War on Science
From Bwtm
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Science financing is in crisis mode after Congress froze spending bill
January 07, 2007 The failure of Congress to pass budgets for the fiscal year has produced a crisis in science financing that threatens to close major facilities, delay new projects and leave thousands of government scientists out of work, federal and private officials say.
“The consequences for American science will be disastrous,” said Michael S. Lubell, a senior official of the American Physical Society, the world's largest group of physicists. “The message to young scientists and industry leaders, alike, will be, 'Look outside the U.S. if you want to succeed.' ”
Last year, Congress passed only two of 11 spending bills – for the military and domestic security – and froze all other federal spending at 2006 levels. Factoring in inflation, the budgets amount to reductions of up to 4 percent for most fields of science and engineering.
Rep. Rush D. Holt, D-N.J., a physicist, said scientists, in most cases, were likely to see little or no relief.
“It's that bad,” Holt said. “For this year, it's going to be belt-tightening all around.”
AFFECTED PROJECTS
- The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, where a four-mile-long collider investigates the building blocks of matter. Without funding, the lab would close for a month and staff of 4,200 would be sent home.
- A $1.4 billion particle accelerator at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee meant to probe the fine structure of materials. Its opening might be delayed a year.
- A $30 million contribution to a global team designing an experimental reactor to fuse atoms rather than break them apart. Controlled fusion, if successful, would offer a nearly inexhaustible source of energy.
- A $440 million X-ray machine two miles long at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the San Francisco Bay Area that would act like a microscope to peer inside materials, aiding science and industry. Construction, begun last year, would slow.
Congressional Democrats said last month that they would not attempt to finish multiple spending bills left hanging by the departed Republican majority, and instead would keep most government agencies operating under current budgets until the fall. Except for the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, the government is being financed under a stopgap resolution. It expires Feb. 15, and Democrats said they planned to extend the resolution through Sept. 30.
Some Republicans favored not finishing the bills because of automatic savings achieved by forgoing expected spending increases. Democrats and Republicans say operating under current budgets, in some cases with less money, can strap federal agencies and lead to major disruptions in service.
For 2007, Congress and the Bush administration agreed the federal budget for the physical sciences should get a major increase. A year ago, in his American Competitiveness Initiative, President Bush called for doubling the money for science over a decade. That prompted schools and federal laboratories to prepare for long-deferred repairs and expansions, plans that today appear in jeopardy.
“It's pretty bad,” said Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate in physics. “There is going to be another year of stagnation. That hurts a lot.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070107/news_1n7science.html
HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY
Skeptic magazine was Duped by an Environmental Activist Group
In last week’s eSkeptic , we published highlights from a press release issued by PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), a Washington D.C.-based environmental watchdog group. That press release, dated December 28, 2006, was headlined:
- HOW OLD IS THE GRAND CANYON? PARK SERVICE WON’T SAY
- Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology
The first sentence of the release reads:
- Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.
Unfortunately, in our eagerness to find additional examples of the inappropriate intrusion of religion in American public life (as if we actually needed more), we accepted this claim by PEER without calling the National Park Service (NPS) or the Grand Canyon National Park (GCNP) to check it. As a testimony to the quality of our readers, however, dozens immediately phoned both NPS and GCNP, only to discover that the claim is absolutely false. Callers were told that the Grand Canyon is millions of years old, that no one is being pressured from Bush administration appointees — or by anyone else — to withhold scientific information, and all were referred to a statement by David Barna, Chief of Public Affairs, National Park Service as to the park’s official position. “Therefore, our interpretive talks, way-side exhibits, visitor center films, etc. use the following explanation for the age of the geologic features at Grand Canyon,” the document explains.
If asked the age of the Grand Canyon, our rangers use the following answer: ‘The principal consensus among geologists is that the Colorado River basin has developed in the past 40 million years and that the Grand Canyon itself is probably less than five to six million years old. The result of all this erosion is one of the most complete geologic columns on the planet.’
Understandably, many of our readers were outraged by both the duplicity of the claim and our failure to fact check it. One park ranger wrote us:
- You’re a day late and a dollar short on this one. As a national park ranger, I found most of PEER’s findings to be bogus. So have others: http://parkrangerx.blogspot.com
A Grand Canyon park interpreter wrote:
- This is incorrect. I have NEVER been told to present non-science based programs. In fact, I received “talking points” demanding that Grand Canyon employees present programs BASED ON SCIENCE and that we must use the scientific version supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences. As an interpreter I have shared the “creation” story of the Hopi people and the Paiute people because it is culturally relative. I used these stories as a tool to introduce the scientific story. Be confident there are good people running government, too.
One of our readers directly challenged Jeff Ruch, the Executive Director of PEER:
- When I challenged that PEER guy to show me some evidence and provided him evidence to the contrary, he didn’t have much. I would say PEER did more than jump the gun. I’d say they are spreading misinformation.
Another Grand Canyon park interpreter offered this explanation:
- Ruch’s attempts to insinuate a conspiratorial link between the NPS and organized religion are misguided and founded in fervent anti-Christian opposition, not reason or the law. Ruch’s anti-Judeo-Christian bias is evidence by his lack of opposition to GCA’s selling of Native American creation myths. His misinformation campaign aims to tarnish the reputation of the NPS to leverage his position that creationism books should not be sold in the GCA bookstore. I’ve emailed a few of my contacts at GRCA, and so far, all deny any conspiracy and all freely give the canyon’s age in education programs (as does all official GRCA print material). I’ll post updates as information becomes available. Until then, don’t believe everything you read.
The reference to the creationism book being sold in the Grand Canyon bookstore — Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail — is true. It is sold in the “inspiration” section of the bookstore, alongside other books of myth and spirituality. In any case, the story is an old one now, and completely irrelevant to the claim that NPS employees are withholding information about the age of the canyon, and/or are being pressured to do so by Bush administration appointees.
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-01-17.html
Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology
— Orders to Cater to Creationists Makes National Park Agnostic on Geology —
December 28, 2006 Washington, DC — Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).
“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”
In a letter released today, PEER urged the new Director of the National Park Service (NPS), Mary Bomar, to end the stalling tactics, remove the book from sale at the park and allow park interpretive rangers to honestly answer questions from the public about the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. PEER is also asking Director Bomar to approve a pamphlet, suppressed since 2002 by Bush appointees, providing guidance for rangers and other interpretive staff in making distinctions between science and religion when speaking to park visitors about geologic issues.
In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.
According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.
Park officials have defended the decision to approve the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View, claiming that park bookstores are like libraries, where the broadest range of views are displayed. In fact, however, both law and park policies make it clear that the park bookstores are more like schoolrooms rather than libraries. As such, materials are only to reflect the highest quality science and are supposed to closely support approved interpretive themes. Moreover, unlike a library the approval process is very selective. Records released to PEER show that during 2003, Grand Canyon officials rejected 22 books and other products for bookstore placement while approving only one new sale item — the creationist book.
Ironically, in 2005, two years after the Grand Canyon creationist controversy erupted, NPS approved a new directive on “Interpretation and Education (Director’s Order #6) which reinforces the posture that materials on the “history of the Earth must be based on the best scientific evidence available, as found in scholarly sources that have stood the test of scientific peer review and criticism [and] Interpretive and educational programs must refrain from appearing to endorse religious beliefs explaining natural processes.”
“As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan,” Ruch added, pointing to the fact that previous NPS leadership ignored strong protests from both its own scientists and leading geological societies against the agency approval of the creationist book. “We sincerely hope that the new Director of the Park Service now has the autonomy to do her job.”
Read the PEER letter to NPS Director Bomar
View the NPS admission that no policy review on the creationist book has occurred
See the 2005 NPS Director’s Order #6 on Interpretation
8.4.2 Historical and Scientific Research. Superintendents, historians, scientists, and interpretive staff are responsible for ensuring that park interpretive and educational programs and media are accurate and reflect current scholarship…Questions often arise round the presentation of geological, biological, and evolutionary processes. The interpretive and educational treatment used to explain the natural processes and history of the Earth must be based on the best scientific evidence available, as found in scholarly sources that have stood the test of scientific peer review and criticism. The facts, theories, and interpretations to be used will reflect the thinking of the scientific community in such fields as biology, geology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and paleontology. Interpretive and educational programs must refrain from appearing to endorse religious beliefs explaining natural processes. Programs, however, may acknowledge or explain other explanations of natural processes and events. (Emphasis added)
Trace how the creationist book controversy started and grew
Look at tax dollars used to support the Bush administration program of “Faith-Based Parks”
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=801
Contact: Carol Goldberg (202) 265-7337
Can't Handle the Truth? - Updated
I recently blogged about how the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) rejected an offer of 50,000 free An Inconvenient Truth DVDs. The NSTA, according to Laurie David, expressed "concern that other ‘special interests' might ask to distribute materials, too" and refused to make a "political" endorsement of the film, fearing that taking the offer would place "‘unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters."
According to David, these multi-million-dollar supporters include Exxon Mobil, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute (API)--which once produced a video distributed by API called "You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel."
The NSTA immediately denied David's charges of bowing to its Big Oil backers. But in a scathing HuffPo post yesterday, David writes:
- New evidence flatly contradicts statements NSTA has made in defense of its suspect partnerships, and efforts appear to be underway to wipe out online evidence showing that what the oil industry got in exchange was the group's imprimatur on classroom videos, teaching guides, and other "educational" materials that play down threats like global warming and play up the glories of continued oil dependence.
While the NSTA rejected the Truth DVDs on the grounds that accepting them would violate its 2001 policy against endorsements, David points out that the policy "didn't stop them from shipping out 20,000 copies of a whopping 10-part video funded by ConocoPhillips in 2003." The series, which credits NSTA Executive Director Gerald Wheeler as an executive producer, cites only one scientist in its "largely dismissive global warming section," according to David. The scientist is Dr. Robert Balling, "a well known global warming skeptic" who has acknowledged taking at least $400,000 from the fossil fuel industry.
David also alleges that the NSTA-- which claimed it had cut off its relations with the American Petroleum Institute five years ago-- had in fact, not, until the story was publicized in recent weeks. According to David, evidence of persisting ties between the NSTA and the API have been suspiciously removed from both of their websites.
The fact that the NSTA feels it needs to rely upon Big Oil in order to support itself is pretty tragic in and of itself. But what's really tragic is the fact that Big Oil's reach is so expansive that it actually creeps into America's classrooms--working to prevent young people from learning about the enormous global problem that they are going to inherit. If anyone needs to see this film, it's young people, because they are going to be dealing with a world ravaged by climate change.
As if this story isn't shocking--and sad--enough already, get this: Wheeler has admitted that he hasn't even seen An Inconvenient Truth.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=146896
Bush's bizarre appointment
Erick Keroack is too extreme to head the federal office for family planning.
November 27, 2006 PRESIDENT BUsh made some winningly conciliatory remarks the day after his party's Nov. 7 electoral drubbing, saying he looked forward to governing in a more bipartisan fashion. Then he turned around and started naming kooky ideologues to key posts.
The latest recess appointment, Eric Keroack as head of the federal government's family planning office, is an extremist so out of line with scientific thought that it is difficult to describe his views without laughing.
As medical director of A Woman's Concern, a small chain of nonprofit pregnancy counseling clinics that offer no information on birth control, Keroack has agitated against abortion and even contraception — including for married women. The organization continues to push the discredited nonsense that abortion increases a woman's chances of breast cancer and is more dangerous during the first eight weeks of pregnancy (when, in fact, the risk of complication is actually at its lowest). Birth control, according to A Woman's Concern's tortured logic, is somehow "demeaning to women." And Keroack has argued that women who have sex with multiple partners alter their brain chemistry in the process, making it harder for them to form close relationships.
This is the man who will oversee $283 million in annual Department of Health and Human Services grants for providing access to family planning education and contraceptives "to all who want and need them."
The administration is still wasting $158 million a year on abstinence-only education programs that the Government Accountability Office concluded this month have not been shown to work and at times put forth misleading information about condoms and AIDS.
Keroack does not need Senate confirmation, so there is little Congress can do about a president who continues to select anti-scientific ideology over basic competence, aside from making it clear that funding for these programs depends on HHS using the money as intended.
But the real check on Bush's silliness comes from voters. On Nov. 7, efforts to limit women's reproductive rights were routed not only in California and Oregon but in South Dakota and Kansas. Appeasing social conservatives is not just bad policy, it's becoming losing politics as well.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-keroack27nov27,0,4380666.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail
A Step Shy of Book-Burning
November 23, 2006 The White House has begun closing the Enviromental Protection Agency's research libraries to the public and to its own staff, cementing Bush's reputation as usher of a new dark age.
It never got down to actual book-burning, but the Republican choke-hold on government would clearly have taken us there. In August, under the guise of fiscal responsibility, the Bush Environmental Protection Agency began closing most of its research libraries, both to the public and to its own staff.
The EPA's professional staff objected strongly, insisting that closing the libraries would hamstring them in their jobs. In a letter to Congress protesting the closures, public employees said, "We believe that this budget cut is just one of many Bush administration initiatives to reduce the effectiveness of the US Environmental Protection Agency, and to continue to demoralize its employees."
The EPA's precipitous move to close the libraries was based on a $2 million cut in Bush's proposed $8 billion EPA budget for 2007. EPA bureaucrats did not wait to see if Congress might restore the funds or shift budget priorities in order to save the libraries; it acted immediately to box up documents for deep storage, and shut the doors.
While the official EPA line is that all of the documents will be eventually be digitized and made available online, this will cost money that the agency does not have, so for practical purposes, all of the thousands of reports and maps that now exist only on paper or microfiche will be lost to the public and to agency scientists. They might as well just burn them.
Closing the EPA libraries is the perfect symbol to characterize the methods of the Bush administration. Since 2000, the Republicans have cemented their reputation as ushers of a new dark age. They have sought to shroud the light of science by closing libraries and by suppressing scientific reports. They have gagged their own scientists and persecuted whistleblowers. They have cloaked government in secrecy, a prime example being Dick Cheney's secret meetings with oil companies to draft an industry-friendly national energy policy. But that era is now winding down.
Just before the election, Barbara Boxer and other senators sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee calling for restored access to the libraries. There is every reason to hope that the Democrats will follow through with their newly won power and get those libraries reopened. But this will be just the beginning of a Herculean task to clean the muck out of the stables and restore an environmental regulatory function to government.
For those who have labored in the environmental trenches, who know the true size of the mountain of excrement that blocks our path to good environmental policy, even the task of listing the environmental tasks to be done feels overwhelming.
In the early days of the Bush reign, the Natural Resources Defense Council began compiling all of the Bush administration rollbacks and assaults on environmental quality. By the November 2004 elections, it had listed more than 300 Bush "crimes against nature." NRDC stopped counting a year later, but you can still see the list at their web site.
So it's hard to say what the Democrats' environmental priorities should be. Climate change, energy, clean air and water, forest and wildlands protection, toxics, endangered species -- they are all important, urgent and critical. The common thread through all of these environmental issues is the need to understand and follow the science. That requires two things: good information and good people. Without the presidency, the Democrats will be limited in their ability to enact new policies, but they should do their utmost to block bad appointees, encourage and protect whistleblowers, and pump some money back into starved and understaffed agencies like the EPA and the Forest Service.
Some recent history shows what can be accomplished under less than optimum conditions. I began my career as a forest advocate in the latter half of the Reagan/Bush I years. That government was characterized by the anti-environmental "we might as well use it all up because Jesus is coming" philosophy of Secretary of the Interior James Watt.
Our hopes were raised when Clinton took office, but passing health care reform, not forest protection legislation was his priority. We got a "forest conference" instead and instructions to the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to protect spotted owls. A court ruling was the only backstop. Then, after the Gingrich revolution, there was no chance to pass proactive wilderness or forest protection legislation.
But forest advocates continued to lobby the Clinton administration, and after eight years, we began to sense a sea-change in the managing agencies. They became much friendlier to science. Not only did Clinton manage to appoint Mike Dombeck, a wildlife biologist, as Forest Service Chief, but the number and status of the "-ologists," the biologists, hydrologists, geologists, and other scientists had risen. We found that even in the absence of strong conservation directives, with good people in place and respect for the science, forest management was greatly improved.
Then that dark day fell in November 2000. By Thanksgiving, as we swallowed hanging chads with our turkey, we knew that our carefully built edifice of protection for forests would be attacked. We hoped to limit the damage, but Bush and company have had a long and destructive run.
Still, it could have been worse. If anything, I think the environmental movement is stronger now than it was when Bush took office. As the environment continues to degrade, people are no longer taking environmental protection for granted. As the public sees what a dark ages approach to the environment looks like, there is a greater appreciation for science.
In the end, it comes down to people. People have voted out the Republicans and voted in the light of reason. Without access to information, reason cannot operate. Let there be libraries!
