One of the few Obama appointments that has me particularly concerned is his selection of John Holdren to be his top science advisor. It's all well and good that Obama has opted to name several well-respected scientists to his administration (such as Chu at Energy and Lubchenko at NOAA, among others), but in placing Holdren at the top, in what is effectively a cabinet-level position, I think that the Obama Administration does not understand, or is not concerned about the, the problem of science politicization. However bad the Bush Administration was in this regard, I have no confidence that Holdren will help the Obama Administration any better, for reasons I explain in this piece for NRO. Here's an excerpt:
Many who decried the alleged politicization of science celebrated Obama’s election. The new president would both elevate and insulate the role of science in the policy-making process. Whereas the Bush administration allegedly silenced scientific perspectives they did not want to hear, a President Obama would ensure scientific analysis informs relevant policy decisions.Unlike some who have criticized the pick, my objection to Holdren is not that he is a climate alarmist -- I believe human contributions to climate change are real and worth addressing (though I also believe Holdren is prone to exaggeration). Nor do I think it a problem that Holdren has endorsed the imposition of significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, as this is the position President-elect Obama endorsed during the campaign. I would fully expect a President to name members of his administration who agree with the Administration's key policy positions on relevant issues. Rather my concern is that Holdren is one who will blur the boundaries between policy and science and squelch legitimate scientific and policy debate on important matters. I hope to be proven wrong, but we shall see.No doubt Obama had the “Bush is anti-science” meme in mind when he explained that his commitment to science means “ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology” and “listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient — especially when it’s inconvenient.” Yet the underlying causes of science politicization are far deeper than who sits in the Oval Office. Even so, President-Elect Obama’s choice of John Holdren for his primary science adviser suggests political misuse and abuse of science will continue in the Obama administration, pledges to respect science notwithstanding.
For some of my prior posts on science politicization, see here and here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Unpolitical Science:
- The Holdren Pick:
I am confused about your views. This statement, and this post, imply that politicization in the Bush Administration was a serious problem. Yet, when I follow your links to previous posts, they both essentially undermine this view.
So how bad was the Bush administration in this regard? Apparently (based on the Grand Canyon case and global warming alarmism that your links refer to), not that bad.
Sk
See, weather is very predictable, and pumping thermal energy into a system always makes the temperature go up everywhere uniformly and would not make weather more violent and unpredictable at all.
It was a very clever and subtle post.
So he once wrote a scathing rebuttal to Bjorn Lomborg, some of which Prof. Adler apparently disagrees with. So what, really? What is the concrete concern here?
People have stated for two decades that we would have had a cure for AIDs in the late 80s if it wasn't for President Reagan. But when the Dems took over under Clinton, they had eight years to find the cure and thus prove their accusation. At last check we still don't have a cure, only Bill Clinton's statement that he never took AIDs seriously when in office.
In the late 80s people convinced the government we could build a single stage to orbit vehicle. They showed "conclusive" evidence that the technology was ready, or would be ready in just a few years. The result, over a decade of spending on a vehicle (the X-33) that would never have worked. And even after George Bush's new NASA finally pulled the sheet over the project the activists still claimed to be right. In the mean time the Shuttle's (which could have had improved models flying five years ago) are rapidly being phased out while its replacement is five years behind schedule.
On the environmental front we have, in the name of saving the Ozone layer, cancelled the SST, then removed hair spray, then changed out everyone's air conditioners, and then ended cadmium plating. After all this have we improved the Ozone layer. "No", the hole still opens every year and then closes at the same time. Worse, now the activists who demanded the replacement of Freon (CFCs) are stating that the new fluid in our air conditioners is a potent greenhouse gas.
On the Global warming front we now know a NASA scientist was fired by Al Gore because he wouldn't play ball on Global Warming. Robert Kennedy says Bush's politicized science, but anyone who disagrees with Kennedy is called every name in the book by him and his friends in the media. And as the weather has turned cooler, deceptive media reports are being run more often. Included in this is an ABC report on the glaciers in Montana which is represented as having been produced in the winter of 2008, but was actually made in the summer of 2006. another is a statement by a major global warming advocate that the cool weather is being caused by a La Nina year. The only problem is 2008 wasn't a La Nina year.
Am I missing something here? Appointing this guy, who's a little harsh on the issue of climate change, is the equivalent of say...a political hack pestering a web designer at NASA to add "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang? Really? They're equivalent?
I wonder why people aren't worrying more about prions.
Holdren's career-long association with the crackpot Ehrlich ought to disqualify him from any science job, period.
From the Daily Telegraph. Emphasis added by me.
Perhaps he was referring to this. BTW Aussie coal comes to about 1%.
The Obama is going to have to work awfully hard to catch up to Bush's record at EPA, NASA, FDA, the Surgeon General, Interior...
I get to program the robot, though.
And I wish people would stop yelling about Reagan not curing AIDS. They're so loud I can't hear them!
I also consider the X-33 as the mistep that proves we should never do science again.
The left has been promising for years that embryonic stem cells will make the lame walk and the blind see, despite the lack of scientific basis for such claims. In addition, they have adopted manmade global warming as a new religion with computer simulations that cannot be validated otherwise than through supposition.
And lets bring back the ban on silicone breast implants while we are at it.
*Except for that Karl Popper fellow. He thought scientific theories had to be falsifiable, otherwise the theory was necessarily a con-job. But what did he know?
In conclusion, all science I disagree with is the product of someone's bias. The only way to solve this problem is for me to pick what is science and what is pseudo-religious claptrap.
For those interested in the issue of climate change, I recommend Watts Up With That as an interesting and informative blog. You will get a science-based viewpoint on climate change that is near impossible to get in the media any more.
I have worked in both academic research and corporate science and engineering. Academic and non-profit researchers have the same base motivations as those in industry, just manifested in a different way. They need money for research, career and salaries just like anybody else. Many of them have hung their careers upon the success of the global warming / climate change effort.
On the other side of the balance is the question of what fraction of scientists financed by government grants and/or paychecks believe that political action (that would enhance the power of their paymasters) is appropriate.
Whatever the scientific truth of the matter is, it will be determined by data and observation and not by who writes the checks.
If we could just call a moratorium on counting individual weather events, in whatever direction, as evidence for or against any hypothesis about climate change, we might have leisure actually to think about what would constitute useful evidence. I am personally pretty confident that real warming is happening, and that human activity is likely responsible for at least part of it. But every friend or co-worker who blames a hot day on the Bush Administration lessens that confidence just a bit.
The question is the manner in which he disagrees and steers the elite science machinery such as the AAAS into discouraging legitimate scientific debate. Had Holdren only a few instances of vocal disagreements, it would be one thing. If he had a good track record of scientific prediction later validated by observation, the loud voice might be excused. Rather, he has sought to marginalize those he disagrees with and has had a track record of alarmism that is acknowledged by many across the political spectrum. Hence the wide-spread reputation of "intolerance."
The other concern voiced by a few posters is that he has a strong history of blurring the distinction between science and science policy, and public policy informed by science. It seems unlikely that we are getting a more enlightened view of science installed; we are only getting a different church.
Oh? Really? Your confidence in your numbers (I guess as an appeal to authority type argument) is misplaced. See The IPCC Can't Count - Author and Reviewer numbers are wrong, by John McLean (Jan 2009), at http://mclean.ch/climate/docs/IPCC_numbers.pdf
It starts:
What I am not seeing is evidence that he has "sought to marginalize" people in any way other than disagreeing with them.
Harry Edgar said it, and it needs to be repeated (and it's covered in some depth at J Adler's NRO link).
Holdren and Erlich's predictions were flat out wrong. Scientific honesty should compel Holdren to account for this but he apparently continues to defend the predictions.
That a lot of the political environmentalism is more religion than science. When Al Gore tells me that the government needs to re-engineer every aspect of my life, and it's a matter of science, and that if I question this I'm a dangerous person (Holdren's description of deniers, BTW, not mine) I'm both a bit leery of the way the current scientific hypothesis is being engraved in stone, and a bit skeptical of the people who want to assert unhindered regulatory power over my life. The reaction to the astrophysicists who have posited that solar activity is an unaccounted for and very significant variable is a good example.
Put it to you this way. If Dick Cheney was asserting that all of American life needed to be re-engineered from the ground up, and that his bureaucrats would determine how we should live, would you question it, and ridicule the people putting forth this "unassailable" science?
Also, does Holdren's prospective position give him any authority to squelch opposing viewpoints? For example, Jim Hansen criticized his supervisors at NASA for attempting to silence him, but it is not clear to me that the science advisor has authority to control the communications of any government scientist. I might well be wrong, but I would appreciate if anyone knowledgeable could weigh in with info.
My basic qualm is with an overly broad usage of the phrase "politicization of science". I'm not sure even restricted uses of the phrase have much meaning. When scientists or science advisors work for the government, hey, no matter what you do, that's political.
If sometimes governments try to suppress or discount known scientific facts, it is worth recalling that "science" just means "knowledge". In that case, rather than call it "politicizing science", it might better be called "embracing falsehoods" or "burying heads in the sand".
Hello Galileo!
CFCs were also a potent Greenhouse Gas. For what it's worth.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5862/424
What I found interesting about this performance was a staggering political naivete. He assembles an enormous collection of problems, going far beyond considerations of environment, and apparently assumes that it's simply a management problem to solve everything yesterday.
(Reference: New Book Reveals Secret Sex Life of Barbie Creator (Thur., Jan. 8, 2009), www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,477877,00.html ).
On one side, you had scientists who received government grants and obviously had a vested interest in giving politicians and bureaucrats the power to regulate every detail of our lives.
On the other side, you had scientists working on behalf of tobacco companies. These men and women were following in the tradition of Galileo, seeking to prevent power-hungry busybodies from silencing the opposition. They were champions of the scientific method, aware that science never arrives at definite conclusions, and therefore were always interested in promoting debate and questioning supposedly "definite" conclusions. Oh, their boundless curiosity, their refusal to accept conventional wisdom, their ability to carry on an open scientific discourse for decades and decades! It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it.
I do not think climate change is a hoax, I think the science on GHG warming is quite likely right. The levels of warming predicted to be caused by human GHG emissions are not alarming or outside of natural variations. What however has not been proven, observed or even shown to be more likely than not is the runaway feedback mechanisms that many of the models predict. These are theoretical and the predictions are not supported by observations.
Galileo Galilei and the manner in which he's interpreted, tendentiously and simplistically, is but one reflection of that fact. It wasn't simply the fact that the primary concern was that Galileo was abrogating Aristotle and Ptolemy, in terms of general philosophical and scientific concerns respectively, it was the additional fact that Galileo wanted to claim that his theory was more than theory and hypothesis and was instead positive fact. Iow, the whole tentative, hypothetical, theoretical conception of science was at issue; Galileo was anxious to claim a positivist view of his claims, not a mere hypothetical/tentative view and not merely in relative terms (cf. Tycho Brahe’s system).
It most certainly was. There were three primary focal points listed in Galileo's condemnations of 1616 and 1633:
1) scientific conceptions per se (hypotheses/theoretical and tentative conceptions vs. more positivist claims)
2) philosophical doctrines (foremost Aristotlian physics)
3) rote-like theological doctrine
They were all primary considerations. In fact Ptolemy's theory had long been considered hypothetical, not a statement of positive scientific fact, and even prior to Copernicus figures such as Nicole Oresme were openly theorizing about heliocentric and other models, without condemmation from the church.
Pure, unadulterated bovine exrement.
Now, if you said:
You would be closer to right.
The AGW debate is a great example of the politicization of science. Influential (if not highly published) scientists have called for expelling skeptics from professional societies. The several climatologists I know are all skeptics, but some are afraid to announce their skepticism, instead retreating to fields of climate study outside of the controversy.
Let us also remember that the Bush administration is a believer in AGW alarmism, and the sometimes subtle and sometimes overt pressure on skeptics has lasted from before his election through the present.
It is no accident that most of the expert skeptics now speaking out are senior, often retired scientists. They have nothing to lose.
The politicization of AGW is far worse than the craziness that led to the disaster called the "Space Shuttle." The economic impact of AGW politicization is already significant, and will become much worse in the future.
Too bad Obama has filled all science positions with true believers.
Government is inherently political. Everything it does it political.
That just doesn't make sense to me.
"even prior to Copernicus figures such as Nicole Oresme were openly theorizing about heliocentric and other models, without condemmation from the church."
Well, that's because Oresme was the church, or at least high up in it. He was also cozy with the Dauphin, and in high demand for his translation skills, among other things. He also learned from the Merton School guys up at Oxford how to dismantle Aristotle while claiming to defend him. So, yeah, politicization of science goes way back.
BTW, Oresme's math is nuts for his time, or in a couple cases, for any time. I would argue that he beat Heisenberg by 700 years on the Uncertainty Principle. He also invented graphing.
True, but I'm not big on enlisting scientists who jump the gun. After the appointment, politicize away; before, show that you know what it is is that Science values.
Science's values are as at odds with those of the State as Machiavelli helpfully noted were the Church's. In the latter case, that's why we have the famous Separation. Perhaps its time to consider a similar one for Science.
The team of Urkels is nearly complete. Technocracy or bust!
http://rasmusen1.blogspot.com/search?q=holdren
His evident distaste for economics and economists is one thing that worries me (and not just because I'm an economist!)
"it can be a highly arcane topic"
Unfortunately true. Had it not been for the Hundred-years War/plague, etc.. it would not be, as he was a remarkable thinker. As it is, he was well ahead of his time, and those of his time likely hesitated to challenge him due to his clear brilliance on other matters, in addition to his powerful position.
BTW, his heliocentric speculation comes in the context of his utter discrediting of Astrology. He was among the first to question it, but his arguments were so clear and compelling (making use of an Uncertainty Principle on the celestial scale rather than the subatomic*) that they likely set Astrology on its eventual road to ruin (among the learned).
* - his proof contains a mathematical argument that shows that the irrationals are more numerous than the rationals, foreshadowing Cantor's Set Theory results that were considered groundbreaking at the turn of the 20th Century.
"His evident distaste for economics and economists is one thing that worries me (and not just because I'm an economist!)"
Um, that's not just distaste, but out and out bigotry. Since then he seems to have become more conciliatory and broad-minded.
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