[MPWG] FW: How Science Became a Partisan Issue

[F.A. Hoffman]

 Subject: How Science Became a Partisan Issue

ATTENTION SCIENTISTS:   
The following article should alarm Dems and Reps alike. There is a link at
the bottom to a comprehesive study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 
October 19, 2004 
Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Became a Partisan Issue 
By ANDREW C. REVKIN 
       

Why is science seemingly at war with President Bush? 
For nearly four years, and with rising intensity, scientists in and out of
government have criticized the Bush administration, saying it has selected
or suppressed research findings to suit preset policies, skewed advisory
panels or ignored unwelcome advice, and quashed discussion within federal
research agencies. 

Administration officials see some of the criticism as partisan, and some
perhaps a function of unrealistic expectations on the part of scientists
about their role in policy debates. "This administration really does not
like regulation and it believes in market processes in general," said Dr.
John H. Marburger III, the president's science adviser, who is a Democrat.

"So there's always going to be a tilt in an administration like this one to
a certain set of actions that you take to achieve some policy objective," he
went on. "In general, science may give you some limits and tell you some
boundary conditions on that set of actions, but it really doesn't tell you
what to do."

Dr. Jesse H. Ausubel, an expert on energy and climate at Rockefeller
University, said some of the bitterness expressed by other researchers could
stem from their being excluded from policy circles that were open to them
under previous administrations. "So these people who believe themselves
important feel themselves belittled," he said.

Indeed, much of the criticism has come from private groups, like the Union
of Concerned Scientists and many environmental organizations, with long
records of opposing positions the administration favors.

Nevertheless, political action by scientists has not been so forceful since
1964, when Barry Goldwater's statements promoting the deployment of
battlefield nuclear weapons spawned the creation of the 100,000-member group
Scientists and Engineers for Johnson.

This year, 48 Nobel laureates dropped all pretense of nonpartisanship as
they signed a letter endorsing Senator John Kerry. "Unlike previous
administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, the Bush administration
has ignored unbiased scientific advice in the policy making that is so
important to our collective welfare," they wrote. The critics include
members of past Republican administrations.

And battles continue to erupt in government agencies over how to communicate
research findings that might clash with administration policies. 

This month, three NASA scientists and several officials at NASA headquarters
and at two agency research centers described how news releases on new global
warming studies had been revised by administrators to play down
definitiveness or risks. The scientists and officials said other releases
had been delayed. "You have to be evenhanded in reporting science results,
and it's apparent that there is a tendency for that not to be occurring
now," said Dr. James E. Hansen, a climate expert who is director of the NASA
Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan.

Glenn Mahone, the assistant administrator of NASA for public affairs,
yesterday denied that any releases on climate had been held up or modified
by anything other than normal reviews. "There has been a slowdown," he said.


But he insisted, "There is nothing in terms of any kind of approval process
with the White House." 
Earlier this year, after continuing complaints that the White House was
asking litmus-test questions of nominees for scientific advisory panels, the
first question asked of a candidate for a panel on Arctic issues, the
candidate said, was: "Do you support the president?"

When asked about such incidents, officials with the Bush campaign call
attention to Mr. Bush's frequent queries to the National Academy of Sciences
as evidence of his desire for good advice on technical issues.

"This president believes in pursuing the best, most objective science, and
his record proves that," said Brian Jones, a campaign spokesman. 

Yet complaints about the administration's approach to scientific information
are coming even from within the government. Many career scientists and
officials have expressed frustration and anger privately but were unwilling
to be identified for fear of losing their jobs. But a few have stepped
forward, including Dr. Hansen at NASA, who has been researching global
warming and conveying its implications to Congress and the White House for
two decades.

Dr. Hansen, who was invited to brief the Bush cabinet twice on climate and
whose work has been cited by Mr. Bush, said he had decided to speak publicly
about the situation because he was convinced global warming posed a serious
threat and that further delays in addressing it would add to the risks.

"It's something that I've been worrying about for months," he said,
describing his decision. "If I don't do something now I'll regret it. 

"Under the Clinton-Gore administration, you did have occasions when Al Gore
knew the answer he wanted, and he got annoyed if you presented something
that wasn't consistent with that," Dr. Hansen said. "I got a little fed up
with him, but it was not institutionalized the way it is now."

Under the Bush administration, he said, "they're picking and choosing
information according to the answer that they want to get, and they've
appointed so many people who are just focused on this that they really are
having an impact on the day-to-day flow of information."

Disputes between scientists and the administration have erupted over stem
cell policy, population control and Iraq's nuclear weapons research. But
nowhere has the clash been more intense or sustained than in the area of
climate change. 

There the intensity of the disagreements has been stoked not only by
disputes over claimed distortion or suppression of research findings, but on
the other side by the enormous economic implications. 

Several dozen interviews with administration officials and with scientists
in and out of government, along with a variety of documents, show that the
core of the clash is over instances in which scientists say that objective
and relevant information is ignored or distorted in service of
pre-established policy goals. Scientists were essentially locked out of
important internal White House debates; candidates for advisory panels were
asked about their politics as well as their scientific work; and the White
House exerted broad control over how scientific findings were to be
presented in public reports or news releases. 

An Early Skirmish 
Climate emerged as a prickly issue in the first months of Mr. Bush's term,
when the White House began forging its energy policy and focusing on ways to
increase domestic use of coal and production of oil.

In March 2001, a White House team used a single economic analysis by the
Energy Department to build a case that Mr. Bush quickly used to back out of
his campaign pledge to restrict power plant discharges of carbon dioxide,
the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming. 

The analysis, from December 2000, was based on a number of assumptions,
including one that no technological innovation would occur. The result
showed that prompt cuts in carbon dioxide from power plants would weaken the
economy. 

Other analyses, including some by other branches of the Department of
Energy, drew different conclusions but were ignored.

Advice from climate experts at the Environmental Protection Agency was
sought but also ignored. A March 7 memorandum from agency experts to the
White House team recommended that the carbon dioxide pledge be kept, saying
the Energy Department study "was based on assumptions that do not apply" to
Mr. Bush's plan and "inflates the costs of achieving carbon dioxide
reductions." The memo was given to The New York Times by a former E.P.A.
official who says science was not adequately considered.

Nonetheless, the White House team stuck to its course, drafting a memo on
March 8 to John Bridgeland, the president's domestic policy adviser, that
used the energy study to argue for abandoning the campaign promise.

None of the authors was a scientist. The team consisted of Cesar Conda, an
adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and now a political consultant; Andrew
Lundquist, the White House energy policy director, who is now an energy
lobbyist; Kyle E. McSlarrow, the chairman of Dan Quayle's 2000 presidential
campaign and now deputy secretary of energy; Robert C. McNally Jr., an
energy and economic analyst who is now an investment banker; Karen Knutson,
a deputy on energy policy and a former Republican Senate aide; and Marcus
Peacock, an analyst on science and energy issues from the Office of
Management and Budget. They concluded that Mr. Bush could continue to say he
believed that global warming was occurring but make a case that "any
specific policy proposals or approaches aimed at addressing global warming
must await further scientific inquiry."

A copy of the memo was recently given to The New York Times by a White House
adviser at the time who now disagrees with the administration's chosen
policies.

The Environmental Protection Agency tried one more time to argue that Mr.
Bush should not change course. 
In a section of a March 9 memo to the White House headed "Global warming
science is compelling," agency officials said: "The science is strongest on
the fact that carbon dioxide is contributing, and will continue to
contribute, to global climate change. The greatest scientific uncertainties
concern how fast the climate will change and what will be the regional
impacts. Even within these bands of uncertainty, however, it is clear that
global warming is an issue that must be addressed."

On March 13, Mr. Bush signed and sent a letter to four Republican senators
who had sought clarification of the administration's climate plans. In it,
Mr. Bush described the Energy Department study as "important new information
that warrants a re-evaluation, especially at a time of rising energy prices
and a serious energy shortage."

He said reconsideration of the carbon dioxide curbs was particularly
appropriate "given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the
causes of, and solutions to, global climate change."

The letter also reiterated his longstanding opposition to the Kyoto
Protocol, the climate treaty now moving toward enactment in almost all other
industrialized countries.

In the next months, the White House set up a series of briefings on climate
science and economics for the cabinet and also sought the advice of the
National Academy of Sciences. The experts convened by the academy reaffirmed
the scientific consensus that recent warming has human causes and that
significant risks lie ahead. But the administration's position on what to do
has not changed. 

Hidden Assumptions 
A handful of experts who have worked on climate policy in the Bush and
Clinton administrations say that both tried to skew information to favor
policies, but that there were distinct differences.

Andrew G. Keeler, who until June 2001 was on the president's Council of
Economic Advisers and has since returned to teaching at the University of
Georgia, said the Clinton administration had also played with economic
calculations of the costs of curbing carbon dioxide emissions, in its case
to show that limiting emissions would not be expensive.

But it made available all of the assumptions that went into its analysis, he
said; by contrast, the Bush administration drew contorted conclusions but
never revealed the details. 

"The Clinton administration got these lowest possible costs by taking every
assumption that would bias them down," he said. "But they were very clear
about what the assumptions were. Anybody who wanted to could wade through
them."

Tilting the Discussion 
Some of the loudest criticisms of the administration on climate science have
centered on changes to reports and other government documents dealing with
the causes and consequences of global warming. 

Political appointees have regularly revised news releases on climate from
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, altering
headlines and opening paragraphs to play down the continuing global warming
trend.

The changes are often subtle, but they consistently shift the meaning of
statements away from a sense that things are growing warmer in unusual ways.

The pattern has appeared in reports from other agencies as well. 
Several sets of drafts and final press releases from NOAA on temperature
trends were provided to The Times by government employees who said they were
dismayed by the practice.

On Aug. 14, 2003, a news release summarizing July temperature patterns began
as a draft with this headline: "NOAA reports record and near-record July
heat in the West, cooler than average in the East, global temperature much
warmer than average."

When it emerged from NOAA headquarters, it read: "NOAA reports cooler,
wetter than average in the East, hot in the West."

Such efforts have continued in recent weeks. Scientists at the Goddard
Institute for Space Studies, a leading research center studying climate,
worked with public affairs officials last month to finish a release on new
studies explaining why Antarctica had experienced cooling while most of the
rest of the world had warmed.

The results, just published in a refereed scientific journal, showed that
the depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica had temporarily shifted
atmospheric conditions in a way that cooled the region, but that as the
layer heals in coming decades, Antarctica would quickly warm. 

The headline initially approved by the agency's public affairs office and
the scientists was "Cool Antarctica May Warm Rapidly This Century, Study
Finds."

The version that finally emerged on Oct. 6 after review by political
appointees was titled "Study Shows Potential for Antarctic Climate Change." 

More significant than such changes has been the scope and depth of
involvement by administration appointees in controlling information flowing
through the farthest reaches of government on issues that could undermine
policies. 

Jeffrey Ruch, who runs Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a
network for whistle-blowers who identify government actions that violate
environmental laws or rules, said the Bush administration had taken
information control to a level far beyond that of its predecessor. 

"The Clinton administration was less organized and systematic, with lots of
infighting, kind of like the old Will Rogers joke 'I belong to no organized
political party; I'm a Democrat,' '' Mr. Ruch said. 

"This group, for good or ill, is much more centralized," he added. "It's
very controlled in the sense that almost no decision, even personnel
decisions, can be made without clearance from the top. In the realm of
science that becomes problematic, because science isn't neat like that."

Dr. Marburger, the president's science adviser, defended such changes. 
"This administration clearly has an attitude about climate change and
climate science, and it's much more cautious than the previous
administration," Dr. Marburger said. "This administration also tries to be
consistent in its messages. It's an inevitable consequence that you're going
to get this kind of tuning up of language."

Choosing Advisers 
Another area where the issue of scientific distortion keeps surfacing is in
the composition of advisory panels. In a host of instances documented in
news reports and by groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists,
candidates have been asked about their politics. In March 2003, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science criticized thosequeries, saying
in a statement that the practice "compromises the integrity of the process
of receiving advice and is inappropriate." Despite three years of charges
that it is remaking scientific and medical advisory panels to favor the
goals of industry or social conservatives, the White House has continued to
ask some panel nominees not only about their political views, but explicitly
whether they support Mr. Bush. 

One recent candidate was Prof. Sharon L. Smith, an expert on Arctic marine
ecology at the University of Miami. 
On March 12, she received a call from the White House. She had been
nominated to take a seat about to open up on the Arctic Research Commission,
a panel of presidential appointees that helps shape research on issues in
the far north, including the debate over oil exploration in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. 

The woman calling from the White House office of presidential personnel
complimented her résumé, Dr. Smith recalled, then asked the first and - as
it turned out - only question: "Do you support the president?"

"I was taking notes," Dr. Smith recalled. "I'm thinking I've lost my mind. I
was in total shock. I'd never been asked that before."

She responded she was not a fan of Mr. Bush's economic and foreign policies.
"That was the end of the interview," she said. "I was removed from
consideration instantly." 

In interviews, senior administration officials said that most advisory
panels reflected a broad array of opinions and backgrounds and that Mr. Bush
had the right at least to know where candidates stood on his policies. 

"The people who end up on these panels tend to be pretty diverse and clearly
don't all support the president's policies," Dr. Marburger said. "I think
you'd have to say that the question is not a litmus-test question. It's
perfectly acceptable for the president to know if someone he's appointing to
one of his advisory committees supports his policies or not."

Inevitable Tension 
To some extent, the war between science and the administration is a culture
clash, both supporters and critics of Mr. Bush say. 

"He uses a Sharpie pen," said John L. Howard Jr., a former adviser to Mr.
Bush on the environment in both the White House and the Texas statehouse.
"He's not a pencil with an eraser kind of guy."

In the campaign, Mr. Bush's team has portrayed this trait as an asset. His
critics in the sciences say it is a dangerous liability.

Dr. Marburger argues that when scientific information is flowing through
government agencies, the executive branch has every right to sift for
inconsistencies and adjust the tone to suit its policies, as long as the
result remains factual. 

He said the recent ferment, including the attacks from the Union of
Concerned Scientists, Democrats and environmental groups, all proved that
the system works and that objective scientific information ultimately comes
to the surface.

"I think people overestimate the power of government to affect science," he
said. "Science has so many self-correcting aspects that I'm not really
worried about these things."

He acknowledged that environmental and medical issues, in particular, would
continue to have a difficult time in the policy arena, because the science
was fundamentally more murky than in, say, physics or chemistry.

"I'm a physicist," Dr. Marburger said. "I know what you have to do to design
an experiment where you get an unambiguous result. There is nothing like
that in health and environment."

The situation is not likely to get better any time soon, say a host of
experts, in part because of the growing array of issues either underlaid by
science, like global warming, or created by science, like genetic
engineering and cloning. 

"Since the Sputnik era we have not seen science and technology so squarely
in the center of the radar screen for people in either the executive branch
or Congress," said Charles M. Vest, the president of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and a member of the President's Council of Advisers
on Science and Technology. "I think it's inevitable we're going to have
increasing conflicts and arguments about the role it plays in policy."

ANALYSIS

Scientific Integrity in Policymaking
An Investigation into the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science 

The U.S. government runs on vast amounts of information. Researchers at the
National Weather Service gather and analyze meteorological data to know when
to issue severe-weather advisories. Specialists at the Federal Reserve Board
collect and analyze economic data to determine when to raise or lower
interest rates. Experts at the Centers for Disease Control examine bacteria
and viral samples to guard against a large-scale outbreak of disease. The
American public relies on the accuracy of such governmental data and upon
the integrity of the researchers who gather and analyze it.

However, at a time when one might expect the federal government to
increasingly rely on impartial researchers for the critical role they play
in gathering and analyzing specialized data, there are numerous indications
that the opposite is occurring. A growing number of scientists, policy
makers, and technical specialists both inside and outside the government
allege that the Bush administration has suppressed or distorted the
scientific analyses of federal agencies to bring these results in line with
administration policy. In addition, these experts contend that
irregularities in the appointment of scientific advisors and advisory panels
are threatening to upset the legally mandated balance of these bodies. 

The quantity and breadth of these charges warrant further examination,
especially given the stature of many of the individuals lodging them. Toward
this end, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) undertook an investigation
of many of the allegations made in the mainstream media, in scientific
journals, and in overview reports issued from within the federal government
and by non-governmental organizations. To determine the validity of the
allegations, UCS reviewed the public record, obtained internal government
documents, and conducted interviews with many of the parties involved
(including current and former government officials).

<http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/page.cfm?pageID=1322> 

 

This edition of Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into
the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science is an update of the UCS report
of the same name released on February 18, 2004 and includes new information
UCS has received on several of the original incidents. The conclusions
reached and recommendations made in the report have not changed. For a full
detail of the changes in the report see Appendix C. To receive a copy of the
February 18, 2004 edition, email rsi at ucsusa.org

 

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