I interviewed Eugenie Scott, the longtime head of the National Center for Science Education, about her new push into defending the teaching of accurate climate science in classrooms. Climate has fast become the “new evolution” when it comes to attacks on teachers who simply share mainstream scientific knowledge with their students–and there was a crying need for a national organization to get involved in supporting teachers, disseminating accurate information, and rebutting misleading educational materials on climate change.

And no one has more experience in this general area than Eugenie Scott and NSCE.

That is not to say it is going to be easy. The climate issue is extremely ideological and people are highly polarized–and in some communities, the weight of sentiment is going to be very much pitted against accurate climate education. It will be very difficult to make headway in such contexts–especially since, as Scott explains in our interview, legal recourse does not seem to be an option (unlike it is when creationism gets taught).

Nevertheless, if anyone knows how to navigate the politics of science and schoolboards, it is Eugenie Scott. I wish her well in her new endeavor and am glad to have such a strong ally.

For more information on NCSE’s new climate initiative, see here. For my Point of Inquiry interview with Scott, see here.

However,  there was no intention to discontinue it, and indeed, with the start of this year my plan is to enliven it dramatically.

For nearly a decade now, the Intersection has been ground zero for coverage of the…intersection between science and politics. But recently, and more specifically due to my research for The Republican Brain, I’ve realized that there’s one aspect of this topic in particular that is little understood, but has the potential to revolutionize how we think—namely, the science of politics itself.

Writing the new book has convinced me that a dramatic merger between previously disparate fields—biology (broadly speaking) on the one hand, and political science on the other—is now underway. For a brief précis, see this 2008 essay by political scientists James Fowler and Darren Schreiber, entitled “Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature.”

The Republican Brain is my attempt to apply this emerging science to the crucial question of why the political right today is in such denial about scientific, economic, and just plain factual reality. And I think that application does indeed yield a lot of insight—but it’s only the beginning.

Psychological research, brain studies, evolutionary psychology, and even genetics are increasingly being used to explain anything from voter turnout to the intensity of partisan attachment. We’re on the verge of a dramatic new way of thinking about politics—but it’s a terrifying one for many folks, because it suggests that despite what we all like to think, philosophy and ideas may not actually be the real drivers of our political behavior. Rather, much of politics is  emotional, and indeed, appears to be driven by automatic responses that we’re not even aware of.

Accordingly, the political mainstream likes to conveniently ignore this new body of knowledge. But here, we won’t. And to that end, I’m bringing in two contributors who can help to advance our thinking:

Andrea Kuszewski.  Andrea is a penetrating writer on psychology and the brain, and focuses on understanding autism, intelligence, and creativity. And, well, politics. She’s the author of the brilliant and much cited guest blog post at the former home of the Intersection, entitled “Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives.” And as I worked on the book, her input has been invaluable. With Andrea, I’ve also organized a session at ScienceOnline 2012 entitled “Covering Political Neuroscience in the Blogosphere,” which will be on January 19 at 4pm.

Everett Young. Everett is a recent political science Ph.D. from Stony Brook, whose thesis was entitled “Why We’re Liberal, Why We’re Conservative: A Cognitive Theory on the Origins of Ideological Thinking.” It is quite long, but I seriously suggest you give it a read, because I think you’ll be fascinated. (I certainly was.) More recently, Everett designed an experiment, at my suggestion, to test liberals and conservatives on their tendency to engage in motivated reasoning—and the results (which were surprising!) are reported in a co-authored penultimate chapter of The Republican Brain. Suffice it to say that thanks to Everett, I have a much deeper understanding of why conservatives today seem so misaligned with reality—and in fact, the core reason does not appear to be what I originally thought it was. But more on that as the book publication date nears.

I still remain the chief blogger here, of course. But both Andrea and Everett will be chiming in from time to time and sharing their expertise. In addition, Jon Winsor will also continue to write here—his expertise on the intellectual history of conservatism and is deep and in fact, he has a new item in the hopper about the Tea Party and anti-intellectualism. Stand by for that.

So to summarize: I’m reshaping this blog to carry forward its original expertise, but also to push into a critical area that, in my view, very few (if any) political commentators know how to handle. And that has to change.

Every couple of weeks–and sometimes more frequently than that–a new paper comes out in a peer-reviewed journal about the science of our politics. Sometimes these create temporary media blips–like the conservatives-amygdala/liberals-ACC paper, co-authored by the British actor Colin Firth (!), did. But there is very little sustained discussion of what it all means, in large part because few know how such a discussion ought to be carried out.

If anything, we instead see a vast number of fundamental misconceptions. Many people seem to think that studying political neuroscience leads to reductionism or determinism, for instance (it does not). And they still think of “genes” and “environment” as being in opposition with one another, failing to realize that they work together, in intricate ways that are barely beginning to be unraveled, to shape who we are.

Here, then, I hope we can help to shape a much more fruitful and informative discussion. One thing is certain: The science of politics is a topic that can no longer be ignored.

Bloggingheads Chris Mooney Jonathan Moreno

Human cloning. Synthetic biology. Mood (and mind) altering drugs. Personalized medicine.

Such topics are rarely at the top of the political agenda. Yet the changes they’re causing, often below the radar, are monumental. Issues of personhood, identity, ethics, are at play. The human future may be very different from the human past as these changes are negotiated and assimilated.

And so may human politics.

To help us prepare for this radical future is Jonathan Moreno, author of the new book The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America, which underscores the strange bedfellow allegiances that may occur in what has been called our “biological century.”

Jonathan Moreno is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is one of 13 Penn Integrates Knowledge university professors.

He is a historian, medical ethicist, and philosopher, and was part of Barack Obama’s transition team.

You can listen here, and order The Body Politic here.

First of all, let me say that the paper has about the best scholarly summary around of what motivated reasoning—or, “identity protective cognition”—actually is. Given that I’m basically asserting that this phenomenon is the number one reason people come to disagree about science and the facts, that is something you really may want to check out.

But that’s not what I find most interesting about the paper. It does three things—1) explains what motivated reasoning is; 2) explains how it’s threatening to the legal system (because motivated/biased interpretations of court findings and opinions by opposed groups of citizens threaten the very idea of court neutrality); and 3) takes a look at the Supreme Court’s 2010 term (and one bizarre Scalia dissent in particular) in this context.

The second point is very important: Kahan suggests it undermines the justice system if battling groups of advocates (say, the American Constitution Society and the Federalist Society) are constantly blasting court opinions from diametrically opposed perspectives, and using motivated reasoning to do so. At some point, as this continues, you wind up legitimating the claim that really, courts don’t know anything special or have any particular expertise—it’s all just opinion, and biased opinion at that. This precipitates a “neutrality crisis” over whether courts can really judge fairly.

In Kahan’s view, judges are indeed likely to be biased, but (much like scientists) also probably have a training that at least partly mitigates against that. In any case, in light of motivated reasoning, he’s more worried about how citizens interpret their decisions:

…when citizens observe conflicts in society that affect constitutional rights—that of a nondeadly criminal suspect not to be subdued with lethal force by the police, or of antiabortion opponents to engage in impassioned but non-violent protest near an abortion clinic—they are prone to form factual beliefs congenial to their values. There is thus an inherent risk that citizens will perceive decisions that threaten their group commitments to be a product of judicial bias. The outcomes might strike them as so patently inconsistent with the facts, or with controlling legal principles, that they are impelled to infer bad faith.

Kahan then goes on to discuss a key 2010 case, Brown v Plata, in which the Supreme Court narrowly affirmed (5-4) a district court ruling that the state of California had to release 40,000 inmates from its overstuffed prisons. At issue was a key factual matter: Was it actually possible to identify prisoners that would not be a menace to society and could be released safely? The lower court gathered lots of evidence from criminologists and prison experts on issues like recidivism—and said that a targeted and selective prisoner release would indeed be safe. The Supremes (narrowly) said that was cool.

Justice Scalia wrote the dissent—and basically, it was sheer postmodernism. Scalia argued that judges can’t really read objective evidence about such a politicized matter–whether a prisoner release could be safe. Some Scalia quotes:

I find it hard to think the judgement really turned upon the facts [of the case]….

[I]t is impossible for judges to make ‘factual findings’ without inserting their own policy judgments, when the factual findings are policy judgments.

…of course different district judges, of different policy views, would have ‘found’ that rehabilitation would not work and that releasing prisoners would increase the crime rate.

This is kind of stunning (Kahan certainly thinks so) since it implies that basically, we can’t trust judges to assess facts. Scalia’s opinion thus makes the neutrality problem even worse—because it suggests it’s all bias, all the way down, even for the most professional of us.

Is that true? And how do you preserve neutral courts–or, to switch to another sector, trust in the findings of the scientific community–if that is indeed the case?

Kahan has an interesting suggestion about how judges should write their opinions in order to avoid provoking the worst of motivated reasoning. I’ll let you read the whole article—but it sounds a lot like this recommendation (e.g., try your best to couch things in such a way that people do not get their backs up).

The problem is, these are Supreme Court decisions. I’m dubious you could ever really write a decision in such a way as to depolarize an issue that people feel strongly about, when you’re essentially giving the final word on it, that nobody gets to argue with ever again.

I have a different suggestion (and one that is equally unlikely to be realized!). How about having the media, which covers court cases and disputes over them, be schooled in motivated reasoning, and have it cease the standard practice of legitimating contrary views of the facts? How about having the press take some responsibility and act like a judge, and essentially short circuit motivated reasoning by not allowing its worst fruits to be disseminated, or postmodern wars of claims (on issues where there is actually a right and wrong answer) to actually reach the airwaves or print?

I know, I know. It would never happen. I just think it might do more good than having judges change their approach–though judges might be more willing to listen to recommendations!

(Carl Gustav Jung)

For a long time, I’ve been writing and speaking on the problem of science communication, particularly with respect to the issue of climate change. I also train scientists to communicate, and have worked with hundreds of them so far—so it’s fair to say I’ve noticed some patterns. (Including “death by Powerpoint,” as one critic of Al Gore’s ongoing “Climate Reality Project” rather unfairly puts it.)

Meanwhile, I’m also doing more and more research on the psychological reasons behind why Americans disagree about scientific facts, and other facts—and what to do about that. (See here for a promising solution.) Understanding the root causes of these clashes over what’s true is a very pressing matter right now, especially as Gore tries to convince the public about the climate “reality” that is unfolding. We desperately need to sway people about the “facts,” but what if we’re not going about it the right way? Indeed, what if our deep seated instincts about how to do this are wrong?

So I was almost, in a way, subconsciously waiting and expecting for this study to come out—and the journal Climatic Change has now obliged. In it, C. Susan Weiler of Whitman College and her colleagues study the personalities of some 200 climate researchers, using the Jungian Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and then compare them to the general public. Sure enough, there are some significant differences—differences of the sort that seem likely to help fuel communication problems.

Now, first of all, some caveats. The authors admit there are criticisms of the Myers-Briggs approach, and frankly, I’m surprised that they did not use the “Big Five” or “Five Factor” personality scale, which, in my understanding, is widely accepted in psychology. I’m also puzzled by one of the conclusions the authors reach based on their results–which honestly, I am having a very hard time squaring with what I know of scientists.

But still, there are overlaps between these personality scales, and the new data are suggestive.

So here are the results: Weiler et al find that the scientists in their sample differ significantly from the public on three out of four Myers-Briggs dimensions. Roughly speaking, scientists do not differ from the public on the Intraversion-Extraversion dimension. (I found this mildly surprising.) But they do tend more toward Intuition than Sensing, compared with the public; more towards Thinking than Feeling, compared with the public; and more towards Judging than Perceiving, compared with the public.

The first two differences make sense to me. Intuition is characterized by “focus on theories,” “ask ‘why’ questions,” “look for patterns and possibilities.” Sensing, by contrast, means “focus on experience” and “Prefer practical, plain language to symbols, metaphors, theories, and abstractions.” The authors suggest this may make average Americans less likely than climate scientists to respond to distant threats about climate change (e.g., to polar bears), and much more responsive to what they perceive around them (i.e., weather).

The second dimension also makes sense to me: Thinkers “present information using cause-and-effect reasoning,” are analytical, and “need to know ‘why.’” Yup, those are our scientists. Feelers are “empathetic,” “connect with people,” “use personal situations, stories and examples to communicate.”

To me this particular gap really, really, really makes science communication difficult.

But I have some problems with what Weiler et al infer about the last dimension, Judging versus Perceiving. They write:

Compared to the United States population, Ph.D. climate scientists also exhibited a strong preference for Judging on the final dichotomy (Fig. 1). This suggests that on average, climate change researchers will prefer to reach a decision or come to closure and ‘move on’ to the next step more quickly than the general population. The general population, with a higher proportion of Perceivers, is more likely to see room for doubt, or want to take more time to explore possible alternatives, especially when outcomes are not likely to be positive. When presenting climate change to the general public, it is important for researchers to confirm what information is still unknown and what areas are still being studied. [Ital added] In this regard, Ward (2008) suggested that “scientists should talk with reporters during the research stage, and not simply when their findings are published in a journal. Sometimes the process of research is what can engage an audience.” As others have pointed out, balancing simplified statements of certainty with more complex statements that reflect the full range of uncertainties associated with climate change is an inherent challenge when communicating with the general public [Ital added] (Moser and Dilling 2004), and one that must be addressed.

I am not going to challenge the study’s data (though note my caveats about personality tests), but the extrapolation about what to do about them [in italics] seems very problematic to me. And I think that Al Gore would agree.

In my experience, scientists are vastly more comfortable with uncertainty than average folks, and they communicate far too much of it, rather than too little. (Just go read any IPCC Summary for Policymakers.)

What’s more, if scientists were really high on the “need for closure” then we’d have a lot of trouble getting them to change their minds and consider new evidence. Huh? That’s what the scientific method is all about.

I’m not saying the data are wrong—it may be that I’m describing the learned norms of the scientific community (nurture), rather than the baseline personalities of those who opt to be researchers (nature). However, I will note that with another scientific controversy, the evolution battle, we have evidence suggesting that those who deny evolution, the anti-evolutionists, are high on need for closure, i.e., closed-mindedness. It is they who do not like the uncertainty that they perceive to follow from the scientific account.

Caveats aside, what can we take away from this approach?

My bottom line is that it is promising. I’m sure there are significant personality gaps between the average scientist and the average American (it would be shocking if there were not), and that these do indeed impair communication. So this study was long overdue.

However, there should be more research, and the Five Factor/Big Five test ought to be used too. And we should reserve judgment about the last conclusion above—that scientists need to give the public more uncertainty. Yikes. Isn’t that tantamount to falling into the same “sowing doubt” strategy that Al Gore right now is trying to defeat?

I’m sure Fox News would love it, though.

(Image credit: Julia Vitullo-Martin)

Hi to all. I’m thrilled to be here at Science Progress—the next stage in what is nearly a decade long run for my science and politics blog, “The Intersection.”

Many of you may know me already. If you don’t, here are the specs.

I’m a science and political journalist and author, as well as a blogger, podcaster, and professional trainer of scientists in the art of communication.

I’m the author of three books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science, Storm World, and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. And I’ve just completed the draft of a new book, which remains unannounced–but I tipped my hand a tad (but only a tad) with this recent article in Mother Jones.

I work regularly with the National Science Foundation to train scientists to be better communicators of their research, and travel monthly to different states to do so. (For more information on the “Science: Becoming the Messenger” program, see here.) I also blog twice a week for DeSmogBlog.com about climate change, and am a host of the Point of Inquiry podcast, with a new show airing every other Monday.

So what can you expect of this blog, “The Intersection,” at its new home at Science Progress?

I cover the policy and the politics of science, as well as the communication of science and a new area, the science of politics. I often invite guest bloggers with similar interests, like Jon Winsor and Jamie Vernon, to contribute as well.

So what does this mean?

Plenty of tracking of misuses of science, on the left and the right alike. I don’t believe the two sides are at all equal when it comes to doing this, but I do believe in at least trying to keep my side honest.

Plenty of analysis of why these kinds of abuses occur—i.e., what drives and motivates them.

Lots of discussion of the place of science in U.S. culture, and how to communicate it better–e.g., here. That includes an increasing focus on understanding what social scientists are telling us about how people’s minds work and why they resist inconvenient information—and how to better get it through, not just on science but on any contested factual issue.

Posts on science policy and scientific integrity issues.

Some dabbling in the history of science, when necessary–e.g., a politician, uh, invokes Galileo.

A dabbling in the science of politics itself—see e.g., here. This is a growing area of interest for me.

It’s really a very important time to be tracking the politics of science, its communication, and the scientific grounding for both of these. On the one hand, we have a situation in which, increasingly, the two political persuasions in the U.S. have diverging conceptions of reality itself. This leads to all manner of fact torturing and abuse.

At the same time, the social sciences—communications, political science, social psychology, even evolutionary psychology and neuroscience—are coming on strong with new insights about why these kinds of reality gaps occur, and how to possibly solve them.

And that’s what my next post is going to be about. Stand by.

A few months back, those who care about accurate climate science and energy education in high school classes registered a minor victory. Under fire from outlets like The New York Times, the education publishing behemoth Scholastic (of Clifford the Big Red Dog and Harry Potter fame) pulled an energy curriculum sponsored by the American Coal Foundation, which gave a nice PR sheen to coal without bothering to cover, uh, the whole environmental angle. The curriculum had reportedly already been mailed to 66,000 classrooms by the time it got yanked.

When it comes to undermining accurate and responsible climate and energy education at the high school level, Scholastic may have been the most prominent transgressor. But precisely because it is a massive and respected educational publisher, and actually cares what The New York Times thinks, it was also the most moderate and easy to reason with.

Although it’s hard to find online now, I’ve reviewed the offending coal curriculum, entitled “The United States of Energy.” In my view, it didn’t even contain any obvious falsehoods—except for errors of omission. It was more a case of subtle greenwashing.

What’s currently seeping into classrooms across the country is far, far worse—more ideological, and more difficult to stop. We’re talking about outright climate denial being fed to students—and accurate climate science teaching being attacked by aggressive Tea Party-style ideologues.

Science magazine just released a report on the state of affairs out there in this place called America, and it’s ugly. From the piece:

How to fight this?

That’s very difficult because, as the Science piece notes, you can’t use the First Amendment. It only bans teaching religion in classrooms, and it is hard to claim that climate change denial—unlike evolution denial—is fundamentally religious in nature. I wouldn’t want to have to argue that case in court.

But while not religiously impelled in a traditional sense, the conservative activists who are attacking the teaching of climate science at the grassroots do fit a familiar profile. We’ve gotten to know them very well by now.

They are hierarchical in outlook, and tend to deny all manner of environmental risks. They often believe that climate science is part of a global conspiracy to impose a statist economy. And of course, they are often conservative white men like Jeffrey Barke, the Los Alamitos Unified School District board of education member who has placed this school at the center of attacks on accurate climate science teaching.

These people are nothing if not highly politicized and emotional. Here’s Barke in his own words:

What is the case for not letting people like Barke influence young students?

Simple: When a political fight erupts at a school over the teaching science, students are effectively being taught to tie science together with emotional, politicized reasoning processes–the way the adults who are interefering in the curriculum have already done in their own minds.

That’s precisely the opposite of what we want to be instilling in young brains. Students ought to be learning to think critically, to be dispassionate and apportion their beliefs to the evidence.

Attacks on climate science in schools aren’t just interferences with teaching, then. By supplying teenagers with politicized misinformation, you’re prepping them to have the kinds of emotionally driven argumentative responses that make our public discourse at the national level so fruitless.

You’re not just instilling denial. You’re creating the next generation of political dysfunction.

You’re not teaching kids to think, you’re teaching them to shout.

Chris is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and author of the bestselling book The Republican War on Science, dubbed “a landmark in contemporary political reporting” by Salon.com and a “well-researched, closely argued and amply referenced indictment of the right wing’s assault on science and scientists” by Scientific American.

The 1998 paper hit the British public like a thunderclap, triggering a decline in use of the MMR vaccine as well as a resurgence of the measles. It was the opening shot in the vaccine-autism controversy that still rages today (albeit in varied forms, not all of which still focus on the MMR vaccine). But the credibility of Wakefield’s work has since taken a steady stream of hits, culminating in this last devastating blow.

On a scientific level, the most severe undermining of Wakefield’s study came in the form of a 2004 analysis by the Institute of Medicine, one wing of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The IOM examined no less than 16 separate studies on the purported dangers of the MMR vaccine, in addition to Wakefield’s. The latter they found “uninformative with respect to causality”; overall, they concluded that “the evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism.”

Even prior to that, ten of Wakefield’s original coauthors (out of twelve in total) had backed away from the work in a 2004 letter to The Lancet. “We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient,” they wrote. “However, the possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for public health.”

Meanwhile, a series of investigative stories published in The Times of London unearthed Wakefield’s undisclosed ties to vaccine litigation in the U.K. The full Lancet retraction that occurred yesterday builds on all of these developments, including, most recently, an investigation into Wakefield by the U.K.’s General Medical Council which declared him “irresponsible” and questioned, among other matters, the risks imposed upon children in the original study.

Let’s pause for a moment here. We’re talking about a single, small study—on just 12 children—that stirred a mass anti-vaccine movement and a trend away from vaccination that threatens public health in some wealthy counties. Already, you should be wondering how it could be possible to build so much upon such a slender reed. But if you then consider the subsequent fate of the study, and the scandal that has attended it, a reasonable person would surely conclude that the original scare about the MMR vaccine and autism had no serious foundation whatsoever.

Here’s the thing, though. It seems obvious to all recent commentators—myself included—that the latest Wakefield news will have virtually no impact on Wakefield’s passionate followers, the anti-vaccine ideologues in the UK and United States who have long cheered him on, and will continue to do so. If anything, it will probably only make them still stronger in their convictions.

Following its original efflorescence in 1998, modern vaccine skepticism has taken many other forms than a focus on the MMR vaccine. In the United States, there has probably been much more concern about the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, which used to be in many vaccines (however, thimerosal has long since been removed from most vaccines, and autism rates have not dropped). The movement is much bigger than Wakefield; but the continuing allegiance to Wakefield, despite all that has occurred, shows that we’re really dealing with something very irrational here, what Michael Specter calls “denialism.”

In a feature story for Discover magazine a year back, I surveyed the vaccine-autism debate and tried to pose a question I felt few others had adequately considered. What would it take—beyond the overwhelming scientific evidence, which already exists—for this battle to finally go away? A Lancet retraction isn’t going to do it, that’s for sure. For vaccine skeptics, that’s just more evidence of corruption and collusion in the medical establishment. Indeed, I doubt any individual scientific development has the strength to move these folks—because we aren’t dealing with a phenomenon that’s scientific in nature.

Instead, I believe we need some real attempts at bridge-building between medical institutions—which, let’s admit it, can often seem remote and haughty—and the leaders of the anti-vaccination movement. We need to get people in a room and try to get them to agree about something—anything. We need to encourage moderation, and break down a polarized situation in which the anti-vaccine crowd essentially rejects modern medical research based on the equivalent of conspiracy theory thinking, even as mainstream doctors just shake their heads at these advocates’ scientific cluelessness. Vaccine skepticism is turning into one of the largest and most threatening anti-science movements of modern times. Watching it grow, we should be very, very worried—and should not assume for a moment that the voice of scientific reason, in the form of new studies or the debunking of old, misleading ones, will make it go away.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Scienceand Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

For the definitive account of what some are now calling “GlacierGate,” I refer you to Climate Science Watch’s Rick Piltz, whose exhaustive investigation and explanation shows clearly that the IPCC made an inexcusable error in the Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation, Vulnerability) volume of its Fourth Assessment Report. The peer review process broke down, and very dubious (and, indeed, plagiarized) claims were published about the likelihood of the Himalayan glaciers vanishing, due to climate change, by the year 2035. The central offending sentence is the following:

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

Not only is this business about 2035 an exceedingly dubious assertion, but part of the error seems traceable to a simple typo—an original source made predictions for the year 2350, not 2035.  When doubts were raised about the passage, however, the IPCC failed to respond either quickly or well. IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri even reportedly referred to a November Indian government report that questioned the IPCC’s findings about the glaciers’ vulnerability as “voodoo science.” Actually, the voodoo was all the IPCC’s, but the U.N. body only acknowledged its error several months after questions were first raised in the Indian report. “In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly,” the IPCC coughed out on January 20.

As a result of these flubs, the “Glaciergate” scandal has grown vastly larger than it should have, and skeptics are calling not only for the resignation of Pachauri, but even the revocation of the body’s 2007 Nobel Prize. There are also allegations that the erroneous content was added to the IPCC report for stark political reasons, but this seems questionable.

So without exonerating the IPCC in this instance—there is no defense for such shoddy work—let’s attempt to inject a little sanity here. The IPCC goofed, but we should keep matters in perspective. We’re talking about one tiny section of a 938-page report on how climate change will affect different parts of the world. It would be amazing if errors did not slip into such a vast document, whatever the professed peer review standards may be. And the mistake was originally caught not by skeptics, but by scientists, including an IPCC report co-author. In the broadest sense, the scientific process is actually working here, even if the IPCC stumbled in this case.

Moreover, Himalayan glaciers are retreating, even if they’re not doing so faster than glaciers in other parts of the world, and even if they won’t be gone by 2035. As a team of scientists who exposed the IPCC’s mistake in a letter to the journal Science judiciously put it:

This was a bad error. It was a really bad paragraph, and poses a legitimate question about how to improve IPCC’s review process. It was not a conspiracy. The error does not compromise the IPCC Fourth Assessment, which for the most part was well reviewed and is highly accurate.

That seems like a very balanced take on “GlacierGate”—which itself follows just months after the devastating “ClimateGate.” It is impossible not to compare the two—even as it is also extremely disheartening to do so.

Once again, this flub and its aftermath raises deep questions about how climate scientists respond to crises and scandal. One of the simplest rules of public relations is that the cover-up is worse than the crime, and that certainly seems to describe what happened in this instance.

More generally, in the case of both GlacierGate and ClimateGate, it needs to be understood that while many science defenders will seek to set the record straight in these instances, and put whatever failing has occurred in proper context, that’s not really enough to distract attention away from a scandal. True, the larger picture of climate science doesn’t change because of the various “-Gates”; but in each case, that larger picture isn’t the story of the moment. The scandal is; and shifting out of the scandal frame, once it has been firmly established, is difficult or impossible to do. You can’t rewind a punch to remove a black eye; you have to wait for the black eye to heal. That’s why these messes should be avoided in the first place, or defused immediately when they happen. (It is hard to believe that, with skeptics out to find anything they can to undermine the IPCC, they could ever vanish completely.)

In broadest perspective, it is time to recognize that it is all-out war right now in the climate research arena. Climate scientists are under concerted attack, as is the scientific information they produce and defend. Moreover, it’s a nastier and, in many ways, a worse situation than what obtained while George W. Bush was president. We’ve swapped a centrally organized government effort to distort climate science for a kind of grassroots, guerilla war against it, driven by blogs and skeptic scientist amateurs who nourish a powerful sense of self-motivation, a generous helping of anger and outrage, and seem to smell blood in the water.

Climate scientists must take this new threat with the utmost seriousness. Frankly, I’ve never seen things this bad, or climate research so vulnerable in the public eye. It is crisis time, folks. And the attacks are just going to keep on coming.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

In my view, the picture here remains pretty dismal. But perhaps out of academic evenhandedness (and also in part by avoiding at least two very problematic areas), NSF paints a more mixed picture.

On the positive side, for instance, the report consistently shows that Americans are not so scientifically benighted as one might think, at least in comparison with the rest of the world. We go to science museums more frequently. We claim a higher level of interest in “new scientific discoveries” than citizens in South Korea, China, and many parts of Europe. And in terms of sheer factual knowledge, we perform pretty much on par with Europe, and ahead of other countries like Japan, China, and Russia.

Through such international comparisons, the latest NSF report suggests that if your preferred standard for judging a nation’s engagement with science is to see how it stacks up next to other comparable (e.g., developed) countries, then the United States really doesn’t fare so poorly. Furthermore, NSF emphasizes that Americans profess to have very positive views about science. They overwhelmingly think science makes our lives better and that it deserves federal funding. And they have an apparently abiding trust in the leaders of the scientific community.

All of which is certainly to the good. And yet  the image of an America little informed about science, and little engaged with it, still shines through in the latest report.

As Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 itself admits, seeing how the country fares on science in comparison with other nations isn’t the only possible means of judgment. If one’s standard is more ambitious—emphasizing, in the latest report’s words, “what a technologically advanced society requires (either today or in the future) to compete in the world economy and enable its citizens to better take advantage of science progress in their own lives”—then it is very hard to feel good about the current state of affairs in the United States.

For instance, just 13 percent of the public now claims to follow science and technology news “very closely,” and this number has been on a downward trend for the past decade, ending with the current low. So while Americans may profess great admiration for science in the abstract, they hardly feel compelled to pay it much attention.

Similarly, there has been little apparent improvement over time in Americans’ basic ability to answer factual questions about science correctly. Moreover, the vast majority of our citizens have scant familiarity with key emerging scientific fields that will dramatically shape the future, such as nanotechnology and biotechnology—and it is important to note that these are the only such fields that the NSF report focuses in on. Ask Americans about other coming scientific technologies or quandaries—say, geoengineering, or synthetic biology—and I imagine the responses would be even more dismal.

And then there are the egregiously politicized issues, like climate change or the teaching of evolution, where the gulf between the scientific community and the public is unbelievably vast. For instance, according to a 2009 Pew study, 84 percent of U.S. scientists think the earth is getting warmer due to human activities, versus 49 percent of the public.

Rather surprisingly, Chapter 7 of the latest Science and Engineering Indicators report doesn’t discuss evolution. Neither does it address another increasingly critical topic, and another central area of breakdown between science and U.S. society: vaccination. Americans are currently in the extremely dangerous throes of vaccine retreat, a growing movement that is based on little more than scientific misinformation.

The latest Science and Engineering Indicators report performs a great service—it gives us all the best data, and it frames it in such a way as to keep us honest. Not everything is rotten when it comes to the state of science in America, and we should remember that. But at the same time, there is much, much to worry about. One year ago, President Obama pledged to restore science to its “rightful place” in American life, and the administration has done much to achieve this goal—but as the latest figures show, none of us has any excuse to feel satisfied or complacent.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Not surprisingly, environmentalists detest MTR, and have been outraged to watch it gain momentum thanks to regulatory policy changes made by the Bush administration. In fact, greens aren’t very happy with the Obama administration’s environmental regulators on this topic, either. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently granted a permit for another mountaintop mine in West Virginia, arguing that the environmental impacts of the project would be adequately mitigated.

But now, a group of prominent environmental scientists are lending their expertise to the case against MTR and, further, are questioning the very idea that mitigation of its damaging impacts is possible—or in other words, whether there is any such thing as a “mild” or “safe” mountaintop removal. In a recent “Policy Forum” article in the journal Science, a team of twelve environmental researchers survey MTR’s many nasty effects, which range from the destruction of ecosystems and the attendant reduction in biodiversity and species endangerment, to stream pollution, fish deformation, the befouling and dangerous pollution of human drinking systems, the increased risk of flooding, and so forth. Then, at the end of the paper, the scientists step beyond the mere “facts” of the case to denounce MTR in uncompromising terms, calling for policy changes to prevent its further use. What started out as pure science became, for these researchers, a clarion call to action:

Clearly, current attempts to regulate MTM/VF [“mountaintop removal mining with valley fills”] practices are inadequate. Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses. Considering environmental impacts of MTM/VF, in combination with evidence that the health of people living in surface-mining regions of the central Appalachians is compromised by mining activities, we conclude that MTM/VF permits should not be granted unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems. Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science. The United States should take leadership on these issues, particularly since surface mining in many developing countries is expected to grow extensively.

Such outspokenness is hardly typical, even for a “Policy Forum” in Science. In general, the standard scientific mode is to provide factual analysis, and then to step back and let policymakers process its implications and proceed, on that basis, to action. We report, you decide. Anything else, it has long been thought, means crossing over into the dreaded realm of “advocacy” and undermining a scientist’s claim to the coveted mantle of objectivity.

And yet there can be little doubt that, in part because it is so outspoken and so direct, the Science paper has had a major media impact. Indeed, the paper has put the Obama EPA in the hot seat: On the one hand, the agency seemed to embrace the latest findings (for how could it argue with the best available science?); on the other, it had just let another MTR permit go through. It suddenly seemed caught in an embarrassing contradiction.

Granted, there were also predictable swipes at the outspoken scientists from the right wing. An American Spectator writer even gloried in this YouTube clip of an MTR explosion. (Yay, destruction!) Scientific outspokenness will always trigger brush-back pitches from those adversely affected by it—that’s an unavoidable consequence of being out in the public arena.

But to me, the most intriguing question is this: How did the 12 environmental scientists on the Science paper managed to achieve such an impact? Did they plan for it, or was it just fortuitous?

So I called up Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the article’s lead author. I was something like her 30^th media interview on the topic, but unlike other journalists, I didn’t want to ask about either the policy or the science of MTR. Rather, I inquired about the communication strategy that had been employed to disseminate news about her paper. And thus unfolded a striking story of a group of scientists, with extremely important research in their hands, doing everything pretty much right to ensure its maximal impact.

As Palmer explained, the project out started as pure science. Her team of researchers began by synthesizing a wide array of data from different scientific fields on the consequences of MTR, in a more thorough way than had ever been done before—a process that consumed many months in the peer review process. But as the truly alarming results started to manifest, members of the scientists’ group soon coalesced around a strong, unanimous position about what they were finding. “Rather than just reporting the science,” says Palmer, “we all agreed that the consequences were so huge, we were very comfortable saying, ‘This just has to stop.’”

Resolved upon its message, the team then sought to disseminate it. They booked the National Press Club, bringing along 6 of the most media-savvy members of the 12-scientist group to make the case. And their message, as in the paper, laid out plainly the policy changes they felt needed to happen on the basis of their work, and upbraided the current administration for ignoring science.

“What’s significant about this article,” Palmer remarks, is “the overwhelming nature of the findings, the demonstration for the first time really clearly the cumulative impacts—but also, scientists making a policy statement. It’s not that common.”

And then came fortuity: Almost simultaneous with the paper’s release, the EPA permitted another MTR project, as mentioned before. That gave journalists double the angle they might have had otherwise, and boom: The result was overwhelming press attention to the case, made by scientists, for why this destructive procedure must end. Scientists made a very positive media splash, and one whose policy effects are likely to long reverberate.

“We’re at a point now where we really can’t afford not to speak up,” Palmer concludes of her efforts. “We’ve got too much at stake.”

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

The tradition goes back to Wisconsin Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who distributed “Golden Fleece” awards to identify government profligacy, and frequently targeted scientific projects or grants for ridicule. Today, Proxmire has an heir in Senator John McCain (R-AZ), notorious for carelessly dismissing grizzly bear research on the 2008 campaign trail, even as his running mate Sarah Palin did the same for fruit fly studies.

And now, in a new twist on the old theme, McCain has teamed up with Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma in a fleece war on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, targeting 100 of its projects, many of them scientific in nature, as examples of wasteful spending.

When Congress passed the economic stimulus bill of early 2009, $21 billion was appropriated for science funding, including research, equipment, development, and construction. This was just a small portion of the $787 billion total stimulus outlay, and of the science funds themselves, by far the largest slice went to the National Institutes of Health ($10.4 billion). Other major gains went to the Department of Energy Office of Science ($1.6 billion), the National Science Foundation ($3 billion), and NASA ($1 billion).

The result was a profusion of science and research capacity development, much of it generating jobs as well as innovations. Consider, for example, a nearly $1 million NIH stimulus grant to Johns Hopkins University for a study on treatment options for drug abuse following inpatient care (such as counseling and follow-up care), which brought with it 86 jobs to support the large project. In other words, in this instance, medical knowledge and economic recovery will advance simultaneously.

And that’s just one of many such stories helpfully compiled on the ScienceWorksForUs website. It is important to remember that whenever major research projects get funded, the dollars tend to create a variety of university-based support jobs and graduate student livelihoods to carry out all aspects of the work. They also enable the retention of existing jobs that may otherwise have gone away, and perhaps also the hiring of professors and researchers.

In the face of all of this, what do McCain and Coburn do in their latest report? They nitpick, ignore the big picture of science funding in the stimulus, and focus in on a few individual grants, which they attempt to trivialize. Thus, for instance, their report mocks a project funded by the National Science Foundation to the tune of $1.57 million: Teams of researchers from Penn State University and other universities are traveling to Patagonia to look for plant fossils, in an area where major dinosaur finds have occurred before. “Move over Indiana Jones!” write Coburn and McCain. The innuendo seems to be that studying plants is for wusses, and can hardly be considered stimulative of the economy. But of course, there is much to be learned about past climates from such a project, and especially about what happened to plants during the extinction of the dinosaurs—and any $1.57 million grant will certainly create jobs to support the research project.

It’s important to recognize that, in the rush to get stimulus funds out the door quickly, agencies like the National Science Foundation unleashed the majority of their dollars on already filed grants. This certainly meant funding a lot of pure science, like the study described above, with stimulus dollars. However, awardees are required by NSF to report how many jobs they created or preserved based on each grant. And again, with almost any major scientific research project, such positions would tend to be created—although with many research projects only now beginning, the number of jobs created may not be known yet in each case.

McCain and Coburn also target various medical studies: For instance, a malt liquor and marijuana study in Buffalo, New York, funded to the tune of $389,357. Coburn and McCain turn this entirely legitimate public health research inquiry into a joke, simply because the substances may have particular lifestyles associated with them. But so what? Young adults abuse these substances, and it is quite legitimate to study the associated effects. This is particularly the case for malt liquor, as the grant reports that it has received little research attention. Understanding early alcohol abuse patterns, as well as the deaths and injuries that result from drug abuse among young men, are clear public health benefits. Moreover, as with any major medical study, it’s inevitable that jobs will be created to support the work.

Something similar goes for another NIH-funded study on sexual behaviors of young women in college, determining whether they are more likely to “hook up” after drinking—once again, public health research that is greeted by McCain and Coburn only with a sneer. And on it goes: They dismiss a public health study on why young males don’t like wearing condoms, along with research on the “Icelandic Arctic Environment in the Viking Age,” the “Learning Patterns of Honeybees,” and so on.

In the end, McCain and Coburn can certainly enjoy their yucks at the expense of science. But there’s virtually no substance to their complaints. In each instance, closer investigation reveals that the research is legitimate science. Moreover, McCain and Coburn never show that a particular grant fails to stimulate the economy, either—they just assume as much, even though scientific grants are known to create jobs.

In the end, while it is certainly worth exposing and rooting out government waste, you need something far stronger than uninformed swipes to get the job done.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

“It,” of course, was the year 2009—and for science in the United States and beyond, it featured developments and revelations variously exciting, disturbing, and above all, political.

It was the year of H1N1 flu, an unsettling test run with a less-than-catastrophic pandemic. The response called into question our capability, and our infrastructure, for dealing with the next threat.

It was the year the Large Hadron Collider finally got those protons smashing—despite being interrupted by various maintenance problems and, yes, even by bread dropped by a bird flying above the machine, which led to overheating.

It was the year of great scientific anniversaries—200 years since Darwin’s birth, 150 since his publication of the Origin of Species, and 400 since Galileo raised his telescope to the heavens. Unfortunately, some sought to exploit these occasions. Creationist Ray Comfort distributed thousands of special “editions” of the Origin to college campuses, each featuring his lengthy anti-Darwinian “introduction.” Only then came the words of Darwin himself, almost unreadable due to their tiny font size.

It was a year of complete U-turns in science policy. President Barack Obama reversed George W. Bush’s dramatic restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, and the first 13 new stem cell lines were approved for federally funded research since 2001. Meanwhile, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency moved to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, finding that they do indeed endanger the public.

It was also the year of the first-ever passage, by a 219-212 margin in the U.S. House of Representatives, of a cap-and-trade bill that would cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions—but not the year for any parallel action in the U.S. Senate.

It was the year that everyone seemed to own an iPhone and use the word “app” in regular conversation. It was the year Twitter went from being a mere annoyance to the epitome of web-based communication.

It was a year that saw the very first Nobel laureate scientist assume a cabinet position, in the figure of U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu.

It was the year in popular culture when science ceased to be nerdy and became world-saving cool. The disaster film 2012 epitomized the trend. Despite the plot’s scientific incoherence, the lead character is a scientist who is described in the film as a “deputy geologist” at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

It was the year of new calls for science communication and public engagement: The Year of Science 2009 movement was launched, the second installment of the World Science Festival was held in New York City, and three books came out exhorting scientists to kick off their shoes and speak to real people, including Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist, Cornelia Dean’s Am I Making Myself Clear?, and my own (co-authored) Unscientific America.

It was the year in which scientists captured the first ever images of an exoplanet—a planet orbiting another star far from our own solar system.

It was the year that Russian scientists upped the ante on the increasingly prominent subject of geoengineering. They did so by running a small-scale field trial that blasted sulfate aerosols out of the back a helicopter and then measured their effect on diffusing sunlight at ground level. On a vastly larger scale, such an intervention could cool the planet.

It was the year that several groups across the country celebrated the 50-year anniversary of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture. There was general agreement that those cultures are as divided as ever, if not more so—but also that a newer and more important rift may like not between scientists and humanists, but rather, between scientists and intellectuals on the one hand, and everybody else on the other.

It was the year of the “largest single investment in clean energy in American history” in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The government put $80 billion into clean energy across a range of sectors, ranging from the construction of a smart grid to the weatherization of homes, as a means to jumpstart economic growth and create jobs.

Sadly, and finally, it was the year for the rebirth of what is now a wide-ranging war on science. Some of us may have thought it ended with the previous administration; but we underestimated the momentum that crusaders against the Obama administration, and against climate change action, could gain on this front. With “ClimateGate,” a smear against climate researchers so damaging that it may even have impelled a measurable drop in public trust of environmental researchers, we enter a new stage for political conflicts over science—one in which the gloves are off as never before.

But if that’s a sobering note to end on, we can make a more uplifting new years’ resolution. As the push to defeat global warming continues to eke out small bits of progress (most recently in Copenhagen), it is time to recognize that our scientists need aid and defending—which includes helping them help themselves through better public communication efforts.

The battle to restore scientific integrity isn’t over. It has only begun.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Something big.

There’s just one small problem. Over recent years, as scientists have continued to iterate their climate and economic models—attempting to factor human population changes, economic growth, and national policies into an exceedingly complex and contingent picture of the atmospheric and planetary future—a distressing theme has emerged. It is very possible that warming is now moving so fast that today’s politically viable policies simply can’t avert a serious risk of catastrophic climate impacts occurring, or suffice to keep climate change within a clear “safe zone.” In other words, whatever Copenhagen achieves, it may not be enough. That’s especially the case for low-lying island nations beset by sea level rise, and other developing countries whose calls for climate justice, and the strongest possible precautionary policies, have engendered much sympathy here.

To see the nature of the conundrum, consider the analyses provided by Climate Interactive, a consortium of scientists and modelers who have developed a very useful way of analyzing the science and policy nexus of the climate debate, which can otherwise seem like a confusing quicksand of information. The Climate Interactive model merges scientific projections of how bad global temperatures could be by the year 2100 with the expected impacts of various national and international policies upon those temperatures. As of the most recent analysis, the model presents the following information: On a business-as-usual trajectory, we can expect a cataclysmic 4.8° Celsius of warming by 2100. Meanwhile, the currently confirmed climate policies embraced by nations worldwide—without a Copenhagen agreement—only get us down to around 3.9°C.

So where do the current Copenhagen proposals fit in between these two markers? Well, that’s the real trick. The summit could always surprise us, but as one of the Climate Interactive collaborators, MIT’s John Sterman, recently observed to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, “the negotiations must deliver the high end of current proposals and stretch beyond them, if the world is to have a reasonable chance of containing warming to below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, or the 1.5°C goal of many developing nations.”

It’s important to note the truly insidious way in which risk manifests itself in these discussions. Really, we don’t know how bad global warming is going to be in 2100; we only have estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to various carbon dioxide emission levels, surrounded by bars of uncertainty. But fundamentally, the climate system—and especially its potential feedbacks—is incompletely understood. So if all of our projections understate the climate sensitivity, there’s a risk of undershooting even with relatively strong policies, and still failing to reach a safe zone.

This line of thinking necessarily argues for ever-tougher, more precautionary policies—and runs smack into messy political realities. One is that the powerhouse countries at Copenhagen, such as China, India, and the United States, are setting 2°C as the target, and not something stronger, like 1.5°C. Another is that whatever approach heads of states agree upon at Copenhagen, getting the U.S. Congress to support such goals in legislation is something else altogether.

Yet at precisely this time, a growing movement argues that 2° Celsius—which corresponds to roughly 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—simply isn’t “safe.” Famed NASA climate scientist James Hansen and the 350.org movement are pushing the boundaries of the conversation by calling for a return to levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that we have already passed (we are currently at 390 parts per million), and that correspond to something more like 1.5°C. And in Copenhagen, a bloc of developing nations has also coalesced around this goal, citing the threats of submerged Pacific islands, a scorched Africa, and much else.

Certainly, not all scientists think the situation is as bad as Hansen does, although the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has also opined in the past that 350 ppm is really the safe level. (Interestingly, Pachauri seemed unwilling to reiterate that view when asked at a press conference here today.) But in the end, picking a scientific winner in such a debate misses the point: The risk of being wrong ought to be too much to be tolerated when the planet itself is at stake. Precaution is really the only thing that makes any sense.

And that’s the anguishing thing about watching the Copenhagen climate negotiations evolve: If you really, really care about planetary risk avoidance, you can’t like the way things are going.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Back in 2006, the year of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it felt as though serious and irreversible progress had finally been made on the climate issue. The feeling continued in 2007, when Al Gore won the Nobel and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that global warming was “unequivocal” and “very likely” human caused. Mega-companies like General Electric were burnishing new green identities, and the Prius was an icon. The Bush administration was widely suspected of having deceived the public about the urgency of the climate issue, and journalists were backing away from their previous penchant for writing “on the one hand, on the other hand” stories about the increasingly indisputable science.

Then came the election of Barack Obama, boasting a forward-looking policy agenda to address global warming and a stellar team of scientists and environmentalists in his cabinet and circle of advisers, including climate and energy expert John Holdren and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu. The United States, it seemed, would finally deal with global warming—and just in the nick of time.

Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack? Certainly, it was hard to imagine how they might pull off such a strike: They had virtually nothing going for them, no raw scientific materials to work with. All the science pointed to a greater-than-ever urgency of addressing the climate issue and a quickly closing window of opportunity for action. Within scientific circles, it was even becoming commonplace to discuss planetary modification, or geoengineering, as an alternative last ditch solution if we couldn’t stop runaway greenhouse warming in time.

But the skeptics were lying in wait. They didn’t need good science to make another sally: Their strength has always been in communication tactics anyway, and not scientific exactitude or rigor. And the U.S. public, never overwhelmingly sure about climate change, has long been susceptible to their smokescreens and misinformation campaigns.

The new skeptic strategy began with a ploy that initially seemed so foolish, so petty, that it was unworthy of dignifying with a response. The contrarians seized upon the hottest year in some temperature records, 1998—which happens to have been an El Nino year, hence its striking warmth—and began to hammer the message that there had been “no warming in a decade” since then.

It was, in truth, little more than a damn lie with statistics. Those in the science community eventually pointed out that global warming doesn’t mean every successive year will be hotter than the last one—global temperatures be on the rise without a new record being set every year. All climate theory predicts is that we will see a warming trend, and we certainly have. Or as the U.S. EPA recently put it, “Eight of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.” But none of them beat 1998; and so the statistical liars, like George Will of the Washington Post, continued their charade.

The public was quite vulnerable to such messages: Americans don’t know climate science very well, and the notion that temperatures aren’t actually “rising” after all must have spurred many doubts. Indeed, I suspect the “no warming since 1998” line of attack helped contribute to an alarming finding released in October by the Pew Research Center: the proportion of Americans agreeing there is “solid evidence the earth is warming” had declined to 57 percent, from 71 percent a year and a half earlier. And those attributing warming to human activities—the robust scientific consensus view—had dwindled from 47 percent to 36 percent over the same time period.

This blow, however, was nothing compared to the “ClimateGate” saga of November, in which a bevy of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom were illegally obtained and exposed, thus generating a dramatic scandal over the climate scientists’ alleged attempts to silence skeptics and thwart freedom of information requests. The truth is that, analyzed in their proper context, there isn’t very much that’s damning about the emails (though some of the scientists may have some things to answer for). But even taken at their worst, the emails do not change one whit the urgency of addressing global warming.

Scientists have pointed this out repeatedly, but to no avail: “ClimateGate” generated a massive wave of media attention, blending together the skeptics’ longstanding focus on undercutting climate science with a new overwhelming message of scandal and wrongdoing on the part of the climate research establishment. This story was not going to go away, and even as scientists put out statements (most of them several days late) explaining that the science of climate remains unchanged and unaffected by whatever went on at East Anglia, the case for human-caused global warming was dealt a blow the likes of which we have perhaps never before seen.

Whether we will recover some necessary momentum in Copenhagen—a formal United Nations venue for deliberation where scientific expertise is respected, and where misinformation will likely have less power—is up in the air. Nevertheless, there’s an important lesson here, for the climate issue and beyond.

In our mass media age, on any politicized scientific topic, there is no reason to assume a correlation between increasing scientific certainty about a problem and increasing public awareness, acceptance, or willingness to take action to address that problem. If anything, the two might well become anti-correlated, as in the global warming case. And that is because—to speak in a language that scientists will certainly understand all too well—the state of the science is only one variable affecting public opinion. And in the global warming debate, there has been an utter failure to control for any of the others.

If scientists, their allies, and their supporters want to better ensure the translation of scientific knowledge into action than we’ve seen in the global warming case, there is simply no choice but to work much, much harder to influence public opinion, and anticipate and thwart the skeptics before they can bring about another “ClimateGate.”

[Clarification: This post originally indicated that climate contrarians seized upon 1998 as the "hottest year in the global temperature record"; it has been changed to indicate that this is the hottest year in some temperature records.]

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

And now, the climate change deniers will claim a scalp.

Yesterday, climate researcher Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the UK—which is responsible for one of three important datasets tracking global temperature trends—announced he would be stepping aside pending an independent review of allegations that have emerged in the scandal variously referred to as “ClimateGate” and the “SwiftHack.” It’s just the latest development in a saga that began when a boatload of CRU emails and documents, obtained through an illegal computer hacking, made their way into the public arena last month. The files were instantly seized upon by climate change skeptics and deniers, who touted them—with a combination of glee and histrionic outrage—as evidence of mainline scientists conspiring to quash legitimate dissent, and to conceal problems with the data and analyses used to demonstrate human-caused global warming.

The truth, however, is that while the CRU emails don’t always look very good—and not all of them can necessarily be defended—in the end this saga amounts to little more than a distraction from the real and burning issues in climate science and climate policy. Moreover, its suspicious timing—coming just weeks before the U.N. Copenhagen climate conference—suggests a strategic attempt to undermine those international deliberations by once again casting doubt on the scientific basis for concern about climate change—a tried, true, and seemingly unending political strategy.

Unfortunately for climate skeptics, the CRU hacking incident fails to support the burden that they have placed upon it. Whatever behavior was revealed in these emails, even its most salacious interpretation can scarcely undermine the global edifice of knowledge about the causes of ongoing climate change—which may be bolstered by, but certainly does not rely solely upon, CRU’s research and analyses. Mainline scientists fully recognize this; thus, following the CRU hacking, the American Meteorological Society reaffirmed its longstanding statement on the human causation of climate change, remarking that “Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true—which is not yet clearly the case—the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.”

In truth, of course, few if any of the CRU emails could legitimately be called scandalous. True, the files show scientists carrying on in a far less guarded fashion than they would in public, and some of them do appear suspicious—but in each individual case, we must also understand the context. Typically, the email-zipping scientists now under massive scrutiny are reacting in the communications to various controversies and scandals in the field—most of which are, in turn, the result of systematic attacks on climate research by conservative think tanks, politicians, and a small group of “skeptic” scientists.

Take, for instance, a rather innocent email from the year 2003 that has been made much hay of, in which climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University opines that “I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.” This has been depicted as evidence of some systematic attempt to suppress dissent or manipulate the scientific process, but the conclusion is unwarranted. Mann is referring to an episode in which this little-known journal published a wildly controversial paper on historic temperature trends that was widely attacked and picked apart by mainstream researchers; in the wake of its publication, several editors at the journal actually resigned. No wonder scientists like Mann were upset with Climate Research. That’s especially so given that, despite its flaws, the controversial Soon & Baliunas paper was instantly and inappropriately thrust into political debate at the highest level via a Senate hearing convened by Oklahoma global warming denier James Inhofe, who claimed that the paper “shifts the paradigm” away from the conclusion that global warming is human caused. (Not.)

Or take another email that has been much touted, one in which Phil Jones writes, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The word “trick,” and the phrase “hide the decline,” have been treated as smoking guns by climate skeptics, but once again, the conclusion is unwarranted. As the bloggers at RealClimate.org (including Mann) note, “trick” here is simply a methodological device or innovation, in this case for merging and presenting data. “Hide the decline” might seem more problematic when taken out of context, but what this actually means is the exclusion of one set of climate records (based on tree rings) that do not show warming after 1960, and are known to be problematic for this reason and not considered reliable. Far from being scandalous, then, this is good scientific practice.

Perhaps the most troubling document in the CRU cache is one that shows Phil Jones actively emailing other climate researchers, telling them to “delete any emails” subject to a Freedom of Information request. Jones now claims he didn’t actually delete any; Mann, who received the email in question, says likewise; and CRU itself says that “No record has been deleted, altered, or otherwise dealt with in any fashion with the intent of preventing the disclosure of all, or any part, of the requested information.” It is understandable that climate scientists under such intense and often politically driven scrutiny would bristle at the prospect of having skeptics selectively reanalyze their data with an ax to grind (indeed, such a qualm about selective interpretation is fully borne out by responses to the CRU emails). Still, such an email is troubling, and the inquiry just launched will understandably probe how CRU has responded to a “deluge of Freedom of Information requests.”

But whatever that inquiry shows, this core fact remains: Just because a group of scientists were found to have behaved like imperfect human beings in emails they thought would remain private does not mean that we don’t have to worry about global warming. Anyone arguing otherwise is making a stunning leap based on the most scanty and inappropriate of evidence—and the willingness of climate skeptics to do this has always been, and will remain, the real scandal.

Chris Mooney is the author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

However, the occasion provides an opportunity to reflect on many, many columns, and on several years of writing about American science as it intersects with our political world and our culture.

The topics I have covered here were diverse. After all, I wrote regularly about the science of hurricanes, about global warming, about the intersections between politics and science, and about science in the media, among many other topics. But the columns also shared many common themes. For I was exploring again and again, albeit in different ways, the problem of why science often just doesn’t get through to the people who need it most in other parts of our society—the politicians, say, or the journalists.

I am confident this emphasis was not wasted. The translation of science into other spheres is a critical problem today, not only because a new generation of science policy controversies will soon be coming down the pike, but also because we live in a time of media upheaval, when (as I have noted in many columns) science journalists are vanishing from the traditional press, and it’s not clear who is going to be there to take their place. It may well be that in the future, the translators of scientific knowledge will have to be the scientists themselves, if only because we may not be able to rely on the journalists any longer.

Looking back, I also see a clear progression to the many columns I wrote— one necessarily dictated by the much larger events that surrounded us all.

We went, during these years, from an administration that had stomped science into the ground, to an administration that consciously pledged to right that wrong. As this occurred, I inevitably focused less and less on anti-science abuses and wrongdoing by the outgoing Bushies, and more and more on the kinds of problems the Obama team couldn’t necessarily fix, despite their renewed emphasis on science. These were, largely, the problems of science in the culture, and in the society. They were the sort of problems that would remain with us long after the Bush administration departed from the White House and Washington.

It’s also notable that I wrote the column during a time of major anniversaries and occasions for reflection on where we now stand with respect to science in America. In October of 2007 came the 50-year anniversary of Sputnik. In July of 2009 came the 40-year anniversary of our landing on the moon. Also in 2009 came the 200-year anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 50-year anniversary of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture.

Such events provided repeated occasions in the column to ponder where we now find ourselves. Essentially, for 50 years in the United States—post Sputnik—magnificent scientific research has been performed. There have been incredible innovations we are all proud of: landing on the moon, decoding the genome, creating the Internet, and more. And we deserve that pride: We made a conscious decision, decades ago, to create a scientific establishment that would reward us in this way. It wasn’t done on the cheap; it wasn’t by accident. Rather, it was one of the soundest investments that our parents could possibly have made.

And yet it is apparent, looking back over those years, that there are also some things we are not so proud of. After all, much of the public didn’t come along on American science’s incredible odyssey of discovery. And our scientists didn’t learn nearly as much about reaching the public as they did about how to understand nature—and how to use such understanding to create technologies that benefit us.

If there has been a central theme to this column, it is that it is long past time for this imbalance—between research and outreach, between the creation of knowledge and its sharing—to finally be redressed.

Even without license to write regularly for the next year, I plan to keep thinking about how we can do that—and I want to thank all of you for following my work on this subject over the past two years.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Consider an episode last month on “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC. The president of Caltech, Jean-Lou Chameau, went on the air to offer his provocative theory about why the United States fares so poorly in science and math education. Our science teachers don’t tend to have science backgrounds, Chameau argued, but instead tend to be trained in general education. That’s the problem-they don’t know their subjects intimately, and so can’t excel at teaching them.

Lehrer’s callers, though—all of whom had been screened to privilege those with science education backgrounds—quickly related their own experiences and complicated this narrative. Few disagreed directly with Chameau’s point, but they added in quite a number of complicating factors.

For instance, some callers pointed out that the necessity of “teaching to the test” often constrains the ability of science teachers to more creatively engage students. Similarly, others observed that many students are afraid of science and math, fearing it’s too hard, and simply not for them. It’s something I’ve heard as well from science teachers: That many of their students insist they’re not a “science person” or a “math person.”

And that’s just the beginning. Another Brian Lehrer caller sadly remarked that we don’t pay our teachers well, whatever their training. Another noted that we live in a culture that values celebrity and money, not intellect. And Lehrer himself pointed out the religiosity of the United States, and how that can impair science education, which of course is particularly notorious on the topic of evolution.

Is it possible that all of these things are true, and all of them are the problem? I would argue that is precisely the case—and indeed, how could it be otherwise? U.S. science education occurs in the context of an American culture that has very deep problems with science—problems that are manifested in many spheres other than the educational system, but are certainly reflected there, too.

What this inevitably means is that even as we fight off the creationists, and (hopefully) invest more in paying teachers and training them, we have to push for cultural change with regard to how we think about science. And at the core of that change must be the recognition that science doesn’t have to be something weird, different, and alienating. It isn’t just brainless memorization, and it isn’t useless stuff that you’ll never need. Rather, it’s fun, and it’s relevant—or at least it can be in the hands of a good teacher. At the middle-school or high-school level, any teacher who can convey this ought to be celebrated, whether or not he or she has a science background.

Since I am a person who was actually turned on to science at a particular point during my educational trajectory, perhaps my personal history is instructive here. Nothing against my high school teachers, but while I got A’s in science, I didn’t learn much of anything in a way that made it deeply resonate for me. That’s because I viewed the whole thing as a kind of game: memorization, which I was good at. The trick works especially well in biology, where knowing all the parts of the cell, or the stages of the Krebs Cycle, are the kinds of things you’re tested on.

It was only in college, when I started reading books by people such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson that science actually took on some meaning for me. In the hands of these literary scientists, science was no longer a body of facts. Rather, it unlocked who we were, where we were going, and why it all mattered. I’m too young to have been a watcher of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” series, but this is a core reason why it, too, inspired so many people to get interested in science.

There’s almost a kind of trap when it comes to teaching an intricate topic such as science. If you lose non-scientists in the weeds of the information, they’ll never see why it matters. But scientists thrive in the weeds-that’s their job. Our science teachers, then, are a critical conduit between the two groups. They may or may not have scientific backgrounds, but if they can’t trim the garden, they are bound to fail.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

It’s the widespread sense in the scientific community that while research has, for the most part, proceeded apace over the last 40 years, the rest of America has not always followed along.

In my new book Unscientific America, along with co-author Sheril Kirshenbaum, I make the case that we really have lost something important since the days of the Space Race and, more specifically, since the post-Sputnik era, when many dramatic investments in American science and American science education were unleashed. However, it’s important to define precisely what that “something important” is, lest we wind up with just another dirge for a lost “golden age”—a feast of nostaglia rather than a contribution to understanding. So to that end, some considerations:

The American Public Doesn’t Hate Science. Many alarming polling results document  just how disconnected Americans are from the world of science and from the knowledge scientists produce. For instance, the new Pew/AAAS study found that far fewer Americans today than ten years ago consider scientific accomplishments to be among our country’s “most important achievements”: Just 27 percent nowadays, versus 47 percent in May of 1999. That’s a huge falling off. Similarly, fewer Americans today view the space program’s triumphs—epitomized by the moon landing—as our country’s top achievement.

This doesn’t, however, make Americans anti-science; rather, they have many positive feelings about the scientific community. Americans overwhelmingly think science has had a positive impact on society, and have a great deal of trust in the leaders of scientific institutions. In other words, it is possible for the public to be both disengaged from, and yet also positively inclined towards, the scientific world. Science may have been more on the public radar during the post-Sputnik era, but out of mind is not the same thing as out of regard.

We Don’t Want to Warp Back in Time To Before the Environmental and Consumer Awakening. Whatever it is that we may lament about what has happened to our society over the past half century with respect to science, we must not lament the set of very important realizations that helped knock science off of its post World War II pedestal. These include the recognition that science’s fruits can have unseen environmental costs, like the damage caused by the pesticide DDT, or the ozone-depleting effect of chlorofluorocarbons; that moneyed interests can corrupt research; that science is not really as objective as its practitioners sometime claim (thanks, Mr. Kuhn); and so on. Any case for why we need to make science more central to American life today certainly cannot be a case to reject these very important reasons for sometimes viewing science itself with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The 1950s and 1960s May Have Represented an “Artificial High” for Science in American Life. The post-Sputnik era was the height of the Cold War, and the Space Race was driven, in significant part, by what we might call nationalistic fervor. In other words, the 1950s were a unique, and not always entirely admirable, era—this was also the time of McCarthyism, let us not forget.

Moreover, if you look farther back in U.S. history, before World War II for example, you see a country whose scientific community lagged significantly behind the science establishment of Europe.  The post-Sputnik years, and the years of the Space Race, might be seen in this context as an anomaly, a peak with valleys on either side. Perhaps this is not what we can expect to be the norm in America.

These are all important considerations to weigh. Nevertheless, if there’s a bottom line that they do not change, it is simply this: Today as in the post-Sputnik era, our nation’s engagement with science is critical to its future. Science fuels the economy, and it also generates the controversies that will force us to make very hard decisions, both ethical and political, long after the stem cell or global warming debates have finally subsided.

And the more we wake up to this as a people, the better prepared we’ll be for what’s coming—rather than surprised or frightened by it. It’s that simple.

It is this central engagement with science and its place in the future that our society had at mid century—when our political leaders were investing heavily in science and science education, and when citizens absorbed intense media coverage of each new step of the Space Race. That’s the important difference between the way people approached science in the ’50s and early ’60s and they way we approach it now. You can’t seriously argue that today, we are similarly engaged as a people with science—just turn on your television.

That’s what remains worrying, even after all the nuances have been dealt with.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

On Fox News on Monday, Sean Hannity inaugurated a series looking at Obama’s policy “czars,” describing them as “a select group of unvetted, unconfirmed individuals who are now at the helm of a shadow government right here in the U.S.” His first example was Holdren—a very poor choice, as it happens, as Holdren was indeed confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  “[Obama has] skirted the Senate confirmation process and has empowered individuals to see major offices now within the federal government, many of whom operate only under the supervision of the White House itself,” bleated Hannity. Who does his research?

Hannity then went on to describe Holdren as a “radical” and intone that he’s anti-American, wants to shut down our economy, and so on. But that’s really nothing compared to the other attacks that have surfaced online of late—and that have now made their way into the right wing Washington Times.

In 1977, more than thirty years ago, Holdren was the third author (with Paul and Anne Ehrlich) of a textbook entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, and Environment. It was a gigantic tome, fully 1,051 pages in length. In one vast 66 page chapter devoted to “Population Policies,” the authors surveyed a gamut of measures that had been undertaken or considered to control human population growth—including the most extreme. Those included coercive or “involuntary fertility control” measures, such as forced abortions and sterilizations.

However, to describe these measures is different from advocating them. And in fact, the Ehrlichs and Holdren concluded by arguing that noncoercive measures were what they suppported: “A far better choice, in our view, is to expand the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences”—such as birth control and access to abortions. In fairness, their text does read as dated today, ripe for quote mining. They were writing in very different times thirty years ago; but even if they were defending these positions then (and they weren’t), that hardly means that they do today.

But you may as well forget about context—historical or textual—when dealing with attack dogs. A website called Zombietime scanned passages of the textbook online, and intoned, “Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A ‘Planetary Regime’ with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States?” The information zinged around, and eventually made its way to the Washington Times, which wrote of Ecoscience: “Several selections from the book have been highlighted at blogs critical of Mr. Holdren, particularly passages that appear to advocate sterilization, forced abortions and consideration of an ‘armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force’ for population enforcement capabilities.”

Only at the end of an article insinuating that these were Holdren’s positions did the Times actually quote the staff of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which then refuted all the claims.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich have also refuted the charges—they sent out an email observing that “We were not then, never have been, and are not now ‘advocates’ of the Draconian measures for population limitation described—but not recommended—in the book’s 60-plus small-type pages cataloging the full spectrum of population policies that, at the time, had either been tried in some country or analyzed by some commentator.” In his Senate confirmation hearing—yes, Fox, there was one—Holdren also rejected the idea that he supports government-mandated efforts at population control.

But wait, you may be wondering: How do I know that the Ehrlichs are right about the their 1977 text, and not the conservatives? Well, because I walked over to the Engineering Library on the Princeton University campus, where I’m located, and got the book. And I can see how one could misread a text this old—from such a different time. But nevertheless, the criticism of Holdren today on this basis is exceedingly thin and stretched. The book is three decades old; Holdren isn’t its first author; it takes a stance against such policies; and neither Holdren nor the Ehrlichs support these policies today, either. Couldn’t we talk about something that’s actually important and contemporary?

Holdren was just inducted as a foreign member of the British Royal Society—a huge honor. Oh, and he and other top Obama policymakers just released a critically important report on the impacts of climate change on the United States. Don’t expect Fox News segments on the importance of the latter.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

The Bush administration’s increasingly unpopular policy, you’ll recall, stated that no stem cell lines derived from blastocysts after the date of the former president’s August 9, 2001 speech on the matter could be used in research receiving federal funds. This raised a host questions, both about ethics and also about coherence—for how could a rule based simply on which day Bush gave his speech have any moral authority?

The policy lacked scientific authority as well, as it was soon revealed that Bush’s promise of “more than sixty genetically diverse” stem cell lines for federally funded research was simply bogus and based on a gross overestimate of the number of available lines. There were really only 21, and “genetically diverse” was a dubious assertion to boot. So the Bush policy wound up constraining research far more than it had at first appeared, and far more than promised. This story of scientific carelessness (or worse) during the president’s nationally televised stem cell address has now been told and retold, and it further undermined the Bush policy: How could a decision made on the basis of incorrect information—and maintained doggedly in the face of contrary information—have any authority at all?

The new Obama guidelines are certainly a stark contrast. They allow the scientific use of all embryonic stem cell lines that are derived from excess in-vitro fertility clinic embryos, if these embryos have been donated for research by people who no longer need them for purposes of creating a child, and who have of course given their informed consent for their use in research, and passed other hurdles. There’s something very important here: If not donated for research, these excess embryos would otherwise have been discarded. They will never be implanted in a womb, so the donors who no longer need them for reproduction can instead designate their tissue for a purpose that carries scientific promise.

Why is this a better policy when it comes to ethics? In critiquing right wing anti-stem cell research views, I and many others have observed that if there’s something morally wrong with destroying embryos period, then the entire in-vitro fertilization industry ought to be the target of ire—not just federally funded embryonic stem cell research. For once you’ve got a fully legal IVF industry chugging along, producing extra embryos that are ultimately going to be destroyed, and giving parents the choice of what to do with them, you’re inevitably going to have some parents choosing to donate excess embryos to research rather than simply discard them. At this point, all the Obama administration is saying is that you can use federal monies to study cell lines that have emerged in this way—hardly a stance that ought to be controversial. Rather, it is vastly more coherent, consistent, and scientifically grounded than the older Bush policy.  It’s also, needless to say, more supportive of the scientific imperative: The Washington Post estimates that the Obama approach opens the floodgates for federal research on some 700 lines, a vast improvement upon Bush’s 21.

To be sure, some well-worn characters from the old days of the stem cell conflict loathe the new policy, including the always-quoted Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who alleges that the new rules “encourage researchers to go out and destroy embryos for taxpayer-funded research.” Doerflinger might enjoy fighting about this for another two presidential terms; but there is simply no way the U.S. Congress will even attempt to reverse what the Obama administration has done in the foreseeable future—and I for one would very much like to move on to some new and more interesting bioethics issues. It’s not like there aren’t any out there.

One such issue might even arise out of the new Obama rules—for they are certainly not what the strongest advocates of embryonic stem cell research might have wanted. Notably, the new guidelines do not allow federal funding for research on stem cell lines derived from embryos created expressly for the purpose of research—for instance through “therapeutic cloning” or “somatic cell nuclear transfer,” in which embryos are injected with the DNA contained in the nucleus of a living person’s body cells and then destroyed for their stem cells. The scientific purpose of this more morally controversial form of research is clear: You could create embryonic stem cell lines whose genes correspond to the later-life development of particular diseases, and so learn more about them.

But that’s not what our government will be funding. And as therapeutic cloning itself hasn’t been pulled off yet—it’s a worry of conservative bioethicists, but not of the mass public—that at least buys a little time until the next controversy. Call it a punt—one that may soon be returned, but also may not. For instance, another less contested avenue of research, so-called “induced pluripotent” stem cell work, is now drawing more attention than therapeutic cloning as a route to obtaining useful embryonic stem cells, and cell lines produced in this way could also be a genetic match for particular diseases.

Whatever happens next, though, one thing is clear. It is long past time to free up our minds, and our energies, so that we can look beyond embryonic stem cell research to the vastness of other bioethical challenges that will confront us in the 21^st century.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

The saga began on June 26, when CBSNews.com’s Declan McCullagh—the journalist responsible for launching the infamous Al Gore/Internet story—breathily reported that the Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency “may have suppressed” a scientific report skeptical of human-caused global warming. Based on internal emails provided by the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, McCullagh’s story highlighted the work of a longtime EPA employee named Alan Carlin, an economist at the agency’s National Center for Environmental Economics. Carlin, it turned out, had prepared a 98 page report questioning the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change on multiple fronts. The scandal, McCullagh suggested, was that Carlin’s dissent was not adequately considered in the process leading up to the agency’s recent proposed endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.

Conservatives pounced on the “news”—here was an apparent science whistleblower story that closely paralleled many alleged Bush era scandals. “Are we witnessing the Democrat war on science?” asked Ben Domenech at the New Ledger. The leading global warming skeptic blog, Watts Up With That, soon posted the “censored” internal EPA document, claiming it had been obtained “courtesy of our verified contact at the EPA, who shall remain anonymous”—real cloak and dagger stuff. And Senator James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma, who has long been the leading congressional enemy of accurate science on climate change, promptly called for a “criminal investigation” into EPA’s malfeasance—on Fox News, of course.

In their zeal to find a “war on science” episode to claim as their own, however, these conservatives forgot one essential matter: substance. If the claims about climate science in Carlin’s report—co-authored with another EPA employee from the same office, John Davidson—aren’t plausible; if leading climate scientists do not accept them; if they lack all credibility; then where there’s smoke there’s no fire. For not only would the EPA be correct to reject Carlin’s claims on substantive grounds, but indeed, as an expert scientific agency it would be bound by its mandate to do so.

Here’s where conservatives’ claims absolutely falls apart. Carlin is, as has constantly been pointed out in the aftermath of McCullagh’s article, an economics expert, not a climate scientist. And as climate scientists have considered his claims, they have withered.

Climate researcher Gavin Schmidt of NASA, for example, has written a very devastating analysis of the claims made in Carlin’s paper, calling it “a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at.” For instance, much like Washington Post columnist George Will notoriously did earlier this year, Carlin’s report claims the globe is in a cooling trend. This is an egregious misreading of the last 10 or so years of global temperatures, and is based quite literally on a trick: If you begin with the hottest year on record—1998—then of course it looks like we’ve been cooling since then.

The Carlin report also contains numerous other climate science canards, including suggestions that the temperature trends we’ve seen are better understood as a result of solar variability than of human activity—a claim that flies in the face, as Gavin Schmidt puts it, of mountains of peer-reviewed research undertaken to detect climate change and attribute its causes. On a scientific level, this just won’t cut it.

Alan Carlin is simply not James Hansen, arguably the most famous of many scientists who claimed to have had their work suppressed or in some way interfered with during the Bush administration. You will recall that the Bush administration had taken a stance critical of mainstream climate science; Hansen felt compelled to defend it; and then NASA underlings interfered with his access to the media. That’s a vastly different story from the present one: The Obama administration has taken a stance aligned with mainstream climate science; Carlin is criticizing it; and his scientific claims are not standing up very well. Of course the Environmental Protection Agency can’t use them to help make policy. According to the EPA, Carlin’s claims were, in fact, considered—and rejected.

All of which is not to discount the possibility that a real science scandal could emerge under the Obama administration. I rather doubt it will happen on global warming, but surely there could be a scientific issue where a dissenter within the administration advances scientific claims with quite a great deal of merit to them, only to find these claims disregarded or, worse, interfered with in some way. If that happens, I and many others will criticize the administration for it. But first there will have to be some scientific substance to the whistleblower’s case; the claims should be, at minimum, seriously arguable based on the latest and best science. That’s something conservatives have flagrantly failed to understand in the present instance.

It’s precisely that disregard for scientific substance, of course, which explains why they could perpetrate a “war on science” in the first place.

Finally, it’s worth adding that even if they were documented to have occurred, one or a few instances of real scientific suppression by the Obama administration would still not render this administration somehow equivalent to the last in its nefariousness. The core point about the Bush administration is that abuses of science were systematic and legion in number, as documented by myself, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and many others. And this overwhelming assault on science was unprecedented in modern American politics. Thus far the Obama administration has done nothing remotely comparable.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

There’s no doubt that a historic decision is coming this year on climate change, and this is the biggest marker yet along the way. Either the United States will tackle global warming for the first time in 2009—or it may fail for the last time when it really mattered.

As is to be expected, then, the rhetoric is flying. Consider this unforgettable bit from the “junk science” denouncer Steven Milloy:

The House of Representatives will vote Friday on the so-called “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” — a.k.a the “Waxman-Markey” global warming bill. But whatever you want to call this legislative atrocity, if enacted into law, it will go down in history as the death knell of the American standard of living and way of life. If you hate America, this bill is for you.

As these lines suggest, the right wing line of attack on climate legislation has always been economic in nature. Yet just as with House Minority leader John Boehner’s (R-OH) egregious exaggerations of the bill’s likely cost, the most rigorous economic analyses don’t support anything Milloy says.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s study of Waxman-Markey, which would set a price on carbon dioxide emissions and ratchet acceptable levels down over time, found that costs per household would be on the order of $80 to $111 per year. The Congressional Budget Office comes up with a slightly higher estimate, $175 per year by 2020, but also notes that this number breaks in favor of the less wealthy: The lowest income households would actually see a benefit of $40 in reduced energy expenses while the wealthiest would see an increased cost of $245. Phrased differently, the CBO’s estimate is that the bill’s cost would be just 0.2 percent of after-tax income. The number is kept low by provisions that would return much of the revenue generated by the new law to consumers to help them offset energy price increases.

For the past month or more since it left Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) Energy and Commerce Committee, the battle over the bill wonks are calling the “ACES” has focused either on such economic issues, or on legislative horse-trading. For instance, the legislation saw some tangible weakening as a result of concessions made to Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), who had pledged to oppose the law and bring a number of rural lawmakers along unless it was made more favorable to agricultural interests. A deal with Peterson on the environmental consequences of biofuels triggered much denunciation from environmentalists, but also unleashed the bill for this first full House vote.

The Peterson-induced weakening—along with a sense that the bill wasn’t tough enough on coal to begin with—has led some green groups, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to take a critical stance on Waxman-Markey. Nevertheless, it’s clear that the bulk of the environmental community still supports the legislation’s passage. And for those who get sick to the stomach each time they see another compromise thrown into a bill that already isn’t absolutely ideal, here’s the thing: It could still get worse.

First there will be a flurry of attempted amendments in the House. And due to filibuster politics, the Senate will surely be far tougher place for this legislation. So if you don’t like what you see now, you’ll probably like it even less as time passes.

Yet there’s no question that all the most important pieces are in this bill: A price will, at long last, be set on carbon. Emissions will be ratcheted down over 80 percent by 2050. And the bill contains important requirements and incentives to promote a transition to renewable energy, including a national mandate that electricity suppliers obtain 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020.

Anyone who has paid very close attention to the climate issue, and contemplated what it would really take to solve it, recognizes that we’re dealing with perhaps most tangled scientific and economic hairball imaginable. With the global scope of the problem, the uncertainty inherent in any prediction of the rate and intensity of future global warming, and the magnitude of the economic and energy changes required to bring about real change—well, it remains an open question whether governments of the world are even capable of dealing with something so vast and difficult. And of course any solutions will also have an aspect of the hairball about them.

But that doesn’t mean that if and when we get them, they won’t be stunning achievements.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

The years in between were squandered on scientific suppression, misinformation, presidential disdain, and illegal behavior by the Bush administration, which failed to produce a subsequent study as required by law. You can learn more about the full sordid tale here, but in brief, it goes something like this:

Having inherited the Clinton-era report (the so-called “National Assessment”), the Bush administration promptly went about undermining and censoring it, refusing even to reference or cite it in government documents or deliberations. And rather than produce a new and updated study when the time came—they are required every four years under the 1990 U.S. Global Change Research Act—the last administration instead sought to run out the clock. Instead of producing a single, nationally relevant, and publicly oriented study, it began a series of 21 planned “synthesis reports,” treating various aspects of the vast climate problem in technocratic isolation.

The Obama administration’s approach couldn’t be more different. It has rolled out its new report with a full press conference and much fanfare. And rather than releasing a staccato of wonk documents, it has produced a single study in plain language that pulls all the information together and strives to make it relevant to individual communities of the United States and to specific economic sectors—perhaps most notably, transportation and energy.

For those familiar with climate science, the latest findings aren’t much of a shock: Since global warming is already happening everywhere, it is of course already afflicting the United States.  We’re seeing rising seas, glacial retreats, more incidents of extreme precipitation, and much else. We have every reason to expect that these regionally variable changes will steadily worsen, with resulting severe threats to coastal communities, water supplies, agriculture, human health, and more.

Yet we can still control how bad it gets, and how we respond. That’s a key message of the Obama report: Cutting emissions now will surely ease the changes we see later. This, in turn, means that so-called “mitigation” and “adaptation” measures shouldn’t be thought of as contradictory; rather, they’re complementary. The new Obama climate report suggests both that strong action can save us from the worst outcomes, but also that we have to prepare for changes already upon us—changes that can no longer be avoided.

The Obama study’s greatest significance is, inevitably, political. We now have, for the very first time when it actually mattered, a government that is putting its full weight, scientific and otherwise, behind the quest to achieve climate action. And just as the Bush administration ran from dealing with the problem and tried to obscure it, this administration can use its considerable resources to pull global warming down from the atmosphere and into our backyards, communities, and local economies.

For unlike a report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a regionally specific U.S. climate change impacts study like the one just released isn’t just about the science. It’s about whether the family business will still be viable thirty years from now, and whether the family home will have to be relocated. For this reason, it has the potential to reach and motivate the American public around climate change in an unprecedented way.

Expect, then, that the new Obama report will be cited constantly as deliberations continue on the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Expect senators and members of Congress to draw on the report to highlight specific consequences of climate change in their states, and perhaps even to relate personal stories from their constituents, highlighting the future they’re facing and how they’re beginning to grapple with it.

This latest study tells us a lot about climate science—but the bigger story is that we have a government that’s finally managing that science on behalf of its citizens.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Still, you have to admire the “Rock Stars of Science” campaign—Rock S.O.S.; hat tip Mary Spiro—which launched with a four page portfolio in GQ magazine that paired up musicians with scientific “celebrities” (none of whom are household names) for a high-end photo shoot. The idea seems to be that having Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Harold Varmus, co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, groove with Sheryl Crow will reflect some of the latter’s rays on the former. The campaign—which advocates for increased funding for biomedical research—is sponsored by Geoffrey Beene Gives Back, the philanthropic arm of the clothing design company. In case it isn’t obvious already, they know how to make anyone, even frumpy scientists, look good.

I am not nearly snooty enough to pooh-pooh this kind of initiative. Rather, I applaud it. For after all, I’ve long felt that when it comes to the cultural standing of science in America, our problem is a lot bigger than a poor educational system, bad test scores, or rampant scientific illiteracy. It is at least as troubling that very few Americans can name Fauci, Varmus, or Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute—and that very few American kids want to be them. A scientific research career, if you can get it, is a pretty good life—one could set one’s sights far, far lower. But it’s not clear that as a culture today, we recognize this.

Rock S.O.S./Geoffrey Beene Gives Back

Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, Sheryl Crow, and Harold Varmus, M.D., President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

Other countries do: The crashing down of South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-Suk amid fraud allegations in 2006 was shocking precisely because Woo-Suk had become a nationally known figure, a celebrity, by virtue of his scientific success. The sense today that America may be “falling behind” in science isn’t just about the numbers of researchers we produce: It’s also based on the accurate recognition that in South Korea, or in China, there is a very different perception of science as central to the national future. It’s a perception we ourselves had 50 years ago, inspired in large part by those dreaded Sputnik bleeps. But times have changed, and it’s an open question as to whether we as a nation can ever go back there again—without, I hasten to add, abandoning any of the lessons learned since.

Initiatives like the Rock S.O.S. campaign, or the National Academy of Sciences’ Science & Entertainment Exchange, suggest that maybe we can. Finger to the wind prognostications aren’t worth much, but one gets the sense that with the Obama administration, the place of science in American culture may be changing—improving. Maybe we were at an artificial low under the Bush presidency.

Yet one also wonders whether the GQ spread does enough to combat prevailing stereotypes of scientists as nerdy, as weird and anti-social, or as mean and condescending religion bashers. Some of the researchers featured in GQ get beyond the geek, but mostly, the contrast between them and the rock stars is sharp and heightened.

It is particularly difficult to miss the fact that while the rock stars are far more diverse, the scientists are all older, white, and male. Yes, it catches your eye to see such scientists rocking out. But it would be even more bracing to see female and racially diverse young researchers—with tattoos! Believe me, they’re out there.

Nevertheless the Rock S.O.S. initiative makes several unforgettable points: Billions of dollars of scientific research can remain invisible without a good marketing campaign. And scientists, while undeniably respected, simply do not sit atop the totem pole of American culture—celebrities, musicians, and sports figures do.

Next stop for Geoffrey Beene: In the pages of Sports Illustrated, I want to see young, athletic scientists catching passes from Peyton and Eli Manning.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

So far, the consensus of forecasts augurs that President Obama’s first hurricane season will be an “average” one: Something like 10 named storms, 6 hurricanes, and 2 intense ones of Category 3 or greater. The reasons are at least twofold: Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic region are cooler than average right now, having been stirred and mixed by strong trade winds; and there is the possibility of the development of El Nino conditions that tend to tamp down Atlantic hurricane activity. (For a fuller discussion of the current forecasts, see here.)

Forecasters quickly add, however, that it only takes one storm to turn a milder year into a very bad one. It is notable that one possible analogue year for 2009, according to Colorado State University forecasters William Gray and Phil Klotzbach, is 1965. That’s the year of Hurricane Betsy, which was—before Katrina—the worst storm to hit New Orleans in modern times.

So as we survey the latest forecasts and prepare for the 2009 season, it’s important to bear in mind that anything that encourages hurricane complacency—including predictions of mild weather—is itself a danger. Throngs of experts have repeatedly warned that we’re extremely vulnerable to these storms, and not nearly where we ought to be in our preparedness measures. Indeed, I would argue that as a society, we still haven’t adequately processed, or responded to, all of the lessons of Katrina.

In 2006, following the devastation caused by that storm as well as by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma, the National Science Board released a report observing that “the present Federal investment in hurricane science and engineering research relative to the tremendous damage and suffering caused by hurricanes is insufficient and time is not on our side. The hurricane warning for our Nation has been issued and we must act vigorously and without delay.” Yet the 2007 National Hurricane Research Initiative Act, a response to this report and the general post-Katrina sense of hurricane vulnerability, did not make it out of committee in the last Congress. So much for acting “without delay.”

Legislators will try again to pass a version of this law in the 111^th Congress, but by now we have strong reason to question whether making dramatic new investments in hurricane research counts as a congressional priority. One would think such funding would rank high among legislative no-brainers; that hurricane funding bills would pass as easily as resolutions naming bridges and highways. But if our leaders couldn’t act in the wake of Katrina, why expect them to act in the wake of Ike?

Someone ought to tell Congress that while we have the best hurricane forecasters in the world at the National Hurricane Center, their hands are still tied by inadequate scientific knowledge. Numerous factors constrain their abilities, most notably our incomplete understanding of why hurricanes intensify or weaken. Forecasters have become excellent when it comes to pinpointing where storms will go, but they can’t yet tell you with as much accuracy how strong they’ll be when they get there. As strong storms cause dramatically more damage than weak ones, this is a key vulnerability.

And then there’s global warming, another arena in which, despite considerable controversy and research, we still just don’t know enough about its effect on hurricanes. Having followed this debate for years, I must confess myself more uncertain than ever about the takeaway message, at least when one gets into matters of any significant detail.

There remains a general expectation that storms will get worse as oceans warm; there is evidence, albeit contested, that this is already apparent in the Atlantic region (along with an increase in storm numbers). And yet the more research that comes out on this subject, the more questions we encounter. Consider, for instance, recent published work by Thomas Knutson of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a scientist known as a cautious moderate in the hurricane-climate debate. Knutson’s latest published study, using a regional model of the Atlantic region and examining hurricane trends under greenhouse warming, suggests we may see fewer storms in total, but also more intense ones. This would appear to contradict what we have seen during the last 15 years or so in the Atlantic, years that have featured both more numerous storms and also stronger ones.

The point is that we have many reasons to learn more about, and prepare more for, hurricanes. Indeed, we have essentially no reasons to do anything else. The question, then, is whether what we do will be reasonable. A good defense, in this instance, is exactly that—a good defense; and investment in the necessary forecasting research and preparations will protect our vulnerable coastal communities that are still rebuilding in the wake of the last miscalculation.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

So in dedicating this column of praise to Eugenie C. Scott—who for over two decades has headed up the Oakland, CA-based National Center for Science Education, or NCSE, the chief defender of the teaching of evolution in the United States—I want to make clear just how much I think such a departure is necessary and deserved.

Scott has been receiving a great deal of recognition lately; I merely want to lend an additional push. First, she recently won the Stephen Jay Gould prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution, in recognition of how her “sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life.” Perhaps an even bigger accolade came from Scientific American, which listed her among the top 10 leaders who have “demonstrated outstanding commitment to assuring that the benefits of new technologies and knowledge will accrue to humanity.” (The list includes other names you might know, like Bill Gates and Barack Obama.)

The opening to the Scientific American commendation is both amusing, and also provides a hint as to why Scott succeeds:

Thomas Henry Huxley was the 19th-century biologist known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his defense of the great scientist’s ideas. The 21st century has a counterpart in the woman who describes herself as “Darwin’s golden retriever.”

As this joke suggests, Eugenie Scott knows well what was obvious even in the Victorian era—there are already plenty of Darwinian bulldogs out there, fighting the creationist pitbulls daily, sounding off on blogs and attacking the religious beliefs of their foes. But being “Darwin’s golden retriever,” and staying friendly when tempers flare—that’s a lot rarer. The line shows both Scott’s genial humor and also the kind of pro-evolution advocacy we need more of: tolerant, strategic, accommodating, but always firm when necessary.

The National Center for Science Education is a clearinghouse for pro-evolution information, and a fount of unrivaled expertise on the complex and ever-changing stances and strategies of the creationists. It is also the leading source of advice and counsel to local communities whenever evolution battles crop up, as they do each year virtually without fail. NCSE’s goal is always to help communities resolve such conflicts without resorting to litigation. But when courtroom fights do arise, the group is also invaluable, and served as a scientific adviser on the historic Kitzmiller v. Dover evolution trial of 2005, which ended in a resounding victory for science and an equally resounding defeat for “intelligent design.”

Scott, an anthropologist by training, has been steering this ship since 1987, her career marked not only by Dover but by another key pro-evolution legal precedent, 1987′s Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard, which banned the teaching of “creation science” in schools. She has been involved in pro-evolution advocacy longer still, since the year 1980.

And if you want some idea of how difficult the job is, just try the following. First, peruse the web for all the creationist attacks on Scott. According to Wikipedia, she likes to joke that sometimes she thinks her first name is “Atheist,” they call her “Atheist Eugenie Scott” so much. Then, when you’re done sampling the anti-evolutionist  barbs, flip over to this recent post by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, which takes Scott and NCSE to task for their “accommodationist” stance on religion, calling it “offensive and unnecessary—a form of misguided pragmatism.”

As this evidence suggests, Scott is regularly under fire from the culture war combatants on both sides. Not only does NCSE have to monitor the endless permutations of the creationists, who are constantly coming up with new ploys for attacking evolution. It also has to deal with the pugilistic evolutionists who want to make this battle about the truth or falsehood of religious belief, rather than the truth or falsehood of what science discovers about the world. In this gauntlet, Scott has remained an eloquent defender of the view that people of science and people of religion can and must work together to solve conflicts—and indeed, this is the best and only way forward.

I would be remiss, though, if I didn’t commend NCSE’s single best initiative: Project Steve. In riposte to creationists who are constantly promulgating lists of scientists who allegedly question evolution, NCSE created an even bigger list of scientists named “Steve” who support it. Yes, that’s right: Scott and NCSE made a statistical argument hilarious and memorable. How many people can you say that of?

I know Scott, although not particularly well. I’ve interviewed her, seen her at the typical conferences, and witnessed her on the ground in Pennsylvania during the Dover conflict. And for some time, I have been asking myself the following question: Given that we’re barely holding back the creationist tide as it is, what on Earth would we do without her? I sincerely hope these latest awards bring added recognition and support to the woman who is working every day in one of the toughest jobs imaginable: Keeping our schools, and our society, safe for science.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

“Everybody got mad at me, and they tried to fire me, but they couldn’t, cause I was on a fellowship,” remembers Paulson. But the longtime dean of science writers, David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle, loved it. “Never do PR,” he advised Paulson. “Always be a journalist.”

Seattle is fortunate that for 22 years, from 1987 to 2009, this irreverent troublemaker of a reporter went un-fired at the Post Intelligencer, where he covered health and science and was for many years responsible for putting out the paper’s weekly science page. During that time, Paulson took the lead on a number of important stories, including raising awareness about Seattle’s serious earthquake risk (now common knowledge, but barely recognized a few decades ago) and covering the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak, in which three children died in the Pacific Northwest and 450 were sickened. In the aftermath, Paulson tailed CDC investigators as they tried to figure out how the bad meat got into the system. “I traveled all around the country, went to meatpacking plants, got chased off by guys with guns,” he remembers. “It was sort of breaking-news detective science, and I was trying to explain to people how with a bug like this, we wouldn’t have known about it if not for a public surveillance system.” In the face of more recent food safety scares involving tomatoes and peanut products, as well as the current influenza outbreak, this sort of reporting is critical for protecting public safety and informing better health policies.

Over time, however, Paulson noticed a change at the Post Intelligencer. His editors, he says, grew less interested in stories that were “too complicated or in depth.” Paulson wanted to really dig into covering the Seattle-based Gates Foundation and its work on global health, but he was instead pushed into writing what he labels “entertainment science” stories. The science of chocolate. Back-in-time research. That kind of thing. “Everything was being driven by web hits,” Paulson observes. “And if they didn’t think a story was going to get a lot of web hits, they didn’t want me to write about it.” Seattle is a very important research hub, with scientists at the top of their fields in a number of areas, such as the study of the genome. The region is also, of course, a hub for numerous software, microchip, and biotech companies, as well the aerospace industry. Yet Paulson found it harder and harder to sneak real science into the paper.

Many of us know what happened next: In March of this year, Seattle went from a two paper to a one paper town as the Post Intelligencer put out its final print edition and went web-only. It is now the equivalent of a news aggregator site without much original journalism. Paulson lost his job, as did many other journalists. He is currently on a one-year severance as he casts about considering what to do next.

When I hung out with him recently for two days in Seattle—Paulson is head of the Northwest Science Writers’ Association, one of the most active such local groups in the country, which had had me out to speak—we drank “paradigm shift” martinis at the restaurant Andaluca and he explained to me his plan—or rather, his plans. He has some intriguing ideas, not least of which is a book proposal whose contents I won’t reveal. He has also thought about trying to start a U.S. “science media center,” parallel to those that exist in the UK and Australia, to help put non-specialist journalists in touch with scientific sources and stories. Meanwhile, he has of course snapped up a lot of freelance writing assignments.

But at the same time, Paulson is also going back to doing the kind of work he did long before he was a science writer or even a publicist: part time carpentry and building contracting. When I chased him down to chat for this column, he was out procuring materials for a job. Paulson doesn’t dislike the work—a visit to his home in Seattle, much of which he designed and built, shows that he’s a committed tinkerer. But still, there can be little doubt that something serious has been lost in Seattle with the decrease in its number of staff science journalists. In Paulson’s words:

I’d say the media in general here is more subject to spin. Fewer stories are being told through the mainstream media, and if you talk to the press officers at the institutions, they’re very frustrated with the fact that they will send out releases, and they’ll have something that’s a pretty big deal, and it won’t even show up in Seattle media. Because if the Seattle Times science reporter is already busy, it isn’t even going to get out there. So it sounds self-serving, but I think there’s less science news getting out now in Seattle.

Paulson emphasizes that what he has experienced isn’t unique—it’s “the same thing other people are going through too.” But that’s precisely the point. In a science-centered age, we’re becoming a society that lacks a professional and impartial means of informing its citizenry about science—and it’s happening one journalist at a time.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

But let’s rewind and recall why we’re doing this. The last administration was—and I think this is an objective statement—the most scientifically controversial in modern American history. Hordes of journalists, advocates, and citizens have now documented all the various ways in which the handoff of information from government scientists to administration officials and the public was repeatedly and egregiously corrupted. The nature of the problem couldn’t be more clear—but as we’ll see, discovering how to fix it turns out to be quite intricate, complicated, and even off-putting.

In fairness, there are many reasons to feel hopeful about OSTP’s undertaking. On a structural level, the administration is doing exactly what it ought to: OSTP is the best choice to serve as the central federal nerve center for scientific integrity matters. The office will have to punch above its weight in this role, since it will need cooperation from much larger government science agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. But the president’s memorandum makes clear that this is now OSTP’s job, and everybody else in government needs to help out.

So we can now think of OSTP as the in-government advocate for the scientist—often the “little guy” in the context of larger federal doings. Finally, somebody’s going to stand up for him, or for her.

Still, it’s easier said than done. As Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the lead non-government advocacy group on scientific integrity matters, put it recently to Science Progress, “It’s not a simple thing to say, ‘Oh, let’s just outlaw abuses of science.’ It’s actually a fairly nuanced, complex thing to look at.” Indeed. Consider, say, the problem of potential conflicts of interest among scientists appointed to serve on federal advisory committees. Where do you draw the line between scientists who are too conflicted to serve and those who are somewhat conflicted, but probably okay? A regulation that isn’t flexible and sensible in such an area could cause more harm than good.

Or take another area of scientific integrity where the last administration saw plenty of controversy: The relationship between government scientists—who tend to be career civil servants—and public affairs officials—who are frequently political appointees. When a government scientist receives a media query on a sensitive subject like global warming, we’ve seen how public affairs “minders” can abuse their power, for instance by seeking to block the interview or listening in on it in a way that could be intimidating for the scientist in question. And yet at the same time, there may be very good reasons to have a public affairs official sit in on a media interview—including to protect the scientist involved. Similarly, there might be good and entirely apolitical reasons to redirect an inquiring journalist away from one agency scientist and to another better equipped to deal with a particular query. Only a very sensitive regulation or group of regulations can root out abuses in this area without going too far.

Indeed, to see how hard it can be to achieve the appropriate balance on matters of scientific integrity, just look at the very different sets of comments offered to OSTP by two key nonprofit advocacy groups on the same side of the issue: The Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Both organizations have done important work on scientific integrity in government, sometimes even in collaboration. Yet their comments take a significantly different tone, and have strongly different emphases.

The UCS recommendations are all about transparency, transparency, transparency. They strongly emphasize the need for mechanisms to ensure greater public access to scientific documents produced by government, and to the scientific rationales underlying government actions. The basic idea seems to be that by making more information about science-based decision making available, and by liberating government scientists themselves to speak freely, we will change the system and ensure a much healthier relationship between science and government.

PEER doesn’t disagree about transparency. But by God, the organization wants scientific integrity wrongdoers to be punished—made an example of. Phrases like “negative career consequences,” “sanctions,” and “appropriate disciplinary action” adorn PEER’s comments, which are scathing in their remarks about government officials (and PEER names names) who have violated scientific integrity principles in some way. Moreover, the group wants an utter ban on the alteration of “technical documents for non-technical reasons unless the basis is included as part of the document.” Where the UCS approach is largely about letting in sunlight, then, the PEER approach largely focuses on outing and punishing abuses so as to deter future ones.

As such differences get worked out, the wonks and the lawyers will have to take over, and it’s likely their nuanced discussions won’t command much public attention. Catching a fossil fuel industry type messing with climate science documents in true “smoking gun” fashion sparks a lot more attention than a protracted deliberation about how to define “conflict of interest.” And yet tuning out now would be a massive mistake—we’ll be living with the results of scientific integrity deliberations for a long time. And if we don’t get it right now, we’ll be having the same discussion again in two decades.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Last week’s story, by the newspaper’s global warming guru, Andrew Revkin, is based on a document that emerged during climate-related litigation between automakers and the state of California. Dated December 21, 1995, it’s a “primer” on climate science by a technical advisory committee to the Global Climate Coalition, the leading industry group on global warming during the 1990s and a chief opponent of the Kyoto Protocol.

This primer rejects the then-recent conclusion by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Second Assessment Report that a “discernible human influence on global climate” had already been detected. But the primer also provides clear reasons for thinking that human-caused global warming is a serious risk.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the primer proclaims. The Global Climate Coalition’s scientific advisers, it appears, simply couldn’t go against the irrefutable physics of the greenhouse effect, which has been understood for at least 150 years.

Later, the report also debunks a number of then-current “contrarian” theories opposing this conclusion—for instance the idea that solar variability explains our temperature trends—opining that they “do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.”

The primer clearly shows that even if they felt human-caused global warming had not yet been definitively shown to have arrived (as of 1995), industry’s experts nevertheless considered the greenhouse effect, and the theory of greenhouse gases, to be extremely well understood. And that meant industrial carbon dioxide emissions were dangerous, period.

In short, these scientists were advising the companies comprising the Global Climate Coalition that they were involved in an activity that had very serious consequences.

It’s important, however, not to read this latest document in isolation. Arguably still more outrageous things have been revealed in the past. In my 2005 book The Republican War on Science, for instance, I highlighted a 1998 New York Times expose centered on this document, describing an American Petroleum Institute climate change communications plan to “maximize the impact of scientific views consistent with ours with Congress, the media, and other key audiences.”

“Victory will be achieved,” the plan stated, when “recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’” And of course, we all know about ExxonMobil’s history—more recently, I understand, it has ceased—of funding think tanks that have consistently sowed doubt about human-induced climate change.

At this point, anyone who seriously engages with the historical, journalistic, and also increasingly legal record on climate change over the last 20 or so years will find a gap between the state of scientific understanding on the one hand, and what some prominent corporate players were saying on the other. Inevitably, then, industry was either advised competently about the science and ignored it—as the latest memo would appear suggest—or was ill-advised, which is hard to believe given the size and scientific resources of most of these companies.

In addition, there’s at least some evidence, cited above, that industry at times set out to fight against the science much like the tobacco industry did—a strategy epitomized by the famous tobacco “doubt is our product” memo.

An interesting question now becomes whether someday, all this will matter for anything other than to generate outrage over the fossil-fuel industries’ shenanigans. For instance, the ongoing Kivalina case, a global warming lawsuit which takes on a number of oil and power companies and tries to seek damages for the plight of a threatened Alaskan village, contains a conspiracy charge. As the lawsuit puts it:

“There has been a long campaign by power, coal, and oil companies to mislead the public about the science of global warming.” ExxonMobil, in particular, is singled out in the case as “the most active company in such efforts.”

In this sense, the latest industry document “helps us factually build the case of what they knew and when they knew it,” explains Matt Pawa, who has specialized in bringing global warming cases against industry and is centrally involved in the Kivalina case. “They clearly had a sense they were causing massive harm to the planet.”

But it’s just one piece of evidence to that effect. The real question, over the next ten years, is whether a judge will determine that the fossil fuel industry’s tobacco-like strategy merits a tobacco-like legal verdict.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Yet we shouldn’t, for that reason, sell Snow’s famous contribution short—even as it is now nearing its 50 year anniversary and prompting renewed chatter. Speaking as a scientifically trained novelist who had seen firsthand the disconnect between different intellectual groups, Snow unforgettably framed the issue that most centrally concerned him—the inadequate influence of science on policy and on society—as a matter of two cultures that couldn’t communicate. (See here for a fuller description of Snow’s argument and what drove him to make it.) It didn’t even matter, as Snow acknowledged from the outset, that there were probably more than just two cultures if you wanted to get technical about it. What counted was the message and, perhaps above all, its timing.

As Snow himself would later note, the “Two Cultures” lecture seemed to feed into a particular Zeigeist—perhaps not only because it captured a deep truth about weird and unnecessary breakdowns between otherwise very smart people, but also because of its articulation at a time when the Soviets had blasted into space with Sputnik I, and the United States set its sights on the moon. And so the “two cultures” concept hit world presses and began to generate such a voluminous international dialogue that even Snow couldn’t keep up with it all. One “contribution,” however, stands out, both because of its own fame and because of its demonstration of just how nasty and unproductive debates over science and culture can become—how dominated by navel-gazing and one-upmanship between people who ought to make common cause.

In 1962, the famous British literary critic and English educator F.R. Leavis decided to take a blast at Snow’s now three-year-old speech in another noted Cambridge peroration, the Richmond lecture. In the process, Leavis generated the mid-century equivalent of a spat between Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. The sheer brutality of Leavis’s assault got everybody talking: It spent far more time denigrating Snow personally than it did dismantling his argument. And ironically, it probably only increased Snow’s fame and notoriety, which by this time placed him among Britain’s and the world’s top tier of public intellectuals.

Insofar as Leavis had an argument, it was that Snow’s wasn’t really worth addressing at all, except in the sense that his puerile claims—and the great publicity they had received—represented a “portent” of society’s declining intellectual seriousness. Snow had described literary thinkers as “natural Luddies” at a time when what the world really needed was the spreading of scientific innovation to poorer countries; Leavis wholly rejected the characterization. He wasn’t anti-science, he said, but merely concerned with the true condition of human life amid industrialization, and how literature can instruct us as to that condition.

But most memorable were Leavis’s attacks. The man knew how to hurl an insult in a way we really don’t any more; even as you recoil at the incivility, you must admire the wordcraft. Snow, Leavis stated, “doesn’t know what he means, and doesn’t know he doesn’t know.” “The intellectual nullity,” he added, “is what constitutes any difficulty there may be in dealing with Snow’s panoptic pseudo-cogencies, his parade of a thesis: a mind to be argued with—that is not there; what we have is something other.” But what else to expect from a crappy writer like Snow? “As a novelist,” wrote Leavis, “he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.” A few more scenes from the execution:

Snow’s argument proceeds with so extreme a naiveté of unconsciousness and irresponsibility that to call it a movement of thought is to flatter it.

Snow rides on an advancing swell of cliché: this exhilarating motion is what he takes for inspired and authoritative thought.

It is characteristic of Snow that ‘believe’ for him should be a very simple word.

And so on. As one ringside observer put it, Leavis “threw Sir Charles Snow over his shoulder several times and then jumped on him…the whole thing left one with a sense of comradely sympathy for Sir Charles, as it might be for a man who had been involved in a serious motor accident.” The eminent critic Lionel Trilling added that while he had problems with Snow’s argument, there could be “no two opinions” about Leavis’s breach of decorum: “It is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.”

In lashing out like this, Leavis merely reinforced the point at issue. To read Snow’s 1959 lecture and Leavis’s 1962 reply in succession is to witness precisely the “mutual incomprehension” that Snow had originally described between literary intellectuals and natural scientists—with the only difference being that where Snow sought to engage, Leavis reacted with the defensiveness of a caged animal, and thoroughly undermined any serious point he may have had to make. In a 1956 New Statesman article that preceded the “Two Cultures” speech, Snow had perfectly predicted this sort of response, describing the literary culture of his day as “behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining—standing on its precarious dignity, spending far too much energy on Alexandrian intricacies, occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique quite beyond its means, too much on the defensive to show any generous imagination to the forces which must inevitably reshape it.”

For while Leavis may have possessed a sharper wit than Snow, and greater intellectual sophistication over all, he stood on the wrong side of history. Even as the Snow-Leavis battle sparked a renewed wave of chatter about the “two cultures,” trends in education clearly favored one combatant over the other.

In the postwar period, notes University of Virginia historian Guy Ortolano, British universities greatly expanded, and virtually all of that growth lay in the sciences, which began to receive copious government funding. It was a ratcheting up that Snow heavily supported: He had served as a scientific adviser to the influential 1946 Barlow Commission, which had called for precisely this course for British higher education, so as to create a much larger scientific workforce. By contrast, Leavis had devoutly hoped that Cambridge—his university and also Snow’s—would come to center on the English education program Leavis headed. Instead, the unhappy critic found himself fighting to prevent the ascension of a scientist to the position of Master of his Cambridge college (Downing) and lamented, “When I am retired, all that I have worked for at Cambridge peters out.” No wonder Snow epitomized everything Leavis despised.

And yet if we are to understand the plight of science today, especially in the United States, it helps to borrow a bit of Leavis’s animating philosophy and merge it with Snow’s. As Ortolano has put it, Leavis was centrally concerned with the “assault of mass civilization upon intellectual standards.” He bemoaned the growth of the mass media and the democratization and expansion of higher education, both of which (he felt) watered down excellence and weakened our ability to determine what really mattered, what to truly value. Leavis wished to defend the highest of high literature from these corroding, dumbing-down forces; but today, when we observe popular media culture, we can see that science, too, has not managed to compete. Not against mass coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death, or Britney Spears’ sad tribulations, or Paris Hilton’s arrest record.

In this sense, Snow and Leavis—both Cambridge men—might have been allies, if only they had known then what we know now. And if only they had been able to talk about it with civility.

We would be remiss, then, if we learned nothing more from the Snow-Leavis affair than that intellectuals sometimes behave badly. Stripped of all the nastiness, we can see in hindsight that both pugilists were saying something very important: Snow, that intellectual culture had grown fragmented and disconnected; Leavis, that mass media culture was squeezing out intellectual culture anyway. When you merge these two points together, you find, perhaps, a powerful articulation of the problem of the intellectual life in our times. Serious people, and serious arguments, are all too rarely taken seriously in the media (except, amazingly enough, on Comedy Central!) Meanwhile, continuing polarization, internecine battles, and ivory tower syndrome among intellectuals distract them from what ought to be their greatest concern—their tragic decline in influence.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

The pessimist argument goes like this: “economy, economy, economy.” Despite the significant economic benefits that will accrue from dealing with climate change—and the way in which new energy policies will boost the economy by creating domestic jobs and weaning us off foreign oil—regulations on greenhouse gas emissions are still too easily painted as a tax on the energy habits of ordinary Americans. Conservatives, in particular, can be expected to beat the hell out of any climate policy that they can spin as an unnecessary drag on the economy. Meanwhile, centrists are easily cowed by this same argument: After all, many Democratic Senators recently joined the GOP in voting to block the use of the budget reconciliation process to get a global warming bill through Congress without the threat of filibuster.

If matters really were so simple—and the “don’t wreck the economy” argument unbeatable—the political hurdles to passing meaningful climate legislation this year might indeed be insurmountable. Fortunately, that’s simply not the case.

Contrary to the pessimists, I prefer to view matters like this. While it will be an extremely difficult battle, there are nevertheless at least three key “knobs” that our leaders can turn, in fine tuning their climate policies, that will help them achieve legislative or policy victory. And if they get the bass, volume, and tone just right, they can still win.

The first “knob”—let’s label it “EPA”—regulates the extent to which administrative action will be employed to control global warming, either to achieve a non-legislative cap on emissions or simply to prompt congressional action. The more the Obama Environmental Protection Agency indicates that it’s simply going to regulate greenhouse gases on its own if Congress doesn’t move, the more Congress will feel pressured: After all, many fossil fuel companies won’t simply want to be left at EPA’s mercy. And thus far, EPA has moved rapidly indeed. It has already submitted an “endangerment finding”—the determination that carbon dioxide is a pollutant subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act—to the White House, the first step toward regulatory action.

Yet there are multiple kinds of leverage available to the administration and to congressional policymakers. The second knob—let’s call it “auction”—would regulate the percentage of emissions permits that would initially be sold off under a cap and trade bill. Industry tends to complain about the economic disruptiveness of going immediately to a 100 percent auction, the Obama administration’s official goal. Centrist politicians inclined to sympathize with these companies could therefore be mollified by a tuning down of the initial auction percentage. Are there problems with this strategy? Definitely. We should get to a full auction as soon as possible. On the other hand, I’m convinced that political dynamics will change dramatically once we have an actual climate bill in place and there is no need to fight over it any more in the congressional arena. So there’s nothing wrong with using the “auction” knob to smooth the transition to a cap, provided the new law turns that knob up to the max with some rapidity (say, within 5 years).

And there’s one final knob, arguably the most powerful of all—labeled “dividend.” For the administration and congressional lawmakers can also “tune” the extent to which auction revenues go back to members of the public to help them cope with projections of higher energy costs. The more money average Americans receive back from the government under a new cap and trade bill, the more popular that bill will be, and the less possible it will be to paint it as an economic attack on the middle class. People simply won’t buy that argument as they go to the bank to cash their government checks.

Personally, then, I think the administration ought to turn the EPA knob to full throttle, tune down the auction knob as far as strategically possible, and crank up the dividend meter. And then, let’s all wait for the weather to change.

Summer is coming, the economy may (possibly) be improving, and you never know what the disrupted climate system itself could bring during the warmest time of the year. With events, politics can change very fast—and I still see the possibility, through the return of significant auction revenues to the public, of achieving a politically popular piece of legislation that will also set us on a path to saving the climate system.

Keep the faith.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

A recent survey of more than 1000 of these young scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), reveals an unusually broad range of career aspirations. Less than half select becoming academic researchers like their mentors as their first choice. One senses that we are reaching a tipping point, where students who prefer to work in the world of public policy, government, precollege education, industry, or law will no longer be viewed as deserting science. Faculty and students can then begin to talk honestly about a whole range of respected, science-related career possibilities. This is crucial, because we must promote the movement of scientists into many occupations and environments if our end goal is to effectively apply science and its values to solving global problems. [Italics added]

This paragraph resonates for me in part because I collaborate with a young scientist who epitomizes the trend Alberts highlights—my co-blogger Sheril Kirshenbaum. She has two MS degrees, but decided to go work on Capitol Hill, in pop radio, and now in journalism and communication, rather than getting her Ph.D.

What’s refreshing about Alberts’ editorial is that, no academic traditionalist, he isn’t objecting to or lamenting this career diversification trend. Rather, he’s celebrating and encouraging it. He’s glad we have more scientists out there like Kirshenbaum—and why?

Because such forsaking of the traditional academic path has the potential to greatly increase the points of contact between science and the rest of our society, to break down walls between the mythic “ivory tower” and the no less mythic “main street.” Alberts even calls for scientific training to “provide our students with the additional skills they will need to be successful as they interface with other professions.” Hear hear!

In this sense, Alberts’ editorial links closely to another recent one in Science—this time by Christopher Reddy of the Woods Hole Research Center—arguing that we must train today’s young scientists to deal with the modern media and to excel in communication. There’s a central overlap here: Those young scientists who forsake the traditional academic career path are very likely to find themselves in fields where “soft skills” such as writing and communication will be valued at a premium.

I agree with Alberts that there appears to be a paradigm shift out there, a generational change in the science world. It’s not merely that science grad students and postdocs don’t want to grow up to become their professors or advisers; it’s also that in many cases, they simply can’t. The academic opportunities just aren’t there; there has been a marked constriction of opportunity in the ivory towers. Furthermore, many students don’t see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They recognize that specialization’s disadvantages go hand in hand with its advantages. They want to do something more, to bring science to the rest of America.

And America needs them.

Now, the critical step will be to ensure that such students aren’t punished for their unorthodox choices, but rather, that such choices open up a whole new field of opportunity to them. I don’t think there’s much worry about not having enough bench scientists; as already noted, the competition for those academic jobs is intense and there are far more young scientists out there than positions. But let’s make sure that we are also creating opportunities for this new generation of scientific innovators that Alberts highlights—if we channel their impulses in the right direction, the dividends will be enormous, not just for science but for all of our society.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

To recap: The Texas Board of Education was rewriting its science standards, both for Earth and Space Sciences and for Biology. In this context, the board got rid of language about teaching the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution, longtime creationist code for undermining it in the classroom. That’s a win. But at the same time, other language was inserted that create new opportunities for sowing doubt about the cornerstone of biology. For instance, students are now expected to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency of scientific explanations concerning any data of sudden appearance, stasis and the sequential nature of groups in the fossil records.” That tortured language can serve only one purpose: Help drag misleading creationist critiques and misinformation into the curriculum.

In the case of Texas, that’s particularly dangerous: The state’s vast size allows its educational practices to significantly influence science textbook publishers. The standards could thus have an impact on other states as well. We’ll have to see how it shakes out, but we can’t feel optimistic.

Granted, in broader perspective, one might view this latest stage in our ongoing evolution conflict in the United States as presenting reasons for hope. After all, in the space of thirty years, we’ve moved from the stupendous absurdities of “creation science”—the attempt to teach students about a biblical flood having laid down the fossil record, about humans and dinosaurs living together (on the ark, among other places), and so on—to Texas’s vague, poorly written agnotology. That’s progress, if it’s to be measured merely by the substantive positions that anti-evolutionists are now forced to advocate.

However, it’s important to remember that “creation science” and “intelligent design” alike were beaten back in the courtroom, not in the court of public opinion. Legal challenges, not popular ones, have whittled down anti-evolutionism to its current lawyerly state. And unfortunately, such progress has no parallel in public surveys about evolution. There are tons of polls out there, but I’ve always preferred to rely on Gallup because, as the National Science Foundation notes, they’ve asked the same question repeatedly since 1982. And there’s no movement: 46 percent of the public agrees with the statement, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

This is not merely anti-evolutionism; it is a specific and extreme form of creationism, the so-called “young earth” variety, which relies directly on biblical literalism. Such a stance rejects the past 200 plus years of science not just in the field of evolution, but in geology and, most assuredly, cosmology, where many of the same literalists question the Big Bang. This core anti-science swath of America wants far more than to have students “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency of scientific explanations concerning any data of sudden appearance, stasis and the sequential nature of groups in the fossil records.” It wants its children entirely shielded from the teaching evolution, even though it has already raised them at home to doubt and disbelieve in the first place. That’s why the current, sneaky creationist language will serve its purpose: For every kid brought up to equate Darwin with a full frontal assault on religion and morality, only the slightest semblance of doubt and questioning will be seized upon and do its own work from there. Biology class won’t have any impact; the beliefs of childhood will last throughout life.

It can be overwhelming, exhausting, and deeply depressing all at once to follow each subsequent stage in the anti-evolution whack-a-mole game, as attacks pop up across the country, state by state, and we go through the same rituals over and over again—sometimes a step forward, sometimes a step back. I must confess that I occasionally tune out, for precisely this reason: I’ve heard it all before. How can we keep fighting, and fighting, and fighting?

Only some kind of seismic change could alter this societal dynamic. It could come at the hands of a great political or religious leader, who finally breaks down walls. Or perhaps it could come from either of the core camps—the scientists, the creationists—if one changed strategy entirely. (Not likely.) Or, it could come if we vastly change the localized way in which we currently determine the content of American science education. (Again, not likely.) But barring any of these things, it will continue to be the scientists against the conservative religious, with powerful feelings on each side.

“Somebody’s got to stand up to experts!” said Texas Board of Education chair Don McLeroy during the latest proceedings, according to the National Center for Science Education. Some defenders of science and reason will find this statement hilariously misinformed.

I find it deeply, painfully sad.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

As it happens, I stand in a rather interesting place to discuss this, having just moved my own co-authored science blog, “The Intersection,” to Discover Blogs on Monday, and for this reason finding myself hailed by Columbia Journalism Review as part of a trend of mainstream media outlets (the dreaded “MSM”) acquiring science-centered blogs and blog content.

A recent cover feature in the magazine Nature by writer Geoff Brumfiel stirred all this up. “Supplanting the old media?” it reads. “Science journalism is in decline; science blogging is growing fast. But can the one replace the other?” In reply, Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Observatory” pointed out that Brumfiel and Nature might be constructing an artificial dichotomy. Brainard highlighted Discover’s burgeoning blog collection as an example of a marriage of old and new media in the science arena, and added: “next week the site will add another ‘top-ten’ blog from the Scienceblogs.com community.”

I don’t know about “top ten,” but that was us.

I feel very conflicted about all this. As both a science journalist and also a science blogger, I would be one messed up dude if I loathed either activity. Clearly there is no sharp dichotomy between blogging and journalism in the science field if the two merge in a person like myself, or in many others, like Carl Zimmer or Rebecca Skloot or Jennifer Ouellette.

Yet while I certainly enjoy blogging and feel it has many benefits—and we’re psyched to be at Discover—I actually side more with Nature and Brumfield than with Brainard in this dialogue. I don’t really see how blogging works as a substitute for traditional science journalism, and I question talk of “marriage” between the two when so many traditional science journalists are losing the jobs—and also, sad to say, when many science bloggers seem to have an adversarial stance toward their science journalist peers (and perhaps vice-versa).

So all the problems during this time of transition that Nature describes (and that many others have highlighted) resonate with me: Blogs have smaller, more specialized audiences. Most of the time, bloggers don’t have journalistic training and don’t “report.” And so on.

But there’s a deeper, and indeed, fundamental difference here that seems to me to have been elided, especially by Brainard. For the most part, blogging isn’t a career. As matters currently stand, most bloggers can’t expect to support a family, get health insurance, a retirement plan, etc, simply through blogging alone. At best they’re the equivalent of faculty adjuncts, never destined for the tenure track.

That’s why the science journalists who you find blogging tend to be freelance or unattached science journalists, and also book authors. We’re entrepreneurs and hacks of all trades; we do a whole bunch of different kinds of things; blogging is just one more to add on the pile. (And we’d be glad to take adjunct work too!)

In other words, our economic models are individualistic and entrepreneurial. One can scarcely doubt that there will always be people in the media willing—or crazy enough—to roll this way. We’re the types to to cry “Freedom!” at the top of our lungs while the media industry removes our entrails. But the question is, what happens to everybody else? The death of traditional science journalism is a death of pensions, healthcare, and childbearing leave. It is a harsh exposure of science journalism to the elements.

That’s why it was so beyond the pale to find a university faculty scientist and science blogger, University of Toronto biochemistry professor Larry Moran, commenting on my blog (quoted by Nature) that “Seriously, most of what passes for science journalism is so bad we will be better of without it…Science journalists have let us down. I say good riddance.” In other words, send them out into the cold.

The deepest problem here, in my mind, is moral: We lack the shared sense that people who cover science in the media—blogger, reporter, or otherwise—are part of the same team and need to be supported in bad times. We rarely take the time to look out for each other. We lack a sense of solidarity.

And now, many of our friends are going down alone.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

I’m not personally scandalized to learn of DARPA holding a conference or having a discussion. One thing about geoengineering, after all, is that not only may we want to do it, but we might also have reason to be concerned about someone else doing it—so the more dialogue, the better.

Indeed, I suspect that at some point soon this topic, currently off the radar of most Americans, is going to come up in a very big way, whether through politico-media scandal or, very preferably, otherwise.

Why? Put simply, because at least in some versions, geoengineering is likely to be cheap, and likely to work. These two attributes are already proving intellectually irresistible to many climate scientists, who at minimum call for geoengineering to be “studied,” and who are already doing so themselves in climate models. At some point, as we continue to struggle to get a handle on the global warming problem, they may also prove practically irresistible to politicians and governments.

In a story in Wired magazine last year, I explained the most likely geoengineering scenario to get serious consideration: Infusion of the stratosphere with sulfate aerosol particles, which will reflect sunlight and cause global cooling. This we know with something bordering on certainty: It’s precisely what volcanic eruptions do. Our planet has already run the experiment. What other environmental side effects would occur is not nearly as certain, of course—this is where the real scandal and controversy kicks in—but in a situation of climate crisis, we might not have the luxury of worrying about them.

Indeed, a group of experts—Stanford’s David Victor, Carnegie Mellon’s M. Granger Morgan, and others—recently made roughly this case in Foreign Affairs (subscription required). It’s just the latest in a series of articles by major climate researchers, or policy wonks, essentially sounding the alarm about geoengineering: This is real, this is very possible, this is scary, this requires attention.

The question to my mind is when the broader political discourse will catch on to what these experts are already realizing. We pay vastly too little attention to global warming in the media; geoengineering is nowhere on the news agenda at all. Yet it’s one of many examples of a coming scientific controversy that is reasonably forseeable in advance—at least to those who are paying attention—but nevertheless seems doomed to catch the broader public unawares at some undetermined point in the future (think of cloning and the Raelians). Whereupon, a reasoned dialogue about the pros and cons of climate control, which is increasingly coming within humanity’s grasp, will probably be the last thing we see.

What would I propose instead? That some important figure in the media or our government broach a dialogue on this topic now, at the very highest of levels. That everyone find some way of going to see the documentary Owning the Weather, which is about this subject and will be premiering at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on April 3^rd. That Congress hold serious hearings. And so on. We must try in all conceivable ways to create a broader dialogue, one that goes far beyond the scientific, expert community.

I’m perfectly aware of the counterargument to this stance: Some worry that the more we discuss geoengineering and give people the idea that it could be a panacea—a faster, cheaper way of averting global warming—then the more likely we could be as a society to go for the easy “techno-fix,” rather than take the hard steps needed to really cut down our emissions. It’s a serious concern, but I believe it must be weighed against several others.

First, science and technology could make geoengineering a foregone conclusion before we’ve even had a chance to determine what we think about it. That will hardly lead to the best societal decision-making. And second, everything I know about global warming suggests that having a backup plan does make a lot of sense. We don’t know how bad it’s going to get, or how fast, or how effective (or ineffective) our eventual climate policies will be. And we only have one planet.

Sadly, there could come a time when nothing is off the table.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

This is an idea that I and others-especially the Union of Concerned Scientists, or UCS-have explicitly pushed for in the past. The basic notion is to be able to conduct an intellectually sound version of what Bush science adviser John Marburger himself purported to do back in 2004, after leading scientists, organized by UCS, brought scathing charges against the administration on scientific integrity grounds. The UCS claimed that scientific information had been undermined across the government, at agencies ranging from the National Cancer Institute to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Fish and Wildlife Service. It was among the earliest-and by far the most prominent-airings of what would become the Bush “war on science” allegation.

In his response, Marburger took the UCS head-on. He claimed that his office conducted a “thorough investigation into all the allegations”-which necessarily involved getting information about what had happened from each federal agency involved in a science scandal. And yet Marburger summarily dismissed the charges in a way that few observers found remotely credible. One of those unsatisfied observers? John Holdren, who told me of Marburger’s effort for my book The Republican War on Science: “One supposes he was ordered to produce a rebuttal, but they could have produced a more nuanced rebuttal than that crass, heavy-handed, and grossly wrong one that they issued.” Indeed, in my book I compared many of the original charges with Marburger’s attempted rebuttal, and found the latter largely wanting on points of substance.

Now Holdren will get to try his own hand at this scientific integrity business. Thanks to the president’s memorandum, there are many reasons to expect he’ll do a better job of it. The memorandum makes official that this is not to be a rearguard, wagon circling action, but rather, forward-looking and comprehensive. Moreover, the federal agencies and their leaders have to cooperate with the science adviser to make sure it’s done properly.

Officially, Holdren is to take no more than 120 days to come up with a plan for how the White House can ensure, across the government, that scientific information is used properly in decision-making; that such decision-making is transparent; that scientific whistleblowers are heeded and protected; that scientific advisory committees are properly staffed with experts rather than ideological hacks, and so on. Most important, there will be rules that agencies must follow to ensure scientific integrity; and procedures in place to investigate, should anyone allege that they haven’t done so.

Provided the executive branch does indeed set up a system set up like this, it would be a huge step forward. The whole problem with the Bush administration’s responses to many allegations of political interference with science is that the answer was always the same: Nothing to see here folks, move along. Repeatedly, Bush spokespeople-Marburger, and also various press secretaries-simply asserted that all the whistleblowers were wrong, all the journalists were wrong, heck, anybody was wrong who suggested anything untoward had happened. They didn’t seriously investigate the problems; they dismissed the idea that there were any problems. Needless to say, it wasn’t a very credible approach.

Now, not only can we hope for a more transparent method of dealing with any potential new politics and science allegations; we can also hope for a much stronger presidential science adviser with the power to investigate them. For that’s perhaps the most significant aspect of the President’s scientific integrity memorandum. It puts John Holdren on a par with the heads of the federal agencies-with the cabinet-who need to report to him to show that their houses are in order. In other words, he’ll serve as a central science czar whose role is to provide good advice and preserve informational integrity, and who will actually be listened to and heeded.

Now, if we could only get Holdren through the Senate and into his job.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

But I’ll dive back in for Governor Bobby Jindal, the creationism-promoting conservative rising star who governs my home state of Louisiana. It’s now notorious that Jindal—who, in light of his post, ought to be extremely attuned to the importance of tracking natural disasters—decided to mock volcano preparedness funding in his rebuttal to President Obama’s speech before Congress last week. As Jindal put it, the recently passed stimulus bill contained “$140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.” Just substitute the word “hurricane” for “volcano” here, reread the statement, and be prepared to gasp at Jindal’s striking insensitivity. Indeed, he didn’t even get the facts right: the $140 million appropriation was for “U.S. Geological Survey facilities and equipment, including stream gages, seismic and volcano monitoring systems and national map activities”—and thus not entirely for volcano monitoring.

Conservatives have been targeting the U.S. Geological Survey for a while—the Gingrich Revolutionaries even tried to do away with it entirely when they swept into Congress in the mid 1990s. This despite the agency’s obvious importance and effectiveness, which it has demonstrated in many instances, such as during the 2004 tsunami catastrophe. The attacks are themselves part of a broader tradition in American politics that is not itself partisan: The mockery of specific scientific appropriations, which are made to look silly even though, in most cases, it’s actually serious research geared toward a public purpose. Call it the “sex lives of marmots” line of argument, as a Washington science policy hand once memorably put it to me.

The greatest modern institutionalization of attacks on specific scientific appropriations came from the Wisconsin Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who initiated the “Golden Fleece Awards.” The idea was to ridicule government projects that wasted public monies, and often these were science-related projects. In the 1980s, the great Carl Sagan even had to go in and meet personally with Proxmire to get him to back off from attacks on NASA’s SETI program. Thankfully, Proxmire listened.

But if Proxmire touched off the Golden Fleece tradition, lately conservatives seem to have been spouting the corresponding rhetoric. We all remember how John McCain and Sarah Palin mocked important scientific research on grizzly bears and fruit flies during 2008 election. In each case—as with Jindal—experts patiently explained that this research serves a purpose and is eminently defensible, or even innovative. But it seems those who lampoon individual scientific research grants rarely bother to find out what they’re actually criticizing. It’s a point and blast—or point and laugh—technique that reeks of deep anti-intellectualism.

We should concede, however, that this impulse does at least have the glimmer of a serious argument behind it. We can’t fund all scientific research; we do have to make hard choices among competing priorities; and there should indeed be a strong relationship between the research we fund with public dollars and what we hope to get out of it.

The tricky thing about most basic research, though, is that you don’t always know what you’ll get out of it when you release the funds. Such research often opens up new and surprising avenues that themselves then spin off important innovative technologies that no one could have predicted. (In Jindal’s case, he wasn’t even attacking basic research, but rather, research of obvious disaster safety import. Not even my caveats can help him.)

In an ideal world, then, specific scientific appropriations would hardly be above criticism—but you would also have to make a cogent argument for why they’re not the best use of our investments. You wouldn’t just mock that which you don’t understand.

At the same time, though, it would also behoove scientists and their supporters to bear in mind that it really isn’t obvious to many people how basic research, applied research, and technology differ. Just consider the stem cell case: Advocates talked about the “search for cures” in a battle over funding for basic research. In California in 2004, “cures” mobilized many supporters of Prop 71, which provided billions of dollars in state funding.

So while the Jindals of the world are certainly debasing our discourse with wanton attacks on science, we also have some ‘splaining to do. Not because it will make conservatives cease the attacks, but because it will help others to tune them out.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

On February 15, as he has done many times in the past, George Will of The Washington Post wrote a howler-filled column about global warming. The gist echoed a point Will has often made: Environmentalist doomsayers like to scare us, but they’re often flat wrong. To this end, the article contained a head-scratchingly long and pseudo-referenced paragraph, making the-oft refuted claim that during the 1970s, the scientific community was convinced that “global cooling” had arrived. In reality, while a few scientists were indeed worried about cooling at the time, and some journalists wrote alarmist stories about the subject, there was no consensus like there is today about human caused global warming.

How to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?

Will’s column also took several other angular swipes at the mainstream scientific understanding of climate change’s human causation, without directly taking it on. In one case, it cited the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center to claim that “global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” In other words, we’re not really warming up—the ice is doing fine. (The Arctic Climate Research Center quickly repudiated Will’s assertion.) In closing, meanwhile, Will made this truly extraordinary claim: “According to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.” As the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Meteorological Organization are central scientific authorities that have long supported the idea of human-caused global warming, this was a particular shocker.

In essence, then, a number of Will’s claims—about “global cooling,” sea ice, and the WMO—were either flatly false or extraordinarily misleading, whether due to dishonesty, ignorance, or some combination of both. This wasn’t necessarily new for Will, any more than it is new for a number of other conservative columnists or pundits who write about global warming. But for some reason, the outrage this time built and fed upon itself. There’s no way to fully list all the things that have since been posted about the matter—the volume is far too great—but Joe Romm of Climate Progress seems to have kicked it off; Adam Siegel of EnergySmart has a very comprehensive overview; the folks at Media Matters and TalkingPointsMemo have driven the story; and Brad Johnson of the Wonk Room has not only written about the controversy in detail but gotten responses from the Post itself. In short, the paper takes the cowardly route and refuses to correct Will’s copious errors of fact, interpretation, and so forth. It equivocates. And it claims that Will’s column was fact-checked by multiple people “to the fullest extent possible.” (Ha.)

But enough blow-by-blow: What does it all mean?

Will is of course an eminence grise of Washington punditry, a regular on ABC’s This Week, and widely regarded as a distinguished conservative intellectual. He is also fatuously wrong about the science of global warming, and apparently impervious to and shielded from correction. Bloggers are now gleefully obliterating both him and the Washington Post, and they are substantively right in everything they’re saying-about climate science, about the stubborn inescapability of facts, and, indeed, about journalistic responsibility.

The Post thus takes a dramatic credibility hit here—and the bloggers a credibility gain—and given the current economic straits facing newspapers and the Post in particular, that’s something it can ill afford. We often hear that “technology” is what’s killing newspapers—innovations like Craig’s List have destroyed the in-print classified advertising market; people have stopped reading physical papers and turned to online headlines from news aggregators or blogs; and so on. But there are also matters of substance and standards, and if the Post editorial page can’t even print correct facts about global warming (or correct already printed errors), then how to make the case that we still need these hallowed gray newspapers to police our society and discourse?

In this sense, I view the George Will affair with sadness. Sure, I share in the temporary glee of the bloggers. But at the same time, I know there are many kinds of journalism, particularly about science, that bloggers will never replace. They’re extremely well-equipped to pounce and skewer a George Will column, but hardly well equipped to deliver an investigative or narrative feature story. We’re watching the media change before our eyes, the science media in particular—and no one can say, in light of episodes like the latest one involving George Will, that much of old media doesn’t in some sense “deserve” what’s happening to it now. Yet if our only sentiment is joy over the bloggers’ latest trophy, or outrage at the Post, we’re missing something deep indeed.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”