Science and the media: 2 - 8 October
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0746
In this week’s review, Steve Corneliussen discusses Michael Mann’s Washington Post op-ed charging bad faith in Republican climate-science investigations, a New York Times commentary criticizing the term STEM as a buzzword, some blogging climatologists’ response to the latest from Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a Post article about increasingly serious consideration of geoengineering countermeasures to climate change, a Nature essay conveying harsh views of climate politics, and a Nature commentary about the rise of science comedy.
Michael Mann advocates “good faith,” condemns “anti-science”
A “good-faith debate is essential for wise public policymaking,” writes Michael E. Mann in an 8 October Washington Post op-ed , but “attacks against . . . science must stop. They are not good-faith questioning of scientific research. They are anti-science.”
Mann charges that following Climategate, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is investigating Mann’s previous employer, the University of Virginia, in bad faith—and that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) seem likely to undertake bad-faith investigations as well, if control of the House of Representatives goes to the Republicans in November’s elections.
“The truth is,” Mann asserts, “that they don’t expect to uncover anything. Instead, they want to continue a 20-year assault on climate research, questioning basic science and promoting doubt where there is none.”
Mann’s op-ed summarizes familiar arguments about global overwarming, and concludes:
My fellow scientists and I must be ready to stand up to blatant abuse from politicians who seek to mislead and distract the public. They are hurting American science. And their failure to accept the reality of climate change will hurt our children and grandchildren, too.
Natalie Angier dislikes the term STEM
For this report, it’s probably germane to mention that when Natalie Angier, science writer at the New York Times, graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College, she had a second major to accompany physics. It was English. Angier doesn’t like the term STEM. She explains why in a long commentary in the Times‘s 5 October Science Times section.
The term is “opaque and confusing,” Angier complains, and “didactic and jargony,” and “greasy-peasy"—and Sally Ride “consciously avoids it.” Angier writes:
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, supposedly the major food groups of a comprehensive science education.
Aficionados pronounce STEM exactly as you’d imagine—like the plant part, like the cell type, like what you do to a tide and I wish I could do to this trend, but it’s probably too late. Go to any convention, Congressional hearing or science foundation bagel chat on the ever ominous theme of “Science in the Classroom, and why can’t our students be more like Singapore’s when they take international tests anyway?” and you’ll hear little about how to teach trigonometry or afford all those Popsicle sticks needed for the eighth-grade bridge-building competition, but you’ll be pelted by references to STEM.
Angier cites survey results released last month by the nonprofit group Entertainment Industries Council. “When some 5000 participants were asked whether they understood the term ‘STEM education,’” she reports, “86 percent said no.” She also cites Elizabeth Stage, the director of the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley:
Dr. Stage, a mathematician by training, thinks it’s a “false distinction” to “silo out” the different disciplines, and would much prefer to focus on what the fields have in common, like problem-solving, arguing from evidence and reconciling conflicting views. “That’s what we should have in the bulls'-eye of our target,” she said.
Angier briefly discusses why some people advocate a term that embraces technology, engineering, and math along with science. Then she resumes arguing her case against all of that:
Science has always encompassed the applied and the basic, and the impulses to explore and to invent have always been linked. Galileo built a telescope and then trained it on the sky. Advances in technology illuminate realms beyond our born senses, and those insights in turn yield better scientific toys. Engineers use math and physics and the scientific mind-set in everything they design; and those who don’t, please let us know, so we can fly someone else’s airplane and not cross your bridge when we come to it. Whatever happened to the need for interdisciplinary thinking? Why promote a brand that codifies atomization?
It’s hard to argue the case for buzz words, of course, but I do note this: Though it doesn’t take a rocket engineer to understand that engineers, mainly—not scientists—conceive, launch, and shepherd flights into space, the ubiquitous cliché remains “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist.” The other day the Post and the Times both ran fine, long obituaries of a rocket expert named Robert Truax. Both articles reported about his three degrees, all in engineering. One article outright called him an engineer.
- The Post headline: “Rocket Scientist Had Daredevil Ideas for Private Spaceflight.”
- The Times headline: “Robert Truax, a Top Rocket Scientist, Is Dead at 93.”
Scientists challenge Virginia attorney general on ethics
“Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
That was the bubble-bursting question of Joseph Welch, the Army’s attorney, to Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings in the US Senate. Now scientists at RealClimate.org have, in effect, asked the same question of the attorney general of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, who is seeking relentlessly to apply the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act to climate research conducted at the University of Virginia.
A 5 October Washington Post article headlined “Climate research legal fight heats up” reports that the attorney general has amended and refiled his “civil investigative demand” for access to information from the university. The article’s opening paragraphs summarize the situation:
The University of Virginia said Monday that it would continue to fight state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II’s efforts to obtain documents related to a climate scientist’s work, just hours after Cuccinelli reissued a civil subpoena for the papers.
The new Civil Investigative Demand revives a contentious fight between Cuccinelli (R), a vocal global warming skeptic, and Virginia’s flagship university over documents related to the research of Michael Mann, who worked at the university from 1999 to 2005. A judge blocked Cuccinelli’s first bid to obtain the documents.
Mann, whose research concluded that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming, works at the Pennsylvania State University.
Cuccinelli has been trying to force the public university, technically a client of his office, to turn over documents related to Mann’s work since April. Cuccinelli has said he wants to see the documents to determine whether Mann committed fraud as he sought public dollars for his work.
But the university went to court rather than comply, and in August, a Charlottesville area judge set aside the attorney general’s original demand.
In a new subpoena sent to the university last week, Cuccinelli asked that the school turn over all e-mails exchanged between Mann and 39 other scientists as well as between Mann and his secretaries and research associates.
The Post article also reports that the Virginia faculty and “academics across the country have said that acceding to Cuccinelli’s inquiry would have a chilling effect on academic freedom.” It quotes Francesca Grifo, director of the scientific integrity program of the Union of Concerned Scientists: “It’s our fervent hope that the university continues to push back and doesn’t allow this to become a ridiculous precedent.”
The scientists at RealClimate.org responded almost immediately to this latest development, in a posting headlined “Cuccinelli goes fishing again.” They, too, supply a summary of the situation. They also offer a number of concrete reasons why Cuccinelli’s “reasoning should scare the bejesus of anyone who has ever published a paper on any topic that any attorney might have a political grudge against.”
But it’s their conclusion that calls to mind that 1954 bubble-burst question. Their ending isn’t framed as a question, but it might as well be. With an earnest, direct simplicity like Joseph Welch’s, the RealClimate.org scientists simply note this key stricture from the ethics guidelines of the Virginia bar:
A lawyer should use the law’s procedures only for legitimate purposes and not to harass or intimidate others.
Washington Post: US interest is rising for formerly “wacky” geoengineering
In a 4 October article inside the A section, the Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin says that interest is rising in Washington and the US for geoengineering solutions to climate change. She begins:
It’s come to this: Climate-conscious policymakers are beginning to contemplate the possibility of playing God with the weather in the hope of slowing global warming.
For years it was considered downright wacky in official Washington to discuss geoengineering: altering the climate by reflecting sunlight back into the sky, sucking carbon dioxide from the air—or a host of other gee-whiz schemes. But in the past year the wacky has won a following, spurred in part by the recent collapse of climate legislation as well as by growing interest among private entrepreneurs and foreign officials.
Though Eilperin notes that “the Office of Science Technology Policy declined to comment on the matter, as did the Energy Department,” she says that among those becoming interested, or at least taking notice, are
- House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN)
- the Government Accountability Office
- “a bipartisan task force of experts”
- the National Commission on Energy Policy’s task force
- National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone
- participants at a recent conference sponsored by Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate magazine.
Eilperin summarizes the well-known arguments for and against geoengineering, including the fear that merely talking about it harms the health of climate-change politics generally. She quotes Steven Hamburg, the Environmental Defense Fund’s chief scientist: “Geoengineering only makes sense—if it makes sense, and that’s an important conditional—as a way to bridge this crisis period.”
Daniel S. Greenberg, Roger Pielke Jr, and the discouraging politics of climate
For those with ardent hopes about the combination of climate science and politics, the 30 September Nature offers a discouraging essay in the form of a book review by the longtime Washington science-policy observer Daniel S. Greenberg. Under the headline “Climate Change: Our Emissions Obsession,” Greenberg engages topics from Roger Pielke Jr’s The Climate Fix, but concludes that the book “illustrates the dilemma confronting scientists who seek to influence politics. Telling it like it is does not thrive on Capitol Hill. But shaping the message to suit the politics often involves a betrayal of scientific truth and a distortion of public and political understanding.”
Pielke worked as a congressional staffer before becoming a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Greenberg calls him “a righteous scold at the intersection of politics and climate-change science,” with prominent climate researchers and their organizations “the object of his ire” for presenting “a narrow scientific message to rouse politicians and the public to confront the dangers of global warming.” Greenberg continues:
In pursuit of public support and government action, Pielke charges, mainstream researchers in the climate-change community have fudged the science, compromised the peer-review process and encouraged governments to pursue dubious remedies, while neglecting possibilities for averting climate-caused disasters. Unrealistic scenarios for reducing carbon emissions have been pushed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he argues, and the leaked e-mails from the notorious “Climategate” episode have emboldened sceptics and diminished public confidence in scientific integrity.
Pielke’s book’s subtitle, What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming, reflects much about Greenberg’s outlook. Greenberg believes that neither “politicians nor the public respond to nuanced, cautiously worded messages from the arcane world of science,” that “anti-tax hysteria, a mainstay of contemporary US politics,” renders unrealistic Pielke’s hopes for modest taxes on coal to finance energy R&D, and that “common sense is frequently unwelcome in climate politics.”
Nature commentary: science humor important, and UK excels in it
Whether or not the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory is gradually branding physics and physicists, especially now that CBS considers it a mainstay and Jim Parsons has won an Emmy (about which his physicist character Sheldon Cooper would exclaim: “Bazinga!”), the show surely promotes the connection of science with comedy. So does a commentary in the 30 September Nature.
The essayist, Helen Pilcher, has long been associated with this topic. Humor, she writes this time, “can make science accessible"; comedy “helps humanize science.” She’s sorry that scientists “are often perceived as separate from culture,” given that science “is part of our everyday lives.”
However, Pilcher also suggests the need to “look closer” and to see “cultural peculiarities emerge.” She avoids bluntness, but part of her message distills to this: Science comedy in the UK is more advanced than in the US. What a British comedian and science enthusiast calls “reading-list comedy” Pilcher sees as “part of a new strain that is unashamedly intellectual,” making audiences clamor for “an encore and a bibliography.” She sees the UK in the “vanguard.”
Pilcher does dwell on the Ig Nobel Prizes , an American parody, and she does quote an intellectual line from a US comedian, Brian Malow: “Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar . . . and doesn’t.” (Malow is to play the inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival this month in Washington, DC.) But she reports that Malow “admits such gags fall flat in mainstream comedy clubs,” whereas in Britain, “science comedy seems to have reached a broader audience—research-related quips can be found on mainstream TV panel games,” on radio programs, and on stage. Pilcher highlights Malow’s statement that “America has some of the world’s finest scientists and finest comedians, but the two have yet to overlap.”
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.
