Yesterday the House Science Committee, while passing an act formally codifying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into law (President Nixon created the agency via Executive Order), dealt with amendments over scientific integrity.

According to CQ.com, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) offered an amendment providing whistleblower protection for scientists and punishment for employees who tampered with science. The amendment would have also exempted NOAA from the Information Quality Act – legislation that allows the public to petition the government over flawed data. Another amendment, by Rep. Costello (D-IL) would have barred the White House from editing reports prior to submitting them to Congress.

Both amendments failed. Chairman Boehlert released a statement addressing his opposition to the amendments, which can be found here. He argues that the amendments would have prompted some difficult jurisdicitional scrambles (mainly with the Government Reform Committee and the Resources Committee – which also has NOAA oversight). He also argues, I think convincingly, that the amendment is written somewhat broadly, and placed in a bill related to an agency that is not, in the eyes of many, a particularly egregious offender in the debates over political interference in science.

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Graham-Rudman-Hollings refers to U.S. legislation in the 1980s that sought to bring the federal budget deficit under control. It didn’t work because it based its “budget cuts” on projected spending, and thus required cuts from some imaginary baseline of what would have happened absent the “budget cuts.” As former Bush Administration spokesman Ari Fleisher explained in 2001:

Graham-Rudman-Hollings was, in essence, an approach based on deficit projections of what government had to do to bring deficits into certain lines. And it lead to a lot of gimmickry, and to other issues that were complicating the process of government.

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are currently in their “Graham-Rudman-Hollings” phase, and this is a condition, ironically enough, shared by both the current U.S. approach as well as that under the Kyoto Protocol.

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I find this just amazing:

Beginning next month, Florida researchers won’t be able to travel to Cuba to carry out any studies. Although the United States allows such interactions, the state has banned faculty members at Florida’s public universities from having any contact with the island nation under a law enacted last week. “This law shuts down the entire Cuban research agenda,” says Damián Fernández, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami.

Cuba is one of six countries that the U.S. State Department has designated as a “sponsor of terrorism,” although U.S. scholars can travel to Cuba for research if they first obtain a government license. The Florida measure, which passed the state legislature unanimously, essentially closes that loophole by disallowing state-funded institutions from using public or private funds to facilitate travel to such countries. (The list includes North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Sudan.)

“Florida’s taxpayers don’t want to see their resources being used to support or subsidize terrorist regimes at a time when America is fighting a war on terror,” says David Rivera, a Republican Cuban-American state legislator who introduced the bill. Florida researchers won’t miss out on anything by not going to Cuba, he adds: “I don’t think there’s anything there that cannot be studied in the Dominican Republic or other Caribbean islands.”

Except Cuba. Duh.

Hurricane Politics

I like Bill Clinton. I wish he were still president (22nd Amendment aside!). But the following characterization of his remarks on hurricane policy is an inevitable consequence of the ongoing debate over hurricanes and global warming, in which hurricanes are used to justify emissions reductions policies:

As Tropical Storm Alberto threatened to strengthen into the ninth hurricane in 22 months to affect Florida, former President Clinton predicted Monday that Republican environmental policies will lead to more severe storms.

Expect to see more of such nonsense in the coming months.

Earlier this year while I was involved in preparing our contribution to an exchange with colleagues for the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society on hurricanes, a particular sentence in the response (PDF) to our paper piqued my interest. The sentence read in full:

As summarized in the Working Group II assessment of McCarthy et al. (2001), model projections of the mean annual number of people who would be flooded by coastal storm surges increase several-fold (75–200 million, depending on the adaptive response) for midrange scenarios of a 0.4-m sea level rise by the 2080s relative to scenarios with no sea level rise.

The sentence caught my attention because it was stunningly ambiguous and unclear. What could it mean? So I set out to learn more about it. What I found and my experiences trying to publish what I have found provides some insights into the increasingly curious world of climate science.

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My last post about the politics of wind discussed the Cape Wind project and the cockamamie excuses — some wrapped in science (surprise!!) — being used to justify political interference with the project. (For what it’s worth, politicians both left and right are fighting both for and against Cape Wind, although from what I can tell the only side to use dubious science as cover so far are the Kennedy’s.)

Unfortunately it now appears that a recent Senate stall tactic on Cape Wind has caused a slew of other projects — nowhere near Cape Cod — to be stalled. The culprit? Senator John Warner (chair of Armed Services), who put this wordy one-liner in Section 358 (Title III, Subtitle F) of PL 109-163 (FY06 supplemental Defense approps):

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There may be a good explanation, but Warren Washington has expressed apparently conflicting views on science censorship in U.S. federal agencies. In today’s Rocky Mountain News Warren Washington, outgoing chairman of the National Science Board (which oversees the National Science Foundation), is quoted as follows:

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Quirin Schiermeier has an article in the current issue of Nature on our recent workshop on disaster loss trends and climate change. The workshop executive summary can be found here and a PDF here. The article, unfortunately, has a few mistakes and is subject to misinterpretation.

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Report of the Workshop on
“Climate Change and Disaster Losses – Understanding
and Attributing Trends and Projections”
25-26 May 2006, Hohenkammer, Germany

Introduction

In summer 2005 both Roger Pielke, Jr. of the Center of Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado and Peter Hoeppe of the Geo Risks Research Department of Munich Re learned from each other that each planned to organize a workshop on the assessment of factors leading to increasing loss trends due to natural disasters. Both agreed that such a workshop was timely, especially given the apparent lack of consensus on the role of climate change in disaster loss trends. Roger Pielke, Jr. and Peter Hoeppe decided to have a common workshop in 2006 in Germany to bring together a diverse group of international experts in the fields of climatology and disaster research. The general questions to be answered at this workshop were:

What factors account for increasing costs of weather related disasters in recent decades?

What are the implications of these understandings, for both research and policy?

[click through to read the rest]

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Jack Stilgoe at DEMOS has a good post up on their blog referring to Terrence Kealey’s latest call for government to get out of the science funding business. I agree with Jack’s take on this:

Kealey’s view is pretty marginal, and doesn’t deserve a huge amount of attention. But it’s an interesting reminder of how some people view science as a homogenous factor of production. For Kealey, it’s about making sure that “science” gets done, rather than wondering about what science should get done and how.

Have a look at Jack’s post for links to Kealy’s op-ed and very useful background information, including a relevant DEMOS report on the public value of science.