If you have not been following the posts on this blog since Wednesday, then let me bring you up to date. I attended a panel discussion on Wednesday given by Drs. Rick Smalley and Neal Lane, two of the signers of the recent report put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) detaling the misuse and misrepresentation of science by the current administration. The discussion centered on why the two of them decided to sign the report, and their thoughts on science and government and the changes that need to be made. One specific subject that came up often in the talk was the administration's stance on climate change science. According to the UCS report, "Since taking office, the Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine the public's understanding of the view held by the vast majority of climate scientists that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are making a discernible contribution to global warming." Smalley recommended looking up the reports on climate change put out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which do reach the conclusion that global warming is taking place and that it is caused for the most part by human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Dr. John Marburger, Science Adviser to President Bush, in his response to the UCS report, cites this speech by President Bush as evidence that the president has acknowledged global warming is occuring and that it is caused by humans.
And that's where things get complicated. Many of the claims in the UCS report are claims I was familiar with- Bush's denial that global warming is occuring or that it is human-caused, false claims about the possible nuclear weapons uses of aluminum tubes intercepted on their way to Iraq, the trumping of good science by politics in the Missouri River controversy... all of these I knew, so I assumed the case against the Bush administration presented by the UCS, citing things that were common knowledge, should be airtight. But, the response by Dr. Marsburger is compelling. Additonally, Marsburger is no GOP hack. As he says in his response to UCS, he is a lifelong Democrat, and according to Neal Lane, who was Science Adviser to President Clinton for several years, Marsburger is probably the most qualified of all of the recent Presidential Science Advisers. In the course of trying to do some additional research about the UCS report and its allegations for my Thursday post, I realized the overwhelming amount of evidence in support of and in opposition to the various claims made by the UCS.
By necessity, to make the report as readable as possible for journalists and the general public, I suppose that the UCS report authors felt that they needed to leave much of the detail out of their reporting of administration science abuses. So, for example, the evidence cited by the UCS report for the administration's misuse of science regarding climate change consists of the administration's deletion of a section of an EPA report mentioning global warming and the discontinuing of a U.S. Department of Agriculture brochure which gave advice to farmers about what they could do to reduce greenhouse emissions. This evidence does not come close to making a definitive case for the administration's misuse of climate change science. Marsburger dismisses these actions as simple bureaucratic choices with no malicious or misleading intent whatsoever, and, indeed, it is easy to sympathize with that view.
So, I found myself pulled in two directions- knowing what I believed to know about the crimes of the Bushies against science and flummoxed by the persuasive arguments of Dr. Marsburger against the claims of the UCS. What I am now going to do is the thing that I hope everyone does when confronted with a contentious issue about which they are passionate; I'm going to educate myself. So, if you would like to follow along with me in my education, here are the websites I'm looking at right now:
This article by physicist David Albright, who from 1992 to 1997 frequently collaborated with the International Atomic Energy Agency and is now president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a D.C.-based think-tank, details the facts and myths about the aluminum tubes that were confiscated in transit to Iraq.
This report, put out by the Aids Research Institute of the University of California, San Franciso, looks at the efficacy of comprehensive sex education versus that of abstinence-only sex education, ultimately reaching the conclusion that comprehensive sex education is demonstrably more effective at reducing teen pregnancy and reducing transmission of sexually-transmitted infections. Based on this conclusion, the report urges the government to reallocate the $102 million in federal money currently being spent on abstinence-only sex programs, which, according to the report, serve political and social goals rather than produce solid public health outcomes for young people.
The Missouri River debate is probably the most maddening for me, because the resources I have found on it seem to contain a lot of partisan bickering. Here is an article in Grist magazine which can serve as an introduction to the issue for those unfamiliar with it. Here is a summary of the stance of the Southern Governors' Association describing their objections to the original U.S. Fish and Wildlife plan to try to recreate the natural flow patterns of the Missouri, and celebrating the fact that the Bush administration in the end decided not to alter the present steady year-long barge-friendly flow of the Missouri River. Here is an article on the American Rivers website detailing the worries about the Bush plan. The article includes a link to a memo written by Assistant Interior Secretary Craig Manson to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asking for a reevaluation of the the original U.S. Fish and Wildlife plan by another team of "experts". He refers to this team as a "SWAT Team", and this term is repeated (in quotes) in both the UCS report and Dr. Marburger's response. Probably the best piece I have seen written on the subject is this article in The New Republic written by Michael Grunwald. Unfortunately, you need to purchase a subscription to read the article.
Getting back to global warming, this piece on the Politics and Science website repeats many of the claims made in the UCS report but adds another interesting accusation, saying that the Bush administration dismissed Dr. Robert Watson, chair of the IPCC, because of an ExxonMobil memo sent to the White House asking for the ouster of Watson. Slate magazine examines the allegation in this article.
The final issue that I am currently looking into is the administration's policies on stem cell research. This was not discussed in the UCS report. According to Dr. Lane, they chose to leave it out because the Bush administration's policies and remarks regarding stem cells are based on moral beliefs rather than a misrepresentation of science. However, it cannot be argued that a lot of scientific research has been stymied by the administration's stem cell regulations, and it can also not be argued that it was misleading for Bush to claim that there were sixty stem cell lines available for research at the time he enacted the regulations. The actual number turns out to be about ten stem cell lines. An article in Slate details Bush's misleading claims and the questionable logic behind his stem cell policies. This article in Washington Monthly also examines Bush's questionable claim of sixty viable stem cell lines.
So, everyone, get to work on that reading. But, it's alright if you save it till Monday; have a good weekend.
