Science and the media: 7-13 May

Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:

• From contrasting groups in the climate wars, contrasting views of “fracking” and shale gas.
• For the anti-nuke, anti-physicist Helen Caldicott, resounding opposition in New York Times letters
• Comments on various topics from Stephen Hawking in a New York Times interview
• Concerning the American Physical Society’s report on direct air capture of CO₂, some controversy
• Evidence for counterproductive disrespect of the teaching profession in a Nature Nature editorial

Shale gas and fracking: Dyson OK, Chu maybe

The Global Warming Policy Foundation calls itself “open-minded on the contested science of global warming” but “deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated.” Though its website carries, for example, the link “Is There No End To The Corruption Of Climate Science? ” and though its academic advisory council includes the prominent climate-consensus skeptics William Happer, Harold Lewis, Ross McKitrick, and Richard Lindzen, the foundation does advocate overcoming the environmental costs of coal—at least in part by shale gas, which, of course, has its own environmental costs.

Several days ago, the foundation issued the report “The Shale Gas Shock .” Very soon, a Wall Street Journal opinion page “Notable and Quotable” blurb quoted from the report’s foreword by the physicist Freeman Dyson:

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration, “seeing increased domestic natural gas production as a linchpin in its long-term energy strategy, has named a panel of experts to find ways to make hydraulic fracturing, a fast-growing method of extracting natural gas, safer and cleaner.” The Times article continues:

The Times article summarizes fracking and reports that numerous cases have been documented “in which fracking fluids leaked into aquifers and contaminated drinking water.” It also reports that “House Republicans issued a press release denouncing the study as wasteful, duplicative and another example of red tape run amok” and that these legislators declared “that fracking has been used safely for more than 60 years and that the Environmental Protection Agency already has sufficient authority to regulate it.”

(see also David Kramer’s story on this from last week).

New York Times letters blast Helen Caldicott

A media report in this venue last week quoted extensively from Helen Caldicott’s New York Times op-ed “Unsafe at Any Dose,” which attacked physicists and the nuclear industry. “Physicists had the knowledge to begin the nuclear age,” wrote the physician author, who also wrote the book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. “Physicians have the knowledge, credibility and legitimacy to end it.” Now a set of four letters in the Times have blasted her.

The first letter comes from physics Nobel laureate Burton Richter, who among other things belongs to the Energy Department’s Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee. He charges that Caldicott “does not seem to want a debate but an acceptance of her negative conclusion about nuclear energy.” He declares that the “real question should be which sources of energy do the least harm.” He cites the National Academy study Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation VII . In closing, Richter sends a challenge: “If Dr. Caldicott is really concerned about human health, she should join me and others in an effort to rid the world of coal generation, switching first to natural gas and nuclear, and when we do develop large-scale, cleaner generation systems, moving toward those.”

In the second letter, a professor emeritus of technology management accuses Caldicott of promoting “a Dr. Strangelove image of physicists” and of caricaturing doctors as authoritarian. He continues:

The third letter comes from Fred A. Mettler of Albuquerque, identified as emeritus commissioner of the International Commission on Radiological Protection and as representing the US on the United Nations Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. “Helen Caldicott is a known antinuclear activist,” he writes, “and would have us believe that there is a vast conspiracy among physicists to promote nuclear power and that physicians are the good guys who know better.” He, too, cites the work of the National Academy, and he makes a particular point of ridiculing Caldicott’s allegations that milk from cows that grazed too close to Three Mile Island has made Hershey’s chocolate dangerous.

In the fourth letter, a health physicist questions Caldicott’s huge confidence “that doctors know what’s good for you in terms of radiation.” The writer asserts that many “millions of people are being exposed to nontrivial doses of radiation for medical procedures without adequate risk-benefit analysis and without adequate recordkeeping for the doses they receive,” and expresses the suspicion that “many doctors have not been well trained enough with regard to radiation risk to make informed decisions about the benefit versus the risk of the radiation procedures they order.”

It’s probably dangerous to extrapolate too much from the letters that appear on a given issue, but maybe in this case it’s fair to conclude that at least among those who submitted letters to the Times, Caldicott found little support for her enthusiastic anti-physicist, anti-nuke charges.

New York Times interviews Stephen Hawking

What the New York Times calls a “rare interview” with Stephen Hawking dominates the front page of this week’s Science Times section. The interview took place in conjunction with a recent visit, at the invitation of Lawrence Krauss, to a science festival at Arizona State University.

“Like Einstein,” the Claudia Dreifus piece begins , Hawking “is as famous for his story as for his science.” Dreifus summarizes his physics accomplishments, then says that “at 69, Dr. Hawking is one of the longest-living survivors” of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis “and perhaps the most inspirational.”

“I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible,” Hawking says. “I am lucky to be working in theoretical physics, one of the few areas in which disability is not a serious handicap.” He adds: “My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.”

Hawking comments on

• a project in which Phoenix schoolchildren wrote essays about what they might say to space beings trying to contact planet Earth,
• the exciting prospect of encountering the unexpected at the Large Hadron Collider,
• his attempt to supplement A Brief History of Time with A Briefer History of Time—"a new version that would be easier to follow"—and on
• his hopes for “a global effort to help Japan recover” from its recent disaster.

Dreifus also asked Hawking about Fermilab’s announcement of what another Times reporter called “a suspicious bump” in accelerator data “that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.” Hawking replied: “It is too early to be sure. If it helps us to understand the universe, that will surely be a good thing. But first, the result needs to be confirmed by other particle accelerators.”

A mention of the interview’s purely political note seems worth appending to this media report. Dreifus asked, “Though you avoid stating your own political beliefs too openly, you entered into the health care debate here in the United States last year. Why did you do that?”

She’s referring to an Investor’s Business Daily editorial that declared, “People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.” Here’s Hawking’s answer:

Today, a note appears at the top of the online version of that editorial: “This version corrects the original editorial which implied that physicist Stephen Hawking, a professor at the University of Cambridge, did not live in the UK.”

Corrects it indeed. The mention of Hawking has been outright removed.

New York Times, American Physical Society, direct air capture of CO₂

The New York Times—but so far, not the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post—has reported on reactions to a new American Physical Society report that found that if systems achieving direct air capture of carbon dioxide are ever to “have a substantial role in removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, [they] would need to be much less costly than the benchmark system considered in the report.”

The report, Direct Air Capture of CO₂ with Chemicals , follows a two-year study conducted by a 13-member committee whose members work in industry, academia, and government laboratories. A 9 May APS press release summarizes what they studied:

The press release observes that “it makes little sense to ignore the emissions of CO₂ in the flue gas from a coal power plant while removing CO₂ from ambient air where it is 300 times more dilute,” that the assessment estimates that such removal “would be seven or more times less expensive” than with the benchmark DAC system, and that “it would not be wise to delay dealing with climate change on the grounds that at some future time DAC could be available as a significant compensating strategy.”

The Times‘s article stipulates that the DAC “concept is entirely different from capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide from power plants and other big polluters before it enters the air. Rather, the aim would be to remove the gas from the planet’s ambient air, where it exists in low concentrations everywhere.” The article reports that in 2007, the British billionaire Richard Branson and former vice president Al Gore “created a $25 million prize for the first creator of such a technology” and that “millions of dollars in venture capital have since flowed to start-up companies tackling the problem.”

The DAC report’s “conclusion was greeted with dismay by several leading scientists,” the Times reports. One is Wallace S. Broecker, a professor of geology at Columbia University, who argues that the “cost depends on how widely” DAC is implemented, and who notes that the “first computers cost a fortune, and now they cost almost nothing.”

Another is Klaus S. Lackner, a physicist and director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia’s Earth Institute, who reportedly criticized the study “as too narrowly focused” and as having “analyzed only outdated technology.” Lackner has an alternative design.

Another critic reportedly charged that “the report had failed to take into account the use of captured carbon dioxide as a feedstock for biofuels, like those made from algae.”

Nature Schoolteachers, scientist volunteers, Nature‘s editors

Has recent public discussion sometimes unfairly mischaracterized schoolteachers, or even unjustly maligned them?

Yes, according to Jon Stewart, the serious comic who anchors the satirical Daily Show on Comedy Central. He has displayed video clips of pundits stereotyping allegedly lazy teachers who vanish every afternoon at 3. He testifies about the contrast between that and what he saw with his own eyes while growing up in the household of a dedicated professional teacher.

No, according to a Washington Post editorial declaring that the maligners target teachers unions, not teachers—and that the unions have it coming.

But consider the tone and content of Nature‘s advocacy this week of Scientific American‘s “1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days ” program, which seeks scientist volunteers for what a Nature editorial calls “a kind of science corps to support the growth of developing minds.” Scientific American says the program will make “it easier for scientists and teachers to connect.”

Great stuff, except for some of Nature‘s implicit assumptions about the teaching profession.

Nature‘s editors note that “in the younger grades, many US science teachers have no science training.” None at all? Granted, no one wants high school physics taught by physical education majors. But does it follow that just because a graduate from a respected university chooses teaching “in the younger grades,” she has faulty knowledge of—and lacks communicable enthusiasm for—the concept of geological time, or the wonders of electromagnetism, or the marvels of animal adaptation?

And even if a teacher earned her degree from a nonprestigious school, must she inevitably lack any special spark for inspiring curiosity in kids about weather’s complexity? For “the younger grades,” does that task really require a science degree or a science minor? Or does it actually require a decent grounding plus pedagogical talent and honed teaching skill? And is it fair to speculate that such talent and skill may not appear widely even among scientists themselves, most of whom have presumably never even tried to teach school?

Nature‘s editors ask, “What can scientist volunteers do?” The editors’ answers suggest that they assume that pretty much any given scientist, thanks to qualities including her own special spark of curiosity, can step right into the school science environment and not just catch up fast and find her way, but lead.

The editors suggest, “Perhaps [such scientist volunteers] could spend an hour in a local classroom or school auditorium talking about a typical day in the lab—thereby helping to demystify the world of science for children.” But that’s the deficit model of science communication—the questionable belief that scientists can enhance science awareness simply by delivering ever-better lectures to captive audiences on a one-way basis. Have Nature‘s editors—who themselves, in other contexts, sometimes advocate the two-way engagement model—consulted any seasoned professional teachers about that?

The editors also suggest that a scientist volunteer “could give a local school board advice about curricula.” No doubt that could be constructively true—for a scientist willing to commit to learning about, and participating within, a school system’s long-range planning effort, as opposed to merely generating off-the-cuff wisdom and lobbing it over the school board’s transom.

The editors assert, “How scientists participate ... will be up to them.” In a context genuinely respectful of the teaching profession, wouldn’t that say instead something like, “Scientists can learn from teachers and school leaders what opportunities are available for helping”?

But in Nature‘s editors’ framing, it’s not a context genuinely respectful of the teaching profession.

And here’s how you can tell that for sure:

Long ago, George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman contained a famous line: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Over time, that line became remembered as the cliché “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

For their editorial summoning not just volunteers to Scientific American‘s worthy program, but superscientists to rescue schoolkids from faculties made up mainly of doltish, undereducated, science-unenthusiastic teachers, Nature‘s editors chose the headline “Those who can.”

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.