Memo to ScienceDebate Supporters – Don’t Fudge Facts

April 18th, 2008

Posted by: admin

Today was the scheduled date for the simultaneously quixotic and pragmatic ScienceDebate 2008. Since it won’t be happening, at least in Philadelphia (the organizers are going to try for another date in Portland, Oregon shortly before that state’s May 20th primary), there have been some pieces in the blogosphere (particulary scienceblogs.com) bemoaning the absence of interest from the candidates in the debate.

While the non-event of ScienceDebate 2008 is worth analyzing (which I hope to do next week), I wish to take to task two authors of an Op-Ed in the April 17 edition of the Wall Street Journal advocating increased support of science and of ScienceDebate 2008.

Two Nobel Prize winners, David Baltimore (Biology 1975) and Ahmed Zewail (Chemistry 1999) manage the impressive feat of making Dr. John Marburger, the Presidential science adviser, disappear.


The piece is novel perhaps only in its location in the Wall Street Journal. The arguments are standard, and include appeals for increased science support due to economic impact, increased foreign competition (Rising Above the Gathering Storm is referenced, almost de rigueur in such pieces), and decreased opportunities for young scientists. But the authors undercut their arguments with some clear factual errors. To wit:

Today we do not have a presidential science adviser and there is no office of science in the White House.

I suspect the authors were trying to criticize President Bush for appointing Dr. Marburger at a lower level (Science Adviser to the President) than prior science advisers (which were formally titled Assistant to the President). But it reads as though we were back in the Nixon administration, when the science adviser position and the Office of Science and Technology Policy were shuttered.

So Baltimore and Zewail misrepresent the state of science advice, and go on to misrepresent the state of science initiatives.

Last year things seemed hopeful, at least for the physical sciences. The National Academy of Sciences issued a report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” that helped drive Congress to pass legislation – the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) – aimed at bolstering the sciences. It was supposed to beef up the study of science in high school. In the end, no money was found to fund the initiative. It was a commitment made, but not kept.

This paragraph is missing a critical adjective in front of funding. The ACI has not been fully funded. Some money has been found to fund parts of the initiative. It still is a setback, but not the catastrophe that no funding would be.

Putting aside the value of their arguments, by fudging the facts Baltimore and Zewail undercut their cause. At the very least they are misleading the public. Should the public figure it out, their reputations – and by extension their arguments – will be discredited. A reasonable response to this would be ‘Why should we listen to them if they can’t get their facts right?’ Baltimore already has enough borderline questionable activity (look into the Baltimore Affair for more information) in his past that he should both know better and be more careful when he makes pronouncements. So should we all.

5 Responses to “Memo to ScienceDebate Supporters – Don’t Fudge Facts”

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  1. docpine Says:

    It is interesting to me who claims to speak for science and what science they are speaking for..especially since we are on a mostly climate related blog here.
    “We need to fund ACI and double the National Science Foundation’s budget for basic research. The government should fund science at a level that will ensure that the U.S. stays in a leadership position in areas like biotechnology, military preparedness, electronics and communication. We need to pay special attention to health research.”
    Note that apparently climate change, as important as it is, does not require one dollar more of agricultural research, environmental research, natural disaster research nor social research to deal with these challenges. And we all know that “basic science” is a code word for science of scientists by scientists and for scientists. So this op ed is basically give us the money, leave other research fields out, or we will claim you are against science.
    This raises all kinds of interesting questions- if you tripled the USGS budget but decreased NSF, would you still be “against science?”

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  3. David Bruggeman Says:

    Great points (though I like to think of myself as a non-token non-climate poster around here).

    Your characterization of the op-ed is consistent with much of the science advocacy message of the last few decades – give us money and autonomy, we’ll give you results. Somehow its failure – at least in securing consistent funding patterns – has not prompted changes in rhetoric, tactics, or strategy.

    While I doubt you would get anyone to say on the record that such a move (boosting USGS) would be against science, I am certain that any cut to NSF would be characterized as against science. The vast majority of federal research funding is concentrated in five agencies: NSF, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Department of Energy (specifically in its Office of Science). The scientific research conducted in other agencies (like USGS, the Department of Agriculture, or the Department of Justice) does not receive much attention from either the science advocacy communities or the science policy research communities.

    I will leave it to others to say to what extent climate change research is distributed in the way you suggest it should (I suspect it is too heavily tilted toward environmental research, but do not know for certain).

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  5. Harry Haymuss Says:

    As far as fudging facts and its long term effect on the public’s perception of science, I think the greatest damage has been done with “global warming” alarmists. When the models improve, e.g. we really start to narrow the gap between reality and models as opposed to what is shown in the Figure 10 at the bottom of this:
    http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2000/annrev00.pdf

    and many other sides of the current Tower of Babel called climate science come closer together, the public will look back and ask how they could have been so bamboozled in the name of “science”. Then the damage done to science by alarmists e.g. Hansen and Kerr will really be known.

    Remember, the end *includes* the means.

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  7. docpine Says:

    David,

    In my opinion, it would be interesting to actually see what climate change research funds are going for in the US.. how much for modeling, how much for new technologies, how much for exploring adaptation. It would be an interesting Masters or Ph.D. project (any students out there?), and difficult to do because of the many research funding sources, even if the study were restricted to the US government.

    If we knew the current mix, we could discuss whether that is the “right” mix, and whether different policy framings of the issue of climate change empower or disempower, or focus funding on different research communities. Then we could ask the question “do different research communities advocate different policy framings and could that be related to self-interest?” And policy makers could further wrestle with the question of how to use the science and either lose the self-interest, or design a process to get the self-interests of different research communities to cancel each other out.

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  9. mt Says:

    The majority of what is supposedly “climate change” funding goes into NASA for earth observation. While there’s a great deal of room for improvement both within and outside NASA, this conflation of these efforts has served only to obfuscate a topic that hardly needs more obfuscation. This was the topic of a shuffle in the early 1990s to assemble a climate research program out of mostly pre-existing parts that had other names. Most of the growth in climate funding at that time was purely symbolic if I understand correctly.

    Anyway, interested folk can chew on these data:

    http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05461.pdf

    and this lovely bar graph

    http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/budgets/funding1989-2008byagency.htm

    Climate modeling per se would be a middling subslice of the DOE and NSF parts. Not enough to keep me going full time as it happens; fortunately some seismologists are going to pick up half my tab.

    Whether a) the modeling field deserves very little because it has had such marginal accomplishments, or b) whether the field has made such little progress in part because it is so modestly funded, or c) whether in fact it has achieved brilliantly in the face of all obstacles is a matter of some debate. You may count me in the “b” camp.

    I simply don’t understand arguments begin by asserting that climate modeling is lucrative.

    Anyway I hope the links are is helpful.