Some members of the climate science community are gathered this week in Exter, UK at a meeting titled, “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change.” Is this meeting for scientists to inform policy makers on a range of possible goals for climate stabilization and a range of means to achieve those goals, or is it a strategy of political advocacy designed to support adoption of a particular goal over others? There is evidence to support both sides of this question, and the presentations, press reports and conclusions from the meeting later this week should allow for a more definitive answer to this question.

Some background

The Exter meeting was first announced in a speech last summer by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in which he called for the meeting to address two “big questions.”

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With all of the hullabaloo about politics and the IPCC, we have not had a chance this week to post on other issues of science policy. But even so, if you make it to the bottom you’ll see that we close this week where we started.

Jessie C. Gruman of the Center for the Advancement of Health writes in a letter in this week’s Science, ” … there is no reason to believe that the behavior of the [Bush] administration that has so perturbed the scientific community will change in the coming years. Therefore, it is critical that scientists organize, choose their battles carefully, and guard against self-serving advocacy that undermines science as an objective tool to guide decisions about medicine, public health, safety, the environment, economic development, and national security.” In addition to watch dogging the Bush Administration, certainly effort well spent, the scientific community might also devote some effort to guarding against self-serving advocacy. This is important because lack of attention to the latter might make it harder to do the former.

In a column in last Sunday’s New York Times, James Fallows discusses the technology policies of the Bush Administration writing, “In its first term, the Bush team made a few important pro-technology choices. Over the next year it will signal whether it intends to stand by them.” Fallows highlights the continuing debate about the roles of the public and private sectors in weather services as one area of technology policy where the Bush Administration could make a mark. (In 2001, I made a similar argument.) Fallows oversimplifies the issue however. The current imbroglio over weather services has a 50 year history and current policies have little to do with the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration could yet make a mark on this issue, but understanding the issues at stake and why it matters are necessary first steps. A primer on the issue can be found here.

There is a second point to be made about Fallows’ column. In it he quotes Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of AccuWeather, a leading commercial weather services firm long at odds with the National Weather Service, “”We feel that they spend a lot of their funding and attention on duplicating products and services that already exist in the private sector, And they are not spending the kind of time and effort that is needed on catastrophic issues that involve lives and property, which I think is really their true function.” He added that the weather service might have done a better, faster job of warning about the southern Asian tsunami if it had not been distracted in this way.” This is a cheap shot by Myers.

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Author: Naomi Oreskes
University of California, San Diego

Since the publication in Science of my article, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” (Science 306:1686, 3 December 2004) and its follow-up piece in The Washington Post, “Undeniable Global Warming, (26 December 2004), a number of people have asked me to clarify what, exactly, I think this consensus is.

This request rather misses the point of my essay, which was to underscore the fact that the scientific societies have already clearly expressed the expert opinions of their membership, and that these statements are readily available and easy to read. Rather than attempt to paraphrase these carefully worded statements, I recommend that anyone who wants to know what climate scientists have to say about climate science, should, quite simply, read what they have to say. (And it takes a lot less time than plowing through all the misrepresentations that now abound on the web.)

Here are the relevant references and links:

American Association for the Advancement of Science,

American Meteorological Society, 2003: “Climate Change Research: Issues for the Atmospheric and Related Sciences,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 85: 508-515. See also this website,

American Geophysical Union, “Human Impacts of Climate,” adopted by unanimous vote of the AGU Council, December 12, 2003,

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Climate Change 2001: Summary for Policymakers

U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Science of Climate Change, “Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions,” Washington DC: National Research Council: National Academy Press, 2001.

Here is a good example why the IPCC should be concerned about the role of its leaders in political advocacy. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, released a press release today titled, “Pachauri Must Resign as Head of UN Climate Panel Activism Compromises Scientific Objectivity.”

The CEI describes itself as “a non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government. We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace.” It is safe to say that the CEI is firmly against the Kyoto Protocol and highly skeptical of climate science. So the political agenda supported by CEI is in direct opposition to the political agenda endorsed in recent months by R. K. Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC.

Here is the calculus that I’d like the IPCC folks to understand: Whatever benefits they believe lending the IPCC’s name and authority (as an institution or as individuals) to their favored political causes is more than outweighed by the substantially greater benefits that they provide to their political opponents by defecting from the IPCC’s formal position as honest broker. Not only does this contribute to a loss of legitimacy and authority of the IPCC (which matters to everyone because we need honest brokers) but it is just poorly played politics in support of the causes to which Dr. Pauchari has lent his name and that of the IPCC.

A Prometheus reader emailed with the following request:

“On RealClimate.org’s “Anomalous Recent Warmth in Europe” discussion thread, someone yesterday quoted something you wrote about the nature of the politicization of the IPCC, and RealClimate’s William Connolley answered that it “appears to be an error or misstatement in [Pielke's] post” and that he doesn’t “think the IPCC folk do think its (the IPCC’s) role to be a political advocacy” and that all “the IPCC folk quoted were speaking personally.” If I understand this correctly — and maybe I don’t — it strikes me as something that I’d hope you’d clarify personally. Thanks.”

Short Answer

The aim of “political advocacy” is to reduce the scope of policy alternatives, typically to a single favored outcome (or in the case of an election, to reduce the field of candidates). Endorsement of a specific policy (or political candidate) when there is a range of alternatives is political advocacy. The actions documented here over recent months by R. K. Pauchuri and scientists in the Harvard press conference are unambiguous examples (of many related to the IPCC) of political advocacy trading on the authority of the IPCC. Political advocacy is an important and honorable part of a healthy democracy. It is, however, not consistent with the role of an honest broker, which is also an important and honorable part of a healthy democracy.

Longer Answer with References

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From Robert Bryce, writing in Slate yesterday,

“… a curious transformation is occurring in Washington, D.C., a split of foreign policy and energy policy: Many of the leading neoconservatives who pushed hard for the Iraq war are going green. James Woolsey, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and staunch backer of the Iraq war, now drives a 58-miles-per-gallon Toyota Prius and has two more hybrid vehicles on order. Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy and another neocon who championed the war, has been speaking regularly in Washington about fuel efficiency and plant-based bio-fuels. The alliance of hawks and environmentalists is new but not entirely surprising. The environmentalists are worried about global warming and air pollution. But Woolsey and Gaffney—both members of the Project for the New American Century, which began advocating military action against Saddam Hussein back in 1998—are going green for geopolitical reasons, not environmental ones.”

Here is what Dan Sarewitz and I wrote on this two years ago,

“We believe that progress on developing cost-effective carbon-free energy sources will be more quickly stimulated through direct investments in energy research and technology justified for their own sake. If nothing else, the focus on climate uncertainty has distracted us from the fact that there are plenty of reasons to improve energy policy, not least of which are the national security benefits gained from energy independence, the environmental and health benefits of cleaner fuels, and the long-term economic efficiencies that can be delivered by renewable energy sources.”

Last October, when R. K. Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), wrote the forward to a report advocating specific policies on climate change I wrote,

“It is troubling that the Chair of the IPCC would lend his name and organizational affiliation to a set of groups with members engaged actively in political advocacy on climate change. Even if Dr. Pachauri feels strongly about the merit of the political agenda proposed by these groups, at a minimum his endorsement creates a potential perception that the IPCC has an unstated political agenda.”

Dr. Pachauri has once again lent his name, and that of the IPCC, to an advocacy effort on climate change. This time Dr. Pachauri is presented as the “scientific advisor” on a report released earlier this week by the International Climate Change Taskforce (ICCT). The report advocates a range of very specific policy actions on climate change – among them, limiting global carbon dioxide concentrations to 400 ppm, a requirement that G8 countries obtain 25% of their electrivity from renewables by 2025, the phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies, requiring Export Credit Agencies and Multilateral Development Banks to adopt minimum efficiency or carbon intensity standards for projects they support and building upon the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. The ICCT was organized by a number of self-described progressive think tanks — the Institute for Public Policy Research in London, the Center for American Progress in Washington DC and The Australia Institute in Canberra.

According to the IPPC website the ITCC’s recommendations are, “aimed at all major governments in the international negotiations, with special emphasis on the United Kingdom (UK), which will hold the Presidencies of the G8 and the European Union in 2005.” Quite simply, there is a clear conflict in Dr. Pachauri seeking to act as an honest broker on climate science as chairman of the IPCC while simultaneously advocating a specific political position in the very process to which he is tasked to provide impartial guidance. The IPCC operates under a guideline that is to be “neutral with respect to policy.” I am unclear as to what this phrase actually means, but I am pretty sure that it is not consistent with overt political advocacy. As a 2001 news article in Nature reported, “The IPCC aims to provide information to policy-makers without endorsing specific policies. As such, it can only work if it is widely perceived to represent a highly credible and unbiased consensus.”

Bob Park suggests that the U.S. needs to rethink the costs and benefits of its space policy priorities:

“Last Friday, the reach of man extended 900 million miles to the surface of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. It stands as one of the most notable voyages of exploration in history. Carried piggyback on Cassini since 1997, the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe parachuted 789 miles to reach Titan’s smoggy surface. Huygens had the good fortune to land on solid ground, within sight of the shoreline of a hydrocarbon sea. Over the next several hours, until its batteries finally died, Huygens transmitted everything it had learned back to Cassini, which relayed it to Darmstadt. The data will keep researchers busy for years. Cassini will continue studying Saturn for another four years. Meanwhile, only 90 miles from the surface of Earth, the NASA On-Orbit Status Report notes that the ISS crew checked gear for a 26 Jan space walk, performed periodic microbial air sampling, did routine maintenance on the toilet facilities, performed a 2.5 hour exercise program, had an interview with USA Today and recorded a video message in observance of the 250th anniversary of Moscow State University. Today’s quiz: Which cost the most, Cassini/Huygens or the ISS?”

On Saturday the Washington Post printed two letters in response to my recent op-ed on politics and science advisory committees.

In the first letter, David Apatoff argues, that “No one argues that science can be divorced from politics.” He is wrong in this assertion. The authors of the NRC report my op-ed was a response to and the folks at RealClimate that I’ve been chatting with recently on this subject are among many who suggest otherwise. By the end of his letter Mr. Apatoff seems to provide a contradictory when he emphasizes the possibility of a clean separation of facts and values, “In a democracy, everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts.” I am completely in agreement with Apatoff that we should be concerned about the recent trend of the politicization of science.

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Author: Kevin Vranes (website. email)

One day last year while, with some astonishment, listening to Sean O’Keefe blithely tell his Senate overseers whatever they wanted to hear, I couldn’t help but wonder how O’Keefe was ever able to talk the White House upper echelon into his nutty manned Mars vision. GW already had the reputation – if not yet the direct sobriquet from Senator McCain – of spending like a drunken sailor (although of course it is Congress that spends, not the President, but editorial writers and talking heads never seem to remember that). It was apparent to most that putting a few people on Mars might be measured in the trillions of dollars (the White House and NASA have sidestepped putting a price tag on moon/Mars, but hinted at about $180B by 2020, which is when the moon bases will be completed and we might be ready to launch to Mars). With the U.S. already in heavy debt and the Chinese and Japanese buying up American dollars just as fast as the Philadelphia mint would print them, spending huge new sums on exploration visions seemed curious.

But no sooner was POTUS running over America with a new grand space vision (which, incidentally, was timed suspiciously close to the Chinese announcement of an intention to go to the moon – causing some to wonder if we were in a new race to repeat something we accomplished forty years previously), than the trickle down began at NASA. Previous grumblings about NASA running NOAA’s satellites were renewed, and most Earth scientists who had received NASA grant money were warned of a tighter future (which was later made reality in the FY05 budget).

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