B and B

Scientific abuse in Bush's Fish and Wildlife Service

A Bush administration official who has been abusing the scientific and regulatory process in her role at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may, possibly, be reined in.  The Washington Post reported yesterday (link via Carpetbagger Report):

A senior Bush political appointee at the Interior Department has repeatedly altered scientific field reports to minimize protections for imperiled species and disclosed confidential information to private groups seeking to affect policy decisions, the department's inspector general concluded.

The investigator's report on Julie A. MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks -- which was triggered by an anonymous complaint from a Fish and Wildlife Service employee and expanded in October after a Washington Post article about MacDonald -- said she frequently sought to reshape the agency's scientific reports in an effort to ease the impact of agency decisions on private landowners.

Inspector General Earl E. Devaney referred the case to Interior's top officials for "potential administrative action," according to the document, which was reported yesterday in the New York Times.

The IG noted that MacDonald "admitted that her degree is in civil engineering and that she has no formal educational background in natural sciences" but repeatedly instructed Fish and Wildlife scientists to change their recommendations on identifying "critical habitats," despite her lack of expertise.

At one point, according to Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a "nesting range" of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a "running battle" with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.

MacDonald has been up to these tricks for years.  Back in the early days of this blog, in December 2004 (almost two and a half years ago!), I pointed to a New York Times article about MacDonald interfering with scientific reports on a threatened species, the sage grouse.  Most galling to me at the time were her comments that reports from scientific experts should be treated as just another industry publication. 

Will this inspector general's report finally help to end the abuse by this one particular person?  The Bushies do not change their ways easily, so even if she is forced out, her replacement will likely be much the same.

Earth science, Bush, and stealth budgeting maneuvers

Bush's attack on the scientists who study our planet heated up last year in a way that I completely missed. In article in the December issue of World Watch, renowned climate scientist James Hansen wrote about the stealth budget cuts dictated by the administration:

... Many people are aware that something bad happened to the NASA Earth Science budget this year, yet the severity of the cuts and their long-term implications are not universally recognized. In part this is because of a stealth budgeting maneuver.

...

When the administration announced its planned fiscal 2007 budget, NASA science was listed as having typical changes of 1 percent or so. However, Earth Science research actually had a staggering reduction of about 20 percent from the 2006 budget. How could that be accomplished? Simple enough: reduce the 2006 research budget retroactively by 20 percent! One-third of the way into fiscal year 2006, NASA Earth Science was told to go figure out how to live with a 20-percent loss of the current year's funds.

The Earth Science budget is almost a going-out-of-business budget. From the taxpayers' point of view it makes no sense. An 80-percent budget must be used mainly to support infrastructure ... . But the budget cuts wipe off the books most planned new satellite missions ..., and support for contractors, young scientists, and students disappears, with dire implications for future capabilities.

Bizarrely, this is happening just when NASA data are yielding spectacular and startling results. [Hansen then describes dramatic evidence of Arctic ice melt.]

One way to avoid bad news: stop the measurements!

As you may recall, Hansen was the scientist who helped reveal early last year how NASA administrators were trying to keep their scientists from talking openly to the media.

That didn't work out so well once the scheme became public, but now the Bushies have stepped up the fight and appear to be out to eliminate these scientists' work. We all will pay the price if they succeed.

GOP to abolish the House Science Committee?

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert of New York announced on Friday that he is retiring, after more than two decades in Congress. One of the few Republicans in D.C. with sensible priorities on science and environmental protection, he has been the chair of the House Science Committee for the last few years. In that role, he has stood up to the Bush administration and the GOP leadership on a few issues where their priorities are badly misplaced. In particular, he has been vocal in favor of NASA's embattled Earth-observing missions and against harassment of scientists working on global warming issues.

Rather than replace Boehlert as head of the Science Committee with a GOP member who shares their hostility to much current scientific research on certain subjects, the House Republican leadership is reportedly considering the idea of simply abolishing the Science Committee. The Hill reported last week (via Space Politics):

GOP insiders were not surprised by [Boehlert's] announcement given that he had heart bypass surgery after winning reelection in 2004 and that House GOP leaders are considering a plan to abolish the Science Committee, which Boehlert chairs, as part of a plan to reorganize the committee structure.

If they follow through with this idea, it would certainly be symbolic of the attitude of Washington Republicans towards science.

EPA screening scientists, too

In addition to NASA and NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency has its own issue with allowing scientists to talk directly to the public. And, unlike the other agencies, the EPA is not even pretending to change its policy.

On February 9, as Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) discovered, the EPA's news director for research and development, Ann Brown, sent an email to all staff saying:

"We are asked to remind all employees that EPA's standard media procedure is to refer all media queries regarding ORD [Office of Research and Development] to Ann Brown, ORD News Director, prior to agreeing to or conducting any interviews. The purpose of this policy is to enable the Agency to clarify the request, and to ensure that the reporter talks with appropriate experts on science, budget, or administrative issues. Support for this policy also will allow reasonable time for appropriate management response."

The timing is suggestive, coming several days after the George Deutsch flap at NASA became public. Who asked Ann Brown to remind EPA scientists that, unlike NASA, their policy wasn't going to change?

I suspect they are connected to the people who propose to cut the EPA's library budget by 80%—cuts that, left intact, would leave both the agency's staff and the general public "without useful access to the agency's vast storehouse of information."

Details on the muzzling of NOAA scientists

The radio program, Earth and Sky, (which inexplicably is not aired in San Antonio) has an interview with MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel, published on February 16. He discusses the recent suggestions that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), parent office to the National Weather Service, has been monitoring the contact its scientists have with the public and suppressing some scientific opinions. Emanuel says:

I think there's little question that this [censorship] has been going. In the last year or so, I've had a number of colleagues in NOAA complaining about this. It takes different forms, and sometimes it's a bit subtle, but there's no question that they feel pressure to be very cautious about what they say on the issue of hurricanes and global warming. It's less clear exactly where this is coming from. We don't really know how high up in NOAA, or even if it's beyond NOAA.

Emanuel claims that the NOAA censorship problem only concerns a few scientists:

[M]y impression is that 99% of the scientific employees of NOAA have no problem at all, and are doing work that has no implications, no political implications. And they're left alone. It's just the few that are doing things that the senior management doesn't approve of that have the problems.

What problems do these chosen few have?

I think that the most egregious cases that I know about have been when scientists have been contacted by somebody in the media, maybe a major television station, and an interview was set up, and these things have to be cleared with the NOAA, with the Department of Commerce press office, and they were just nixed. They were just basically told, "no, you may not do this interview. End of story."

Who are the chosen few that "senior management doesn't approve of"? A Wall Street Journal article from February 16 actually names two:

Pieter Tans, a researcher who studies carbon dioxide at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., says public-affairs "minders" now sit in on more interviews, something that didn't happen before. He said he sees it as an attempt to control comments about the dangers of climate change.
...
Thomas Knutson, a research meteorologist with the agency's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., said he believes his views have been censored by the NOAA public-affairs office because of his view that global warming could be making hurricanes worse. Last October the public-affairs office said no to a scheduled interview with CNBC television, he said.
...
On another occasion, Dr. Knutson said he had been invited around the time of Hurricane Katrina to appear on a television show with Ron Reagan, the son of former President Reagan who is co-host of a show on MSNBC. But shortly before he was to appear, he got a voice mail from a person in public affairs. "He said, 'The White House turned it down,'" Dr. Knutson said.

Emanuel is also concerned that NOAA, late last year, officially took sides in an area of considerable scientific controversy. In response to the super-active Atlantic hurricane season, the NOAA published an article in their official magazine titled "NOAA ATTRIBUTES RECENT INCREASE IN HURRICANE ACTIVITY TO NATURALLY OCCURRING MULTI-DECADAL CLIMATE VARIABILITY. In other words, they told the public not to link all this destruction and devastation to our changing climate—it's just a natural cycle that we're currently cresting.

Yet it turns out that a significant number of scientists believe there is evidence suggesting that our warmer climate is already causing stronger hurricanes." Emanuel says:

There is the problem of an agency, like NOAA or NASA, taking a very decided stance in something that, among scientists, is controversial. I've never seen that happen before. What would have happened if back in the 1980's, NOAA had held a press conference to say that there's no such thing as an ozone hole? I mean everyone would have been shocked that they would take a position in an ongoing debate like that. And yet they have done this with hurricanes and global warming. Although I understand that they have retracted that recently, and couched it in more, in looser terms.

The Wall Street Journal article says that this retraction took place last week:

Amid a growing outcry from climate researchers in its own ranks, the [NOAA] backed away from a statement it released after last year's powerful hurricane season that discounted any link to global warming. A corrected statement, which says some NOAA researchers disagree with that view, was posted to NOAA's Web site yesterday [February 15].

The retraction appears to have taken the form of a footnote added to the end of the November article—in small print. I can't find any other reference to it in a more prominent place on NOAA's web site or amongst their press releases. The small print says:

*EDITOR’S NOTE: This consensus in this on-line magazine story represents the views of some NOAA hurricane researchers and forecasters, but does not necessarily represent the views of all NOAA scientists. It was not the intention of this article to discount the presence of a human-induced global warming element or to attempt to claim that such an element is not present. There is a robust, on-going discussion on hurricanes and climate change within NOAA and the scientific community. The headline and paragraph could have more clearly stated:

“Agreement Among Some NOAA Hurricane Researchers and Forecasters” There is agreement among a number of NOAA hurricane researchers and forecasters that recent increases in hurricane activity are primarily the result of natural fluctuations in the tropical climate system known as the tropical multi-decadal signal.”

Despite this rather weak correction, the original, misleading, headline and article still dominate on that web page, for future web surfers to stumble across. The editor's note is not even referred to until the concluding paragraphs. It can easily be missed altogether.

Emanuel, thanks to a "strong statement" issued by the head of NOAA recently, thinks the problems may be mostly in the past. I think he is way too optimistic.

NASA's administrator also issued a "strong statement" recently. But his bosses in the White House went ahead and replaced the infamous George Deutsch in the NASA press office with another scientific novice and political appointee.

It appears that the Bushies do not have any intention of stepping back from their attempts to control the flow of information out of NASA, and so the fortunes for improving the similar climate at NOAA—much further away from the public eye—do not appear promising.

The head of NOAA has not even acknowledged that there is a problem, as Emanuel points out:

Recently, the administrator of NOAA, Conrad Lautenbacher, issued a statement to his employees pretty much along those lines as well [scientific openness to the press]. Although he also denied that there was any wrong-doing, which [NASA Administrator Mike] Griffin did not do. And I think that was a mistake, because too many people know better.

Mistake? Or a calculated move? No problems means no changes are necessary.

NASA suppressed Earth science news

The NASA press office scandal rolls on, with yet more revelations about misdeeds over the last couple years.

Bush flunkies in the NASA press office have apparently been trying to suppress Earth science reports ever since the Presidential election of 2004, according to yesterday's New York Times. Apparently they must have thought that too much news on pollution and global warming—or should I use the NASA press office's preferred term of 'climate change'—might have a negative effect on their patron's political standing.

Top political appointees in the NASA press office exerted strong pressure during the 2004 presidential campaign to cut the flow of news releases on glaciers, climate, pollution and other earth sciences, public affairs officers at the agency say.

...

In a conference call with colleagues in October 2004, the colleagues said, [Gretchen Cook-Anderson, in charge of managing the flow of Earth science news at NASA headquarters] said that Glenn Mahone, then the assistant administrator for public affairs, had told her that a planned news conference on fresh readings by a new NASA satellite, Aura, that measures ozone and air pollution, should not take place until after the election.

...

[A]rchives of news releases on the NASA headquarters Web site show a sharp change in the number of such releases, to 12 in 2005 from about four dozen in 2004, a figure that had helped lead to the pressure to cut back.

Meanwhile, the Bushies have another way to cut back on the flow of Earth science news besides using their press office thugs. But we already knew about this tactic—slash its funding!

House Science Committee Chair Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) said yesterday at the hearing on NASA's budget (emphasis mine): "I am extremely uneasy about this budget, and I am in a quandary at this point about what to do about it. This budget is bad for space science, worse for earth science, perhaps worse still for aeronautics."

Committee member Mark Udall (D-Co) added:

"The situation facing the space and Earth sciences is equally troubling. More than a billion dollars was removed last year from the budgetary runout for space and Earth science that had been in the FY 2005 NASA outyear budget plan. An additional $3.1 billion is removed from the runout in this year's budget request.

So just two years after OSTP director Marburger lauded the "robust" science program that would be undertaken if the [Moon-Mars] exploration initiative were approved, we have seen more than $4 billion taken out of NASA's space and Earth science accounts."

One of the most inexplicable aspects of those cuts is NASA's plan to cut between $350 to $400 million from research and analysis funding over the next five years. As you may know, that is the funding that helps develop the next generation of scientists and engineers at our nation's universities.

Hopefully this bipartisan viewpoint in Congress will help repel the Bush forces and save NASA's Earth science programs for the future. They had some success last year. What will happen this year?

Climate scientist Hansen trying to do for NOAA what he did for NASA

Is there another batallion of George Deutsch's hidden away in the bowels of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration? Climate scientist James Hansen, whose actions led to the unveiling of the NASA press office scandal over the last couple weeks, suggests that there may be. The Washington Post reports in their Saturday edition:

James E. Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who sparked an uproar last month by accusing the Bush administration of keeping scientific information from reaching the public, said Friday that officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are also muzzling researchers who study global warming.

Hansen, speaking in a panel discussion about science and the environment before a packed audience at the New School university, said that while he hopes his own agency will soon adopt a more open policy, NOAA insists on having "a minder" monitor its scientists when they discuss their findings with journalists.

...

After the panel discussion -- which also featured Princeton University professor Michael Oppenheimer, American Enterprise Institute fellow Steven Hayward and Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich -- Hansen said he knows of NOAA scientists who are chafing at the administration's restrictions but are afraid to speak out.

Obviously, I do not know what lies behind Hansen's allegations. But last August, Chris Mooney wrote two posts about a what he believed was a mysterious lack of press releases from NOAA for "cutting edge" climate research that they were funding.

Not long after that, and about a month after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Raw Story reported that NOAA, which is the parent agency of the National Weather Service, was insisting that all media contact by employees be pre-approved.

The Department of Commerce has issued a blanket media policy to employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), requiring that all requests for contact from national media be first approved by the Department, RAW STORY has learned.

According to a leaked Sept. 29 email memo sent out to NOAA staff, including employees of the National Weather Service (NWS) -- both of which are under the Department of Commerce -- employees must collect information from reporters and forward it to the Department.

...

“Prior to this policy change, if a media organization called our office (or any other National Weather Service office) and wanted an interview, we would do our best to accommodate the request as quickly as possible,” said one NOAA employee who requested anonymity. “While often such requests are from local media, local offices do get requests from national media if a weather event is big enough to be a national story.”

The policy requires that local weather offices forward media requests to the NWS press office, who in turn would forward the request on to the Commerce Department’s public relations office. The Department would then decide whether comment should be granted.

Under this new policy, the Department, rather than the weather agencies, would also determine who would then provide comment.

“There has been no explanation as to why this policy was issued. It does appear the intent of this policy is to restrict the flow of weather information to the national media,” said the NOAA employee who also expressed concern over why Commerce is suddenly making blanket policy decisions for the NWS and deciding who can speak to the media.

Hansen's earlier comments about the problems at NASA jump-started the process to help straighten up how that premier government science agency treats its public communications. It looks like Hansen is now trying to do the same for another such agency.

Global Precipitation Measurement mission delayed until 2012

I've only had a chance to briefly peruse the NASA budget proposal, but it didn't take long to discover at least one major negative impact on important Earth science. The launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, whose data will be so important for improved understanding of hurricanes, amongst other things, has been put off a further two-and-a-half years to late 2012.

Last spring, I summarized the GPM mission in a post here. Its goals:

GPM aims to provide "near-global measurement of precipitation, its distribution, and physical processes," in order to help scientists more fully understand the details of Earth's water cycle. The total cost is approximately one billion dollars, so it is a major project. Fittingly, the data it gathers will be extremely useful in many areas of direct benefit to society. Climate scientists will be able to improve their climate models and thus improve climate prediction, which will be crucial to planning for and trying to reduce the effects of global warming in coming years. Meteorologists will be able to use this data to improve their weather models and thus improve weather forecasts. And hydrologists will be able to use data about rainfall in large drainage basins to better understand flood hazards and to enable more precise planning of activities dependent upon fresh water, which is an awful lot of activities

As I wrote in that same post, the schedule of GPM was one of the top concerns of the National Academy of Sciences panel that last year warned Congress that NASA's fleet of Earth-observing missions was at risk of collapse.

Those concerns are not likely to be allayed by news like this.

NASA science's future clouded by Bush vision

Another year, another Bush NASA budget that fails to adequately fund the agency that is supposed to fulfill his so-called "Vision for Space Exploration." Unfortunately, this was predictable right from the moment when Bush first proposed that NASA set its sight on returning humans to the Moon. That is why I suspect that the actual Bush vision is more along the lines of a Vision for Gradually Purging NASA of its Troublesome Scientists—particularly those ones who study the planet we live on. The recent actions of Bush flunky George Deutsch to harass those same scientists is certainly consistent with this hypothesis. (By the way, Deutsch has apparently resigned from NASA.)

The headlines claim that NASA's budget has increased by a few percent, thus keeping up with inflation. But hidden below the surface is the news that the lame duck Space Shuttle program and the initial preparations for the thinly-justified, relatively uninspiring goal of sending humans back to the Moon eat up all of that small increase and more. The actual science that NASA does—in particular the missions that gather data on how the Earth works and how it is changing—will likely have to be severely cut in coming years if Bush gets his way.

Keith Cowing of NASA Watch calls it "the slow motion gutting of space science." Likely the same will be said of Earth science once the full details emerge.

The Chair of the House Science Committee, Sherwood Boehlert of New York, who last year led the charge to temporarily preserve NASA's Earth science programs, says this about the Bush administration's NASA budget proposal:

I am also greatly concerned about the proposed budget for [NASA], and particularly the slowed growth for NASA's space and earth science programs. We will be reviewing that budget closely to determine exactly what impact the sharply reduced growth for NASA science will have. Science missions have been NASA's most successful activities, and they are also the activities at NASA that most enhance human understanding of our world (the true meaning of 'exploration') and that have the greatest potential to develop new technologies. Science funding should not be taking a back seat to operational programs that have much less impact. We have to be sure that we are not demonstrating that science is a 'crown jewel' of NASA by seeing how much we can get for it at the pawnshop.

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has been repeatedly saying in recent months, "NASA simply cannot afford to do everything that our many constituencies would like us to do." In spite of this common refrain, Griffin has previously claimed that science would not be cut.

But what is clear now, if only suspected before, is that NASA science is going to get the short end of the stick. If Congress allows that to happen, it will be a travesty. For, as Rep. Boehlert says, science missions have been NASA's most successful activities. And the unheralded Earth science programs are NASA's most valuable activities.

At least they are the most valuable for those of us who have to live on this planet.

Framing science?

On the heels of his dubious advice for scientists to get involved in targeting individual politicians for defeat, journalist Chris Mooney now, in a new article in Seed magazine, has further suggestions for how scientists can combat the distortion of their work by those with ulterior motives.

The questions he is trying to answer: "How can scientists combat the political distortion of science? How can they defend evolution? How can they win back America, and better translate what they know for the public?"

Aside from the "win back America" one (scientists have not lost America, after all), these are reasonable questions. Political distortion of science has become epidemic amongst the ruling party in Washington, DC. Evolution has been under attack by religious conservatives for decades. And scientists have traditionally been poor at translating their knowledge to the public.

Mooney's approach: "Ideally, and in the best spirit of science, we should view the current political quandary as a problem to be addressed through trial and error—empirical attempts to determine what actually works when it comes to translating science for the general public."

Finally, his suggestion:

Ironically, followers of regular politics are catching on to something that doesn’t seem to have dawned on most scientists yet: It’s actually possible to study empirically which public communication messages work and which don’t. It’s even becoming possible to craft a communications strategy that’s based on a rich understanding of how the human mind actually operates—one that, if properly executed by scientists and their supporters, could help rescue scientific integrity in America while better informing the American public. If we want to defend the knowledge that science has brought into the world, perhaps we should consider drawing upon the talents of researchers—social and cognitive scientists—who have brought empirical methods to bear on the study of effective political communication itself.

Yes, good ol' "framing"—an approach that the GOP has used as part of their political success over the last decade (e.g., "death tax" rather than "estate tax"), and that many of their opposition suddenly became enchanted with (including myself, if only briefly) after the heart-breaking loss of the most recent Presidential election.

Mooney goes on to provide an example of how framing can be used in the name of science:

Consider the technically complex issue of climate change, where attacks on science have been rampant and the public has been deeply confused. Grady and Aubrun [of the communications consulting firm Cultural Logic] have found that as an explanation, the “greenhouse effect” simply confuses people. Few Americans have any firsthand experience of greenhouses, and they don’t grasp the proposed analogy between carbon dioxide (a gas) and glass walls. So instead, Grady and Aubrun suggest talking about a “carbon dioxide blanket” encircling the earth—an explanation that instantly helps people understand why a heating effect is taking place. Sure, it’s a metaphor and shouldn’t be taken literally. But then, so was the concept of an ozone “hole”—a phrasing that instantly allowed the public to understand the issue of ozone depletion and that helped to galvanize political action.

I must admit to letting out a big groan when I read the "carbon dioxide blanket" suggestion. As a former scientist with a keen interest in communicating the wonders of scientific discovery to the general population, this strikes me as a move in exactly the wrong direction. Explaining global warming as being caused by a "carbon dioxide blanket," even if it were accurate, will not do anything to counter the misinformation about scientists supposedly still arguing over whether humans add to global warming and by how much and whether it is harmful. In general, use of frames like this, as Mark Paris put it in a comment at Mooney's blog, "might give people the illusion that they understand the problem rather than any real understanding."

These kind of slick PR tactics are best kept far away from the presentation of scientific results to the public, I believe, lest the public's understanding of science erode further and the public's trust of scientists eventually dwindle towards the level of that of advertisers and politicians.

Mooney does have a better suggestion, regarding fending off the attempts by religious conservatives to insert religious belief into public school science classes. Rather than boycotting hearings led by anti-evolutionists, as scientists recently did in Kansas, they should engage the public. "[T]he scientific community should be promoting a positive message that teaches the public why evolution is such a powerful scientific theory, and about how scientists weigh evidence."

Of course, this applies much broader than evolution. And also, it is hardly a new suggestion. But reminders are always helpful.