Disaster losses have increased dramatically in recent decades. Yet as discussed here frequently there is no scientific evidence showing that any part of this increase can be attributed to changes in climate, whether anthropogenic in origin or not. This is a long post on this subject. It contains a lot of gory detail on what I consider to be a major misuse of science in the climate debate, viewed through the lens of a recent paper in Science. I focus on this issue mainly because this is an area where I have considerable expertise, and in this context my work is often mis-cited or ignored. This misuse of science is pretty much overlooked by scientists (here is one exception) advocates on either side of the debate, and the media (here is one exception). A number of colleagues and I have a letter on this subject coming out in the November Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (I’ll post a pre-publication version of this soon). Also, in partnership with Munich Re we are organizing a major workshop on attribution of causes underlying the observed trend of ever-escalating disaster damages. Munich Re seems very supportive of rigorous science on this topic. So clearly, I intend to pursue this subject.

Some important things to say before proceeding — As I have written often on these pages, I accept the IPCC WGI consensus position on climate change and I am a strong advocate for policy action on climate change. I am also quite concerned by the role of science and scientists in the highly politicized context of climate.

I have titled this post “The Other Hockey Stick” drawing on some comments made by Hans von Storch in a talk at NCAR last month. The “other hockey stick” refers to the graph used by the IPCC based on Munich re data to show increasing disaster costs and has been widely used to argue for evidence of a climate change signal in disasters. Such claims are made by prominent scientists (such as Rajendra Pachauri and John Houghton) and can be found frequently in the scientific literature. The motivation for the present discussion is a paper in the 12 August 2005 issue of Science. Evan Mills, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Wrote in the essay,

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A Prometheus reader asked if I might read an article by Pat Michaels, affiliate of the conservative Cato Institute and Virginia State Climatologist and an interview with Bill Gray of Colorado State University and offer a critique. Specifically, the reader asked if I might comment on Gray’s allegations of funding being cut and whether or not Michaels misrepresented the work of me or Emanuel. So here are some reactions.

Michaels is no stranger to over-the-top rhetoric, and there is some of this here. But in this essay he accurately characterizes my work and quotes me accurately. I’d say more about the relationship of my work and Kerry’s recent paper, but I have a comment on Kerry’s recent paper submitted to Nature and they require no discussion of finding prior to publication. When that is either published or rejected I’ll be happy to say more in this subject. Michaels is correct to call out both Kevin Trenberth and Bill Gray for comments unbecoming a leading scientist. I agree in both cases that the comments are inappropriate.

Michaels does make one important mistake. He mischaracterizes the total funding for climate research citing a total of $4.2 billion. This number surely includes investments in technology which have nothing to do with climate science research. And of the $1.8 billion on climate science the vast majority is spent on satellites. He is correct to suggest that such large funding creates a constituency, but I disagree with him when he argues that climate scientists make decisions on papers based on funding. There are important sociological factors at play, but they are subtle and perhaps not even recognized by many climate scientists.

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An alert Prometheus reader pointed us in the direction of an article in today’s New York Times on the effects of Fox News on voting. Here is an excerpt:

“The share of Americans who believe that news organizations are “politically biased in their reporting” increased to 60 percent in 2005, up from 45 percent in 1985, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. Many people also believe that biased reporting influences who wins or loses elections. A new study by Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Ethan Kaplan of the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, however, casts doubt on this view. Specifically, the economists ask whether the advent of the Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch’s cable television network, affected voter behavior. They found that Fox had no detectable effect on which party people voted for, or whether they voted at all.”

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Tom Yulsman writes:

Is evolution compatible with religion?

People on opposite ends of the spectrum in the debate have shown in recent weeks that they do manage to agree on one thing: that the answer is ‘no.’ They frame the debate in black and white terms, leaving no room for nuance and ambiguity. In doing so, they pit religion implacably against science itself, harming both.

On one side of the debate stand proponents of intelligent design, most notably at the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute. They say they do not reject evolution outright, just the idea that evolution of complex biological structures can happen without intervention by an intelligent designer.

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This update from the excellent resouce provided by AAAS on R&D funding is worth a read. An excerpt:

“The funding outlook for the federal research and development (R&D) portfolio looks just a little brighter going into the August congressional recess than it did a month ago, and brighter still than when the fiscal year (FY) 2006 budget request was released in February. Because of Senate-proposed increases for biomedical R&D at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and congressional agreement on modest increases for environmental research in July, the federal R&D investment appears headed toward modest increases next year despite tough budget conditions.”

NASA finds itself at a crossroads. It has safely returned the space shuttle to flight, but the flight also showed that troubles have resurfaced with falling foam. NASA now faces decision about what to do next. I can imagine only a few possible outcomes of this decision making process.

1. NASA pursues business as usual. This would involve seeking an engineering fix for the shuttles foam problem and then seeking to fly through 2010, as current plans call for.

This course of action can lead to three possible outcomes.

1a. NASA returns to return to flight and flies the shuttle the number of times currently scheduled and retires it on schedule.

1b. NASA returns to return to flight and flies the shuttle fewer times than currently scheduled and retires it on schedule.

1c. NASA returns to return to flight and flies the shuttle until it suffers another catastrophic loss or a less consequential engineering failure/problem that forces retirement

2. NASA decides not to deviate from business as usual and retires the Shuttle after deciding what to do with the space station (and Hubble).

As an outsider, it seems to me that there are a lot of incentives for business as usual, and a significant possibility that the Shuttle is flown until it can fly no more. And of course, NASA will face a decision to pursuer business as usual following each successful shuttle flight.

Should NASA decide to retire the Shuttle it brings in a large set of possibilities for U.S. space policy. The President’s “vision,” such as it is, allows a lot of room for discussion of where, when, how and who. It is never too early to begin a public discussion that involves more stakeholders than just NASA about what future the U.S. and its partners might pursue. To date, neither the President nor Congress has encouraged such a dialogue.

Jacob Weisberg writes at Slate, “That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument” (Thanks Chris Mooney for the link). Chris Mooney author of a forthcoming book about how the right abuses science agrees, ironically enough enaging in his own abuse of science, “I agree that evolutionary thinking will tend to eat away religious belief “in aggregate ” as Weisberg writes ” and then Mooney qualifies this statement with “… but that’s different from saying that it’s because the two views are in irreconcilable, logical conflict. That’s simply not true, as evolution is silent on God’s existence.” Mooney should have stuck to this last point, rather than trying to have it both ways.

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One interesting characteristic about science policy is that it does not map neatly onto the stereotypical liberal-conservative Manichean worldview. To take just one example, two columns in the past month over at Tech Central Station, a web site run by folks who espouse a “faith in technology and free markets,” show wildly divergent views on science policy.

In an essay from 15 July 2005, Sallie Baliunas makes the fanciful suggestion that public demands for relevance from government-supported research have lead to increasing fraud among scientists. She describes how once Richard Feynman was “freed of the impediment of relevance” he was then able to conduct novel research into theoretical physics and collect a Nobel Prize. But Baliunas does not seem to recognize that federal funding for nuclear physics in the twentieth century was motivated by a very practical objective, winning the Cold War. Without the Soviet Union, federal funding for nuclear physics would surely have been considerably less. Just look at the funding trend for this area in the post-Cold War era. She expresses concern that if scientists are asked to perform research with practical applications, it might “drive away Feynman-type thinkers” and also lead to research misconduct by scientists upset that they have not been given a blank check and no accountability.

A very different essay comes from Iain Murray, who writes,

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Often here at Prometheus we take issue with scientists who assert that a certain view on science compels a specific political agenda. We less frequently comment of the opposite case, scientists who claim that a particular political ideology determines scientific findings. The reasons for this are pretty obvious; hardly any scientist would make such a claim.

But in a stunning example of what appears to be a public career suicide, Climatologist Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist for University of Alabama in Huntsville well known for his long-time collaborations with John Christy on satellite temperature trends, has written an article for Tech Central Station in which he claims that he “came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.”

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Science policy in sports. It sounds like a pretty good combination until you actually get into the details, and then it gets scary. Arthur Caplan, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, had a great op-ed in Newsday yesterday on technology and the elite athlete. Here is an excerpt:

“So what are we going to say when the archer, the chess master, the competitive marksman, the Nascar driver or the women’s professional golfer says, “If I take these same drugs I just might get enough of an edge to move ahead of my competition”? Throughout the 1990s when home runs were flying out of baseball stadiums, launched by players who obviously were using steroids, when professional football linemen got huge, when track and field records continued to fall, not much in the way of protest was heard. Americans are in love with those who take risks to break a record, or one another’s bones, in the name of sport. Nor do Americans gripe when we show up at the Olympics with our athletes who have the best training, superb diets, and top-flight equipment and whomp the tar out of athletes from poor nations, some of whom seem to have shown up just to get a decent meal. We are used to employing science to our advantage when it comes to sports, so why should we draw the line at genetic engineering or new miracle pills? There is nothing about the reaction to Rafael Palmeiro’s downfall that indicates we are ready to deal with the fundamental ethical question raised by his use of steroids – how can we draw the line when it comes to enhancement? Is the point of sport to see what human beings can do without aid of any sort in fair competition? If so, we may need to close the training facilities and cut back on what dietitians and trainers are allowed to do. But if the point of sports is to test the limits of human performance, then we had better get ready to add genetic engineers and a bevy of pharmacologists to the hordes of specialists now working with elite athletes from elementary school to the pros. There is no right answer to what the point of sport is. But Rafael Palmeiro has made it a question no one who cares about sports can avoid.”

A New York Times article on records in sports may be and indication where we are headed:

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