A double-barrelled look at foreign-born graduate students in the United States suggests that the percentage of those students who remain, will likely decrease.

This article from today’s Washington Post highlights the increasing amount of opportunities for students back in their home countries.  The author, Vivek Wadhwa, does not paint a concrete trend in this particular piece, but if trends at his institution, Duke University, are representative, his concern over a decreasing amount of entrepreneurs and innovators in the United States is not an empty one.  While the current economic downturn is not limited to the United States, a tightening labor market here will likely make foreign-born scientists and engineers think more about opportunities in their home countries.

While Wadhwa makes mention of the immigration regulations that make it harder for skilled foreign-born students, scientists and engineers to enter and stay in this country, a New York Times article from March 3 (H/T Science Careers) provides more examples of how this problem has reemerged in recent months.  Combine difficulty entering the country with an increase in opportunities in other countries, and another advantage this country has enjoyed in attracting top science and engineering talent is decreasing.

Now, I understand an essential policy tension at play here.  There are generic security concerns about people entering from countries where we are not on the best of terms.  I don’t know what an effective way of resolving that tension would be.  But there is another essential policy tension at play – the United States’ preference for family-based immigration over employment or skills-based immigration.  In a past life I assisted immigration attorneys in bringing over highly qualified immigrants for temporary and/or permanent stays.  When it is so much easier to bring over a top-level international athlete because he is married to an American citizen, I think it’s possible the tension is pushed a bit too far away from attracting skilled immigrants.

From Nature News is a report of political protests over an Israeli Day of Science hosted at science museums in the U.K.  A lead protest group makes the argument that a protest of a demonstration of Israeli university research is necessary because “These universities are without exception complicit in the mechanisms and policies of the Israeli occupation, and in developing the military technology used in the massacre in Gaza.”

Academics and other scientists are certainly welcome to participate in politics, and such participation is an important aspect of academic freedom.  While I understand the perspective that government supported research might be considered complicit in other policies of that government, I have a harder time seeing how an exclusionary protest like this might be effective.  While we may be more accustomed to the interactions of politics and science, that hasn’t trickled down so much to science museum audiences.  The cognitive dissonance is probably too strong to make a worthwhile impression.  Science has typically been used more effectively in diplomatic efforts, rather than confrontational ones.

Looking at an article in Sunday’s Washington Post and remarks from National Security Adviser James Jones at the annual Munich conference on security policy, a new form is emerging for the National Security Council (NSC), one that should make it easier for science and technology advice to enter into relevant NSC discussions.  As part of a widespread reorganization of both the NSC and its Homeland Security equivalent, the membership of the NSC will become more flexible, including agencies and advisers besides the State and Defense Departments, depending on the issue.  Jones’ remarks from the Washington Post article:

“The whole concept of what constitutes the membership of the national security community — which, historically has been, let’s face it, the Defense Department, the NSC itself and a little bit of the State Department, to the exclusion perhaps of the Energy Department, Commerce Department and Treasury, all the law enforcement agencies, the Drug Enforcement Administration, all of those things — especially in the moment we’re currently in, has got to embrace a broader membership,” he said.

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While scientists and their advocates in the U.S. are hoping the new administration will fully fund the COMPETES Act and double the research budgets of the DOE Office of Science, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, South Korea aims to do more.  According to a post on the Science magazine science policy blog, South Korea aims to become one of the top seven R&D countries in the world.  They currently consider themselve number 12, spending 3.23% of GDP on R&D in 2006 (the U.S. spends a smaller percentage of its GDP), and 25.6% of their research budget on basic and fundamental research.  They plan to boost the GDP percentage to 5% and the share of research budget on basic and fundamental research to 50%.

I’m not as convinced as the blog poster that the South Korean plan will make the country more of a science powerhouse and not just a tech giant, since the boosts in even basic and fundamental research planned will probably be focused heavily on the seven tech areas targeted by the country.  I also have my doubts that government tax incentives will really persuade the country’s businesses to contribute three-quarters of all R&D spending (however, that might be my American bias).  Even if they do, current trends in industrial R&D suggest that a very small r and an enormous D in that figure.  It isn’t clear if that will allow for the enormous boosts in research grants that are part of the plan.  All said, it’s still nice to see a government trying an aggressive plan rather than passing a bill with little funding to support it.

In 2003 Dan Sarewitz and I wrote an article titled “Wanted: Scientific Leadership on Climate” (PDF). In that article we made the following brash assertion:

What happens when the scientific community’s responsibility to society conflicts with its professional self interest? In the case of research related to climate change the answer is clear: Self interest trumps responsibility.

Our argument was that the scientific community sought to take care of its own interests first while “the needs and capabilities of decisionmakers who must deal with climate change have played little part in guiding research priorities.”

If you need any evidence that little has changed in the five years since we wrote that article, have a look at this story by Andy Revkin in today’s New York Times. The article discusses the termination of the Center for Capacity Building at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s largest government-supported atmospheric (and related) sciences research lab.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, an important hub for work on the causes and consequences of climate change, has shut down a program focused on strengthening poor countries’ ability to forecast and withstand droughts, floods and other climate-related hazards.

The move, which center officials say resulted from the shrinking of federal science budgets, is being denounced by many experts on environmental risk, who say such research is more crucial than ever in a world with rising populations exposed to climate threats.

In e-mail exchanges, these experts said the eliminated program, the Center for Capacity Building, was unique in its blend of research and training in struggling countries.

The Center for Capacity Building (still online at ccb.ucar.edu) was created in 2004. It built on decades of work by its director, Michael Glantz, a political scientist who has focused on the societal effects of natural climate extremes and any shifts related to accumulating greenhouse gases.

What were the budget implications of this Center?

Altogether, the eliminated program had an annual budget of about $500,000. The budget for the entire atmospheric research center is $120 million.

According to data from the NSF (p. 384 of this PDF), the primary funder of NCAR, the NSF contribution to the NCAR budget for FY2009 is expected to grow by 9.5%, and the lab’s budget is projected to grow by about $13 million over the next decade. NSF explains (emphasis added):

In FY 2009, GEO support for NCAR will increase by $9.0 million, to a total of $95.42 million to: accelerate efforts in provide robust, accessible, andinnovative information services and tools to the community; enhance NCAR’s ability to provide to researchers world-class ground, airborne, and space-borne observational facilities and services; increase our understanding of societal resilience to weather, climate, and other atmospheric hazards; and increase efforts to cultivate a scientifically literate and engaged citizenry and a diverse and creative workforce.

So why did NSF have to cut a large part of its commitment to the social sciences? Cliff Jacobs, NSF program officer responsible for NCAR, explained the decision as follows:

Clifford A. Jacobs, the National Science Foundation’s section head for the atmospheric research center and related programs, said the decision did not mean that the center was interested only in basic physical climate science.

“This came as a very, very difficult decision,” Dr. Jacobs said. “You have to protect your core activities, but as budgets keep shrinking you have to redefine your core.”

In this case “shrinking” must mean “not growing as fast as we would like” since the budget has obviously not been decreasing in size. Let this be a reminder that as we often enjoy discussing the politics of the left and the right, some of the the most damaging politics are found in the battle among disciplines within academia. Unfortunately, in this case the collateral damage extends far beyond academia:

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Dr. Glantz said that he was let go Monday and that three other researchers were also losing their jobs. One, Tsegay Wolde-Georgis, left a similar program at Columbia University less than a year ago to work with Dr. Glantz. Dr. Wolde-Georgis’s focus is bolstering the ability of African nations to anticipate and withstand drought and other climate shocks.

I look forward to the day when serving the needs of decision makers becomes part of the “core” in the leading institutions of the atmospheric sciences.

The Indian government has put out a climate change action plan (PDF) that places economic development and adaptation ahead of mitigation (sound familiar?). The report was endorsed by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri:

[Pachauri] said that India has realised the climate change threat. India’s climate change action plan recently released by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a “good policy document” and needs to be implemented.

Interesting, the report’s views of climate science are at odds with that presented by the IPCC.

The Indian climate change action plan states of observed climate changes in India (p. 15):

No firm link between the documented [climate] changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established.

For example, the Indian report states of the melting of Himalayan glaciers (p. 15):

The available monitoring data on Himalayan glaciers indicates while some recession of glaciers has occurred in some Himalayan regions in recent years, the trend is not consistent across the entire mountain chain. It is accordingly, too early to establish long-term trends or their causation, in respect of which there are several hypotheses.

By contrast, the IPCC (WG II Ch. 10 p. 493)says of Himalayan glacier melt:

The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers can be
attributed primarily to the global warming due to increase in
anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.

Imagine the reaction if the U.S. (or British or German or Australian . . .) government put out a report placing economic growth ahead of mitigation while contradicting the science of the IPCC. Dr. Pachauri’s endorsement of a report that contradicts the IPCC indicates that issues of science and national interests are apparently universal.

The World Bank and UK government issued a report today titled, “Strategies For Sustained Growth And Inclusive Development.” Here is what the report says about the implications for climate change of development in the developing world (p. 86), something that the report calls absolutely necessary:

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This post summarizes, in capsule form, what I believe to be the necessary elements of any successful suite of policies focused on climate mitigation and adaptation. This post is short, and necessarily incomplete with insufficient detail, nonetheless, its purpose is to set the stage for future, in depth discussions of each element discussed below. The elements discussed below are meant to occur in parallel. All are necessary, none by itself sufficient. I welcome comments, critique, and questions.

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Here are a few useful FAQs on recent increasing prices of food around the world:

International Monetary Fund (FAQ link)

UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAQ link)

World Bank (Link)

Gary Becker and Richard Posner (Link)

Please feel free to add useful resources in the comments.

The World Bank has released a valuable new dataset with data on the global economy calculated as PPP and MER. In 2005 the global economy was about $44 trillion (MER) and $55 trillion (PPP). The slide below is taken from the press briefing presentation (ppt).