Science and the media: 26 March - 1 April

Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:

• Science in the political controversy emanating from Wisconsin, as seen on the New York Times opinion page
• Two new articles from the Pakistani polymath physicist and social commentator Pervez Hoodbhoy
• The argument that public nuclear fears should be taken more seriously, as presented in a Nature commentary
• Recent egregiousness, most notably at CNN, in the realm of nuclear hysteria
• The advent of the periodical Nature Climate Change

New York Times, Krugman draw science into Wisconsin contentiousness

In a newly developing dimension of Wisconsin’s turbulent political contentiousness about government employment, Republicans are seeking access to a prominent scholar’s e-mail messages. A New York Times editorial and Times columnist Paul Krugman have not only harshly criticized the tactic, but have highlighted analogies to recent political contentiousness about climate science.

William Cronon serves as a professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and as president of the American Historical Association. In recent blog postings and in a 22 March Times op-ed , he has criticized Wisconsin Republicans for “seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well.”

Cronon charges that Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, “has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War,” and compares Walker to the late Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Even before Cronon’s op-ed appeared, Wisconsin Republicans had filed a freedom-of-information request demanding access to any of his university e-mail messages that might contain certain words or phrases, including Republican, Scott Walker, union and rally.

The 28 March Times opinion pages engaged all of this with:

• A mixed set of letters to the editor , one of which condemned the McCarthy comparison as “shameful” and a “disgrace.”
• The editorial “A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin,” for which the Times‘s online teaser said, “State Republicans target a distinguished historian for criticizing the union-busting law.”
• The Krugman column “American Thought Police,” for which the teaser alleged a “chilling effect of right-wing attacks on scholars.”

It’s probably noteworthy that by implication, the editorial’s opening classifies climate scientists as “liberal academics":

The editorial closes by asserting that professors “are not just ordinary state employees” and by citing the conservative federal judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who has noted that state university faculty members are “employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives.” The editors declare that a “political fishing expedition through a professor’s files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues” and that the effort “makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous.”

The Krugman column makes similar arguments, but replaces the Cuccinelli example with that of the controversy over e-mail correspondence among scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK—"Climategate,” to use a connotatively freighted name. Krugman calls the Cronon affair “one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.”

Krugman stipulates that technically, “Republicans may be within their rights,” but concludes by asserting that what’s at stake “is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding.” He asserts that “Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down,” and declares that it’s “up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.”

Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, cont.

Readers of Physics Today may remember Pervez Hoodbhoy, the polymath Pakistani physicist and social commentator, for his August 2007 article “Science and the Islamic world: The quest for rapprochement.” Recently Hoodbhoy published a pair of physics-related political articles in prominent online English-language periodicals:

“Pakistan can’t handle Fukushima” summarizes the Japanese disaster, criticizes Pakistan’s lack of a proper nuclear-safety culture, and argues that until “nuclear fusion power becomes available after some decades, Pakistan, like other countries, must rely on a mix of oil, gas, hydro, coal, solar, wind, and other renewables.”

Hoodbhoy predicts that in a disaster, the “rich and the fortunate would succeed; the rest would not. Unlike the orderly and disciplined evacuation of post-tsunami Fukushima, all hell would break loose as millions would try to flee. Looters would strip everything bare, roads would be clogged, and vital services would collapse.” He warns, “Japan’s nuclear disaster should open our eyes.” And he declares, “It is time to down-size Pakistan’s nuclear fission power production.”

The lengthy “Pakistan’s nuclear bayonet” reviews Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons history, of course with substantial attention to relations with India. The article explains that Pakistan’s “nukes generate income” because proliferation-worried “international financial donors are compelled to keep pumping in funds.”

Hoodbhoy asks, “But can our nukes lose their magic? Be stolen, rendered impotent or lose the charm through which they bring in precious revenue? More fundamentally, how and when could they fail to deter?” He continues: “A turning point could possibly come with Mumbai-II. This is no idle speculation. The military establishment’s reluctance to clamp down on anti-India jihadi groups, or to punish those who carried out Mumbai-I, makes a second Pakistan-based attack simply a matter of time.”

Hoodbhoy’s concluding paragraph requires quoting:

Colin Macilwain in Nature: Concerns over nuclear energy are legitimate

With important exceptions, charges Colin Macilwain in a Nature column , nuclear experts commenting on Fukushima have been “defensive, selective, condescending towards public fears and . . . ultimately counterproductive.” He believes that “legitimate” technical analysis has been “largely drowned out by the flood of technical reassurance offered by nuclear scientists and engineers in the wake of the disaster.”

Macilwain cites three problem areas requiring, in his view, better attention: multiple reactors at the same site and insufficient seriousness about moving to safer reactor designs and about replacing on-site water storage of spent fuel rods.

Macilwain also offers a physics-history theory about what he believes he’s seeing:

In closing, he declares that the “real risk of nuclear power is that active human intervention has to be maintained, come rain, shine, war or political upheaval. That, and the threat of a downside too terrible to contemplate.”

CNN anchor adamant: Fukushima radiation threatens US

With due respect to Colin Macilwain’s caution (please see the earlier accompanying report) against condescension towards public nuclear fears, a certain level of nuclear hysteria has inevitably persisted since the tsunami, with highlights—probably the wrong word—that may merit at least brief attention.

Earlier in March, the columnist Amy Goodman not only brandished Hiroshima in the nuclear-power discussion, but falsely conflated Fukushima and the tsunami that actually caused the devastation. The run on both radiation detectors and potassium iodide pills that had begun even then in the US now seems particularly noteworthy in the nuclear-hysteria realm.

According to a recent New York Times article , post-Fukushima demand “quickly outstripped supplies and the limited capacity to produce more.” One company’s orders for Geiger counters grew by more than an order of magnitude.

But something now circulating on the web may beat that story when it comes to irrationality about the more than 5000 miles of ocean separating Japan from the US west coast—and this story involves not misinformed citizens, but Nancy Grace, a CNN journalist with two advanced degrees in law. Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth blog posting “Radiation + Cable Anchor + Science = ?” at the New York Times site begins:

Revkin links to the brief clip, which shows anchorwoman Grace hectoring a meteorologist concerning what she sees as an imminent radiation threat crossing the Pacific to harm Americans. The meteorologist strives mightily to keep this bizarre, impromptu debate grounded in factual reality. Revkin calls the exchange “astonishing.” For my own part, I’ll just add that in decades of paying close attention to science in the news, I’ve never seen anything remotely like this clip.

New periodical: Nature Climate Change

Here’s the first line of an e-mail message from the organization that publishes Nature and many other science periodicals: “Dedicated to publishing the most significant and cutting-edge research on the impacts of global climate change and its implications, the first issue of Nature Climate Change is now published and available free to view online.”

And here are a few indicators of what prospective readers can expect:

Volume 1 Issue 1 features most prominently the research paper “Global radiative forcing from contrail cirrus,” which Nature Publishing Group blurbs this way:

A commentary in the first issue argues that “public understanding of climate science deserves the strongest possible communications science to convey the practical implications of large, complex, uncertain physical, biological and social processes.” The article promises to “identify the communications science that is needed to meet this challenge and the ambitious, interdisciplinary initiative that its effective application to climate science requires.”

The research paper “Perceptions of climate change and willingness to save energy related to flood experience” examines the hypothesis that “individuals who have direct experience of phenomena that may be linked to climate change would be more likely to be concerned by the issue and thus more inclined to undertake sustainable behaviours.”

The first issue of this ambitious new periodical also offers what it calls a special feature on “opening the future":

Nature Climate Change invites registrations for table-of-contents e-mail alerts.

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.