100-year flood, and they’re saying this is a 75-year flood, What kind of sense does that make? You’d think they’d get it right’ (Peterson, 1995).

Second, the ‘100-year flood’ is only one of many possible probabilistic measures of an area’s flood risk. For instance, in the part of the floodplain that is demarcated as the ‘100-year floodplain’ it is only the outer edge of that area that is estimated to have an annual probability of flooding of 0.01, yet confusion exists (Myers, 1994). Areas closer to the river have higher probabilities of flooding, e.g., there are areas of a floodplain with a 2% annual chance of flooding (50-year floodplain), 10% annual chance (10-year floodplain), 50% annual chance (2-year floodplain) etc., and similarly, areas farther from the river have lower probabilities of flooding. The ‘100-year floodplain’ is arbitrarily chosen for regulatory reasons and does not reflect anything fundamentally intrinsic to the floodplain.

Third, the ‘100-year floodplain’ is determined based on past flood records and is thus subject to considerable errors with respect to the probabilities of future floods. According to Burkham (1978) errors in determination of the ‘100-year flood’ may be off by as much as 50% of flood depth. Depending on the slope of the flood plain, this could translate into a significant error in terms of distance from the river channel. A FEMA press release notes that ‘in some cases there is a difference of only inches between the 10- and the 100-year flood levels’ (FEMA, 1996). Further, researchers are beginning to realize an ‘upper limit’ on what can be known about flood frequencies due to the lack of available trend data (Bobée and Rasmussen, 1995).

Fourth, the 100-year floodplain is not a natural feature, but rather is defined by scientists and engineers based on the historical record. Consequently, while the ‘100-year floodplain’ is dynamic and subject to redefinition based on new flood events that add to the historical record, the regulatory definition is much more difficult to change. For instance, following two years of major flooding on the Salt River in Phoenix, Arizona, the previously estimated 100-year flood was reduced to a 50-year flood (FIFMTF, 1992, p. 9-7). What happens to the structures in redefined areas? Any changes in climate patterns, especially precipitation, will also modify the expected probabilities of inundation. For example, some areas of the upper Midwest have documented a trend of increasing precipitation this century (Changnon and Kunkel, 1995; Bhowmik et al., 1994). Furthermore, human changes to the river environment, e.g., levees and land use changes, can also alter the hydraulics of floods. Finally, the extensive use of the term ‘100-year flood’ focuses attention on that aspect of flooding, sometimes to the neglect of the area beyond the 100-year flood plain (Myers, 1994).

The fact of the matter is that the NFIP is based on the idea that floods occur with a constant probability and that such constancy can be quantified in maps to guide development and insurance. This assumption is fundamentally wrong. The NFIP cannot succeed until it addresses this fundamental flaw. Meantime, expect the public to foot the bill for a policy that cannot work because it fundamentally mischaracterizes how the world really works.

And They’re Off . . .

Interesting times are ahead for science policy discussions for a lot of reasons. This story from The Hill mentions the bills that we referenced a few days ago:

A bipartisan group of senators will introduce an ambitious trifecta of bills today aiming billions of dollars in new spending at the nation’s sliding science and technology sector. The bills, collectively called Protecting America’s Competitive Edge (PACE), sprang from a request made by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) to the independently funded National Academies: What specific actions could Congress take to ensure continued U.S. competitiveness? When the National Academies came back with 20 recommendations and a report on how to implement them, the senators took notice, as did President Bush, who is reportedly considering making science and technology innovation a major theme of his State of the Union address. Alongside Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), Alexander and Bingaman are sponsoring three versions of PACE: one for energy, one for education and one for tax policy. The bills would set up a new transformational-energy agency within the Energy Department, create science and math scholarships for 25,000 students and boost research spending at seven federal agencies. The bills are estimated to cost upwards of $9 billion, a price tag that could prove anathema to a congressional leadership already wary of the bloated federal deficit. But the PACE bills have the solid support of the GOP-leaning business community.

The brief article is here.

Public Value of Science

Yesterday we pointed to a thoughtful report from DEMOS, a UK think tank, titled “See-through science” published in 2004. Last year DEMOS published a follow-up report that provided a somewhat more sober perspective on the staying power of the so-called “deficit model” of the public understanding of science. The follow-up report is tilted, “The Public Value of Science” and is just as thoughtful as the first. Here is what it says about the deficit model:

Beneath the thin crust of consensus in these debates there lies a deeper ambivalence. Old assumptions continually reassert themselves. To give one recent example, Alec Broers, in his 2005 Reith Lectures, The Triumph of Technology, rehearsed the now familiar argument that ‘it is time . . . to move away from the old concept of “the public understanding of science” to a new more dynamic “public engagement”’. Minutes later, in the debate that followed, he had this exchange with Mary Warnock:

Baroness Warnock: After the election, the government, whatever government, has simply got to bite the bullet and start planning and constructing new nuclear reactors. In spite of your extremely welcome insistence that the public must be involved, do you think the public is really well-enough informed? Are they not perhaps too apprehensive to make this decision? It seems to me that what is needed here is very firm leadership.

Lord Broers: I agree with you. But I don’t know how quickly we can educate the public, to bring the evidence forward in a calm and rational way.

No sooner have ‘deficit’ models of the public been discarded than they reappear.

Later in the report the authors single out those who would use the notion of objective scientific truth to argue against public involvement in science policy decision making:

As we noted earlier, rumours of the death of the ‘deficit model’ have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the progress of the science and society agenda, there are still those who maintain that the public are too ignorant to contribute anything useful to scientific decisionmaking. One of the most vocal is the Liberal Democrat peer, Dick Taverne. In a letter attacking Nature’s editorial on upstream engagement, Taverne rejects ‘the fashionable demand by a group of sociologists for more democratic science’. He goes on: ‘The fact is that science, like art, is not a democratic activity. You do not decide by referendum whether the earth goes round the sun.’ But Taverne is setting up a straw man. As we emphasised in See-through Science, upstream engagement is not about members of the public standing over the shoulder of scientists in the laboratory, taking votes or holding referendums on what they should or should not be doing. That Taverne can conceive of accountability only in these terms reflects nothing more than the poverty of his own democratic imagination. This agenda is not about imposing cumbersome bureaucratic structures on science, or forcing lay people onto every research funding committee. Questions about structures do need to be considered, but are a sideshow compared with the far more important – and exciting – challenge of building more reflective capacity into the practice of science. As well as bringing the public into new conversations with science, we need to bring out the public within the scientist – by enabling scientists to reflect on the social and ethical dimensions of their work.

But getting individual scientists or communities within the scientific enterprise to “reflect” on the broader dimensions of their work can be a challenge. A few written comments from students in my graduate seminar this week were extremely perceptive along these lines. One student observed,

Pielke (2002) states, “many granting agencies now ask in their evaluation criteria whether the proposed research will benefit society.” Although many scientists support this principle, they do not have the expertise to assess their work in this way. This statement resonated with my office mate and me, and we had a good laugh. Whether applying for a large research grant or a graduate student fellowship there is always a requirement to state broader impacts or to indicate how the proposed research furthers the mission of the funding agency. In addition, the applicant must usually specify how the results will be made available to the public. These are always the most exasperating questions to answer, and I generally feel like I'm pandering to some reviewer with my uninspired response. Its not that I do not think science should provide some benefit to society at large. To the contrary, I and most scientists are trying to better understand the natural world so that we can fix some of the problems in it. I just can’t answer the broader impacts question very well because, aside from understanding a tiny piece of the sea level rise puzzle, I don’t really know how my increased knowledge of meltwater movement on the Greenland Ice Sheet will benefit my neighbor down the street.”

Another student was less charitable,

In science and engineering, it seems that people are becoming more specialized in certain areas and do not always see beyond their realm. They did not always realize how their work affects others and vise versa. . . The individuals see their finished product and move on to their next task. What goes on beyond that point may not be of their concern. There are many other things that go into research such as funding and politics. Many people say to themselves “That is not my job, so I do not have to know”. . . I believe that today many people play the ignorant card . . . Again, it is not their responsibility and therefore they believe they do not need to care.”

These comments from practicing, early-career scientists echo the arguments of the DEMOS report which finds fault in the so-called linear model of the relation of science and society, which provides a rationalization for both detachment and a lack of accountability in the form of a narrow focus on scientific truths:

When all else fails, critics of upstream engagement tend to resort to arguments based on a linear model of innovation. They grudgingly concede that technologies and applications may merit some public discussion, but insist that ‘basic science’ should be kept apart, as a unique domain governed by curiosity and ‘science for science’s sake’. Yet like deficit models of the public, linear models of innovation are a default, unthinking response to the complexity of the subjects they purport to describe. As John Ziman observes, despite the fact that ‘the linear model of technological innovation is obviously over-simplified. . . it underlies what most politicians, business people, civil servants and journalists say about science’.”

So what is a science studies scholar to do? If the linear model of science doesn’t work in shaping public views about science and about science in particular policy issues, it certainly won’t work in shaping scientists’ views about science in its broader societal and political contexts. The DEMOS reports are open in acknowledging that the answers to this challenge are not readily apparent, but that there are numerous efforts ongoing to enage the scientific community in discussions about its role in society. Their closing words encourage us to keep this subject in play even if challenging,

These are difficult issues and we do not pretend they can be easily resolved. But they bring us back to where we started: the fundamental questions of why we do science, where it is taking us, and who it is for. Tony Blair’s speech to the Royal Society, in which he warned of emotion driving out reason, was titled ‘Science matters’. Our argument has been that, yes, science does matter. But it matters for more than narrow, economic reasons. We need to talk, and occasionally to argue, about why this is so. And we need to infuse the cultures and practices of science with this richer and more open set of social possibilities. This is how, together, we can build public value.

Read the whole thing, here.

Global Spending on R&D

According to a recently released UNESCO report, in 2002 the world spent $830 billion on research and development in the public and private sectors, which represents about 1.7% of global GDP or $134.40 per person. The United States spent 3.1% of its GDP or $1,005.90 per person; the EU spent 1.8% of its GDP or $431.80 per person, Japan 3.1% and $836.6/person, Israel 4.9% and $922.40/person, China 1.2% and $56.20/person, and India o.7% and $19.80/person. This data come from this table in PDF.

In 2002, the United States had 1.26 million researchers with R&D funding per researcher at $230k. For the EU, 1.11 million researchers, and $177,000 per researcher, Japan, 647,000 researchers, $165k/researcher, Israel 9,200 researchers, $661k/researcher, China 811,000 researchers, $89k/researcher, India 118,000 researchers, $177k/researcher. This data comes from this table in PDF.

A press release describes it as follows:

North America continues to lead in scientific investment, with public and private funding accounting for 37% of the world’s gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) in 2002. However, Asia is now the second largest investor, with a share of 32%, overtaking Europe which contributed 27% of GERD, according to data from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) featured in the UNESCO Science Report 2005.

Aside from the two summary table linked above the whole report must be purchased, here is a link to the report.

Partisanship and Ability to Ignore Facts

So this study looks interesting:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows. And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view. Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered. The results were announced today. "We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say. Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained. The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making. . . The brain imaging revealed a consistent pattern. Both Republicans and Democrats consistently denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate but detected contradictions in the opposing candidate. "The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and the person can learn very little from new data," Westen said.”

If this study is correct then those “junk science” and “war on science” folks will each probably find a way to ignore or discount its conclusions! But on a deeper philosophical note, does this mean that those who allege that either Republicans or Democrats are worse abusers of science are in fact themselves abusing science?

George Keyworth II to Speak at CU

For you local folks:

George Keyworth II, White House science adviser to former President Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1986, will speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder on Tuesday, Jan. 31, at 7 p.m. in room 270 of the Hale Science Building.

The free, public event is part of a yearlong 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.

Keyworth, who played a key role in Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative known as "Star Wars," will speak on science and the presidential decision-making process. Following his remarks, CSTPR Director Roger Pielke Jr. will interview Keyworth about topics like the role of scientific information in the Star Wars initiative. The event will conclude with a question-and-answer session with the audience.

As the senior technical member of Reagan's staff, Keyworth led efforts to capitalize on U.S. science and technology and strengthen industrial competitiveness. He was instrumental in establishing strong budgetary priorities for basic university research, strengthening university engineering programs and stimulating more productive industrial participation in university research and education.

He also played a key role in the modernization of strategic military forces, and was deeply involved in initiatives to use science and technology to support U.S. foreign policy interests, especially with the People's Republic of China.

Keyworth's scientific contributions include pioneering work in high-resolution spectroscopy. Most recently, he has focused on the broad implications of distributed computing and digital connections. Keyworth received a doctorate in nuclear physics from Duke University in 1968.

The CU-Boulder series previously hosted science advisers to Presidents G.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. Frank Press, science adviser to Jimmy Carter, will conclude the series with a public talk at CU-Boulder April 11 at 7 p.m. in room A2B70 of the MCD Biology Building.

Additional information about the series, as well as webcasts, transcripts, audiotapes, photographs from past talks and a library of background materials are available at the series website.

**Posted by Bobbie Klein

Have we really moved beyond PUS?

The excerpt below is from the excellent report from DEMOS, a UK think tank, titled “See-through science,” which discusses the evolution of engagement between the scientific community and the rest of society. It argues that we have moved beyond the simplistic and unsuccessful efforts by scientists to enhance the public understanding of science (PUS) as a way to motivate public action in particular directions, such as supporting science or accepting certain technologies. Perhaps this is the case in certain contexts having to do with the introduction of potentially disruptive technologies like nanotechnology, but my sense is that the PUS model is alive and well in the scientific community at large. Just consider the recent NRC report on US competitiveness I mentioned yesterday. Here is the excerpt from the DEMOS report:

Phase 1: Public understanding of science (PUS)

The initial response of scientists to growing levels of public detachment and mistrust was to embark on a mission to inform. Attempts to gauge levels of public understanding date back to the early 1970s, when annual surveys carried out by the US National Science Foundation regularly uncovered gaps in people’s knowledge of scientific facts (for example, whether the earth goes round the sun or vice versa). Walter Bodmer’s 1985 report for the Royal Society placed PUS firmly on the UK agenda, and proclaimed ‘It is clearly a part of each scientist’s professional responsibility to promote the public understanding of science.’ The Bodmer report gave birth to a clutch of initiatives designed to tackle the blight of public ignorance, including COPUS, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science.

Phase 2: From deficit to dialogue

For more than a decade, the language and methods of PUS oozed across the face of UK science policy. But instead of lubricating understanding, scientists gradually discovered that PUS was clogging the cracks and pores which might have allowed genuine dialogue to breathe. Implicit within PUS was a set of questionable assumptions about science, the public and the nature of understanding. It relied on a ‘deficit model’ of the public as ignorant and science as unchanging and universally comprehensible. Partly as a result of PUS’s failings, relations between science and society festered throughout the 1990s, and an occasional rash of blisters erupted (the BSE crisis, GM crops, mobile phones, MMR). It wasn’t until 2000 that PUS was washed away, when an influential House of Lords report detected ‘a new mood for dialogue’. Out went PUS, which even the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser now acknowledged was ‘a rather backward-looking vision’. In came the new language of ‘science and society’ and a fresh impetus towards dialogue and engagement.

Phase 3: Moving engagement upstream

The House of Lords report detected ‘a new humility on the part of science in the face of public attitudes, and a new assertiveness on the part of the public’. And in the four years since it was published, there has been a perceptible change. Consultation papers, focus groups, stakeholder dialogues and citizens’ juries have been grafted on to the ailing body of British science, in the hope that they will give it a new lease of life. Every so often, a few drops of PUS still dribble out from a Lewis Wolpert or a Lord Taverne, but these voices are now a dwindling force. The science community has embraced dialogue and engagement, if not always with enthusiasm, then at least out of a recognition that BSE, GM and other controversies have made it a non-negotiable clause of their ‘licence to operate’.

Read the whole report here.

United States Competitiveness

It looks like science policy issues might be increasing at the focus of policy makers attention in the near term. Chemical & Engineering News reported late last week,

“A bipartisan group of senators plans to introduce a package of legislation next week aimed at boosting U.S. competitiveness in science and technology by doubling federal funding for basic research and establishing a new science agency within the Department of Energy. The bills will be collectively titled the Protect America's Competitive Edge Act. They would implement 20 recommendations contained in an October 2005 report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that outlined a series of steps the U.S. should take to maintain its global economic competitiveness. The legislation would establish an agency at DOE called the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) that would provide grants for "high-risk" research and development programs in the energy sector.”

The 20 recommendations referred to are from the NAS report “Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future”. The report was in response to a request from Congress that asked:

(1) What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that federal policy-makers could take to enhance the science and technology enterprise so that the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st Century?

2) What strategy, with several concrete steps, could be used to implement each of those actions?

Like kids in a candy store, the NAS committee was unable to limit itself to just 10 and came up with a list of 20 recommendations. Here are the recommendations:

Annually recruit 10,000 science and mathematics teachers by awarding 4-year scholarships and thereby educating 10 million minds.

Strengthen the skills of 250,000 teachers through training and education programs at summer institutes, in master’s programs, and Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate training programs and thus inspire students every day.

Enlarge the pipeline by increasing the number of students who take AP and IB science and mathematics courses.

Increase the federal investment in long-term basic research by 10% a year over the next 7 years.

Provide new research grants of $500,000 each annually, payable over 5 years, to 200 of our most outstanding early-career scientists.

Institute a National Coordination Office for Research Infrastructure to manage a centralized research-infrastructure fund of $500 million per year over the next 5 years.

Allocate at least 8% of the budgets of federal research agencies to discretionary funding.

Create in the Department of Energy and organization like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Office called the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

Institute a Presidential Innovation Award to stimulate scientific and engineering advances in the national interest.

Increase the number and proportion of US citizens who earn physical-sciences, life-sciences, engineering, and mathematics bachelor’s degrees by providing 25,000 new 4-year competitive undergraduate scholarships each year to US citizens attending US institutions.

Increase the number of US citizens pursuing graduate study in “areas of national need” by funding 5,000 new graduate fellowships each year.

Provide a federal tax credit to encourage employers to make continuing education available (either internally or through colleges and universities) to practicing scientists and engineers.

Continue to improve visa processing for international students and scholars.

Provide a 1-year automatic visa extension to international students who receive doctorates or the equivalent in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or other fields of national need at qualified US institutions to remain in the United States to seek employment. If these students are offered jobs by United States-based employers and pass a security screening test. They should be provided automatic work permits and expedited residence status.

Institute a new skills-based, preferential immigration option.

Reform the current system of “deemed exports.”

Enhance intellectual-property protection for the 21st century global economy.

Enact a stronger research and development tax credit to encourage private investment in innovation

Provide tax incentives for US-based innovation

Ensure ubiquitous broadband internet access.

Depending upon how this is financed it looks to me like a $5 to $10 billion price tag for all this annually, maybe more. Since both parties are strong supporters of both R&D and U.S. competitiveness, it will be interesting to see how this issue develops. One question that seems to be unasked is, will implementing these 20 recommendations actually lead to the desired results? That is, will they address the issue of US competitiveness? What is the problem anyway?

Conference of Interest – Science, Technology and Innovation

This announcement has been out for a while, but I bring it to the attention of Prometheus readers because it highlights some of the same things we talked about after my post “Policy Sciences and the Field of S&T Policy.” That is, this is a conference that intends to be critical about the progress of research in the field of Science, Technology and Innovation. Here’s the important information:

The Future of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy: Linking Research And Practice SPRU 40th Anniversary Conference, 11th-13th September 2006 (link)

This conference … offers the opportunity to engage in a critical evaluation of the present and future research agenda of the Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) field.

Those interested in presenting a paper should submit a 500-word abstract by 17 March 2006 along with their full contact details. The abstract should be submitted to SPRU40thConf@sussex.ac.uk . All abstracts will be subject to peer-review.

Authors will be informed whether their papers have been accepted by 10 April 2006.

Final papers must be submitted by 14 July 2006; the maximum length is 5,000 words.

Participants for the conference are encouraged to register as early as possible, and at the latest by 31 July 2006. The conference fee will be £250 (£200 for students), or £300 (£250 for students) if you also wish to attend the Conference Dinner and the Reception in the Brighton Pavilion. This fee does not include any travel or accommodation costs. A late registration fee of £75 will be payable by those who register after 31 July (assuming there are still places available).”

I encourage everyone to read the full announcement. Depending on who you ask, there is little or no difference between STP and the Science, Technology and Innovation field. Arguably its members are more European (SPRU is in England, STI programs in the U.S. include George Washington University and Georgia Tech); focus more on policy for science, technology and innovation (while many in STP are more concerned with how science influences policy); and are focused more on quantitative analysis. But I don’t think anyone who identifies with STP would feel out of place at STI, or at this conference.

But as I mentioned at the start, this conference is making an effort to have a reflective, critical discussion about the progress of STI. Some excerpts:

"We aim to identify fruitful new ways forward in the field of STI policy by subjecting these established frameworks to structured debate and critical evaluation."

"[W]e would like to engage in a critical evaluation of the approaches developed by the STI research community and their use in policy practice."

"(ii) Contribution of Our Studies to Policy-Making - What is the evidence that we, the research community, have actually helped to improve the quality and effectiveness of policy and management? In particular, what are the unanticipated consequences of our models on policy-making?"

"Overall, we invite participants and contributions that are willing to engage in developing the future research agenda of the STI field. The conference aims to trigger a critical and collective dialogue that could contribute to making the STI field more exciting and challenging for our research community, more relevant to policy practice and more 'in synch' with society at large."

This last sentence, to me, summarizes what I think any public policy research community should ask themselves, and ask themselves frequently. Even if you can’t attend this conference in September, I encourage you to keep asking these questions in your own work and other conferences and workshops.

Big Knob Critique Response

In 2000, Dan Sarewitz, Bobbie Klein and I published a paper titled “Turning the Big Knob: Energy Policy as a Means to Reduce Weather Impacts” (PDF) in which we calculate the relative sensitivity of future tropical cyclone damages to the independent effects of changes in storm behavior under climate change to changes in societal vulnerability. For the changes in both storm behavior and societal vulnerability we used the assumptions of the IPCC. Brian Schmidt, who works for an environmental organization in San Francisco, and who occasionally has visited our website with always-thoughtful comments, has taken the time to write up a critique of our paper and post it on his blog. We appreciate the engagement. Brian graciously asked us for a response, so here it is.

First a correction, Schmidt states that “Climate will increase hurricane costs by about 40-50%, according to the studies cited in the paper.” This is what those early-1990s studies said, however, they used assumptions about changing hurricane intensity that were later revised downward by the IPCC. Using in the damage projection methods the actual numbers cited by the IPCC SAR for changing “maximum potential intensity” of tropical cyclones the projected increase in damages due only to the effect of changes in storms related to climate change is in fact about 8-10%. For close followers of this subject the numbers used by the SAR were about twice those projected in a subsequent paper by Knutson and Tuleya. This error is repeated throughout Schmidt’s post. It is worth noting that the general conclusions are pretty much insensitive to an error of this magnitude.

Schmidt offers three critiques of our paper. First, he writes, “it ignores the combined effects of climate change and increased economic value.” We have heard this before. The response is that we are performing a sensitivity analysis and not generating a prediction of future damages. Our point in this paper was to identify the independent effects of climate change versus societal change. It Schmidt would like to go ahead and add another factor that recognizes the fact that future damages will indeed be the result of the combined effects, he should go right ahead. This does nothing to change the fact that the independent effect of societal changes is larger than the independent effect of climate change by a factor of between 22 to 1 and 60 to 1. This is the case if combined effects are included or not.

Schmidt offers up this as a second critique, “Another major problem is the implicit assumption that by controlling land-use, one can in effect relocate away from global warming.” We said no such thing. What we did say is that if societal factors are far more responsible than climate change for the expected growing impacts of tropical cyclones, then from a policy perspective it is only logical that decisions related to societal vulnerability are likely to have greater potential to address those impacts. We discuss land use, but also forecasts and warnings (to save lives), reducing environmental degradation, enforcement of building codes and other policies. Relocation is not something that we discuss.

Schmidt’s third critique is even less appropriate, “A third major problem parallels the problem with Bjorn Lomborg's critique of a lack of economic analysis over global warming, particularly a lack of cost-benefit analysis.” We did not conduct a cost-benefit analysis, nor did we claim to, so it is hard to respond to this. We conducted a sensitivity analysis to ascertain where policy makers might have the greatest ability to influence future hurricane damages. What we found is that using the “big knob” of tuning global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is unlikely to be able to affect anything more than a very small portion of future tropical cyclone losses, and that this finding is very robust under all combinations of scenarios of climate change and societal change present in the IPCC SAR.

Schmidt offers three other minor critiques:

“ Damage estimates are artificially low because they come primarily from a time when hurricanes were at a low point in their long-term cycle. Recalibrating the damages to include more intense hurricane cycles we are experiencing now would give much larger figures.

Let’s accept this as true. It is irrelevant. Our analysis focused on how damages would increase as a multiple of a particular base year. Changing the base has no effect on the multiple, and has no effect on our sensitivity analysis.

“It's dated. It's from 2000, and relies extensively on 1996 IPCC assessments, which rely on still earlier studies. This isn't a flaw of the study itself, but rather than relying on it, the work should be done again with updated information.”

It is a 2000 paper. Nonetheless the analysis holds up exceedingly well as there has nothing that has occurred related to scientific understandings of tropical cyclones or projections of societal vulnerability that would change our basic conclusions. We do intend to update this analysis using the assumptions of the IPCC AR4 (we do have funded research on such sensitivity analyses under our SPARC project.). Better yet would be if the IPCC itself did such a sensitivity analysis, not just for tropical cyclones, but for every climate impact that is the joint function of climate and societal factors.

“It ignores costs resulting from redirecting land use.

We don’t claim to be doing a cost-benefit analysis, nor do we discuss relocation.

The bottom line is that the analysis is robust under a wide range of realistic and unrealistic scenarios for climate change and societal change. Even if we were to simply assume that the IPCC SAR underestimated changes in future tropical cyclone intensity by 100% or 200% the qualitative implications of our paper would remain unchanged. I appreciate Schmidt’s comments that changing land use behavior is difficult. But the reality is that there is no basis for expecting that a global energy policy focused on stabilizing greenhouse gas offers a meaningful tool with which to modulate future tropical cyclone damages.

The lure of a “big knob” that can be tuned to an ideal state is indeed appealing, but in the case of tropical cyclones the sooner we recognize that effective policy will take place on the ground in thousands of vulnerable locations around the world that experience damage, then the more effective policy responses will be.

“Practically Useful” Scientific Mischaracterizations

Gavin Schmidt, NASA scientist and a RealClimate proprietor, and I have occasionally engaged in a bit of back-and-forth on issues of science and politics. I respect Gavin, and we have always enjoyed cordial relations, but as regular readers here will know, I have frequently criticized RealClimate for hiding an implicit political agenda behind the fig leaf of putative concern about scientific truth. A recent exchange between Gavin and I related to a recent post of mine provides a look behind the fig leaf, and more importantly illustrates how hiding behind science contributes to sustaining gridlock on climate policy.

My post made the case the statements of some climate scientists about the state of climate science are likely shaped by the overriding objective of the Framework Convention which is to prevent "dangerous anthropogenic interference" in the climate system. Gavin and I both seem to agree that the ultimate of the Convention is not grounded in an accurate reading of how the world works. I’ll let Gavin explain the fundamental weakness in the Convention’s overriding objective:

”This post is based on a kind of false dichotomy, that there are two separates states of 'climate' - One which is benign and one which is 'dangerous' and that the sole scientific and political task is to ascertain when the switch is and presumably avoid it. Does it really need me to point out how over-simplisitic this is? The fact is that there will not be a global tipping point that pitches us into 'dangerous' terrrority, more like countless local tipping points (for ecosystems, climate, argiculture) that will come at varying points in the trajectory. The further along we go, the more damage will be done - it may not be a smooth increase but it is certainly not a binary system.”

But Gavin makes an interesting leap in a further entry when he says “there are no binary states 'benign' vs 'dangerous'. This is a completely separate question from whether it is practically useful for a policy to set an arbitrary limit as if there were.”

So what he is saying here is that in some situations it is OK for policy makers to mischaracterize how the world actually works if they find such mischaracterizations to be “practically useful.” My response to this was to ask a question:

“But I am curious why is it then that you folks at Real Climate focus so much on "getting the science right" in the climate debate but you draw the line when it comes to the implementation of the FCCC? Maybe as a practical matter it is useful for Senator Inhofe (from his perspectives) to mischaracterize the science? It is OK for the FCCC to mischaracterize how the world works but not Inhofe? Seems like you are saying that policies out of step with scientific understandings are OK if the goals are in one direction but not others. . . In a number of publications I (and others) have pointed to the impracticality of the current policy framework, in part because it does not reflect how the world actually works.”

Let’s take a look at some of the effects of the Framework Convention’s mischaracterization of how the world works for real-world outcomes:

Astonishingly, developing countries face barriers to getting resources to deal with climate disasters because they can’t prove that the climate-related impacts, such as disasters, that they have experienced have actually crossed the “dangerous interference” threshold. Consider this report of the International Institute for Sustainable Development,

”. . . if a country seeks funding for a project on flood prevention, the GEF would only be able to finance a portion proportional to the additional harm that floods have caused or will cause as a result of climate change, and the rest would have to be co-financed by some other body. The plea from LDCs [Least Developed Countries], particularly the SIDS [small island developing states], lies precisely on this paradox, in that even if funds are available in the LDC Fund, their difficulty of finding adequate co-financing, and the costly and cumbersome calculation of the additional costs, renders the financial resources in the LDC Fund, in practice, almost inaccessible.”

Obviously, it is practically impossible to distinguish any climate change signal in disasters. The Framework Convention does not appear to be grounded in economic reality either, as suggested by Nordhouas and Boyer (2000, PDF):

“. . . it appears that the strategy behind the Kyoto Protocol has no grounding in economics or environmental policy. The approach of freezing emissions at a given level for a group of countries is not related to a particular goal for concentrations, temperature, or damages. Nor does it bear any relation to an economically oriented strategy that would balance the costs and benefits of greenhouse-gas reductions.”

Stanford’s David Victor agrees,

“Diplomats have been trying to build an overly ambitious system for controlling greenhouse gases that is based on a fundamentally flawed architecture. . . Governments need to start thinking about the alternatives to the Kyoto Protocol approach.”

One of the great ironies of this situation is that from the perspective of the stated political objectives of the Bush Administration, it would have been far more “practically useful” for them to have signed on to Kyoto rather than flipping the bird to the rest of the world when they unilaterally pulled out of the Protocol. I made this case in a post here a while back. This up-is-down perspective can cause dissonance I know. I am in fact saying that the best way to stymie progress on the climate issue is to support the Framework Convention and its Kyoto Protocol and the best way to facilitate action is to argue the case for new and innovative options to the policy strategy outlined under the Framework Convention. Because everyone is pretty wedded to their positions, it is not surprising that this argument finds few supporters on either side of the current debate.

So to return to where we started on this post, when scientists overlook, excuse, or otherwise defend the inescapable reality that the Framework Convention is grounded in a vision of the world that does not square with how the world actually works, not only are they showing their political colors, but more importantly, they are contributing to the sustainability of the current gridlock on climate change. When leading scientists point out the inconsistency of the Article 2 of the Climate Convention with reality, then we might have an opportunity to discuss new and innovative policy options. And that is something that really would be practically useful.

Senator Craig and the Fish Passage Center

I've written a good bit on salmon issues in the Columbia and Snake River systems (see Prometheus posts 1 and 2, and nosenada posts). I last left the issue with news of Senator Larry Craig's (R-ID) annoyance at a broker of information in the system.

Litigation has been running for years over the Federal government's obligations to protect various ocean-bound species of salmon and their inevitable conflict with the 11 major dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers. In this case, the federal government means the Army Corps (who run the dams), the Bonneville Power Administration (who oversee the power ops), and NOAA-Fisheries (who are supposed to be watching out for the salmon under the ESA). NOAA-Fisheries has negotiated compromise solutions with BPA and the Corps on protecting both salmon and power issues. Environmentalists have sued, claiming that under the ESA, NOAA-Fisheries is only supposed to be protecting the salmon without taking economic considerations in account.

The federal interests in this case are simply an extension of one side of the interest triangle on Columbia/Snake salmon. The three major stakeholders are power consumers, farmers and fish lovers. The first category is represented by BPA because BPA sells the power and hears about it when that power gets expensive. Power consumers are both residential users and their co-ops, as well as major industries, such as Alcoa. Farmers' interests are obvious. Fish lovers include the various tribes of the region with treaty rights, sport fishermen and commercial catch operators. The basic issue is that fish lovers want BPA to spill water over the tops of the dams in the summer to help salmon smolts safely get out to sea. But that spilt water is water BPA cannot use for power generation and thus represents lost revenue and, by extension, higher rates for consumers.

(Worth noting, we are talking about summer power and the demand then is not from the Pacific Northwest but from out-of-market California for air conditioning. In other words, BPA doesn't actually lose money by spilling water in the summer, rather it loses revenue it could gain by selling power to another market.)

To this point, the presiding judge on the case, James Redden of the Federal District Court in Portland, OR, has usually sided with the plaintiffs and found the government's salmon recovery plans inadequate. The latest ruling came in October, with Redden stating in his decision:

I found NOAA's opinion that DAM operations would not jeopardize the continued existence of listed salmon species was arbitrary and capricious because it was based on a flawed framework of analysis that improperly segregated elements of the proposed action NOAA deemed to be nondiscretionary.... In addition, I found NOAA's analysis of the effects of the proposed action on critical habitat was arbitrary and capricious, and its analysis of the likelihood of recovery as well as survival of the listed species was inadequate.

The decision continues in even more scathing language on pages 3 and 4. This is entirely consistent with Redden's many decisions throughout the history of this issue and his exasperation at the federal agencies comes through clearly.

Redden's series of rulings has led Senator Craig to (predictably?) call Redden an "activist judge." This is an extension of Senator Craig's political decision on choosing up sides of the interest triangle. In this case he avoided the tack taken by every other Senator in the region -- all of whom have avoided publicly favoring one side -- and chose to side with power interests over sporting interests (who also have a strong Republican base).

Beside the name calling, Senator Craig's decision to favor one side has led to finding a way to influence the outcome of the policy decisions in the system more directly. He has done so by going after the data used by the plaintiffs to inform the Redden decisions. Specifically, Senator Craig targeted the BPA-funded Fish Passage Center (FPC), which aggregates fish count data and provides analyses of the health of the salmon stocks.

This is language that appears on pages 178 and 179 of S. Rep. 109-84 in the Energy and Water Appropriations bill (PL 109-103) :

The Committee is concerned about the increasing cost of salmon recovery efforts in the Columbia River Basin, and about the potential adverse impact of those increased costs on customers of the Bonneville Power Administration. The Committee also is concerned about the quality and efficiency of some of the fish data collection efforts and analyses being performed. As a result, during fiscal year 2006, the Bonneville Power Administration may make no new obligations from the Bonneville Power Administration Fund in support of the Fish Passage Center. The Committee understands that there are universities in the Pacific Northwest that already collect fish data for the region and are well-positioned to take on the responsibilities now being performed by the Fish Passage Center, and that the universities can carry out those responsibilities at a savings to the region’s ratepayers that fund these programs.

This language does not square with Craig's and his staff's early statements on the FPC, in which they derided it as a political agency with an pro-fish agenda. This mirrored the public comments of a prominent stakeholder on the pro-energy, anti-spill side. Only after Craig was skewered by local press did the story change to one of efficiency and overlap.

Of course, no metric exists to test whether the FPC is an honest broker or an advocacy organization, but my reading of their work places them clearly on the side of honest broker. Editorials from throughout the Pacific Northwest written in response to Senator Craig's actions seem to back me up. Senator Craig did not like the data coming back; data which supported the contention that federal agency plans to help salmon survival were not helping the salmon. So he found a way to kill the messenger.

There is something that clearly does not stand close scrutiny in the report language above. If the committee is concerned about the quality and efficiency of data collection, why is it decentralizing the collection and analysis, while "hoping" that PNW universities will take up the role? Furthermore, why is the committee de-funding the one organization that the federal agencies and other stakeholders in the system can turn to for on-demand aggregated information? Although individual scientists may do it as part of grant-supported research projects, the universities in the area have no charter or mandate to collect, analyze and provide this information on demand. The clear implication here is that some players in the system do not want the information available.

Senator Craig's staff tried halfheartedly to justify the decision to de-fund the FPC based on the above reasoning, but their early comments very clearly pushed this as a political decision, rather than a prudent policy decision. The timing could not have been more clear, as Craig's anger was palpable on the heels of a summer Redden decision that yet again found for the plaintiffs and against the agencies.

However, all the above said, somewhere in the Conference Committee (the process that reconciles the House and Senate bills and leads to final passage), somebody chose to temper Senator Craig's language. The report language of the Energy and Water Appropriations bill as passed out of Conference (H.Rep. 109-275, pg. 174) reads a bit differently:

The Bonneville Power Administration may make no new obligations in support of the Fish Passage Center. The conferees call upon Bonneville Power Administration and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council to ensure that an orderly transfer of the Fish Passage Center functions (warehouse of smolt monitoring data, routine data analysis and reporting and coordination of the smolt monitoring program) occurs within 120 days of enactment of this legislation. These functions shall be transferred to other existing and capable entities in the region in a manner that ensures seamless continuity of activities.

Clearly the committee was uncomfortable with cutting the FPC free and letting the data fall into the sea. Although this final language is not substantially different from the Senate language, the last sentence above is an important directive that seems to make this issue more about efficiency and overlap and less about simply killing the FPC for the sake of killing the FPC.

[Final note: if you're confused about all the Senate report this and House report that and PL 109-xxx's, the appropriations bills are all summarized here. The Public Law (PL) is the passed legislative language; the reports are the plain-English explanations by the Committees of their actions. The most relevant report is the Conference Report.]