Here’s the backstory, in case you missed it. Last month, the U.S. Department of Education sponsored an event to encourage kids to read books. One of the books at the event featured SpongeBob on an “earth-friendly adventure.” As E&E Reporter Jean Chemnick explained, SpongeBob’s sidekick Mr. Krabs…

…decides to pump enough greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere to bring on “endless summer” so his ocean-front swimming pool will always be full of paying customers. The plot backfires, however, when he and SpongeBob realize they have created an environmental disaster.

Fox News, television’s equivalent of a playground bully, beat up on Nickelodeon, the Education Department and by implication, SpongeBob. Fox commentator Gretchen Carlson complained that SpongeBob should have told kids climate change is “actually a disputed fact”. A spokesman for the Heritage Foundation piled on, saying SpongeBob had given us “an important reminder of why the federal government shouldn’t be involved in school curriculum.” Watch the Fox clip here:

But when it put the squeeze on SpongeBob, Fox created an ideal opportunity for the Obama Administration to slug it out on the real issues here: Is climate change really a “disputed fact”, and why shouldn’t the federal government be involved in educating kids about it?

Unfortunately, the Education Department went on defense rather than offense. Justin Hamilton, press secretary at the Department of Education, told Huffington Post it was corporate partners rather than the federal government that provided the books at the event.

“The kids get to pick whatever books they’re interested in,” he said. “We’re very happy that corporate sponsors have made good books available for kids to select and take home.”

Hoping for a more muscular response, I searched the Department’s web site but found no spirited statement on its right – nay, its obligation – to help teach kids about climate science, the atmosphere, the biosphere, ecosystem services, air pollution, weather and other elements of eco-literacy. After all, it’s our lack of knowledge and concern about these topics that turned climate change from a “disputed fact” into an observable reality that kids will have to deal with for many generations to come.

Past congresses have agreed.  In 2009 and 2010, Congress asked the National Science Foundation to create a program that would improve climate change education in the United States. As the National Research Council explained in a report produced as a result of Congress’s request:

The global scientific and policy community now unequivocally accepts that human activities cause global climate change. Although information on climate change is readily available, the nation still seems unprepared or unwilling to respond effectively to climate change, due partly to a general lack of public understanding of climate change issues and opportunities for effective responses. The reality of global climate change lends increasing urgency to the need for effective education on earth system science, as well as on the human and behavioral dimensions of climate change, from broad societal action to smart energy choices at the household level.

When challenged by bullies, deniers and flat-earthers, federal officials should fight back hard on this issue. President Obama should direct them to do so. The result would be more media attention and more public education on climate facts. Backing away from the fight encourages Fox to act like all other bullies: The more they get away with abuse, the more they do.

So, let’s all send a message to Education Secretary Arne Duncan: Don’t be a scaredy pants; side with Square Pants. In the meantime, SpongeBob’s green adventure is available at Amazon.com. Buy it for your kids. The publisher says it’s filled with “green goodness.” And as SpongeBob himself might say: When it comes to eco-literacy, we need to soak up all the information we can.

Bill Becker is the Executive Director, the Presidential Climate Action Project. Cross-posted in partnership with Climate Progress.

Hollywood has done it again. The latest film about creepy scientists setting us on the path to the end of the world as we know and, more or less, love it will soon be in a movie theater near you—“Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” Since we’ve been warned for so long by filmmakers and novelists about the dangers of science run amok we really have no good excuse not to believe them. From “The Island of Dr. Moreau” to “Brave New World” to “Blade Runner,” “Gattaca,” “Splice,” and now the inevitable prequel to the iconic “The Planet of the Apes,” we learn anew why we should never tempt biologists with the latest science.

Don’t pass that apple, Eve, just transfect that genome.

Why are we so anxious about biology? Considering how sci-tech crazy the world is, including the convergence of physics, engineering, and genetics, basic biology would seem to be commonplace. That’s the question I pose in my forthcoming book, The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America (Bellevue Literary Press, 2011).

Through the 18th century, the Enlightenment philosophers largely set the tone of growing admiration among the educated classes for the importance of science for social improvement. By the early 19th century, the growth of knowledge itself provoked anxiety. Since its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been a touchstone of popular resentment of overreaching science and scientists. Lately, it has functioned as a standard reference point for the critiques of an arrogant scientific community that messes around with stem cells and cloning.

Although the creature might be the central figure in our nightmares (my mother remembers walking home alone in terror after seeing the just-released 1931 Hollywood version), the center of the story is the scientist, Dr. Frankenstein. The creature is a physical horror but an innocent; the scientist, with his Promethean overreaching, is a moral monster. He and his ilk are the ones we have to fear. Shelley’s tale is nearly always taken out of her context.

Like the later genre called science fiction that she helped inspire, Frankenstein is a commentary more on the present than on the future. Shelley wrote in an atmosphere stirred by the British Romantic science movement of that period, the experimental analogue of the Romantic poets, who were excitedly investigating the properties of air, water, heat, and electricity. They hoped that greater knowledge of the physical world would lead to radical social improvements such as more effective medical treatments.

And they believed that knowledge grounded in demonstrative experiments would liberate the human mind. The idea that electricity could reanimate a dead or assembled body was only one element of Romantic science. It is unfortunate, then, that the most famous reflection on the Romantic scientists is a horror story. Not only did the Romantics anticipate some of the experimentation that flowered a century later with more powerful devices and more nuanced theory, they also stumbled upon at least one discovery that would prove to be enormously beneficial: nitrous oxide, the first truly effective pain reliever.

Thus, already in Frankenstein there is a template: abstract but dramatic anxiety about the direction of science that obscures its concrete achievements for improving human life. Even then scientists needed better public relations. Granted that the bomb made it hard for atomic physicists to improve their poll numbers (especially with all those giant ants roaming around New Mexico in Them!, released in 1954), today’s biologists face an even steeper uphill climb.

In fairness, the director of “The Rise of the Planet of the Apes” says that his movie is not an antiscience morality tale but rather “much more about mankind’s hubris.” That, of course, is precisely the point of morality tales. Human overreaching tends to have bad consequences. Just ask Oedipus.

The movie isn’t out until later this week.  But consider our recent experience with another planet dominated by allegedly higher primates. If the smart apes soon to rise in a theater near you can figure out how to straighten out Capitol Hill maybe we ought to give them a chance.

Jonathan D. Moreno teaches bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Political philosophy has a legitimate role in policy debates, but not in the underlying climate science. There are no Democratic or Republican carbon dioxide molecules; they are all invisible and they all trap heat.

On June 13 a larger group of Australian scientists one-upped that American letter by publishing their own open letter with even more uncharacteristically blunt statements of scientific fact. Besides direct calls for media accountability, the Australians are taking their letter one step further by following it up with a two-week series of statements titled “Clearing up the Climate Debate.” Each statement in the series explains a basic science concept that the media gets wrong again and again, such as: why we know the greenhouse effect is real, why we know humans are contributing to it, and the difference between peer review and rhetoric.

Below is the text of the initial letter (emphasis is ours). At the bottom you can find a list of all of the signatories and links to each of the daily statements. Now to be fair, not everyone on the list is a “climate scientist.” In July 2010 a group of 31,000 purported climate scientists was slammed for inflating its numbers with nonscientists in a similar short petition stating that there is “no convincing scientific evidence” for anthropogenic climate change.

But here’s the difference. That petition had only 39 actual climate scientists among its 31,000 signatories, and scarcely more than a quarter of the total had doctorates in any field at all. The signatories of the Australian letter by contrast at least seem to all hold professorships, and have published in the peer-reviewed literature. Some of them can even be found in the interactive climate science literature graphic we featured last week. And let’s also not forget that while a National Academies study found that 97 percent of climate experts agree that climate change is “very likely” caused by human activity, in the end science is–thankfully–not decided by majority vote.

Here’s the Australian letter from June 13:

The overwhelming scientific evidence tells us that human greenhouse gas emissions are resulting in climate changes that cannot be explained by natural causes.

Climate change is real, we are causing it, and it is happening right now.

Like it or not, humanity is facing a problem that is unparalleled in its scale and complexity. The magnitude of the problem was given a chilling focus in the most recent report of the International Energy Agency, which their chief economist characterised as the “worst news on emissions.”

Limiting global warming to 2°C is now beginning to look like a nearly insurmountable challenge.

Like all great challenges, climate change has brought out the best and the worst in people.

A vast number of scientists, engineers, and visionary businessmen are boldly designing a future that is based on low-impact energy pathways and living within safe planetary boundaries; a future in which substantial health gains can be achieved by eliminating fossil-fuel pollution; and a future in which we strive to hand over a liveable planet to posterity.

At the other extreme, understandable economic insecurity and fear of radical change have been exploited by ideologues and vested interests to whip up ill-informed, populist rage, and climate scientists have become the punching bag of shock jocks and tabloid scribes.

Aided by a pervasive media culture that often considers peer-reviewed scientific evidence to be in need of “balance” by internet bloggers, this has enabled so-called “sceptics” to find a captive audience while largely escaping scrutiny.

Australians have been exposed to a phony public debate which is not remotely reflected in the scientific literature and community of experts.

Beginning today, The Conversation will bring much-needed and long-overdue accountability to the climate “sceptics.”

For the next two weeks, our series of daily analyses will show how they can side-step the scientific literature and how they subvert normal peer review. They invariably ignore clear refutations of their arguments and continue to promote demonstrably false critiques.

We will show that “sceptics” often show little regard for truth and the critical procedures of the ethical conduct of science on which real skepticism is based.

The individuals who deny the balance of scientific evidence on climate change will impose a heavy future burden on Australians if their unsupported opinions are given undue credence.

The signatories below jointly authored this article, and some may also contribute to the forthcoming series of analyses.

Signatories

Winthrop Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Australian Professorial Fellow, UWA

Dr. Matthew Hipsey, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, Centre of Excellence for Ecohydrology, UWA

Dr Julie Trotter, Research Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Environment, UWA Oceans Institute, UWA

Winthrop Professor Malcolm McCulloch, F.R.S., Premier’s Research Fellow, UWA Oceans Institute, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Professor Kevin Judd, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr Thomas Stemler, Assistant Professor, School of Mathematics and Statistics, UWA

Dr. Karl-Heinz Wyrwoll, Senior Lecturer, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Dr. Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleoclimate scientist, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research School of Earth Science, Planetary Science Institute, ANU

Prof Michael Ashley, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof David Karoly, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Prof John Abraham, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, University of St. Thomas

Prof Ian Enting, ARC Centre for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems, University of Melbourne

Prof John Wiseman, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne

Associate Professor Ben Newell, School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Matthew England, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Alex Sen Gupta Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof. Mike Archer AM, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Steven Sherwood, co-Director, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr. Katrin Meissner, ARC Future Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Dr Jason Evans, ARC Australian Research Fellow, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Global Change Institute, UQ

Dr Andy Hogg, Fellow, Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU

Prof John Quiggin, School of Economics, School of Political Science & Intnl Studies, UQ

Prof Chris Turney FRSA FGS FRGS, Climate Change Research Centre and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW

Dr Gab Abramowitz, Lecturer, Climate Change Research Centre,Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Andy Pitman, Climate Change Research Centre, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, University of Adelaide

Prof Mike Sandiford, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne

Dr Michael Box, Associate Professor, School of Physics, Faculty of Science, UNSW

Prof Corey Bradshaw, Director of Ecological Modelling, The Environment Institute, The University of Adelaide

Dr Paul Dargusch, School of Agriculture & Food Science, UQ

Prof Nigel Tapper, Professor Environmental Science, School of Geography and Environmental Science Monash University

Prof Jason Beringer, Associate Professor & Deputy Dean of Research, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Neville Nicholls, Professorial Fellow, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

Prof Dave Griggs, Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University

Prof Peter Sly, Medicine Faculty, School of Paediatrics & Child Health, UQ

Dr Pauline Grierson, Senior Lecturer, School of Plant Biology, Ecosystems Research Group, Director of West Australian Biogeochemistry Centre, UWA

Prof Jurg Keller, IWA Fellow, Advanced Water Management Centre, UQ

Prof Amanda Lynch, School of Geography & Environmental Science, Monash University

A/Prof Steve Siems, School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University

Prof Justin Brookes, Director, Water Research Centre, The University of Adelaide

Prof Glenn Albrecht, Professor of Sustainability, Director: Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy (ISTP), Murdoch University

Winthrop Professor Steven Smith, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, UWA

Dr Kerrie Unsworth, School of Business, UWA

Dr Pieter Poot, Assistant Professor in Plant Conservation Biology, School of Plant Biology, UWA

Adam McHugh, Lecturer, School of Engineering and Energy, Murdoch University

Dr Louise Bruce, Research Associate, School of Earth and Environment, UWA

Are you a scientist? Do you agree? If you’d like to add your name to the list, send an email to megan.clement@theconversation.edu.au

This is the first part of our series Clearing up the Climate Debate. To read the other instalments, follow the links below:

• Part Two: The greenhouse effect is real: here’s why.
• Part Three: Speaking science to climate policy.
• Part Four: Our effect on the earth is real: how we’re geo-engineering the planet
• Part Five: Who’s your expert? The difference between peer review and rhetoric
• Part Six: Climate change denial and the abuse of peer review
• Part Seven: When scientists take to the streets it’s time to listen up on climate change
• Part Eight: Australia’s contribution matters: why we can’t ignore our climate responsibilities

This article is adapted from a Climate Progress post by Joe Romm.

I say this because I was a little surprised to recently find myself the object of an Internet tempest for a few days over an interview I did with my friend, conservative political theorist Robert George of Princeton University. Robbie, with whom I disagree about many things but deeply respect for his willingness to engage in honest debate, understood what I had to say and knew I said so prior to this interview. Apparently, other critics of stem cell research had chosen to ignore my caustic comments about some proponents overpromising cures over the years.

In the interview I said many scientists and their supporters favoring public funding of embryonic stem cell research had gone too far in hyping the prospects of rapid cures following right on the heels of generous government funding. They did. My saying so, however, was hardly the news The American Spectator, First Things, and other electronic conservative outlets made it out to be.

Anyone who has followed my advocacy for embryonic stem cell research would know I have long been critical of claims that funding today means people tomorrow will leap from their wheelchairs and walk. This is me in 2006 describing overpromising of embryonic stem cell research in Wired: “There’s big expectations, a lot of hype.” And saying the same thing at greater length two years ago: “There has been hype and overpromising. … I don’t know if stem cell research will work, I think it’s very interesting, I support doing it, but I think you have to be honest and say there’s a small chance nothing will work.”

I then explained why the hype had grown so loud:

There was such a bitter battle over funding, so one side was screaming that you can’t kill embryos to try and save people and in response, the defenders of stem cell research began to say, ‘look, if you would let us do this research we can save lives. … it was in the heat of that political battle to score points that they [proponents] overstated the case.”

Having lived during the 1990s when the hype machine was spinning full throttle about the curative powers of gene therapy, the clinical wonders that would quickly follow from mapping the human genome, and the frothy promise that genetically engineering plants would quickly cash out in the form of fortified foods such as golden rice that would rapidly solve the nutritional deficiencies of the world’s poor, I am keenly sensitive to the kind of overpromising that occurs when a novel form of science is in search of public funding. The fact that the fight over public funding of embryonic stem cell research had the critics screaming “murder” regarding the destruction of human embryos evoked even more overwrought language from proponents about the speedy cures lying right around the corner.

Since everyone for some reason now seems very interested in coming clean about hype in the embryonic stem cell debate, I thought I might take a quick tour of five of the most outrageous, overhyped claims by critics that have characterized what has passed for debate during the years since George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Rose Garden in 2001 to offer his “compromise” position over public funding of embryonic stem cell research.

Hyped claim #5: The Bush “compromise”

The president tried to offer a “compromise” about government funding of embryonic stem cell research. Government funds could be spent on stem cell lines made from human embryos prior to August 9, 2001, but nothing else. The president said there were cell lines available from 64 embryos for which consent had been obtained to use them in research.

Except there were not. Some of the cell lines were owned by non-U.S. companies who would not share them. Some of the cell lines did not grow well. Some of the cell lines had been generated without informed consent from anyone. What was touted as a brilliant “solution” by many conservatives and not a few middle-of-the-road commentators was nothing more than a ban dressed up as a compromise.

Hyped claim #4: Adult stem cells can do it all

The number of antiembryonic stem cell researchers offering up this bit of hype are legion. The argument goes that since adult stem cells have been used to cure many people while embryonic stem cells have not, there is no need to pursue embryonic stem cell research. Father Thad Pacholczyk, often quoted in right-wing circles, who is a staunch critic of embryonic stem cell research, offered one of a zillion such examples in 2006 of why there is no need to pursue embryonic stem cell research, because there are “dozens of diseases currently treatable using these [adult] stem cells, including sickle-cell anemia, leukemia, spinal cord injury, and heart disease.”

I am not sure what he was talking about regarding spinal cord injuries, which as far as I know remain completely incurable, but it is true that bone marrow transplants have cured a lot of children and adults. And bone marrow is a type of adult stem cell. That is where the truth of this claim ends and the hype begins.

The research behind bone marrow transplantation began in the 1950s. It received generous government grant support for the next 50 years. It still does. Embryonic stem cells were first discovered in 1998. Research involving those cells has received minimal funding from any source since then. As Robert George forthrightly said in our discussion, it is just dishonest not to concede that you are giving up a key line of research if you don’t fund embryonic stem cell work by pretending you know that it can be completely replaced by adult stem cell research.

Hyped claim #3: If embryonic stem cell research is so promising, then why isn’t private research behind it?

A typical example of this absurd claim appeared in The Wall Street Journal where Richard Miniter opined in 2001:

Of the 15 US biotech companies solely devoted to developing cures using stem cells, only two focus on embryos. Embryo stem cell research is at the drawing-board stage – not for lack of funds but for lack of promising research to finance. Venture capitalists have no agenda beyond making money; if they see embryo projects that are likely to bear fruit over the next five to seven years – the usual VC time horizon – they will fund them. That the market is speaking so loudly against embryo stem cell research probably explains why embryo researchers are so eager to reverse the ban on government funding.

It has been echoed in the conservative right-wing blogsphere ever since.

This is hype in a very pure form. No venture capitalist or firm is going to back research in a big way that (a) is just starting out, (b) does not yet understand the basic science involved, and (c) has elicited huge opposition from the then-president of the United States and his supporters in Congress. Governments fund basic, early-stage research. The U.S. government has long been the 100-pound gorilla of such funding. It is only later, as commercial possibilities emerge, that the private sector gets really interested. Keep the NIH out of funding basic stem cell research and few private dollars will flow no matter how promising that line of research might be.

Hyped claim #2: IPS cells are the magical solution to the embryonic stem cell quandary

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer led the hype machine on this subject. Back in 2007 an announcement was made that researchers in Japan had discovered how to reprogram adult skin cells to resemble embryonic stem cells. Krauthammer immediately declared Bush had been right to ban public funds for embryonic stem cell research (I thought that had been a “compromise”) since there was now a way to create “a magical stem cell that can become bone or brain or heart or liver” without using human embryos. Magical—really? Could there be any claim more fraught with hype then declaring that any biomedical discovery is ready to go right out of the lab to your doctor’s office?

Making adult cells into embryo-like cells remains the current darling of critics of research involving embryos. But the technique is barely understood and its safety is a huge concern to those working in the area. Not only was it hype to declare in 2007 that the game was over for embryonic stem cells or even to continue to say in 2011 that there is no need to pursue embryonic stem cell research (note, by the way, no cures from IPS—five years and counting) is nothing less than unadulterated hype driven by an agenda utterly disconnected from the nascent state of the science.

Hyped claim #1: Frozen embryos should be put up for adoption rather than used as sources of stem cell lines

The meshugana lawsuit that Dr. James Sherley, a biological engineer at Boston Biomedical Research Institute who works on adult stem cells, has brought is currently holding up NIH funding of expanded embryonic stem cell research. Sherley implausibly argues that permitting more funding for research on stem cells derived from human embryos would harm his work by increasing competition for federal funding.

What has been forgotten about this suit is that it was originally joined by an adoption agency called Nightlight Christian Adoptions, which argued that expanding funding for research on embryos obtained from fertility clinics reduces the number available for use in adoption.

Now the Nightlight folks got the axe from a federal judge and were kicked out of the lawsuit. What needs to be remembered, though, is that far too many critics of embryonic stem cell research, including President Bush, advance adoption and continue to do so as if it were an alternative to either the destruction of embryos at fertility clinics or the use of abandoned frozen ones in research.

This is Bush in 2005: “There’s an alternative to the destruction of life, with little babies being born as a result of the embryos that had been frozen.”

Now I am very sensitive on the matter of unwanted embryos left behind at fertility clinics. In 1999 I published a paper with George Annas and Sherman Elias, “Stem Cell Politics, Ethics and Medical Progress,” in which we first outlined the ethical case for using unwanted frozen embryos at infertility clinics as the true compromise position about where to obtain embryos for stem cell research. It was a good idea then and remains so now.

There have been about 50 reported adoptions of frozen embryos from infertility clinics in the past five years. Few will have any interest in using embryos from couples having infertility problems to try and have a child. And the whole point of using infertility treatment in the first place is to create a genetic tie between the child and one or both parents. Knowing there are hundreds of thousands of unwanted frozen embryos in clinics today means pointing to adoption as an “alternative” to their use in research is utter hype.

While I am on this particular bit of hype, I should add that those who do not favor the use of unwanted and certain-to-be-destroyed frozen embryos languishing in clinics worldwide never ever say what they propose be done with them. Conservatives say destruction is unthinkable, however, since it is inevitable then what are they talking about? ( I suppose this constitutes hypocrisy and not hype.)

There is plenty more hype to be had from what has passed as debate over the past decade or so since human embryonic stem cells were first isolated. I don’t mean to suggest that most of the hype has come from critics rather than proponents. I do mean to suggest, however, that those who live in very fragile houses often constructed of hype ought not be quick to cast stones.

Arthur Caplan, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and the Sidney D. Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Year after year the worriers and fretters would come to me with awful predictions of the outbreak of war. I denied it each time. I was only wrong twice.

-Senior British intelligence official, retiring in 1950 after 47 years of service

One of the defining characteristics of humans is our ability to ignore or downplay facts that would shatter or overturn our world view.  At the same time, we tend to favor or selectively recall information that confirms our preconceptions, which is called “confirmation bias.”

I bring that up because, these days, pretty much everything that seems anomalous is called a “Black Swan,” a term popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in writings such as, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.”

And so we have both the Washington Post and Foreign Policy writing major pieces on Japan’s “black swan.”  But how exactly can a nuclear accident in Japan be a black swan.  The Japan Times ran an article whose lead sentence was “Of all the places in all the world where no one in their right mind would build scores of nuclear power plants, Japan would be pretty near the top of the list” back in May 2004 — seven years ago!

The article warns “that Japan has no real nuclear-disaster plan in the event that an earthquake damaged a reactor’s water-cooling system and triggered a reactor meltdown.”   It even notes, “there is an extreme danger of an earthquake causing a loss of water coolant in the pools where spent fuel rods are kept.”  It was written by “a geoscientist who worked at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory on the Yucca Mountain Project,” and has this quote:

“I think the situation right now is very scary,” says Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismologist and professor at Kobe University. “It’s like a kamikaze terrorist wrapped in bombs just waiting to explode.”

So again, how precisely is the current accident a black swan?

In the first chapter of his book, Taleb writes:

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans….

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.  First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.

Ah, you see the sleight of hand.  The summary doesn’t match the original definition.

“Rarity” isn’t the same as lying “outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.”  Indeed, come to think of it, the fact that “nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility” isn’t quite the same as being “outside the realm of regular expectations.”

People often warn of things that lie “outside the realm of regular expectations.”  Global warming comes to mind.

If you Google “global warming” and “black swan” you’ll get nearly 2 million results — which is in its own way evidence that global warming isn’t a black swan.  Yes, the post at the top of that search is one of the earliest pieces I wrote on CP, “The Black Swan and Global Warming,” back in 2006, when I was young and naive, posting but once a day.

I quoted a Taleb essay that began, “A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations.”

Taleb argues at length that 9/11 was a black swan, stating:

ad a terrorist attack been a conceivable risk on Sept. 10, 2001, it would likely not have happened.

But that is a dubious claim at best.  Indeed, even Joel Achenbach in his WashPost piece, “Japan’s ‘black swan’: Scientists ponder the unparalleled dangers of unlikely disasters” notes:

People debate what qualifies as a black swan. Most alleged black swans turn out to have obvious precursors and warning signs — the Sept. 11 attacks included. Nothing comes out of the blue, truly.

Was Pearl Harbor a black swan?  Were the oil shocks of the 1970s.  In my 1994 book Lean and Clean Management, I write about the strategic planners at Royal Dutch Shell, who anticipated those shocks (see here).  As for Pearl Harbor, consider this, from my book:

The Japanese commander of the attack, Mitsuo Fuchida, was quite surprised he had achieved surprise.  Before the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, the Japanese Navy had used a surprise attack to destroy the Russian Pacific Fleet at anchor in Port Arthur.  Fuchida asked, “Had these Americans never heard of Port Arthur?“

So Pearl Harbor wasn’t a black swan.

The fact is that the events that we are shocked about over and over again weren’t merely “explainable and predictable” after the fact.  They were vary often predicted or warned about well in advance by serious people.  The powers that be simply chose to ignore the warnings because it didn’t fit their world view.

The Trojan horse was a black swan, if one ignores Cassandra, which, of course, was her fate.

I first had the idea for this piece after posting on Transocean, the company that operated the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil rig, who told its shareholders that it gave its executives multi-million-dollar bonuses based on the company’s “best year in safety performance.”  As Interior Secretary Ken Salazar noted, this “complacency” matched the “complacency that created an oil spill that was pouring over 50 thousand barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico a day.”

A commenter on that post then directed me to this Crooked Timber post, “With Notably Rare Exceptions,” which starts by quoting Alan Greenspan:

Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.

As Henry at CT then writes:

It’s best not to interpret this as an empirical claim, but a carefully-thought-out bid for Internet immortality. It has the sublime combination of supreme self-confidence and utter cluelessness of previously successful memes … but with added Greenspanny goodness. I tried to think of useful variations on the way in to work this morning – “With notably rare exceptions, Russian Roulette is a fun, safe game for all the family to play,” …  but none do proper justice to the magnificence of the original. But then, that’s why we have commenters. Have at it.

With notably rare exceptions, nuclear power is safe.  With notably rare exceptions, unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases are safe.

My point in this quote is that, of course, lots of people warned about the bubble that Greenspan himself helped create.  But even now, it appears to have been a black swan for Greenspan.

Global warming obviously is not a black swan.  It is an event “outside the realm of regular expectations” but one can’t say “nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility”:

• Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”
• Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred

In my 2006 post, I argued that rapid polar warming and the potential for a melting of the tundra and massive release of methane was a black swan.  I suppose, for 99% of policymakers and the media it is a black swan, but in fact even the worst-case scenario for global warming isn’t technically a black swan:

• Science stunner: On our current emissions path, CO2 levels in 2100 will hit levels last seen when the Earth was 29°F (16°C) hotter

We have been warned as much as one could reasonably expect us to be warned, but we choose to ignore the warnings.  In fairness, though, there is a massive fossil-fuel-funded disinformation campaign out there trying to convince us that all swans are in fact white.  Would it were so.

This article is cross-posted at climate progress. Joe Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Editor of Climate Progress.

First of all, science and technology are in the process of converging. Technology has been around since at least the beginning of agriculture, arguably in tools and weapons used by hunter-gatherers, but science in its modern form is a latecomer. One difference between science-based and non-science-based technology is that scientific theories often have surprising implications that even their pioneers don’t anticipate.

A classic example: Albert Einstein had to be persuaded by fellow physicist Leo Szilard that the atomic bomb was a practical possibility, partly in light of the Einstein’s own special theory of relativity, so that Einstein would lend his prestige to a letter alerting President Franklin D. Roosevelt of this potential.

Secondly, science-based technology development is remarkably recent, accelerating only toward the end of the 19^th century, with specific, crafted applications of ideas drawn from the emerging explanatory and demonstrable theories, especially in biology. Of course, it is still possible to engage in technical manipulations of the world without paying attention to any underlying theory, so science and technology will never be identical. But there is every reason to believe that the convergence will go on indefinitely, as science becomes an increasingly critical input to the process of technology innovation.

For a time the idea of starting with a scientific theory as a way to solve a practical problem was so novel that the term “applied science” was coined. But so much technology is now science-based, as in the development of new microprocessors, that applied science—particularly in the public policy arena where policymakers want to speed up commercialization of new technologies—is becoming virtually synonymous with technology.

To appreciate the traditional relationship between technology and invention, take the example of Thomas Edison. He was both a nonscience based technologist and an inventor. The incandescent light bulb was built on a diverse array of gradually improved materials and owed its origins only very indirectly to electrical theory (an early theorist of which was another great American inventor, Benjamin Franklin). Alexander Graham Bell was another to whom the term technologist/inventor applies. Both Edison and Bell were brilliant craftsmen who addressed a problem, but neither was an innovator.

Like science and technology, the relationship between invention and innovation is also evolving, but differently. While science becomes an increasingly critical component of innovation, the process of innovation in turn is becoming increasingly dependent on a wider array of activities than just invention.

Innovation, in the words of the historian Harold Evans, involves more than inventing a new technology, it involves “a universal application of the solution by whatever means…. Invention without innovation is a pastime.” Universal application is a matter of dissemination, sometimes called “diffusion,” or moving an ingenious solution out into the world. In that sense, the telephone as an innovation is owed to someone who is far less than a household name: Theodore Vail, the founder of AT&T. His vision and organizational genius turned Alexander Graham Bell’s technology into national telephone service through the merger of Western Union and the Bell Company.

As the technologies that power our lives become increasingly complex, each new useful innovation stands on the shoulders of an ever growing pyramid of previous inventions. The Pentagon’s invention of the Internet in the 1960s created the opportunities for innovators such as Tim Berners-Lee to develop the World Wide Web. Reminiscent of AT&T’s Theodore Vail, who married two entities to produce his communications system, Berners-Lee joined hypertext to the Internet to produce the Web.

What’s more, the diffusion of inexpensive Internet access into the majority of American homes and businesses, coupled with advanced telecommunications and satellite infrastructure, has made possible yet another innovation, the iPhone application, which can now be instantly disseminated through AT&T’s 3G network to handheld users across the globe.

None of these society-changing technological innovations could have come into being without the work of a diverse array of entrepreneurs and engineers in sectors from computing to telecommunications to infrastructure to marketing—all of whom figured out how to commercialize these inventions by making them useful, profitable, and affordable.

With little notice, these innovations in computing and information technology now shape the science of laboratory biology, as genetic sequences can now be emailed to labs around the world and chromosomes reconstructed from the biochemical data. In this sense, as well, ease and immediacy of scientific communication are giving the scientific community leverage as a new invisible college and also constituting it as a global force, a world polity of instantly shareable knowledge and innovation. The fact that innovations are shaping the way our society and economy function, and even shifting into the development of previously unrelated areas of science and technology are evidence that we have surpassed a factor-driven economy, and exist now in a truly innovation-driven one.

The important public policy lesson is that in the 21^st century technological innovation is not a zero-sum game. Progress in one field of technology or science often yields unpredictable benefits for others. While once an inventor might have relied on her own ingenuity and locked herself in her garage to keep her intellectual property, now the prize will go to those able to collaborate in local, regional, or even global alliances of researchers, technologists, and entrepreneurs. Innovation begins with invention, but success or failure of new technologies in shaping society and improving human lives ultimately hinges on whether there is a profitable business plan to be built around the production, sale, and use of that technology.

As the inherently cooperative and interconnected nature of science, technology, invention, and innovation becomes evermore manifest, public policy needs to reflect the emerging reality that these forces will continue to shape our economy and our society in profound ways we simply cannot predict. We need to ensure that our economy is supportive of the full spectrum of innovation activities beyond invention—from research and development, to demonstration, and on to commercialization. We also need a STEM education system that ensures our students are prepared to participate in these activities, and better work force training and higher educational opportunities to enable our students and workers to quickly shift into the manufacturing and services jobs that comprise the 21^st century innovation economy.

These are difficult policies to create and institute. But if public policy recognizes the inherent value of science as not just the pursuit of obscure truths, but as an irreplaceable input to the technology innovation process that sustains our modern economy then policymakers can begin the effort better positioned and better informed about the possible outcomes.

Jonathan D. Moreno is Editor-In-Chief, and Sean Pool is Managing Editor of Science Progress.

Last week Fox News and other conservative media outlets tried once again to fabricate controversy over climate science when they pounced on a presentation made by the president’s science adviser Dr. John Holdren in Oslo. In it, Holdren makes the case (for the umpteenth time) that it’s time to move past the oversimplified term “global warming” and start facing the painful reality that without sharply reducing our carbon pollution, we face something more akin to a “global climate disruption.”

Sadly, even the Atlantic monthly (which is seen as center-left but is center-right on climate) repeated the right-wing narrative that the White House was somehow pushing new rhetoric in place of real science with its stenographic post, “Right Has Field Day With New ‘Global Warming’ Term.”  Ironically, the Atlantic criticized Holdren’s phrase  “global climate disruption” while its own construction “the scientifically supported but nevertheless controversial theory of global warming” is risible.  Yes, well, it is only “controversial” if one buys into and keeps repeating right-wing anti-science talking points.

I’ve been writing about efforts to come up with a better term than “global warming” for a long time (see “Is ‘Global Weirding’ here?”).  I myself tried to coin the term “Hell and High Water” a few years ago, since that is a more accurate description of what is to come if we stay on or near our current emissions path.  It didn’t take — even though Time magazine used the phrase for its Pakistan flooding story, which didn’t mention global warming and which wasn’t shared with U.S. readers anyway!

It was GOP strategist and wordmeister Frank Luntz who counseled in a confidential 2003 memo that the Bush administration and conservatives should stop using the term “global warming” because it was too frightening:

It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation.

1) “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming”. As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.

So let’s set the record straight on two points.  Holdren’s speech focused on laying out the rock-solid and increasingly dire science (must-see PPTs here).  And the term he was recommending is essentially identical to one that he and many other scientists suggested 13 years ago:

Scientists’ Statement
Global Climatic Disruption

June 18, 1997

We are scientists who are familiar with the causes and effects of climatic change as summarized recently by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We endorse those reports and observe that the further accumulation of greenhouse gases commits the earth irreversibly to further global climatic change and consequent ecological, economic and social disruption. The risks associated with such changes justify preventive action through reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases. In ratifying the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United States agreed in principle to reduce its emissions. It is time for the United States, as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, to fulfill this commitment and demonstrate leadership in a global effort.

Human-induced global climatic change is under way. The IPCC concluded that global mean surface air temperature has increased by between about 0.5 and 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years and anticipates a further continuing rise of 1.8 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century. Sea-level has risen on average 4-10 inches during the past 100 years and is expected to rise another 6 inches to 3 feet by 2100. Global warming from the increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere causes an amplified hydrological cycle resulting in increased precipitation and flooding in some regions and more severe aridity in other areas. The IPCC concluded that “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The warming is expected to expand the geographical ranges of malaria and dengue fever and to open large new areas to other human diseases and plant and animal pests. Effects of the disruption of climate are sufficiently complicated that it is appropriate to assume there will be effects not now anticipated.

Our familiarity with the scale, severity, and costs to human welfare of the disruptions that the climatic changes threaten leads us to introduce this note of urgency and to call for early domestic action to reduce U.S. emissions via the most cost-effective means. We encourage other nations to join in similar actions with the purpose of producing a substantial and progressive global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions beginning immediately. We call attention to the fact that there are financial as well as environmental advantages to reducing emissions. More than 2000 economists recently observed that there are many potential policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions for which total benefits outweigh the total costs.

The Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratified by the United States and more than 165 other nations, calls for stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at levels that will protect human interests and nature. The Parties to the Convention will meet in December, 1997, in Kyoto, Japan to prepare a protocol implementing the convention. We urge that the United States enter that meeting with a clear national plan to limit emissions, and a recommendation as to how the U.S. will assist other nations in significant steps toward achieving the joint purpose of stabilization.

Initial Signatories

• Dr. John P. Holdren
• Dr. Jane Lubchenco
• Dr. Harold A. Mooney
• Dr. Peter H. Raven
• Dr. F. Sherwood Rowland
• Dr. George M. Woodwell

Signed by 2409 scientists as of June 11, 1997

Now I don’t actually think Holdren should spend time proposing different names for global warming in his capacity as White House science adviser, even if he has been doing so for over a decade.  It just gives people an excuse to ignore the science and call it “controversial.”  That said, it would be nice if any of his critics actually looked at his terrific presentation.  I am reposting a few of his PPTs.

Scientists have been advocating for a new term for “global warming” for a long time. That’s because slight changes in global average temperature can have drastic effects on local climates and ecosystems around the world, affecting billions of lives. The simple term “global warming” does not capture the very severe and uneven impacts that warming is already having on society.

“Global warming is in fact a dangerous misnomer,” Holdren said, “because it implies something that is uniform across the planet, is mainly about temperature, is gradual, and indeed might even be good for you.” He then went on to tell how “the phenomenon in question” is none of these things. It is “highly non-uniform, it’s not just about temperature….  It is not gradual but rapid compared with the capacity of society to adjust … [and] it’s gonna be mostly bad and worse and worse going forward for more and more people.”

Warmer average global temperatures mean more devastating storms like Nashville’s Katrina, more floods like the devastating one that put one-fifth of Pakistan underwater, more intense droughts and wildfires like the one that wiped out tens of thousands of homes in Russia and caused them to stop exporting wheat for the year, and long-term droughts like the on Australia has faced for more than a decade years (see Absolute must read: Australia today offers horrific glimpse of U.S. Southwest, much of planet, post-2040, if we don’t slash emissions soon).

Unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases also means a host of other interrelated problems from ocean acidification to species migration to the erosion and eventual submersion of coastal communities due to sea level rise.

Anyone who follows the science of climate change will agree that the term “global warming” is outdated, oversimplified, and gives only an incomplete picture of the multitude of ways in which a warmer world will disrupt not only the functioning of Earth’s ecological life support systems, but also our economic, social, and geopolitical systems. So Dr. Holdren’s suggestion that we replace the 40-year-old misnomer with something more accurate is welcome and long overdue.

Despite the laughable conspiracy theorists’ pouncing on Holdren’s remarks — “Sounds like somebody’s starting to feel uncomfortable because the icecaps and Greenland ice sheets aren’t melting fast enough” — the dire nature of the facts and analyses that he presents go far beyond simple “global warming.”

That’s why so many people have been recommending other terms for so long.  James Gustav Speth, the former chair of the Council on Environmental Quality under the Carter administration and founder of both the World Resources Institute and the National Resources Defense Council used the term “global climate disruption” in an article as far back as 2005. Other examples of scientists using the term before the Obama administration include:

• The organization of university presidents in 2007
• Chuck Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008
• Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine in 2008
• References in academic journals like this one in 2009
• Paul A.T. Higgins of the American Meteorological Society in a report for the American Association for the Advancement of Science earlier in 2010

So fear not, conservative and center-right media. “Global climate disruption” is not some new White House brand name designed to trick people into the malevolent clean energy conspiracy. It is simply a more accurate way of describing the many catastrophic impacts that global warming will have on our society, environment and economy if we keep listening to the siren song of “do nothing” from your fellow anti-science disinformers.

Shakespeare wrote in “Romeo and Juliet,”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Call it what you will, but that which we call global climate disruption by any other name will still drastically alter our way of life, cause irreversible damage to our climate, and harm the health and welfare of billions of people.

Joseph Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and is editor of ClimateProgress.org. Sean Pool is Special Assistant for Energy, Science and Technology Policy at the Center for American Progress. A version of this article is cross-posted under the title “Climate disruption caused by global warming driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases” at Climate Progress.

If we’ve learned anything from the financial crisis (and I certainly hope we have), it is that the priorities of Wall Street still largely dictate the priorities of our governments. Who would have ever thought that one of the most gung-ho, pro-market administrations in recent history would bail out several investment firms and—gasp—nationalize (at least partly) others? Yet, at the same time that some governments are frantically shoring up their faltering financial markets by shoveling in billions of dollars, they also are preparing deep cuts in spending for less “essential” sectors. One of those likely to be affected in the short-term is government science. That’s why now is the time for scientists to stand up, speak up, and practice communicating to policymakers the reasons why science helps Americans live safer, healthier, and more productive lives.

One reason why scientists rarely, if ever, get a seat at the table in Washington D.C. is that the profession lacks charismatic, influential leaders (and, no, Al Gore does not count).

Although President-elect Barack Obama promises to boost research funding during his first term in office, and pledged to double the budget of the National Institute of Health over the next decade, one can expect to see some degree of retrenchment. Unfortunately, this could mean science budgets will stagnate further or remain at the lows imposed by the previous administration. According to the National Science Foundation, federal research funding fell for 2 years running in real terms between 2006 and 2007 for the first time in its 35-year record-keeping history.

To say that further cuts would come at the worst possible time is no small exaggeration. The Obama administration will need to deal with a number of pressing science-related issues, such as managing the threat of bioterrorism and the budding nanotechnology market—and that’s not even including tackling the looming climate crisis. Science may have been persona non grata on the campaign trail (despite the best efforts of the Science Debate 2008 team), with climate change only making token appearances in several debates, but it can longer fly under the radar. Indeed, as Science Progress contributing editor Chris Mooney pointed out earlier this week, Obama made it clear in his Tuesday night speech that science is as pivotal to our future as it has been to our past, saying of the 20^th century: “A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.”

But already we have seen several prominent research labs close up shop under the strain of funding difficulties, and we will likely see many more in the coming months as the credit crunch’s tentacles continue to spread. With many universities set to pare back their hires over the coming years, an already poor job market for new science graduates in academia could become bleak.

So what should be done? For one thing, those who value science and the innumerable contributions it has made to society should continue make the case to their elected representatives that we need policies that maintain and expand research funding. In an ideal world, your average news consumer would be familiar enough with the latest science so as to appreciate the challenges we face and the need for more federal support. (A man can dream, can’t he?)

On a more fundamental level, what we need right now is not necessarily more scientists (though that certainly wouldn’t hurt), but more effective science communicators. One reason why scientists rarely, if ever, get a seat at the table in Washington D.C. is that the profession lacks charismatic, influential leaders (and, no, Al Gore does not count). In an arena dominated by lawyers, former bankers, and military officers, rare is the legislator who hails from a background in research or academia—with a few notable exceptions.

As much as scientists like to disavow it, there is much truth to the well-worn stereotype of the scientist as a reclusive nerd. When scientists do congregate en masse, they tend to split off by discipline—the chemists stay with the chemists and the biologists stay with the biologists. Moreover, the scientific community, though close-knit, is very insular: researchers often have little patience for journalists or the average layman when it comes to communicating their work. “If only they knew what I knew,” they say, “then they would understand why my research is so important.”

Unfortunately that is not necessarily the best way to get your point across to an uninformed public—or to ingratiate yourself to a skeptical but powerful politician, for that matter. In their landmark article on the subject, called “Framing Science,” Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor of communication at American University, and Chris Mooney argue that scientists must learn to actively “frame” their research to make it relevant to a variety of audiences. Because regular citizens are often unable to weigh competing theories and arguments, they say, scientists need to pare down complex issues, or “frame” them, in order to help the average news reader understand why it matters and, if action is necessary, what should be done.

While many scientists remain resistant to the idea, suggesting that science should always be kept separate from the political process, several organizations have stepped into the void to provide media training and policy fellowships to the younger generation of scientists.

Communication Partnership for Science and the Sea, or COMPASS, organizes training sessions on campuses around the country to help faculty and graduate students in the marine sciences communicate information to the public, the media and policymakers. National fellowship programs such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s prestigious Science & Technology Policy Fellowship place freshly-minted Ph.D.s in government agencies—everything from the FBI to the USDA—to help them learn the ropes of the legislative process. Organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Research!America are vocal advocates for research and help to bring important science issues to the fore of policy conversations.

We will need as many effective communicators as we can muster if we hope to successfully confront the scientific challenges of the 21^st century, and now is the moment to speak up and be heard.

Jeremy Jacquot is a graduate student in marine environmental biology at the University of Southern California and is a contributing writer for VentureBeat, DeSmogBlog, The Huffington Post, and TreeHugger.

Manufactroversy (măn’yə-făk’-trə-vûr’sē)
N., pl. -sies.

1. A manufactured controversy that is motivated by profit or extreme ideology to intentionally create public confusion about an issue that is not in dispute.
2. Effort is often accompanied by imagined conspiracy theory and major marketing dollars involving fraud, deception and polemic rhetoric.

With all the sophisticated sophistry besieging mass audiences today, there is a need for the study of rhetoric now more than ever before. This is especially the case when it comes to the contemporary assault on science known as manufactured controversy: when significant disagreement doesn’t exist inside the scientific community, but is successfully invented for a public audience to achieve specific political ends.

Three recent examples of manufactured controversy are global warming skepticism, AIDS dissent in South Africa, and the intelligent design movement’s “teach the controversy” campaign. The first of these has been called an “epistemological filibuster” because it magnifies the uncertainty surrounding a scientific truth claim in order to delay the adoption of a policy that is warranted by that science. Languaging expert Frank Luntz admitted as much in his now infamous talking points memo on the environment, leaked to the public in 2002, where he confessed that the window for claiming controversy about global warming was closing, but he nonetheless urged Republican congressional and executive leaders “to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” ExxonMobil was doing this when it published its “Unsettled Science” advertisement about climate science on the editorial pages of the New York Times in March 2000. A more recent guest editorial by a reader made the same claim in the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in January 2008. All three seemed to be following the playbook of the tobacco industry when scientists discovered that their products cause cancer; when a threat to their interests arises from the scientific community, they declare “there are always two sides to a case” and then call for more study of the matter before action is taken.

I think it’s shortsighted to cede the public stage to the anti-science forces in the naive hope that no one will pay attention to them.

South African President Thabo Mbeki’s support for AIDS dissent eight years ago is a similar case. Like global warming skepticism, this assault on the science of HIV/AIDS research ingeniously turned the scientific community’s values against it by drawing on the importance of rational open debate, a skeptical attitude, and the need for continued research. Mbeki alleged that the mainstream scientific community branded scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS as “‘dangerous and discredited’ with whom nobody, including ourselves, should communicate or interact.” Claiming the successful dissident’s authority in post-apartheid South Africa, Mbeki condemned the mainstream scientific community for occupying “the frontline in the campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism which argues that the only freedom we have is to agree with what they decree to be established scientific truths.”

A parallel case is being made by the intelligent design movement in conjunction with its “teach the controversy” campaign against evolutionary biology. Ben Stein’s new movie, Expelled, portrays scientists as participating in a vast conspiracy to silence anyone who questions the Darwinian orthodoxy. This movie promises to be the most extreme application yet of the intelligent design movement’s “wedge” strategy to break the supremacy of evolutionary theory in contemporary science. Just as a wedge can be set into a chink in a solid structure and, with the careful application of some concentrated force, will split that structure to pieces, so too do the producers of this movie hope that it can break the scientific community and allow for a change in how science is taught in America. Of course, any claim by biologists that there is no scientific controversy to teach merely feeds the conspiracy theory.

In light of this difficulty, some have suggested that the best response to manufactured controversy is no response at all. They say that countering such nonsense merely gives these modern-day sophists publicity and enables their continued efforts to reopen debate on settled science. I understand this impulse to remain silent in the face of foolishness, but as a professor of rhetoric, I think it’s shortsighted to cede the public stage to the anti-science forces in the naive hope that no one will pay attention to them. Ever since the field of rhetoric was born, there have been those who misuse the power of persuasion to mislead public audiences, and it has been only through vigilant counter-persuasion that such deception has been overcome.

The ancient sophists, or “wise men” (wise guys?) who taught the new art of rhetoric to those who would pay their fee in the 5^th century BCE, included Gorgias, who was said to have boasted that he could persuade the multitude to ignore the expert and listen to him instead, and Protagoras, who claimed that there are always two sides to a case and it’s the sophist’s job to make the worse case appear the stronger. It was to oppose this kind of deception that Aristotle codified the art of Rhetoric in his treatise by that title. He recognized that before lay audiences “not even the possession of the exactest knowledge” ensures that a speaker will be persuasive, so Aristotle promoted the study of rhetoric so that experts could confute those who try to mislead public audiences.

Today’s sophists exploit a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data.

As a scholar of rhetoric, I have studied some modern cases of manufactured controversy to discover how to best confute these contemporary sophists, and I have come up with some preliminary hypotheses about what makes their arguments so persuasive to a public audience. First, they skillfully invoke values that are shared by the scientific community and the American public alike, like free speech, skeptical inquiry, and the revolutionary force of new ideas against a repressive orthodoxy. It is difficult to argue against someone who invokes these values without seeming unscientific or un-American. Second, they exploit a tension between the technical and public spheres in postmodern American life; highly specialized scientific experts can’t spare the time to engage in careful public communication, and are then surprised when the public distrusts, fears, or opposes them. Third, today’s sophists exploit a public misconception about what science is, portraying it as a structure of complete consensus built from the steady accumulation of unassailable data; any dissent by any scientist is then seen as evidence that there’s no consensus, and thus truth must not have been discovered yet. A more accurate portrayal of science sees it as a process of debate among a community of experts in which one side outweighs the other in the balance of the argument, and that side is declared the winner; a few skeptics might remain, but they’re vastly outnumbered by the rest, and the democratic process of science moves forward with the collective weight of the majority of expert opinion. Scientists buy into this democratic process when they enter the profession, so that a call for the winning side to share power in the science classroom with the losers, or to continue debating an issue that has already been settled for the vast majority of scientists so that policy makers can delay taking action on their findings, seems particularly undemocratic to most of them.

Aristotle believed that things that are true “have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites,” but that it takes a good rhetor to ensure that this happens when sophisticated sophistry is on the loose. I concur; only by exposing manufactured controversy for what it is, recognizing its rhetorical power and countering those who are skilled at getting the multitude to ignore the experts while imagining a scientific debate where none exists, can scientists and their allies use my field to achieve what Aristotle envisioned for it—a study that helps the argument that is in reality stronger also appear stronger before an audience of nonexperts.

Leah Ceccarelli is an associate professor in the Communication Department at the University of Washington. She teaches rhetoric and is the author of the award-winning book Shaping Science with Rhetoric.

Not only does it waste our time, but it may play right into their hands.

On one level, I can understand all the chatter. It was more than a little outrageous that at this very late hour, with global warming so well established as a scientific conclusion and with critical policy decisions yet to be made, the skeptics chose to make a last stand. Indeed, it’s particularly offensive to those of us who have spent years battling climate skeptics, refuting them at every turn, trying to preserve the integrity of climate science and, ultimately, to protect the planet. Again and again, when the skeptics have come out in force, we have dutifully strapped on our weapons and returned to battle. We’re soldiers, and that’s just what we do. It’s a familiar mode.

But it’s also one I’ve come to question. First of all, what is the point of fighting and debating climate skeptics any more? This November we are going to elect a president who has a strong stance and wants to deal with global warming–the difference between the Democrats and John McCain on the issue, while hardly insignificant, scarcely compares to the difference between either of them and our current president. And even George W. Bush has been on record for some time accepting the reality of human-induced global warming.

So we’ve reached a point where we may well be wasting our energies if we continue to battle climate skeptics. Indeed, we run the risk of propping them up far more than they deserve.

For that’s the other problem with constantly rebutting anti-science forces—not only does it waste our time, but it may play right into their hands. Consider: Over at his blog Framing Science, Matthew Nisbet makes a very strong case that the rhetorical strategy of the Heartland Institute is exceedingly similar to that of the anti-evolutionist think tank the Discovery Institute. If so, it follows that the defenders of climate science ought to be at least as leery of outright engagement with Heartland as the defenders of evolutionary science are when it comes to engaging with Discovery.

The reason is that if you actually bother to rebut the Heartlands and Discoverys of the world, you instantly enter into a discourse on their own terms. The strategic framing these groups employ to attack mainstream science heavily features the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty—and so if you try to answer their arguments, you’re inevitably committed to conveying more abstruse technical information and, thus, more uncertainty as soon as they wail back at you (which they thoroughly enjoy doing).

If you create a big fuss over what your intellectual opponent is saying, you might well be helping him or her.

And there’s another important dynamic at play here involving the media. Journalists know that global warming is a big deal, that the presidential candidates all want to address it, that Al Gore won the Nobel, and so on. So when most of them see something like the Heartland conference, their broad inclination will be to look askance at it…at least at first.

But now suppose that this oddball conference comes under prominent attack from those on the other side. Suddenly, journalists are looking at a “controversy,” and there’s nothing they more enjoy covering. And off we go.

There’s certainly a longstanding mentality among progressive groups that nonsense must be refuted, often in rapid-fire mode if possible. But that mindset runs up against something else that ought to be obvious: controversy sells. If you create a big fuss over what your intellectual opponent is saying, you might well be helping him or her. Fox News’s highly publicized lawsuit against Al Franken surely helped sell copies of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. So why wouldn’t repeated critiques by environmental groups of someone like, say, Bjorn Lomborg or the Heartland Institute do exactly the same thing?

Nevertheless—and to stick with environmental groups for a second–they fall into this trap constantly, refuting at length anti-environmental forces at rightwing think tanks or in the media. The Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund (now known simply as Environmental Defense) both published lengthy studies to refute New York Times contrarian John Tierney’s 1997 attack on the efficacy of recycling, to name just one example. Couldn’t all the energy and resources bestowed on rebutting our enemies be better used to help promote our friends—perhaps, say, by devoting resources to getting the word out about individuals who have written pro-environment books? Rather than reacting, couldn’t we be setting the agenda?

Unfortunately, yet another example of scientific defenders enabling anti-scientific forces has recently come to my attention. The rightwing comedian Ben Stein has a new movie out called Expelled, a supposed documentary about how evolutionary forces are suppressing the intelligent design movement’s intellectually valid dissent. Now, this is nonsense, but what better way to help nonsense thrive than to unleash public statements that would seem to confirm it or to be consistent with it?

Sure enough, one of the Expelled trailers features the following quotation from Oxford evolutionary biologist and atheism apostle Richard Dawkins: “If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.” And then in comes Ben Stein to play the rebel, the Galileo, against this oppressive scientific orthodoxy, against “Big Science” that tells the little guy to “shut up.” How’s that for enabling?

We know so much, we scientists, we science defenders. We ought to know better.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

From: Science Progress Advisory Board and Editors

The undersigned members of the Science Progress advisory board and editorial staff express their support for the Science Debate 2008 initiative and encourage the presidential candidates of both major political parties to devote one nationally televised debate specifically to issues related to science, technology, and innovation.

The next president must be able to make clear and effective decisions about science and technology policy, and must be able to synthesize advice from advisers who can make recommendations without fear of political interference. Policy decisions on the issues of greatest concern to voters–national security, the economy, health care, and energy and the environment–should rest upon a foundation of sound scientific advice. Candidates must be able to clearly articulate how they will harness that counsel to lead the United States toward a clean energy transformation, care for the health of the country’s citizens, and cultivate a diverse and dynamic low-carbon economy that capitalizes on American creativity and entrepreneurship.

The objective of Science Progress is to improve the understanding of science among policymakers in order to develop exciting, progressive ideas about innovation in science and technology for the United States in the 21st century. We believe that the Science Debate 2008 initiative shares the same ethos that is behind our mission statement:

Science Progress proceeds from the propositions that scientific inquiry is among the finest expressions of human excellence, that it is a crucial source of human flourishing, a critical engine of economic growth, and must be dedicated to the common good. Scientific inquiry entails global responsibilities. It should lead to a more equitable, safer, and healthier future for all of humankind.

Current Advisory Board Signatories

Martha Farah, PhD, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences; Director, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania
Steve Fetter, PhD, Dean, School of Public Policy University of Maryland – College Park
John Gearhart, PhD, Professor of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Physiology, Comparative Medicine, and Population Dynamics; Director of Stem Cell Biology, McKusic-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
John H. Gibbons, PhD Science Advisor to President Clinton; President, Resource Strategies
Barry Glassner, PhD, Executive Vice Provost, University of Southern California
Kathryn Hinsch, Founding Director and Board President, Women’s Bioethics Project
Neal Lane, PhD Malcolm Gillis University Professor; Senior Fellow, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Rice University
Zack Lynch, MA, Executive Director, Neurotechnology Industry Organization
Tara O’Toole, MD, MPH, Chief Executive Officer and Director, Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Scott Page, PhD, External Faculty, Santa Fe Institute; Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics University of Michigan
Jonathan Tucker, PhD, Senior Fellow, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies
Paul R. Wolpe, PhD, Senior Fellow, Center for Bioethics; Professor, Departments of Psychiatry, Medical Ethics, and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Laurie Zoloth, PhD, Director, Bioethics, Center for Genetic Medicine Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities Professor of Religion, Northwestern University
Richard O. Lempert, JD, PhD, Eric Stein Distinguished University Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Michigan Law School, NSF, AAAS, NRC
Dawn Bonnell, PhD, Trustee Professor of Material Sciences; Director, Nano/Bio Interface Center University of Pennsylvania
John S. Irons, PhD, Research and Policy Director, Economic Policy Institute
Susan Solomon, JD, CEO, New York Stem Cell Foundation

Editorial Staff

Jonathan Moreno, Editor-In-Chief
Kit Batten, PhD, Editorial Advisor
Ed Paisley, Editorial Director
Andrew Plemmons Pratt, Assistant Editor

The effort of AAAS parallels those of other science community and science media sources. NPR’s Ira Flatow, the host of “Science Friday,” has devoted several programs of late to the importance of science in the election. Another interesting example came from Popular Mechanics magazine, which created a website entitled “Geek the Vote,” once again providing a rundown of candidate science and technology policy stances. However, as the editors explain, the methodology had its limits:

We thoroughly reviewed the campaign Web sites of leading candidates from each party for position papers and press releases that spelled out policy proposals. (This involved judgment calls; campaigns don’t all group their proposals using the same language. In particular, automotive, environmental and energy policies tend to cross category boundaries.) We did not examine speeches, debate transcripts or interviews with journalists. We called or emailed each campaign at least twice to invite staff members to provide documentation on subjects that weren’t addressed on a candidate’s site.

Yet another related approach appeared on a website created by Physics Today, which compiles candidate stances on evolution, climate change, energy policy, science education, and other matters—based largely upon campaign websites and some secondary sources. In terms of trolling the public record for science policy information, though, the mother lode probably comes from the nonprofit group Scientists and Engineers for America, which has created the SHARP Network, a wiki-like database of information about the science and technology records of the presidential contenders as well as all other national elected representatives.

What about hearing from the candidates themselves, in their own words?

All of this is deeply valuable, in an informational overload kind of way. But it has its limits. After all, for the most part these resources simply compile campaign stances from websites and press releases. What about hearing from the candidates themselves, in their own words?

Hillary Clinton gave a major science policy speech back in October, on the 50^th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik—and John Edwards, no longer in the race, outlined his own views in an interview with the excellent science blog, Blog Around the Clock. And voters in Michigan and Florida recently got to hear John McCain and Mitt Romney really go at it over global warming—at least one major science issue on which every candidate ought to have his or her stance comprehensively interrogated.

But none of it is enough. As Science‘s Don Kennedy wrote in a recent editorial on science and the election: “We need to know the candidates’ qualifications for understanding and judging science, and for speaking intelligently about science and technology to the leaders of other nations in planning our collective global future.” And I would add that we need to hear this from the candidates themselves, in their own words. We need to get a sense of how they process information—how they inform themselves about science policy matters, and how their acquired knowledge comes out, in real time, once they have.

Now, some of you may suspect where this is all heading—towards a plug for the ScienceDebate2008 initiative, which I have helped to organize and spearhead. And you aren’t necessarily wrong. But, there’s considerably more to be said before we even get there.

We need candidates themselves discussing science policy, and we need them doing it on the national television airwaves.

You see, there’s another problem with the previously mentioned compilations of candidates’ science policy stances—namely, who’s compiling them. All of them come from either science-centric organizations or popular science publications. In short, these informational catalogues are geared towards those who are scientists or and those who care about science—not the general population, who largely aren’t and often don’t. Insofar as they process information about science at all, most American’s aren’t going to process it in this format, or from these sources. So if we believe that science matters to all of their futures, and that they deserve to know and appreciate that—and I certainly do—then they have to be reached in a different way entirely.

In short, while much valuable labor has definitely gone towards sciencey voter’s guides of various sorts (and I’m sure this column has missed some of them), that’s not sufficient. We need to change both the medium and the messenger. We need candidates themselves discussing science policy, and we need them doing it on the national television airwaves. In that way, not only can we get past carefully sculpted answers and science policy information written by campaign staffers, rather than the contenders themselves. At the same time, we can bring that information before audiences who, in a massively over-saturated media environment, wouldn’t even dream of going to look for it.

Now co-sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, the AAAS, and the Council on Competitiveness, ScienceDebate2008 will, in the very near future, be inviting the remaining presidential candidates to precisely such an event (details yet to be announced). And even if it doesn’t come off this year, the organization—which undeniably got a late start in this election cycle—plans to stay around and make certain that such debates happen in future election years. After all, a publicly televised debate, covered by the entire mass media and featuring the candidates themselves, is really the only way to put science on the electoral agenda. So it has been heartening to watch virtually the entire world of U.S. science mobilize this election year in recognition of that reality.

Nevertheless, it’s still an uphill battle—against, among other obstacles, risk-averse campaigns and profit-driven media conglomerates—to make it happen. So in the meantime, if you want the best available source of science policy information on the candidates that I have yet found, I would recommend a series of candidate-specific journalistic reports that appeared in AAAS’s flagship magazine Science (for links see here, scroll down). Here we find the candidates’ positions and dispositions alike described through attempts to interview either their science advisers or other scientists who had come into contact with them. So for example, for the Mike Huckabee profile, reporter Jennifer Couzin canvassed, among others, scientists in Arkansas. And for the Hillary Clinton profile, reporter Eli Kintisch talked to Clinton’s actual campaign science consultants.

These reports really do give you a sense not only of the candidates’ stances on science, but also how they individually approach scientific issues, based on their past political histories and the perceptions of those who have been close to them. And unless we succeed with ScienceDebate2008—or 2012, or 2016—that may be the best we’re going to get.

Chris Mooney is the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

The anti-evolution, pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute issued this predictable reply, despite the book’s clear assertions and supporting evidence that “‘intelligent design’ creationism is not supported by scientific evidence” (p 40) and “attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist” (p 12).

Committee members who oversaw production of the book include Francisco J. Ayala, past president of the AAAS; Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History; and Science Progress advisory board member, former NAS president, and recently-named Editor of Science Bruce Alberts.

“Atlantis is grounded till January 2 at the earliest.” (60 Second Science)

The public isn’t worried about nanotech risks; scientists are. But it turns out that “the public trusts industry and university scientists more than governmental bodies, regulatory agencies and the media.” Matthew Nisbet points to Peter Rodgers’s editorial (subscription) in Nature Nanotech on the opportunity to frame scientific communication on nanotechnology (hint: forget the details, and get help from professional communicators if needed). (Framing Science)

Sorting through the empirical research on the “wide variety of social factors that affect (or are affected by) sex differences in math and science.” (Cognitive Daily)

Hill Heat, Dot Earth, and Climate Progress all cover the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies and speeches for the IPCC and Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Venture Capitalists with money in cleantech start-ups at the Always On Venture Summit West were not optimistic that the U.S. government will enact carbon caps in the near future. (Wired Science)

“If your project is disease-related, health-related, you should not submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation.”

At an Institute of Medicine panel on global health yesterday, an argument over the effect of climate change on the spread of infectious diseases (via the KSJ Tracker).

“We did not propose cutting out entire pages….after they [the Office of Management and Budget] received our comment, they sent back a recommendation to the CDC that they simply drop whole pages from the beginning of the testimony.” An interview with John Marburger (National Journal subscription), Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

How hard is it to assemble an FDA advisory panel free of experts with conflicts of interest? Not as hard as the FDA makes it seem, reports the Center for Science in the Public Interest (via The Scientist Blog).

The NSF-funded Discovery Corps Fellowship grants scientists $200,000 for two years to run outside-the-box scientific outreach projects. But stigmas against outreach work, as opposed to dedicated research, may have kept applicants numbers so low that the program may dissolve (Science subscription).

Christopher Mims, of the new Scientific American site 60 Second Science explains Evolutionary Developmental Biology in 123 seconds.

“This mosaic of images opens up a window to the Antarctic that we just haven’t had before.” NASA and the United States Geological Survey unveil the most detailed satellite-image map of the continent ever created. The map will help researchers plan expeditions to monitor changes in Antarctic ice and should prove useful to the International Polar Year, a multinational effort to study environmental chance at the poles.

A new study financed by the National Institute of Mental Health finds that mental health problems among New Orleans residents in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were no more extensive than those after other natural disasters, but that the delayed government response likely exacerbated the problem.

Andrew C. Revkin joins James E. Hansen in lamenting the dearth of metaphors that might motivate large-scale action to avert climate change. Words alone may not be enough.

But, Meredith, part of the challenge the news media has had in covering this story is the old habit of taking the “on the one hand, on the other hand” approach. There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, but when you’re reporting on a story like the one you’re covering today, where you have people all around the world, you don’t take—you don’t search out for someone who still believes the Earth is flat and give them equal time.

Gore’s core concern here is a familiar one. It has been applied to science coverage of issues ranging from evolution to the relationship between abortion and breast cancer (for further elaboration see here and here). Ironically, though, when it comes to reporting on global warming in the United States, “phony media balance,” though once a serious problem, actually appears to have declined. And—the ironies continue—Gore himself is probably a major part of the reason for this shift.

Coverage from 1988 through 2002 in top U.S. papers, the Boykoffs found, had been “informationally biased.”

The evidence that Gore needn’t worry so much—that, in fact, he may be “flogging a dead norm”—arrives via a new paper from media scholar Maxwell T. Boykoff, which has just appeared in the journal AREA, a publication of the U.K. Royal Geographical Society. But before we explore its intriguing results, it helps to rehash the intellectual history underlying this latest research.

It was the very same Boykoff, working with his brother Jules in 2004, who published a kind of Ur-text for criticism of media coverage of global warming in the journal Global Environmental Change. Coverage from 1988 through 2002 in top U.S. papers, the Boykoffs found, had been “informationally biased”—privileging “balanced” accounts despite an ever-strengthening scientific consensus about the human role in climate change. Or more specifically, 52 percent of a random sample of articles published during this period in the U.S. “prestige press”—the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal—had a broadly “balanced” structure. With this research, the Boykoffs provided empirical data strongly supportive of the concern articulated by Gore and many other science defenders.

But now, says Max Boykoff in his more recent paper (which covers the period from 2003 to 2006), that troublesome pattern of coverage has declined markedly. The years 2005 and 2006, in particular, saw not only a huge surge in U.S. media attention to climate change at these same papers, but also a decrease in “balanced” (as in biased) coverage, to the point that the papers were no longer significantly out of whack with scientific consensus. One focusing event that seemed instrumental here? The May 2006 release of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Boykoff’s new paper—structured as a compare-and-contrast of coverage patterns at leading U.S. and U.K. dailies—is crammed with fascinating information about how the press has covered what may be the most important issue facing humankind. Reading it helps us understand why U.S. climate reporting changed for the better, and thus imparts some key lessons about how our media can be expected to cover future science controversies.

Consider, for example, that even though Boykoff studied the five aforementioned U.S. papers but only three U.K. ones—The Guardian, The Independent, and the Times of London—he found that the U.K. papers not only never suffered from the “balance” problem, but they wrote more than twice as many total stories as the U.S. ones (although total coverage increased markedly in both nations over the course of the four-year period studied). That’s a staggering gap, and it suggests that U.S. news outlets have served us poorly indeed. But why did this occur?

We had a much more influential denial machine, but also a scientific establishment that failed to take it on.

As you might expect, U.S. and U.K .media saw different but to some extent overlapping focal events, which apparently contributed both to rising coverage levels and (in the United States) to a decrease in phony “balanced” coverage. The 2006 Stern Report on the economics of addressing climate change made a much bigger splash in the U.K.; but here, Hurricane Katrina drove dramatic attention to global warming. In both countries, An Inconvenient Truth had a big impact. However, the individual events, taken by themselves, don’t seem capable of explaining why it is that at least until 2005 and 2006, the U.S. and U.K. media diverged so greatly.

Instead, and in my view correctly, Boykoff fingers our partisan politics here in the United States, as well as what we might call our “denial machine.” When stories were “balanced” in the United States, who tended to get quoted providing the “other side”? Well, a small number of contrarian scientists, many of them tied to conservative think tanks that were, in turn, partly funded by ExxonMobil. This has all been documented exhaustively by now, but for far too long, our media seemed oblivious to the relationship between fossil fuel interest and global warming skepticism.

By contrast, the U.K. media got pretty uppity about “Esso’s” role. Granted, it helped that the Royal Society, Britain’s top scientific organization, sent the oil giant an explicit letter in 2006 challenging its support of viewpoints outside the scientific mainstream. Where was the U.S. National Academy of Sciences or the American Association for the Advancement of Science on this front? We had a much more influential denial machine, but also a scientific establishment that failed to take it on. If the U.S. media got rolled on this story, it’s partly because U.S. scientists, as a group (despite stellar individual exceptions), didn’t help matters.

That’s critical, because the strategy of the contrarians was to sow doubt about mainstream climate science, thus triggering not only “balanced” coverage but, in general, an overwhelming impression of scientific uncertainty and controversy. It was only when the fog of doubt lifted—and when global warming could be reframed along different lines—that the issue garnered not only more attention but the right kind of attention. Boykoff highlights in particular a 2005 USA Today story from Dan Vergano: “The debate’s over: Globe is warming.” Yes it is, and yes, we finally caught on—and it may or may not be too late. Let’s hope that the next time we encounter a politicized scientific issue, a strategic attempt to sow doubt, and a confused media, scientists and their defenders move much more rapidly and decisively to counteract misinformation and set the record straight. If this story shows nothing else, it’s that we can’t simply trust our media to do it for us.

Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Writing on the new Dot Earth blog at NYT, Andrew Revkin explains that environmental campaigners are under fire for promoting a “politics of fear.” Catastrophism is merely one strategy among many, and it does not capture the myriad opportunities of other arguments, which involve not only mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, but also focus on re-orienting energy policy. So here are four other frames circulating in the current discussion. Each may fit a certain situation or audience better than the others, and each is a positive response to the threat of climate change.

Energy security in the U.S. interest. This is usually associated with “reducing dependence on foreign oil.” Solutions range from renewable energy sources like wind and solar to boondoggles like coal-to-liquid.

Energy security to prevent humanitarian crises. Joe Romm explained here on Science Progress the significance of awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC and the former vice president: “Gore is trying to prevent a humanitarian crisis; he is trying to prevent regional wars that will be driven by resource scarcity.”

Economic opportunity at the upper end of the U.S. economy. In a conference call with bloggers yesterday, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) spoke with enthusiasm about the impending flood of capital into green technologies: “There are going to be two or three Googles created in the energy sector in the next few years.”

Economic opportunity at all levels of the U.S. economy. Growing new sectors of the economy with green collar jobs is one element; reducing the impact of rising fuel costs on low-income workers, who spend a larger share of their income on energy than wealthier workers, is another.

When it comes to the relationship between a changing climate and specific disasters, “cause” is a word we really ought to retire.

When it comes to the relationship between a changing climate and specific disasters, “cause” is a word we really ought to retire. Consider: Disasters arise from specific local conditions; in the California case, drought, Santa Ana winds, and a few execrable arsonists. Global warming may make particular conditions more likely to occur (or recur) in a statistical sense, but it never creates the first spark, if you will.

And so global warming is not the reason that a few fires, once ignited, exploded into deadly infernos and caused so much damage in late October. Neither is it the reason that a particular atmospheric disturbance—once known as Tropical Depression 12—later developed into Hurricane Katrina and took a particular course that led to an explosive intensification once the storm crossed the deep, warm Gulf of Mexico “Loop Current.”

That’s the first caveat to get out of the way here, but there are others. For even if global warming is indeed changing the average wildfire risk to human populations, it may not be the only factor doing so. One of the major messages to emerge following the California fires is that, in some sense, we did this, not through greenhouse gas emission but rather through urban sprawl and through building valuable homes in fire-prone regions.

A similar narrative arises with respect to hurricanes. The main reason we’ve been experiencing so much hurricane damage in the U.S. lately has more to do with societal trends—the ever increasing concentration of population and wealth in vulnerable coastal areas—than with global warming. Almost 50 percent of the U.S. public now lives within 50 miles of a coastline. Even if global warming isn’t changing storms, these people are setting themselves up for disaster.

All of which leads to an important generalization about climate change and disasters: Even as we must be cautious not to attribute any single disaster to climate change, and even as we must acknowledge the societal factors that make us more vulnerable, we still have every right to fear the double whammy of a societal trend superimposed atop a climatic trend. In both the hurricane and the wildfire cases, there are reasons for thinking that’s precisely what’s happening.

Scientifically speaking, it’s hard not to be struck by the similarities. In 2005, amidst a dramatic Atlantic hurricane season, two scientific papers came out stating that hurricanes had measurably intensified on average over the past several decades and implicating global warming as the culprit. Similarly, in 2006, a paper in Science came out finding that a marked increase in western U.S. wildfires reflected a climate trend towards warmer springs and summers, and earlier snowmelt.

Following the Southern California wildfires, then, we discover yet another science scandal.

We must bear in mind, though, that these were early attempts to examine exceedingly complicated scientific problems—which in turn leads to a second important generalization. After scientists identify a plausible linkage between a changing climate and the increased incidence of a particular type of disaster, the story hardly ends there. Rather, we as a society must then concentrate our scientific energies–and government resources—on developing the aforementioned research (often presented at first without regard to the implications for specific communities) into a form that is of most use to human populations.

That means regional studies. That means going to governors and mayors in western states, or coastal states, and having something to tell them.

This task–which can only be considered a critical public service in our new era of climate instability–inevitably falls to our federal government, and more specifically, to its climate science research apparatus. And sure enough, in the late 1990s the Clinton administration inaugurated a “national assessment” process to study the regional impacts of climate change and their implications for the United States. But as I have written in many places—including the latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, currently on news stands—the Bush administration quashed that effort, and was in fact recently rebuked in federal court for doing so.

Following the Southern California wildfires, then, we discover yet another science scandal. Global warming is probably changing wildfire risks, and western states (and their citizens) have a need to know more precisely how that will affect them. But they don’t–because of the Bush administration’s continual suppression and misuse of science, and because of the tragic politicization of the climate issue.

Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

America has more than enough scientists and engineers, according to a new report from the Urban Institute. BusinessWeek writer Vivek Wadhwa points out that ACT and SAT scores have gone up over the past 20 years and between 1993 and 2001 65% of students who obtained a bachelor’s in engineering went on to pursue a masters degree or job in another field. Moreover, between 1985 and 2000, the U.S. produced 435,000 science and engineering degree-holders, but only added 150,000 jobs per year to the science and engineering workforce. His conclusion is that we do not need more science education, but that the government needs to generate demand for scientists and engineers by creating national programs to solve large scale problems like global warming and the spread of infectious diseases.

Inside Higher Ed features a Q and A with Paula E. Stephan and Ronald G. Ehrenberg, editors of a new book of essays on Science and the University. They discuss the change in America’s scientific goals from the 1950′s to today, balancing competition and collaboration with foreign scientists, and the proper approach scientists should take to the federal funding process.

“Demand-side” innovation theory seems to be the right regulatory approach for the EU, according to The European Policy Centre. An article on Science|Business Policy Bridge highlights some of the Centre’s recommendations, including, “creating the right market conditions in Europe for companies to innovate, academics to discover, and investors to take risks.” They claim that those conditions “don’t necessarily come from spending more money on research…Instead, it’s a question of freeing technology markets to work more efficiently.”

The InterAcademies Council report released Monday on sustainable energy options reiterates familiar suggestions for greening the planet’s energy future (improve efficiency, sequester CO2, develop renewable energy sources), but it also presents a compelling argument for applied scientific and technological research in pursuit of the common good.

The first conclusion outlined in the executive summary of the report, Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future, reads:

Meeting the basic energy needs of the poorest people on this planet is a moral and social imperative that can and must be pursued in concert with sustainability objectives.

Placing the interests of the developing world at the forefront of a major international report on sustainable energy is an emphatic statement that science policy should promote the equity, safety, and health of everyone.

These considerations should not be limited to discussions of climate change and green energy. In the summer edition of Issues in Science and Technology, Daniel Sarewitz notes that much discussion of U.S. science policy dwells on “how much” funding goes to different programs and does not ask “what for.” Particularly in the legislative season of appropriations bills, scientists and policy makers alike may focus on the “how much” questions. But in many situations, the more appropriate questions may be some of those Sarewitz suggests, including, “Who is most likely to benefit from the translation of the research into social outcomes?” and “Who is unlikely to benefit?”

Science (subscription) notes that the emphasis in Lighting the Way on developing nations may galvanize support for the recommendations in Washington D.C. If the report does drive policy decisions on sustainable energy, then it can also frame other questions, large and small, about how applied science and technology can make the world a more equitable place.

As Federation of American Scientists points out in a press release today, “At a time when the scientific community is feeling threatened by political forces seeking to undermine its credibility it is tragic that one of the icons of modern science has cast such dishonor on the profession.”

Watson is not the first scientist of stature to use his or her notoriety to advance spurious ideas that fly in the face of scientific research. But when professional science already faces so many politically-motived obstacles, it is all the more unfortunate that a Nobel laureate would parade personal prejudice as scientific fact.

In an interview with the magazine Medline Plus, NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni repeats his call for more embryonic stem cell research. Dr. Zerhouni has made similar statements before, including during congressional testimony in March.

When confronted with this disagreement with its policy on the part of its chief medical adviser, the White House has offered the typical non-denials—”No, there’s no disagreement, we both think embryonic stem cell research should proceed”—without confronting Zerhouni’s point that the research is hobbled by the current policy.

Also familiar is the spin that this is a matter of science versus ethics, a line the president used in the 2004 presidential debates. Now the administration has gone further.

The notion that scientists lack ethical judgment—they’re only trying to cure horrible diseases after all—surfaced more clearly than ever in the reported White House response to Dr. Zerhouni’s latest statement. According to the Washington Post blog The Sleuth, spokesman Tony Fratto said that the president must “draw the line in a different place than Dr. Zerhouni” because he has to take into account “moral and religious views.”

The change of tone is notable. The White House could have said, “Well, we just disagree and the president is the decider.” Instead, as its position has become more untenable the White House has moved from “science vs. ethics” to “scientists don’t worry about ethics.”

Fortunately, those benighted scientists and the rest of us have politicians to do that for us.

There is clearly a need to keep the United States competitive with emerging science superpowers such as India and China by inspiring technological innovation-through basic research funding and complementary scientific and economic policies-thereby ensuring economic growth. And then there is the need to restore scientific integrity to the U.S. government after the many science-related scandals that we’ve seen during the Bush administration. Problem is, when progressive politicians outline their policies for science these days, they often conflate the need to protect scientific integrity with the need for scientific innovation.

Problem is, when progressive politicians outline their policies for science these days, they often conflate the need to protect scientific integrity with the need for scientific innovation.

It’s as if they were reading the National Academies’ Rising Above the Gathering Storm report in one hand, and Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason in the other. Or as Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) put it in a recent speech: “By ignoring or manipulating science, the Bush administration is putting our future at risk and letting our economic competitors get an edge in the global economy.”

I fully understand the temptation to commingle these two messages. After all, throughout the post-World War II era science has been powerfully defined in this country in terms of its ability to make our lives better by fueling economic growth and innovation. Progressive politicians want to tap into that resonant message. Yet at the same time they also want to discuss science in the context of scandal, and more specifically, the Bush administration’s repeated meddling and interferences with government scientists and, indeed, the dissemination of scientific information itself.

On an intellectual rather than thematic level, however, that conjunction doesn’t always work so well. Consider: “Competitiveness” is a problematic term insofar as we really ought to want science to advance globally, not in any single country. And when it comes to money, scientists always want more public research funding than government can probably give them. It’s more than appropriate for the democratic process to decide where lines ought to be drawn and other priorities pursued with limited resources.

But if scientists wish to make the case for more funding, they should do so on the grounds that it benefits the nation.

These are not integrity issues, which, to my mind, ought to be considered fundamental and non-negotiable. Suppression, misinformation, assaults on free speech and inquiry, deliberate torquing of scientific deliberations—such abuses are simply intolerable in any context. By contrast, when it comes to decisions about how much to invest in scientific research, politicians must make tough choices, legitimately counterbalancing the need to ensure innovation and advancement with many other competing mandates.

In fact, while “scientific innovation” could be said to encompass the funding of a wide range of basic research enterprises across scientific disciplines, “scientific integrity” problems tend to arise only around a relatively small number of highly contested subjects—stem cells, global warming, evolution, and at least in the Bush administration , anything having to do with sex or abortion.

That’s why, when I composed my book The Republican War on Science, I decided I simply could not define any individual failure to fund scientific research—or, any particular redirection of research priorities, such as has occurred at NASA thanks to Bush’s Moon-Mars initiative—as an “abuse” of science. There may be many reasons to support a greater U.S. investment in science—and indeed, I support precisely that—but it isn’t a crime or abuse of power to oppose such investments. To claim otherwise is to make a kind of category error, and to confound illegitimate and legitimate uses of political power.

But hey, we all support science, right? So aren’t I making the perfect the enemy of the good by drawing these distinctions? Well, no. Failure to think clearly about the difference between “science innovation” issues on the one hand, and “scientific integrity” issues on the other, can muddy the waters and leave my own intellectual allies open to attack. I can’t tell you how many times, when discussing scientific integrity issues regarding the Bush administration, I’ve heard the comeback: “But this government supports lots of scientific research funding.”

That’s true, though not at the levels of financing that scientists would like to see. But if scientists wish to make the case for more funding, they should do so on the grounds that it benefits the nation—not that they’re automatically entitled to it, and not that it would be a scandal if they don’t receive it. Drawing such core distinctions between issues of integrity and issues of innovation won’t merely help to keep the message on target. In the long run, those distinctions can only help advance the cause of science—in all of the different spheres where it runs up against the political process.

Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

The culture wars exploded. Our national politics became more polarized and contentious. Science fights erupted regularly around environmental, regulatory, and moral issues. In some cases science advisers were even fired.

We’ve gone from the age of Edward R. Murrow to the age of Bill O’ReillyAnd then came the Bush administration, demonstrating just how large the gap between a president and the nation’s knowledge base can really get. Today we look around anguished and feel sorely tempted to label the 1950s and early 1960s a golden age of scientific inquiry married to effective government policymaking.

Yet it would be a serious mistake to blame political polarization alone for a declining influence of the scientific community on U.S. policy. It is certainly true that science suffered along with many other forms of serious expertise over the past several decades, beaten down by our divisive politics. But let’s not forget that something else has vastly changed since the 1950s and 1960s as well: the nature of the media.

We’ve gone from the age of Edward R. Murrow to the age of Bill O’Reilly. And if we seek the reasons that scientists have seen their influence on policy decline—and the gulf between themselves and society widen—we can’t neglect that there’s been very little adaptation on the part of the scientific community to a radically different, and far more challenging, media environment.

Two decades ago we truly had “papers of record.” And if you sat down to watch the evening news at 6 p.m., you pretty much had to opt for network news coverage, including coverage of science-related issues that were seriously explored. Today, in contrast, newspapers are struggling, but we have millions of blogs, ideologically driven news outlets matching every political persuasion, hundreds of cable channels, and Google News to sift our headlines.

The consequence is profound: Citizens who don’t care about science now don’t have to hear about it at all. They don’t need to stick their fingers in their ears and go, “la la la.” They can simply steer away from that particular channel, or from that particular nook of the Internet. They can just watch the Food Network.

As a result, scientists can no longer assume that a responsible and high-minded media will treat their ideas with the decorum and seriousness they deserve and deliver them up to policymakers and the public for somber consideration. Instead, partisan media will convey diametrically opposed versions of where science actually stands on any contentious subject—even as most of the public (and many policymakers) tune out science more or less completely in favor of entertainment, sports, and other media choices.

It’s a perfect recipe for the declining influence of science amid political polarization, misinformation, and unedifying discourse at media outlets—many of which take a generally antagonistic approach to the scientific community, depicting it as a convocation of liberal eggheads. So should scientists and their defenders simply wring their hands and complain about this dismal state of affairs? Or should they instead take steps to adapt to the modern media environment to ensure their continuing relevance and influence?

Fortunately, a new dialogue and perhaps even a new paradigm are now emerging about how to communicate science, through the media, to policymakers, and the broader public. It’s epitomized by The Scientist magazine’s October cover story, in which two communication scholars, Matthew Nisbet of American University and Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin, explain why scientists must strategically “frame” their knowledge to make it relevant to the diverse audiences that draw information from our fragmented media system.

Nisbet and Scheufele explain in detail what the modern media really means for the transmission of scientific information, and how scientists must adjust accordingly. The gist of their argument is directed straight at scientific institutions, which they say must pare down scientific information and emphasize those aspects of an issue that will resonate with the values and dispositions of diverse audiences.

The two scholars built upon some initial ideas about “framing science” that Nisbet and I first suggested in an April article in Science magazine (subscription required except for members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), but they carry the argument much further by outlining a comprehensive communications strategy for scientists. This isn’t “spin,” it’s good communication. It increases receptivity to a scientific message.

An accompanying editorial titled “Scientists on Science,” by The Scientist editor Richard Gallagher, acknowledges as much and whole-heartedly endorses the approach, conceding that scientists simply cannot remain passive in the transmission of knowledge. They’ve got to be heavily involved, from beginning to end.

The truth is facts don’t ever speak for themselves. Especially in today’s media environment, they need a messenger, a skilled one. Furthermore, if you don’t frame your knowledge and make it relevant in today’s communication environment, you must get ready to be ignored—or, worse, to have someone else frame your scientific research for you, perhaps in the most unflattering of ways.

Fifty years after Sputnik, then, there’s much that we must do to re-establish a strong influence of scientists on policy. Indeed, we need our scientists now more than ever to ready us for the myriad problems facing humanity. But there are some areas in which science can also help itself. Communication is one of them. That’s why scientists and scientific institutions would be well advised today to consider the advice offered by Nisbet and Scheufele. Scientists have already proven they know how to research, how to think. Now is the time for learning how to speak to all Americans.

Chris Mooney is the Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

U.S. labs that handle deadly germs have reported “100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003,” reports the AP. No one was hurt, but the number of incidents are going up with number of labs approved to handle the pathogens. The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing today.

The latest on framing science: Matthew Nisbet & Dietram Scheufele in The Scientist on The Future of Public Engagement (now out from behind the subscription veil). Nisbet has it on Framing Science.

How the vagaries of scientific publishing don’t necessarily lead to better science getting published.

The EPA decided not to approve highly toxic methyl iodide as a pesticide. The agency balked after receiving a letter from 54 scientists, including 6 Nobel laureates, who “were astonished EPA was considering approving such a toxic chemical for agricultural use.” (Via Wired Science.)

PBS and Wired premier a new science magazine TV series last night, which (not to be confused with the publication’s blog) is called Wired Science.

Smithsonian magazine just issued a Fall 2007 special issue titled “37 Under 36: America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences,” comprised of 37 crisply written profiles of smart and creative young men and women making a difference. Oftentimes, the editorial content of magazine packages such as these come across as glossy as the accompanying photos, especially in special issues. In this case, the written words and the photos are equally compelling.