Dan Sarewitz has posted the text of a paper that he gave at the AAAS meeting last month titled, “Proposition 71: Vulgar Democracy in Action” (PDF). Here is how it begins:

In 1947, when Congress passed legislation to create the National Science Foundation, President Truman vetoed the bill because it insulated the administration of the proposed agency from direct Presidential control. At issue here was not a simple question of turf or the exercise of power, but a fundamental principle of democratic governance: that publicly funded programs must be ultimately accountable to the public via democratically elected officials. In the decades since Truman’s veto, as the nation’s investment in research has grown from a few tens of millions to about sixty billion dollars, this principle has never seriously been challenged. Indeed, it is precisely this accountability that has allowed the publicly funded research enterprise to maintain its political legitimacy, productivity, and growth through such crises as the Tuskegee experiment and the death of Jesse Gelsinger, and which has stimulated a considerable beneficial evolution of scientific norms in such areas as protocols for human subjects’ research, the treatment of laboratory animals, and the role of gender and ethnic diversity in clinical trials. Democratic accountability, that is, is good for science.

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Sherwood Boehlert (R-MI), chairman of the House Science Committee, announced that he will not run for re-election. Here is an excerpt from his announcement:

As I see it, my unwritten instructions from the folks back home were basic and clear: go to Washington, listen to all the arguments, pro and con, weigh all the available facts, and then do what you think is best in our interest and that of the nation.

I have followed those instructions, believing as I do that Edmund Burke was right, more than two centuries ago, when he said,

‘Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.’

My manner of representation and voting record of more than two decades has earned for me the label of moderate.

I’m proud of that label, fervently believing that the overwhelming majority of thinking people reject the extremes of the left and right.

They find stalemate unacceptable and want us to sort out our differences and find common ground. As I see it, that personifies a moderate.

As events of the past year in Washington have documented, this has been the ‘moderates moment.’ There is an abundance of evidence to suggest that our influence has expanded and our moment has been extended.

A few years ago, Congressional Quarterly, the highly respected, non-partisan magazine, conducted an extensive review and analysis of the records and performance of all 535 of the Representatives and Senators. The magazine then developed a list of 50 of ‘the most effective Members of Congress,’ honoring me among them as a ‘centrist’ who works to build consensus.

The magazine went on to say of the group ‘they exemplify skills and behaviors that help them accomplish their goals.’

That made me proud.

Congrats Rep. Boehlert!

In the comments from a post last week, Sylvia Tognetti and David Bruggeman raise some very interesting issues and questions about the role of scientific advisory committees, and in particular that of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In this post I’d like to highlight one important part of this issue, and that is the inevitable intermixing of science and politics in the process of writing government reports and those produced by science advisory committees. Consider the experience of Phil Clooney vs. Rick Piltz which was discussed on 60 Minutes last night (along with more from James Hansen).

For those who are unfamiliar with the issue, I discussed it in depth here last year, and here is a short synopsis:

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A reporter I know sent to me a press release yesterday titled “Scientists Dispute Link Between Hurricanes and Global Warming.” The press release was disseminated by the TCS Science Roundtable. TCS – Tech Central Station – is often a very useful and informative site for analyses and opinions from a self-described perspective that values “the power of free markets, open societies and individual human ingenuity to raise living standards and improve lives.” As such TCS is very much a special interest group. People can choose to agree or disagree with TCS analyses, or share its values. But in this post I want to highlight the role that university and some government scientists play in the unhealthy politicization of science through their willing association with advocacy groups (like TCS, but also, e.g., environmental advocacy groups), and the increasing tendency for organizations that should serve as “honest brokers of policy options” to transform themselves into advocacy-like groups.

The scientists cited in the TCS press release with information on contacting them to discuss hurricanes are the following:

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We’ve on occasion discussed a paper that we did in 2000 on the relative contributions to future damage of changes in intensity of hurricanes (called tropical cyclones worldwide) and changes in societal vulnerability, under the assumptions of the IPCC to 2050. Our paper found that the independent effects of changes in societal vulnerability are larger than the independent effects of changes in storm intensity by a factor of between 22 to 1 and 100 to one. The ratios are far larger the further one goes into the future. This would seems to provide pretty compelling evidence that even if scientists are underestimating the degree to which hurricane intensity will change in the future, energy policies simply are not going to be an effective tool of hurricane policy. Thus we have often recommended keeping separate the issues of greenhouse gas reductions and hurricane policy.

For obvious reasons some people find this argument inconvenient. One response to a talk I gave on this last week was, “if we don’t have the imagery of hurricane damage it is going to make the task of selling greenhouse gas reductions that much harder” (see also the recent discussion at Kevin’s NoSeNada blog, and thanks to Brian S. for motivating this further discussion). Below is some simple math that should make the point inescapable, drawn from the analysis in Pielke et al. 2000 (PDF). Have a look, and play around with the numbers yourself.

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Just a reminder for readers in DC, I’ll be giving a talk at the Smithsonian at 5:30PM. Details here.

The science community has successfully tricked a major politician into thinking that the U.S. is experiencing a rapid decline in its science and technology standing in the world. In the March issue of the American Physical Society News (link here, subscription required) Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA), chair the very influential House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the major science agencies, writes the following:

In my role as chairman of the House Science-State-Justice-Commerce
Appropriations subcommittee, which controls the budget of NASA, the National Science Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology policy and NOAA, I have met over the past year with groups that advocate for business, education, and research and development. What I heard from them is that America is facing unprecedented competition from countries such as China and India and our role as the global innovation leader is being challenged. I was alarmed to learn that three key measuring sticks show America on a downward slope: patents awarded to American scientists; papers published by American scientists, and Nobel prizes won by American scientists.

What does the data say? Actually, the opposite:

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When should a scientist get involved in political advocacy related to policy making in the area of their expertise? And once having decided to get involved, what form of advocacy should the scientist engage in, given that there are numerous options for scientists as advocates?

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On Friday, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies released an inventory of 200 existing consumer products that claim to incorporate nanotechnology.

Here is a link to the inventory.

The inventory has implications both for the economic value of nanotech investments (currently over $1 Billion in US federal funding alone), and also for the EHS (Environmental, Health, and Safety) dimenions of nanotech in society. We might think of these as conflicting understandings of “health” – one focused on economic health, the other on human and environmental health.

Not too long ago, a report “slammed” nanotech research and its funding for not delivering economically. The Wilson Center’s inventory may this reassure some as a contrary indicator.

On the other hand, Congress held hearings late last year and last month to explore EHS issues related to nanotech. The Wilson inventory may thus also raise alarms about health and safety.

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I would love to be the first person to conclusively identify the signal of increasing greenhouse gases in the historical record of disaster losses. I have no doubt that such a study, scientifically solid and peer reviewed, would be widely cited, globally reported, and the author(s) would reach near rock star status in the climate science and advocacy communities. The problem is that I (and a number of colleagues) have been looking for such a signal for more than 10 years, recording our efforts in dozens of papers along the way, and so far the signal hasn’t been found.

On Wednesday his week I’ll be giving the NRC Ocean Studies Board’s annual Roger Revelle memorial lecture at the Smithsonian in Washington DC in which I’ll provide an overview of this search and what we’ve found to date. The message of the talk is as follows:

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