The Pacific Institue’s Integrity of Science blog has moved! A long time in the making, we have now officially moved this blog over to ScienceBlogs.

Please bookmark and update your feeds to reflect the new site: http://scienceblogs.com/integrityofscience/

See you there!

The Management

What:
“Defining and Protecting the Integrity of Science: New Challenges for the 21st Century,” a panel discussion in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Leaders from various scientific sectors will be addressing political attacks and interference in science at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The discussion, “Defining and Protecting the Integrity of Science: New Challenges for the 21st Century,” will bring together leaders from the journal Science, academia, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Pacific Institute, and the AGU itself. These leaders will discuss their experiences with politically- and privately-motivated attacks, efforts to understand scientific integrity, and thoughts on the future relationship between science and policy making. More at www.integrityofscience.org.

Who:

Peter Gleick President, Pacific Institute (presiding); “The Integrity of Science: Identifying Logical Fallacies, Deceitful Tactics, and Abuse of the Public Trust”

Francesca Grifo Senior Scientist and Scientific Integrity Program Director, Union of Concerned Scientists (presiding); “Preventing Federal Government Abuse of Science”

Judith Curry Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, member of NOAA Climate Working Group; “Falling out of the Ivory Tower: a Case Study of Mixing Hurricane Science, Politics, and the Media”

Don Kennedy Editor-in-Chief, Science; “Science, Policy, and Peer Review”

Timothy Killeen President, AGU; Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Where:
Room MCS 308
Moscone Convention Center South,
San Francisco, California
Directions

When:
8am-10am, Tuesday, December 12, 2006.

Interviews:
To schedule a one-on-one interview with any of the panelists, please contact Ian Hart at 510-251-1600 x106.

The good news is that we’ve made it through 12 straight months without a carbon-amped Mother Nature laying waste to another great American city. Beignets all around. The bad news is that we didn’t make it to Hump Day without another allegation of the Bush administration tampering with scientific findings. Maybe next week. The AP reports:

The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday.

The possibility that warming conditions may cause storms to become stronger has generated debate among climate and weather experts, particularly in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

In the new case, Nature said weather experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — part of the Commerce Department — in February set up a seven-member panel to prepare a consensus report on the views of agency scientists about global warming and hurricanes.

According to Nature, a draft of the statement said that warming may be having an effect.

In May, when the report was expected to be released, panel chair Ants Leetmaa received an e-mail from a Commerce official saying the report needed to be made less technical and was not to be released, Nature reported. Source

Not only does the issue of federal tampering and silencing of science fail to go away, it seems that many within the administration are going out of their way to perpetuate it. Science advocate Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-NJ was quick to respond.

“The administration has effectively declared war on science and truth to advance its anti-environment agenda … the Bush administration continues to censor scientists who have documented the current impacts of global warming.”

Science tampering probably won’t end up being a big campaign issue this fall (if Tip O’Neill’s local maxim holds) but we expect this to add fuel to the fire.

In other news, if you’re keeping score you know we’ve been pretty quiet lately. Don’t fret — more new posts soon — over at ScienceBlogs. Stay tuned.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is sponsoring a scientific integrity editorial cartoon contest they are calling “Science Idol.”

On issues from air quality to global warming, government science is being censored, manipulated, and distorted on an unprecedented scale. Scientists and citizens alike have helped UCS put the issue of political interference in science squarely on the public agenda. Now here’s your chance to show off your artistic and comedic talents in support of independent science—it’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what about an editorial cartoon?

The deadline is July 31, so get cracking. You can learn more about the “Science Idol” contest and UCS’s scientific integrity work here.

On another note, we’re moving. The Pacific Institute’s Integrity of Science Blog will soon be setting up residence at ScienceBlogs. More about that soon, but suffice to say we are excited to be joining the numerous excellent blogs that the Seed Magazine venture hosts.

Chris Mooney has a great piece in this month’s Seed Magazine (hat-tip to UCS). “As science goes, so goes the nation: How the White House misunderestimated the height, width, breadth and depth of a crucial cultural meme” nicely teases out the similarities in the White House’s handling of James Hansen and NASA, Hurricane Katrina, and the war in Iraq.

The president, for whatever reason, hasn’t shown that he respects what’s going on in what one of his aides so hilariously described as the “reality-based community.” The “Bush is anti science” meme carries political weight because it underscores why so many Americans (including previous supporters) are becoming increasingly disenchanted with Bush: They don’t think he’s fit to lead, and they don’t believe many of his appointees are competent administrators of various branches of the government, virtually all of which require some form of scientific or other expertise. Bush’s recently-exposed decision to meet with television producer and novelist Michael Crichton to discuss global warming—rather than heeding the advice of the National Academy of Sciences on this subject—epitomizes the president’s disregard for the critical role of legitimate expertise in decision-making, whether it’s about global warming, educational policy or nation-building.

Ouch. Stephen Colbert’s roast wasn’t nearly as biting. Share this article with your friends, and enemies.

The changes come as NASA prioritizes its budget to pay for completion of the International Space Station and the return of astronauts to the moon by 2020 — a goal set by President Bush that promises a more distant and arguably less practical scientific payoff. Ultimately, scientists say, the delays and cancellations could make hurricane predictions less accurate, create gaps in long-term monitoring of weather, and result in less clarity about the earth’s hydrological systems, which play an integral part in climate change.

Guest Blog from Amy Baker:

A commentary in the May 24/31 Journal of the American Medical Association (“Protecting Special Interests in the Name of ‘Good Science’”) attempts to address some of the issues surrounding the Data Quality Act and its deceptive name. For the unfamiliar, the Data Quality Act is a mere two sentences attached to a must-pass appropriations bill in 2000. But what the Act lacks in wording, it makes up for in its negative impact on science-based decisionmaking.

Representative Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo) introduced the two sentences, which passed without prior hearing or debate. According to article author Linda Rosenstock, MD, MPH,

The act allows individuals or interest groups to request correction of information disseminated by an agency, in essence providing a formal administrative process for challenging the quality of the science and the information an agency uses.

It should be no surprise, then, that in its first 20 months, the Act had been used primarily by industry; the Washington Post found that 32 of 39 petitions “were filed by regulated industries, business or trade organizations, or their lobbyists.” The bulk of the petitions have been filed against HHS and the EPA.

For example, in 2004 the National Institutes of Health conducted a study and suggested reducing salt intake to lower blood pressure. Subsequently the study was challenged by the Salt Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce, under the guise of protecting data quality.

In his book The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney explains that “the so-called Data Quality Act creates an unprecedented and cumbersome process by which government agencies must field complaints over the data, studies, and reports they release to the public.” It is, in short “a science abuser’s dream come true” (103).

Rosenstock continues,

it is already clear that the act provides an additional powerful weapon in the current arsenal by which vested interests foster scientific uncertainty as a socially acceptable means to delay or block actions intended to protect our environment and health. Perhaps more worrisome, and as yet unmeasured, is the degree to which federal agencies, under the burden of the new law and wary of its use, will simply self-censor information that, although of the highest quality, is likely to come under challenge by those who perceive they will suffer from its dissemination.

Protecting data quality is a valid goal, but the Data Quality Act only aids to subvert scientific research and “has already resulted in the significant delay of the release and use of valid scientific information.” Because of the Data Quality Act, industry has been given the chance to fight regulation even earlier in the process, raising the status of nitpicking and increasing the burden of the scientific community to prove themselves to a few skeptics whose doubt is not driven by data quality so much as company profits.

OK, this is the last straw for me. Do you believe global warming is real but you’re not convinced that the impacts will be bad enough to do anything? Well, you’re part way home — at least you’re starting to listen to the science.

Here is the last straw for me, however. I think we have to do whatever it takes to prevent global warming entirely, because it turns out that warming and more carbon dioxide makes poison ivy worse. Not only does the nasty stuff grow three times larger when exposed to more CO2, but it produces more of that nasty, itchy chemical — urushiol.

Maybe we can deal with sea level rise; maybe we can adapt to the loss of species; maybe we can manage the disruptions to our water supply from losing western snowpack. But more vicious and dangerous poison oak? Shoot me now.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060529/ap_on_sc/poison_ivy_2

Andrew Wheeler, staff director of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (chaired by Senator James “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” Inhofe) appeared on E&ETV’s OnPoint today to discuss climate change. He spend much of the interview chewing marbles, so we’re grateful that OnPoint provided a transcript (subscription required). Wheeler touched on most of the usual foot-dragging arguments during the 13 minute interview. There are a number of points we’d like to contest, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll highlight just one.

… what [Senator Inhofe] is concerned about is whether or not man-made contributions are contributing to the climate changing and what those contributions might be. A number of the scientists who’ve looked at the models and looked at what the level of CO2 releases are have stated that if you zeroed out CO2 releases it’s not going to do very much as far as altering the predictions based on the modeling of what the temperature might be in 50 or 100 years.

This statement falls squarely onto the climate science foot dragging timeline. First they denied the climate was changing. Then they denied that climate change is man-made. Now Inhofe and Co. are prepping the next stage: acknowledge it’s happening, even acknowledge it’s man-made problem, but deny that there is anything we can do about it. It’s a convenient just-keep-attacking-the-science strategy, as long as you can wait the populace out. We’d like to offer this quote from a 2004 Science essay as a rebuttal:

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

If that future comes, and Senator Inhofe seems determined in his course, our economic rigidity and corporate kowtowing will reflect poorly on the “Me” generation.

We may be the last blog of this ilk to welcome Gregg Easterbrook to the fold, but welcome Gregg.

In other news, points to Media Matters for doing what they do best: taking talking-heads to task when they spread misinformation. In today’s Climate Change edition, they debunk Du Pont and Limbaugh for selective citing and other acts of junk science spreading.