Dan Whipple’s UPI column today has some kind words for Prometheus and a response to a post here a few weeks back that took issue with his use of the politically-loaded phrase “climate skeptic.” The UPI column today goes over well trodden ground reviewing the surface-troposphere temperature record debate and the “hockey-stick” controversy. Rather than developing a political taxonomy of the climate debate focused on science, I thought that it might be worth focusing on the actual political and policy agendas at play. Please consider the list below as food for thought, experimental, subject to change and not definitive. We’d welcome your comments, additions and subtractions.

Climate realists. The UPI column correctly places me in this camp. But Steve Rayner characterized this community best, “But, between Kyoto’s supporters and those who scoff at the dangers of leaving greenhouse gas emissions unchecked, there has been a tiny minority of commentators and analysts convinced of the urgency of the problem while remaining profoundly sceptical of the proposed solution. Their voices have largely gone unheard. Climate change policy has become a victim of the sunk costs fallacy. We are told that Kyoto is “the only game in town”. However, it is plausible to argue that implementing Kyoto has distracted attention and effort from real opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect society against climate impacts. While it may not be politically practical or desirable to abandon the Kyoto path altogether, it certainly seems prudent to open up other approaches to achieving global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”

Scientizers. This large and diverse group actively works to frame the climate issue as a scientific debate under the expectation that if you win the scientific debate then your political agenda will necessarily follow. This group is comprised mostly of scientists of one sort or another. I would include here the dueling science-cum-politics weblogs Realclimate.org and Climateaudit.org (we had an exchange with Reaclimate folks a while back). I would also include here CATO’s Patrick Michaels and the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri (see this post) and others who have a clear political perspective but choose frequently to debate the science as a proxy war. A great irony is that the Scientizers have different political views but share the expectation that science is the appropriate battleground for this debate, and have together thus far successfully kept the focus of attention on the climate science rather than policy and politics.

(more…)

Here is a Dilbert strip about the honest broker.

On Saturday a New York Times article reported,

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon – which has long underwritten open-ended “blue sky” research by the nation’s best computer scientists – is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff… The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation’s economy.”

And a few weeks ago Science reported,

“More than 750 U.S. microbiologists–including the president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology in Washington, D.C., Stanley Maloy of San Diego State University, and seven past ASM presidents–sent an open letter to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias Zerhouni this week, complaining that the current spending spree in biodefense is threatening the very foundation of microbiology. While budgets have skyrocketed for exotic agents such as plague, anthrax, and tularemia–each of them negligible as human health threats–research on widespread and perhaps mundane pathogens is falling by the wayside, the letter says, as is work with traditional model organisms such as Kiley’s E. coli.”

Each of these stories refer to assertions that one particular research portfolio is somehow “better” than an alternative research portfolio. Such conflicts over different way to put together research portfolios raises what is (or should be) a fundamental question of science policy research: How might we evaluate (and according to what criteria) the relative worth of alternative research portfolios?

(more…)

In this week’s Nature representatives of several environmental organizations ask wrote, referring to the United States:

“Granted that the public is not at all scientifically literate about climate change, and granted as well global warming is not among the environmental issues that the public is most concerned about. However, the battle over public opinion about the existence of global warming has been won. Efforts made trying to convince the public that global warming is “real” are pretty much wasted on the convinced. The public overwhelmingly believes global warming to be real and consequential. In fact, I’d even hypothesize that when compared to what the public actually believes about climate change and the future, the IPCC reports would seem pretty tame.”

Consider these examples:

(more…)