Science and the media: 19 - 25 February

Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:

• Scientists’ concerns about energy-critical elements as seen in national media coverage
• The outlook for the US patent office as portrayed in a front page article in the New York Times
• Nature Middle East’s editor’s intriguing thoughts on scientific statesmanship in Egypt’s future
• A Washington Post article on the UN’s new way of thinking about atmospheric pollutants
• A Wall Street Journal columnist’s thoughts on alarmism in science news
• From the New York Times, the latest Climategate news

National news: APS, MRS raise alarm about rare earths and other elements

The American Physical Society’s homepage includes a notice that says “Securing Materials for Emerging Technologies: New report from the APS . . . and the Materials Research Society (MRS) describes a plan to secure future supplies of rare earths and other elements critical to US energy independence.”

Over the weekend, both the New York Times (Saturday) and the Washington Post (Sunday) reported that APS and MRS had announced the report on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Times article and the Post article add only a little bit from the report itself to the summary offered in APS’s press release . That summary begins:

This summary goes on to discuss

• a “bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, of Colorado, the ‘Critical Minerals and Materials Promotion Act of 2011,’ [that] makes similar recommendations to those found in the report,”
• the reasons for naming elements energy-critical,
• the need for “information, collection and analysis,” and
• the need for R&D “focused on energy-critical elements and possible substitutes that can enhance vital aspects of the supply chain, including: geological deposit modeling, mineral extraction and processing, material characterization and substitution, utilization, manufacturing, recycling and lifecycle analysis.”

APS and MRS call for a federal “consumer-oriented ‘Critical Materials’ designation for ECE-related products” and for increased recycling of ECEs. With the exception of helium, the report recommends against establishing federal “non-defense-related economic stockpiles of ECEs.”

New York Times front: “Building a Better Patent Office”

Does an understaffed, bogged-down US patent system, hobbled by inadequate information technology, require boosting for the sake of American innovation? If so, the New York Times may have done a service by running the article “U.S. Sets 21st-Century Goal: Building a Better Patent Office” on the 21 February front page.

The article buries an illustrative anecdote that might have served as its “lede.” It notes that not far from the office of David J. Kappos, who directs the patent office, there’s “a model of the light bulb Edison presented for patent in November 1879"—and that Edison’s approval took only two and a half months. Contrast that with this datum:

Such “delays and inefficiencies are more than a nuisance for inventors,” the article declares, and then continues:

Only in the last three years has the patent office begun accepting “a majority of its applications in digital form.” Concerning that tardiness, the article offers another illustrative anecdote: “Mr. Obama astonished a group of technology executives last year when he described how the office has to print some applications filed by computer and scan them into another, incompatible computer system.”

The article also reports that:

• For the first time, a satellite office is being opened—in Detroit, giving rise to wisecracks about old technology.
• The staff has grown, but not enough to keep up. In 1997, 2.25 patents were pending for every one issued; now it’s almost six.
• The system could pay its own way, thanks to application and maintenance fees, but Congress diverts the income.
• Despite efficiency improvements, Paul R. Michel, a retired federal judge with special experience and perspective concerning patents, asserts that the patent office “can’t be made efficient in 18 months without a vast increase in finances.”

Scientist president for Egypt?

Consider how Mohammed Yahia , youthful editor of the hopeful new Web site Nature Middle East , came to introduce and examine that question—Scientist president for Egypt?—this week.

A year ago, Yahia introduced his site-editor blog with an inaugural posting that began:

And indeed Yahia has been trying to stimulate and help lead that discussion. A brief tour through the blog’s archives reveals, just to cite a few examples, engagement of the Middle East’s synchrotron project SESAME, study of the challenges in Arabic science journalism, and discussion of women in Arabic science.

Last July, long before the blog mused about the Nobel chemist Ahmed Zewail as Egypt’s possible future president, Zewail figured centrally in a posting about a new NGO, or nongovernmental organization. It began, “Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail and a host of other scientists from the Arab world gather today in Bibliotheca Alexandrina for the official launch of the ‘Age of Science’, an NGO with a clear science promotion agenda.” The NGO’s name, Yahia explained, is also that of “Zewail’s Arabic autobiography, which quickly became a bestseller after it was published in 2005.”

Yahia continued:

Here’s the wistful ending of that posting from a half-year before the Egyptian revolution: “Personally, I will sit and watch for now, capping my overflowing excitement. This is almost set up perfectly to actually play an active role in generating an interest in science among the general population, but too many disappointments taught me to wait and see before being excited.”

And here’s the opening of Yahia’s posting from 12 February:

That posting goes on to tell of Zewail’s hopes over past years to “overhaul ... science research and education in Egypt"—efforts “halted for unknown reasons over and over again.” Yahia also quotes Zewail on the science-and-religion question: “I don’t see there is any contradiction between science and religion whatsoever. Science looks into facts.”

The posting’s ending contains an early mention of a possible Zewail presidency:

Then on 22 February, a Yahia posting carried the headline that I’ve borrowed and adapted: “A scientist president?”

That posting’s ending requires summarizing first. There Yahia stipulates that as a naturalized US citizen, Zewail is constitutionally barred from running for Egypt’s presidency.

But even if that’s not something that can be changed, the posting has gedanken value. Here’s how it begins:

Most notably, Yahia quotes Zewail’s “strongest message yet” about the presidential possibility: “My national responsibility towards our country in these dire times and thousands of letters from Egyptians from within the country and abroad made me reconsider and think about running for the presidency.”

Recall, please, that in that first posting from a year ago—the one introducing “the Nature Middle East blog, House of Wisdom"—Yahia wrote, “We will discuss the problems of the region and the role of science in solving them.”

That’s something like the original purpose of the American Philosophical Society, founded by the polymath physicist Benjamin Franklin in 1743, the year Thomas Jefferson was born. More than half a century later, following the American revolution, US President Jefferson served concurrently as president of Franklin’s organization.

Often today, you hear varying comments about the applicability of “Jeffersonian democracy” in the Middle East. Probably such commenters seldom think about Jefferson’s science-mindedness. But it sounds like Yahia would.

New view of planetary emissions reductions

A 24 February Washington Post article , citing a new UN study , reports that the “projected rise in global temperatures could be cut in half in coming years if world governments focused on reducing emissions of two harmful pollutants—black carbon and ground-level ozone, including methane—rather than carbon dioxide alone.”

The article defines black carbon as “a component of soot” that threatens human health and “is known to hasten the melting of snow,” and says that ground-level ozone “kills farm crops and also adversely affects health.” The key point, reportedly, is that reducing those pollutants can lead much more quickly to benefits than can reducing carbon dioxide.

So what’s to be done? The article reports that reducing emissions of black carbon requires “placing a ban on open-field burning of agricultural waste, replacing industrial coke ovens with modern recovery ovens, introducing clean-burning biomass cook stoves for cooking and heating in developing countries and eliminating high-emitting vehicles.” For ground-level ozone, including methane, the prescriptions are to upgrade wastewater treatment, control methane emissions from livestock and reduce gas emissions from long-distance pipelines.

The article reports that the prescribed reductions would delay the expected warming for 20 years, until 2070, that “the study is aimed at local pollution control officials in municipalities worldwide, particularly in developing nations such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa,” and that this new focus has developed “in part because leaders have failed to reach a broader agreement to curb carbon dioxide, global warming’s biggest contributor.”

NOAA exonerated in the climate wars

Though the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal seem so far not to have published this news in a paper version, the 25 February New York Times article “Scientists Are Cleared of Misuse of Data” reports that the Commerce Department’s inspector general—acting formally on a request from Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-OK)—has “found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming.”

The Times article never uses the ubiquitous context-setting word Climategate, maybe on grounds of perceived inappropriate connotation. In any case, the senator made his request in the context of the famous controversy over University of East Anglia e-mail messages. “Of 1,073 messages,” the article says, “289 were exchanges with NOAA scientists.”

The article adds that in this 18 February report that was “circulated by the Obama administration” on 24 February, the inspector general wrote, “We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data.” The article also says: “Nor did the report fault Jane Lubchenco, NOAA’s top official, for testifying to Congress that the correspondence did not undermine climate science.”

The report did not review the climate data itself. It can now be listed with exonerations of various kinds by the British House of Commons, Pennsylvania State University, the InterAcademy Council and the National Research Council.

The article stipulates that Sen. Inhofe “said the report was far from a clean bill of health for the agency and that contrary to its executive summary, showed that the scientists ‘engaged in data manipulation.’”

According to the article, the report did find fault in two other ways. It questioned NOAA’s “handling of some Freedom of Information Act requests in 2007" and “noted the inappropriateness of e-mailing a collage cartoon depicting Senator Inhofe and five other climate skeptics marooned on a melting iceberg that passed between two NOAA scientists.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.