I wanted to note for our readers the essay titled “History of Science and American Science Policy” from the current (June 2008) issue of Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society. Full citation:

Wang, Zuoyue and Naomi Oreskes. 2008. “History of Science and American Science Policy,” Isis, 99:2 (June), 365-373.

The essay is part of the journal’s Focus section, which in this issue asks “What is the Value of History of Science?” The other essays explore how the History of Science has or could influence other areas of scientific activity. While I found value in each of the essays, there are two things I wanted to post related to this particular example.

One thing that struck me as I read about the work of historians of science in the policy sphere in the late 1950s and 1980s is their absence in the 22 years since the 1986 study sponsored by the House. Add to that relative absence of other scholars dealing with science and technology policy in the practice of same, and I’m persuaded there’s a whole lot of knowledge transfer not going on that could.

That it doesn’t happen (or isn’t obvious) in science and technology policy research makes me wonder if the academic field is doing much more than perpetuating itself. Since only a small percentage of their students need go into academic careers to sustain their numbers, they don’t have to work that hard.

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My first reaction upon seeing this story was that someone was having some fun. But it doesn’t seem like benthic bacteria . . . So this article from the AFP comes as a surprise, and a reminder that forecasting the future remains a perilous business. With news like this, it seems premature to dismiss skepticism about climate science as fading away, far from it, expect skeptics of all sorts to have a bit more bounce in their steps.

DHAKA (AFP) – New data shows that Bangladesh’s landmass is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of the century, experts say.

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh’s landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.

Maminul Haque Sarker, head of the department at the government-owned centre that looks at boundary changes, told AFP sediment which travelled down the big Himalayan rivers — the Ganges and the Brahmaputra — had caused the landmass to increase.

The rivers, which meet in the centre of Bangladesh, carry more than a billion tonnes of sediment every year and most of it comes to rest on the southern coastline of the country in the Bay of Bengal where new territory is forming, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels due to global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of its food production.

Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century.

But Sarker said that while rising sea levels and river erosion were both claiming land in Bangladesh, many climate experts had failed to take into account new land being formed from the river sediment.

“Satellite images dating back to 1973 and old maps earlier than that show some 1,000 square kilometres of land have risen from the sea,” Sarker said.

“A rise in sea level will offset this and slow the gains made by new territories, but there will still be an increase in land. We think that in the next 50 years we may get another 1,000 square kilometres of land.”

Mahfuzur Rahman, head of Bangladesh Water Development Board’s Coastal Study and Survey Department, has also been analysing the buildup of land on the coast.

He told AFP findings by the IPCC and other climate change scientists were too general and did not explore the benefits of land accretion.

“For almost a decade we have heard experts saying Bangladesh will be under water, but so far our data has shown nothing like this,” he said.

Some hard-to-believe numbers reported in the Financial Times yesterday on the investments by major energy companies in R&D (emphasis added):

The west’s biggest oil companies raised their research and development spending by an average of 16 per cent last year but still lag behind many other industries, a survey by the Financial Times has found.

There is also a wide variation in R&D budgets, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of revenues.

Royal Dutch Shell, already the top spender in 2006, raised its budget the fastest with a 36 per cent increase to $1.2bn for 2007. Last year it spent more than twice as much as BP on R&D.

ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, has a market capitalisation almost twice that of Shell, but spent only two-thirds the amount on R&D, at $814m.

Relative to revenues, oil companies’ R&D expenditures are strikingly low: about 0.3 per cent last year for Shell, and 0.2 per cent for Exxon. That compares with typical proportions of 15 per cent for technology and pharmaceuticals companies, and 4-5 per cent for motor companies.

In other words, compared to revenues technology and pharmaceutical companies spend 50 to 75 times the amount on research and development than Shell or Exxon. Is it any wonder that your desktop computer would have been considered a supercomputer a few decades ago, whereas you are still filling up your car with the same stuff that your great-grandparents did?

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program has put online for public comment a draft version of its synthesis report ( here in PDF), and I suppose the good news is that it is a draft, which means that it is subject to revision. But what the draft includes is troubling in several respects.

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Today’s New York Times has a very interesting article by Keith Bradsher on fuel subsidies in developing countries, which sheds some light on the politics of efforts to increase the costs of energy. Here is an excerpt:

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The management of the Free Enterprise Action Fund have thrown their hat into the ring seeking to limit what can be said or claimed in the context of climate change. In this case they have asked the U.S. government’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to pass judgment on whether certain claims by companies can be considered false and misleading, and thus in violation of securities laws of the U.S. government.

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For some, this will be old news, as data like this has been available for a few years. For others, read and take heed as the physical sciences stagger toward a doubling of their federal research budgets.

In what might be described as the only success of the science and technology advocacy communities in the post-Cold War period, the budget of the National Institutes of Health was doubled during the last part of the Clinton Administration and ending during the first years of the current Bush Administration. What was greeting with huzzahs and kudos a few years ago has left a sour aftertaste in the mouth of many, in part because a doubling path was not sustainable, and nobody planned for it.

Some of the sobering details, taken from the latest Senate Appropriations Subcommittee report concerning the NIH. You can find the full report online. (Hat Tip, American Institute of Physics)

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A guest post by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch

The July 2008 newsletter of the American Physical Society (APS) opened a debate concerning the IPCC consensus related to anthropogenic induced climate change. We responded with a brief comment concerning the state and changing state of consensus as indicated by two surveys of climate scientists. Data was presented concerning climate scientists assessments of the understanding of atmospheric physics, climate related processes, climate scientists level of agreement with the IPCC as representative of consensus and of the level of belief in anthropogenic warming. (The full manuscript is available here .) Our comment was summarily dismissed by the editors as polemic, political and unscientific. The following is a brief account of this episode.

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Bruce L. R. Smith, science policy scholar and visiting professor at George Mason University, has a review of The Honest Broker out in the current issue of Issues in Science and Technology (not yet available online). Smith has some nice things to say, but takes serious issue with my choice of focus on the role of scientists in the policy process. In short, he doesn’t think they matter much at all. Some readers of this blog may be surprised to see Smith’s utter dismissal of the significance of scientists in the policy process, in favor of lobbyists.

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If you are paying attention to the latest dust up over climate change then you know that a judgment has been rendered (PDF) by the relevant British authority (OFCOM) on complaints about the airing of a controversial documentary by UK Channel 4 challenging consensus climate science and politics, titled The Great Global Warming Swindle.

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