The New York Times editorial board had nothing nice to say about yesterday’s Supreme Court decision eroding protections for whistleblowers.

The Supreme Court whittled away at the First Amendment yesterday, ruling against a prosecutor who raised concerns about the validity of a search warrant. The court made the law in this area messy, and even illogical. It suggested the attorney would have had more protection if he had embarrassed his office publicly than by working quietly through the system. But the bigger problem is that the ruling rolls back government workers’ rights to speak out against possibly illegal actions.

[...] The First Amendment should not protect employees from discipline for every statement they make at work, clearly. But as the dissenters point out, it should protect them in a case like this one, where an employee was bringing to light information that advances the public interest in honest government and the rule of law.

Given the nuances of the decision, we suspect the Court will be seeing similar cases in the future. In the meantime, we fear that acts of science distortion and potentially illegal actions are more likely to go unreported.

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.

For new science graduates, New Mexico state senator Dede Feldman has a commencement speech. She warns in an opinion piece in yesterday’s Albuquerque Tribune that amid the politicization of science in Washington and beyond, today’s graduates may have to bear witness tomorrow. If asked their beliefs – in stem cell research, global warming, or some other controversial topic – Senator Feldman encourages graduates to proclaim their beliefs, in data.

“We are counting on you to show us how to resolve differences when theories clash – not through force or intimidation, but by experimentation and research.”

Unfortunately, we can’t rely on scientists to guide our policy processes by themselves. In the unfortunate reality of today’s political climate, we need all graduates – whether they studied Law, English, or Basket Weaving – to stand up for scientific integrity (and it’s not as if most of today’s graduates don’t have several years of high school and college science under their belts). Scientists do not constitute a majority in the electorate or Congress. It’s everyone’s responsibility to recognize the value in untainted research and demand fact-based decision making.

If Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is a hit, he may have climate science’s greatest detractors to thank. That’s the theory Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby posed yesterday. A Washington culture of “contempt for expert opinion” has created “a hunger for a leader with diagrams and charts, for a nerd who lays out the basic facts ignored by blinkered government.” More from Mallaby:

“[D]ishonesty reaches its extreme on the issue of global warming. Yes, climate science is complex, and nobody can forecast the earth’s temperature with complete confidence. But the fact that scientists don’t know everything isn’t a license to ignore what they do know: that the earth is warming, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising at an accelerating pace – and that these changes are driven at least partly by fossil-fuel consumption.”

Mallaby posits that the new CEI advertisements, aside from being “nonsense,” may be contributing to a cultural landscape where “statements of scientific conventional wisdom” become “heroic actions.”

And he’s hardly the only one talking about those ads. Following their release, the University of Missouri-Columbia released a press release, not so subtly subtitled “Engineering Professor Curt Davis says TV Spots are Misrepresenting His Research” (hat tip to Think Progress). CEI cited a study by Davis, Director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence, in their Glaciers commercial: “But other scientific studies found exactly the opposite …” Not so opposite, it seems:

“These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate,” Davis said. “They are selectively using only parts of my previous research to support their claims. They are not telling the entire story to the public.”

Sadly, this is hardly a first for those who must rely on slight of hand in place of science. The University of Missouri-Columbia is unlikely to take out 60-second ads in response to CEI, and the distortion will air in 14 markets without clarification. But if Mallaby is right, those markets may end up being ripe for “An Inconvenient Truth.”

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Tarek Maassaranik, a staff attorney at the Government Accountability Project, is questioning the legality and efficacy of NASA’s new media policy. Although Maassaranik spends most of his space tracing the history of the Bush administration’s attacks on climate science, his op-ed in today’s Topeka Capital Journal is framed by NASA’s new media policy.

Regrettably, while the new policy is an improvement, technical loopholes and omissions in the eight-page document undermine NASA’s promise of scientific freedom. …

The new policy violates the Whistleblower Protection Act and other laws against muzzling federal employees and interfering with their rights to take their concerns to Congress. These are not innocent mistakes or oversights. Having been briefed by Hansen’s attorneys, NASA decision-makers were well aware of the legal violations inherent in their new policy. Such media guidelines, which cast as much uncertainty as this administration wishes to ascribe to climate change, only leave us with our heads further in the clouds.

We’d have liked more specifics on how the policy is in violation, but this piece is a good primer on recent political tampering with science. We look forward to hearing more from GAP.

Like Mission Impossible 3 (Tom Cruise-detractors) and The Da Vinci Code (Opus Dei), Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has its detractors (climate skeptics) fueling some pre-release backlash. Claiming eco-alarmism, the Competitive Enterprise Institute fights fire with fire.

“Mr. Gore has always promoted causes that would require taking decisions away from the people and putting them in the hands of an expert elite,” said [Myron] Ebell, who directs CEI’s global warming policy program. “Mr. Gore’s ideal would be to give each person a book of energy rationing coupons and every year put fewer coupons in the book. It is a program of mandatory energy starvation.” Source

CEI has gone so far as to develop two sixty minute commercials that, according to Greenwire, will be targeted to Middle America. “Energy” suggests a false dichotomy where we can either drive our minivans in peace or ride our bicycles in the snow. “Glaciers” suggests a “he said, she said” scientific debate (“But other scientific studies found exactly the opposite”). Each commercial ends with “Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution, we call it life.”

We call these commercials tired and clichéd in their desperate attempts to muddy public understanding of climate science.

Today’s New York Times has an interview with the retiring House Science Committee Chairman, Representative Sherwood “Sherry” Boehlert (R-NY). His best line comes before the Q&A:

“This is a town where everyone says they are for science-based decision making — until the science leads to a politically inconvenient conclusion. And then they want to go to Plan B.”

His statement calls to mind the title of the forthcoming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Now, in the interest of full disclosure, this author admits he gave up his ticket to Al Gore’s climate talk in favor of watching Game 3 of the 2004 World Series unfold on TV. Which is why this author is glad they made a movie out of the talk. You can catch the preview here.

And in the interest of defending the integrity of science along non-partisan lines, we’re going to have to see the movie if only to figure out what Gore meant by this statement in an interview in today’s Grist.

“In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.”

We like “Category 5 denial,” but “over-representation of factual presentations”? Strikes us a throwback to the good old days of Clinton-Gore wordsmithing, but it may also be an invitation for criticism. But we’ll hold our judgment until we see the movie and figure out what he means.