Recently in Science and Society Category

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Wind and solar land-use requirements as calculated and discussed in a New York Times commentary
  
• Rush Limbaugh's and other conservatives' climate-politics backlash against Mitt Romney, as reported on the Washington Post's front page
  
• Recent Yucca Mountain geologic nuclear-waste repository technopolitics
  
• Starkly conflicting views on the imminent US switch to new-tech light bulbs
  

New York Times op-ed: enormous land use for solar or wind power

An 8 June New York Times op-ed highlights for the public an informal technocivic phenomenon often seen among physicists, engineers and others who muse about large-scale energy production: rough calculations of the enormous amounts of land that would be required for solar or wind.

For example, Chris Uhlik, Google's engineering director, told in a recent unpublished talk about calculations showing that to scale up wind power for generating U.S. primary energy would require a footprint roughly the area of Nevada plus Arizona, and that to scale up solar would require an area equivalent to California.

In the Times op-ed, Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute begins by citing California's self-imposed new "ambitious mandate" to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewables like sunlight and wind by 2020. "Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia now have renewable electricity mandates," Bryce adds—and there's talk in Washington of a federal mandate.

Bryce continues:

But there's the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources—most notably, land. Even a cursory look at these costs exposes the deep contradictions in the renewable energy movement.

Bryce offers a few paragraphs of back-of-an-envelope calculations for solar and wind under California's mandate, notes that the Nature Conservancy has coined the term energy sprawl to describe such land requirements, and tosses in a few numbers illustrating "the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects." No matter how "you crunch the numbers," Bryce writes, "the takeaway is the same: the amount of steel needed to generate a given amount of electricity from a wind turbine is greater by several orders of magnitude" than for natural gas.

Bryce ends by citing environmentalists' "small is beautiful" dictum. If we are to take that principle to heart "while also reducing the rate of growth of greenhouse gas emissions," he declares, "we must exploit the low-carbon energy sources—natural gas and, yes, nuclear—that have smaller footprints."

Washington Post front: Romney vs. fellow Republicans on climate science

Above the fold on the 9 June Washington Post front page appears the headline "Romney in hot seat on warming—Views on climate change put presidential candidate at odds with GOP base."

The article elaborates on implications from something reported online by CBS News and others: "Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke with many in his party on Friday when he said he believes humans have contributed to global warming." In New Hampshire, Romney reportedly said, "I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed."

The Post piece emphasizes polling numbers that highlight the left-right divide on human-caused climate disruption. It observes that the "putative Republican presidential front-runner, eager to prove his conservative bona fides, could easily have said what he knew many in his party's base wanted to hear," but instead "stuck to the position he has held for many years."

A "conservative backlash" has ensued, the article reports, citing the Club for Growth, the blog Conservatives4Palin.com, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Rush Limbaugh. From a transcript at rushlimbaugh.com, here's some of what Limbaugh told his national radio audience:

Bye-bye, nomination. Bye-bye nomination. Another one down. We're in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of manmade global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates who want to buy into it! Why? 'Cause in New Hampshire they obviously care about it. . . . People in New Hampshire for some cockamamie reason want to believe in global warming. There was snow on the summit of Hawaii's biggest mountain, Mauna Kea, after a thunderstorm dropped inches of ice this morning. In Hawaii!

CBS's online report charges that Republican candidates Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty have "shift[ed] on climate change issues."

Yucca Mountain science and politics, cont.

As of the morning of 9 June, the Yucca Mountain geologic repository for nuclear waste was back in the news at the Washington Post, though not at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.

The 8 June Post carried an editorial with the headline (in the paper version) "Radioactive politics: What happened to an administration that was going to be guided by science?"

Guided by science? Is Yucca Mountain about science as clearly as, say, evolution is about science? Robert Alvarez, a former Clinton administration energy official, doesn't think so. The 9 June Post, at the foot of the editorial column on the left-hand side of the opinion spread, carried a "Taking Exception" box containing Alvarez's letter with the headline "Politics has always outranked science at Yucca Mountain."

Richard M. Jones of the American Institute of Physics explained the recent background in some detail in the 7 June issue of "FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News." It carried the headline "New Developments in Yucca Mountain Controversy." Jones reported on Capitol Hill discussions and a 76-page report from the Government Accountability Office.

That GAO report begins, "DOE decided to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository program because, according to DOE officials, it is not a workable option and there are better solutions that can achieve a broader national consensus. DOE did not cite technical or safety issues." It's that second sentence that caused the Post to headline its editorial with an assertion that Yucca Mountain is about science.

There are "reasonable things to do if Yucca is permanently dead," wrote the Post's editors, after offering a brief recap of past developments leading to the Obama administration's effort to kill the project. The editors continued:

But it's not even clear that's the case. House Republicans want to restore funding for the project and forbid money from going to shut it down—though Mr. Reid will no doubt fight back in the Senate. The government's 2008 license application is still pending at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The only thing that seems certain is that toxic politics have resulted in a lot of wasted time and money.

Alvarez's "Taking Exception" letter declares, "Fierce opposition to disposal sites in the states where most of the nation's 104 reactors are located resulted in a choice that had more to do with political convenience than scientific merit." The letter concludes:

Even if Yucca Mountain were to open today, by the time it accommodated all the spent nuclear fuel now housed in unsafe conditions at reactors across the country, a comparable amount of highly radioactive waste would be stockpiled at crowded and vulnerable spent fuel pools at 51 sites. The safe and secure storage of nuclear spent fuel in dry, hardened casks should have a higher priority than pursuing the quest, now in its 55th year, to find a dump for the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.

Jones at AIP concluded, "The controversy will continue, playing out at the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], in the courts, and in Congress."

The light-bulb wars

"When it comes to making light," wrote Andrew Rice in the 5 June Sunday magazine of the New York Times, "libertarians and aesthetes are joined in an unlikely alliance." That alliance opposes environmentalists and the federal law that will soon ban the sale of energy-wasting, Thomas Edison-style, incandescent light bulbs, which emit light of a quality that many people prefer. Rice's article and recent Wall Street Journal articles, taken together, offer an anecdotal snapshot of the current state of the light-bulb wars.

The Times piece summarized the entrepreneurially motivated applied physics that has been underway thanks to what many conservatives condemn as deplorable federal intrusion into the market. "Over the past few years," Rice began, "in conditions of strict secrecy, a multinational team of scientists has been making a mighty effort to change the light bulb." He described how "some of the industry's most brilliant minds are plumbing the mysteries of light on an atomic level, working to devise the bulb of the future." They're developing LED technology to overcome objections to the compact fluorescent and other bulbs that meet the new federal requirements. To fill America's billions of light sockets in this new way, Rice wrote, "represents not just a technological challenge but also an opportunity the industry hasn't encountered since Edison first flipped a switch."

Rice retold the story of Edisonian light-bulb technology and explained a bit of the engineering, and the perceptual esthetics, of bulb radiation. He cited the view of a scientist named Roland Haitz "that just as computer chips were becoming exponentially more powerful," LEDs are "getting brighter and cheaper at a predictable rate"—a proposition that, according to Rice, is now known as Haitz's Law. Rice analyzed the marketing challenges that will arise if that law holds true. He cited the federal government's $10 million L Prize, designed to encourage bulb innovation. The phaseout will initially send people toward toward hybrid halogen bulbs, which he called "a transitional product that only barely meets the new regulations," and toward compact fluorescents. But the industry is well aware that people dislike these alternatives—which is why, he wrote, there's so much R&D, and why there's an L Prize.

Meanwhile a Wall Street Journal article covered some of the same ground, complete with an illustration comparing and differentiating traditional incandescent bulbs, halogen-incandescents, compact fluorescents and LEDs. The article focused in large part on the industry's coming marketing challenges, and closed this way:

"Right now people don't think about light bulbs," says Ellen Sizemore, product marketing manager for LED retrofit lamps at Osram Sylvania. "And the industry is going to force them to do that."

That closing led to one of the two letters that the WSJ published in response. "It would have been more accurate," the letter said, if the reporter had used the word government instead of the word industry, given that "the government is the driving force behind the 'us versus them' battles: low-flow toilets that don't work well, shower heads you have to 'fix' and, soon, a smart grid that won't let you have electricity when you want it." The letter continued: "As every day goes by there is more 'force' and less 'freedom.' It just goes on and on. Don't laugh at the hoarders of light bulbs. In the face of the enemy, it's the only choice."

Battles? Enemy? Well, these are the light-bulb wars—as the second letter showed too. It offered bitter terseness in recycling a gun-rights bumper-sticker slogan. In its entirety, the WSJ's second letter said: "To adapt Charlton Heston: They can pry the last incandescent light bulb out of my cold, dead hands."

A few days later, the editors who selected and printed that pair of letters offered a fusillade of their own: the editorial "The Light Bulb Police: Americans deserve their choice of illumination." The editorial showed no awareness of the LED developments, maybe because the WSJ's usual sharp awareness of the power of entrepreneurial innovation lessens when the government has intruded. It lamented, without full accuracy, that "we will all be required to buy compact fluorescent lights." Then came sarcasm:

The ban passed at the height of the global warming fad-scare when all proper thinkers were supposed to sacrifice to the anticarbon gods. . . . Mr. Obama's Energy Department told Congress recently that to repeal the ban would "detrimentally affect the nation's economy, energy security, and environmental imperatives." Yes, and cause the seas to rise to swamp Miami and New York too.

The editorial closed by criticizing Republicans for insufficient opposition: "If Republicans can't understand the appeal of sparing Americans from the light bulb police, what are they good for?"

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• From two major newspapers, starkly contrasting sarcasm on climate science
  
• A biochemist's Washington Post op-ed calling for young scientists to work in China
  
• Nature's coverage of an American Institute of Physics worldwide survey on women in physics
  
• Renewal of physicist William Happer's vigorous public skepticism about climate
  
• A physicist's Wall Street Journal review of Roger Penrose's cosmology book Cycles of Time
  

Skirmishes in the climate mockery wars

What's the state of American technocivic discourse on climate? That's a big question, but just anecdotally, there are the climate wars, and then there are the climate mockery wars. A pair of starkly contrasting mockery examples from early this week in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal might show something about the overall discussion.

It's hard for the WSJ's online "Best of the Web" columnist James Taranto to outdo himself in mocking the climate consensus and its advocates. For years he has repeatedly recycled what he considers the hardee-har-har of weather-climate conflation—gleefully reporting, for instance, that Al Gore has given a global warming speech on an outlier of an especially cold day.

Now, in a recent column, Taranto notes that something bothers him "about the media mockery of Harold Camping," the man who predicted the world would end last Saturday. Taranto asks, "Why are only religious doomsday cultists subjected to such ridicule?" Then he asserts:

Nonbelievers are no less susceptible to doomsday cults than believers are; Harold Camping is merely the Christian Al Gore. But because secular doomsday cultism has a scientific gloss, journalists like our friends at Reuters treat it as if it were real science. So, too, do some scientists. It may be that the decline of religion made this corruption of science inevitable.

Taranto may not be able to outdo himself in mocking anthropogenic climate disruption, but maybe the climate-change activist Bill McKibben can outdo Taranto from the opposite side.

The sustained sarcasm in McKibben's 24 May Washington Post op-ed extends even to the headlines on the piece, which come from editors, not the author. In the online version: "A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!" In the paper version: "See no climate change: What to make of these record-breaking natural disasters."

McKibben's op-ed begins:

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week's shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn't mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas—fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they've ever been—the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they're somehow connected.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year's record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest—resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi—could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

"It's far smarter," McKibben adds, "to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change."

But as he continues in this vein of mockery, he never actually cites any climatological findings disputing that "mantra." Are such findings available? Have climate scientists moved beyond their former cautiousness on that scientifically and also socially crucial question?

Not according to the Post's own front-page news article from the same day. It reports that experts "have begun studying whether global climate change is driving more frequent—and more intense—tornado-spawning thunderstorms. Such work is at an early stage, making it difficult to draw conclusions."

But apparently if you're Bill McKibben, you grant yourself a license to write like James Taranto about it anyway.

My own assessment is that Taranto expects no techno-ideological conversions to result from his rhetorical strategy of fierce sarcasm. He's just enjoying some fun with a self-selected online-only audience already on his side.

But McKibben's piece appeared in both the online and on-paper op-ed page, which reaches all sorts of readers. I wonder if McKibben thinks his own sarcasm can somehow convert skeptics under some principle of rhetorical parity violation, whereby the persuasive ineffectiveness of Taranto's side's sarcasm somehow avoids being mirror-matched by a comparable ineffectiveness on McKibben's.

Matt Stremlau and young American scientists

Last Sunday's Washington Post contained an op-ed that seems notable not only for what it says, but for who is saying it—a young voice for science. Matthew Stremlau may lack a Wikipedia page—so far—but he doesn't lack willingness at least to try to lead.

Stremlau has a Harvard biochemistry Ph.D. His work at Harvard showed why monkeys, unlike humans, resist HIV/AIDS. At Science magazine, his essay on that topic won the General Electric and Science Magazine Grand Prize for Young Life Scientists. He served as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow at the State Department. He has published not only in scientific journals and Nature, but in the Los Angeles Times. He's now at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In 1999, as a Henry Luce Fellow, he spent a year as a visiting scientist in Beijing; in 2006, he began another year there conducting stem cell research.

Under the headline "Go to China, young scientist," Stremlau's Washington Post op-ed argued that as "public funding for science and technology shrinks, it just isn't possible for people who want to become scientists in America to actually become scientists." Here's the heart of the piece:

The global science landscape is radically different from what it was when I started graduate school 10 years ago. Opportunities for cutting-edge science are sprouting in many other countries. China stands out. But there are plenty of others. India, Brazil and Singapore boast world-class research institutes. Saudi Arabia aggressively recruits researchers for its King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. With a staggering $10 billion endowment there—larger than MIT's—American scientists no longer need to suffer through Boston's endless winters. Not to be outdone, Abu Dhabi opened the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in 2009. These emerging powers have a voracious appetite for good scientists. So they're trying to poach ours.

I spent nearly two years doing molecular biology research in China. I have worked at the National Laboratory for Agrobiotechnology and at Peking University in Beijing. The Chinese are serious about science. Government spending on research and development has increased 20 percent each year over the past decade. Even in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008-09, China continued to bet big on science and technology. China now spends $100 billion annually on research and development. The Royal Society, Britain's national science academy, estimates that by 2013, Chinese scientists will author more articles in international science journals than American scientists do.

Stremlau's op-ed closes with this line, addressed to his scientific peers: "If the United States can't fund its scientific talent, find another country that will."

Nature on AIP study: "Gender divide in physics spans globe"

Nature this week reports on an international survey conducted by the American Institute of Physics, Global Survey of Physicists: A Collaborative Effort Illuminates the Situation of Women in Physics. The study compared "the career experiences of 15,000 physicists from 130 developed and developing nations," Nature says, and found that "men have greater access than women to opportunities and resources, and their careers suffer less when they have children."

The article quotes Rachel Ivie, assistant director of AIP's Statistical Research Center: "We knew things were unequal, but not this unequal." Ivie spoke recently at the 4th International Conference on Women in Physics in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Slide 8 from her talk visually and vividly illustrates the survey's global reach. Nature reports that the "survey reveals few differences in the degree of gender inequality between developed and developing countries."

The article continues:

Ivie says that two factors contribute to these problems. First, physics remains a male-dominated field, operating through an old boy network. "It's not that senior people actively exclude women; they just don't think of recommending them for key posts or inviting them to speak at conferences," says Ivie.

Elizabeth Freeland, a physics postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, agrees. "This is an unconscious bias—which makes it harder but not impossible to get past," she says.

The other subtle but sinister factor is that women and men face different cultural expectations. The survey suggests that women are universally considered responsible for childcare and childcare decisions. "The overarching barrier [to women's ascension in the field] is the deeply entrenched perception of both men and women that men are expected to be solely breadwinners, while women are expected to be solely caregivers," says Prajval Shastri, an astrophysicist at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore.

Later the article adds, "Female participation in managerial, editorial or supervisory roles was up to 15% lower than male participation, but in one area women were far more active: advising undergraduates, a 'nurturing' task that typically garners little professional credit."

William Happer vs. climate "true believers, opportunists, cynics"

William Happer has renewed his vigorous public skepticism about human-caused climate disruption.

Here's a truncated snapshot of his stature in science: Princeton physics Ph.D., former director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory, former director of energy research at the Energy Department, endowed chair at Princeton, fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, member of the National Academy of Sciences.

He has just published a commentary, "The Truth About Greenhouse Gases," in the June/July 2011 issue of First Things, which says of itself that it's "published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society."

Happer's commentary contains nearly 4500 words, the length of a substantial magazine article. Here's a sampler of disconnected but representative passages:

• I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The "climate crusade" is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children's crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.

• I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life.

• The earth's climate has always been changing. Our present global warming is not at all unusual by the standards of geological history, and it is probably benefiting the biosphere. Indeed, there is very little correlation between the estimates of CO2 and of the earth's temperature over the past 550 million years (the "Phanerozoic" period). The message is clear that several factors must influence the earth's temperature, and that while CO2 is one of these factors, it is seldom the dominant one. The other factors are not well understood. Plausible candidates are spontaneous variations of the complicated fluid flow patterns in the oceans and atmosphere of the earth—perhaps influenced by continental drift, volcanoes, variations of the earth's orbital parameters (ellipticity, spin-axis orientation, etc.), asteroid and comet impacts, variations in the sun's output (not only the visible radiation but the amount of ultraviolet light, and the solar wind with its magnetic field), variations in cosmic rays leading to variations in cloud cover, and other causes.

• The existence of the little ice age and the medieval warm period were [sic] an embarrassment to the global-warming establishment, because they showed that the current warming is almost indistinguishable from previous warmings and coolings that had nothing to do with burning fossil fuel. The organization charged with producing scientific support for the climate change crusade, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), finally found a solution. They rewrote the climate history of the past 1000 years with the celebrated "hockey stick" temperature record.

• This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient facts was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin's photographs by dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator's reign. There was no explanation of why both the medieval warm period and the little ice age, very clearly shown in the 1990 report, had simply disappeared eleven years later.

• A Russian server released large numbers of e-mails and other files from computers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. Among the files released were e-mails between members of the power structure of the climate crusade, "the team." These files were, or should have been, very embarrassing to their senders and recipients.

• [P]eer review has largely failed in climate science. Global warming alarmists have something like Gadaffi's initial air superiority over rag-tag opponents in Libya. ... Peer review in climate science means that the "team" recommends publication of each other's work, and tries to keep any off-message paper from being accepted for publication.

• Let me summarize how the key issues appear to me, a working scientist with a better background than most in the physics of climate. CO2 really is a greenhouse gas and other things being equal, adding the gas to the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and natural gas will modestly increase the surface temperature of the earth. Other things being equal, doubling the CO2 concentration, from our current 390 ppm to 780 ppm will directly cause about 1 degree Celsius in warming. At the current rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere—about 2 ppm per year—it would take about 195 years to achieve this doubling. The combination of a slightly warmer earth and more CO2 will greatly increase the production of food, wood, fiber, and other products by green plants, so the increase will be good for the planet, and will easily outweigh any negative effects. Supposed calamities like the accelerated rise of sea level, ocean acidification, more extreme climate, tropical diseases near the poles, and so on are greatly exaggerated.

• The models are not in good agreement with observations—even if they appear to fit the temperature rise over the last 150 years very well. Indeed, the computer programs that produce climate change models have been "tuned" to get the desired answer. ... [T]he models have failed the simple scientific test of prediction. We don't even have a theory for how accurate the models should be.

• A major problem has been the co-opting of climate science by politics, ambition, greed, and what seems to be a hereditary human need for a righteous cause. What better cause than saving the planet? Especially if one can get ample, secure funding at the same time? ... As the great Russian poet Pushkin said in his novella Dubrovsky, "If there happens to be a trough, there will be pigs." Any doubt about apocalyptic climate scenarios could remove many troughs.

• Publications of contrary research results in mainstream journals are rare. The occasional heretical article is the result of an inevitable, protracted battle with those who support the dogma and who have their hands on the scales of peer review.

• In 2009 a conference of "ecopsychologists" was held at the University of West England to discuss the obvious psychological problems resident in those who do not adhere to the global warming dogma. The premise of these psychologists was that scientists and members of the general population who express objective doubt about the propagated view of global warming are suffering from a kind of mental illness. We know from the Soviet experience that a society can find it easy to consider dissidents to be mentally deranged and act accordingly.

• An [American Physical Society] Council statement issued on November 18, 2007 states: "The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security, and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now." This is pretty strong language for physicists, for whom skepticism about evidence was once considered a virtue, and nothing was incontrovertible. In the fall of 2009 a petition, organized by Fellow of the American Physical Society Roger Cohen, and containing the signatures of hundreds of distinguished APS members, was presented to the APS management with a request that at least the truly embarrassing word "incontrovertible" be taken out of the statement. The APS management's response was to threaten the petitioners, while grudgingly appointing a committee to consider the request. It was exactly what James Madison warned against. The committee included members whose careers depended on global warming alarmism, and the predictable result was that not one word was changed. Bad as the actions of the APS were, they were far better than those of most other scientific societies, which refused to even reconsider extreme statements on climate.

• Life is about making decisions, and decisions are about trade-offs. We can choose to promote investment in technology that addresses real problems and scientific research that will let us cope with real problems more efficiently. Or we can be caught up in a crusade that seeks to suppress energy use, economic growth, and the benefits that come from the creation of national wealth.
  

Physics in the Wall Street Journal

Anyone who thinks about physics in the Wall Street Journal probably thinks first about the ideological wars over climate science, as seen in the WSJ's op-ed pages. But there are other dimensions. The WSJ regularly invites opinion pieces and reviews from physicists—for example, Jeremy Bernstein and Lawrence Krauss. Now the WSJ's op-ed page has offered a book review by Peter Woit of Columbia University, who holds a Princeton PhD in physics and wrote Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law.

Woit's review—entitled "In the End Is the Beginning: A daring theory of how the universe, instead of expanding indefinitely, could start again in another Big Bang"—engages Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose, whom Woit describes as the author of "thought-provoking books on physics, consciousness and the theory of computation" and as "one of the most remarkable mathematical physicists of our era."

Woit explains that Penrose "has turned his attention back to the Big Bang and some of the seemingly imponderable questions it provokes: What came 'before' the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, and how might the universe it brought into being come to an end?" In a technical discussion that might be a bit extraordinary for a newspaper, the key paragraph seems to be this one:

Mr. Penrose's radical suggestion is that, somehow, this distant past and distant future can be matched together, since they share the same geometry. A universe at either extreme of its existence is one that has no fixed ideas about what is big and what is small. Perhaps this curious coincidence indicates that one can pass continuously from one extreme to the other, and this transformation is what happened at the moment of the Big Bang.

Woit later adds, however:

As Mr. Penrose acknowledges, there are various problems with his hypothesis. There is no real evidence that the universe will ever stop expanding, and it is unclear whether Mr. Penrose's use of conformal geometry can really solve that. As far as we know, electrons are stable, with unchanging non-zero mass. That means they will always be around to provide an energy scale, no matter how far out into the future one goes, ruining the conformal symmetry needed to ultimately match up with the Big Bang.

"Readers should be forewarned," writes Woit at the end, "that what they have in their hands is un-refereed research of a sort that may very well not pan out and convince other scientists."

Physics-community readers of the WSJ, meanwhile, should be forewarned that it's probably a mistake to overinterpret the WSJ opinion editors' strong views against the climate consensus as their only engagement of physics.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Science magazine and New York Times coverage of a study of "deliberate practice" in teaching college physics
  
• New York Times front-page coverage of major findings about exoplanets
  
• Nature editors' advocacy of naming the present geological epoch anthropomorphically
  
• Science magazine's post-Fukushima review of the state of low-dose radiation biophysics
  
• A mysterious silence in the climate wars
  

College physics: two-way engagement vs. one-way lectures

"As a psychologist, I'm ashamed that it is physicists who are leading this effort, and not learning scientists," admitted James W. Stigler, a UCLA psychology professor, to the New York Times. Here's the Science magazine abstract for the study in question, "Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class":

We compared the amounts of learning achieved using two different instructional approaches under controlled conditions. We measured the learning of a specific set of topics and objectives when taught by 3 hours of traditional lecture given by an experienced highly rated instructor and 3 hours of instruction given by a trained but inexperienced instructor using instruction based on research in cognitive psychology and physics education. The comparison was made between two large sections (N = 267 and N = 271) of an introductory undergraduate physics course. We found increased student attendance, higher engagement, and more than twice the learning in the section taught using research-based instruction.

The study has been reported and assessed in both the online Science magazine news article "A Better Way to Teach?" and in the New York Times piece "Less Talk, More Action: Improving Science Learning."

The Science piece summarizes:

Any physics professor who thinks that lecturing to first-year students is the best way to teach them about electromagnetic waves can stop reading this item. For everybody else, however, listen up: A new study shows that students learn much better through an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor.

The research, appearing online . . . in Science, was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman. First at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now at an eponymous science education initiative at UBC, Wieman has devoted the past decade to improving undergraduate science instruction, using methods that draw upon the latest research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and learning theory.

In this study, Wieman trained a postdoc, Louis Deslauriers, and a graduate student, Ellen Schelew, in an educational approach, called "deliberate practice," that asks students to think like scientists and puzzle out problems during class. For 1 week, Deslauriers and Schelew took over one section of an introductory physics course for engineering majors, which met three times for 1 hour. A tenured physics professor continued to teach another large section using the standard lecture format.

The results were dramatic: After the intervention, the students in the deliberate practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. They were also more engaged—attendance rose by 20% in the experimental section, according to one measure of interest—and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.

The Times piece, after offering an equivalent summary, goes on to report criticisms. It quotes Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia: "The whole issue of how to draw on basic science and apply it in classrooms is a whole lot more complicated than they're letting on." The Times adds that he "said that, among other concerns, the study was not controlled enough to tell which of the changes in teaching might have accounted for the difference in students' scores."

The Times also quotes Stigler concerning the possible biasing effect of having the "deliberate practice" teachers serve also as the study authors: "This is not a good idea, since they know exactly what the hypotheses are that guide the study, and, more importantly, exactly what the measures are that will be used to evaluate the effects. They might, therefore, be tailoring their instruction to the assessment—that is, teaching to the test."

But the Times also quotes Stigler's opinion that "the authors are pioneers in exploring and testing ways we can improve undergraduate teaching and learning"—which is why he's "ashamed" that his own colleagues didn't lead the effort.

The news obviously calls to mind two buzz phrases from the science-outreach realm: the deficit model, in which scientists seek to defray citizens' knowledge deficit with one-way lecturing to captive audiences, and the engagement model, involving two-way interactions. Nowhere in either news article do those terms appear, but it's clear that the pedagogical researchers' "deliberate practice" overlaps substantially with the engagement model and contrasts sharply with the deficit model.

New York Times front page reports unbound or distant Jupiter-mass objects

As highlighted on the New York Times front page, as mentioned only in a single sentence in the Wall Street Journal's daily "What's News" roundup, and as ignored altogether in the Washington Post, this week's Nature carries the report "Unbound or distant planetary mass population detected by gravitational microlensing" plus the companion commentary "Astronomy: Bound and unbound planets abound."

The Nature report's authors are the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics Collaboration, from New Zealand and Japan, and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment Collaboration, from Poland and Chile. They announce "the discovery of a population of unbound or distant Jupiter-mass objects."

As the Times's Dennis Overbye explains it, the discovery is "that space [is] littered with hundreds of billions of planets that [have] been ejected from the planetary systems that gave them birth and either [are] going their own lonely ways or [are] only distantly bound to stars at least 10 times as far away as the Sun is from the Earth."

Overbye reports that astronomers "said the results would allow them to tap into a whole new unsuspected realm of exoplanets . . . causing scientists to re-evaluate how many there are, where they are and how they are created, even as astronomers immediately began to ponder whether the new planets in question are in fact floating free or are just far from their stars." He explains the gravitational microlensing method as relying "on the ability of the gravitational field of a massive object . . . to bend light and act as a magnifying lens, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity."

Nature editors: Recognize the Anthropocene to "focus minds"

Nature's editors this week are seeking to intensify the technopolitics of the word Anthropocene—the anthropomorphizing name that, on behalf of all of science, the International Commission on Stratigraphy is considering for the present geological epoch. The most obvious political implications involve climate, but that's far from the whole story.

As reported here last winter, the abstract for the introductory piece in a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: "The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?" summarized the question:

Anthropogenic changes to the Earth's climate, land, oceans and biosphere are now so great and so rapid that the concept of a new geological epoch defined by the action of humans, the Anthropocene, is widely and seriously debated. Questions of the scale, magnitude and significance of this environmental change, particularly in the context of the Earth's geological history, provide the basis for this Theme Issue. The Anthropocene, on current evidence, seems to show global change consistent with the suggestion that an epoch-scale boundary has been crossed within the last two centuries.

A 28 February New York Times editorial argued that a "strong case" exists for the proposed name. Now a Nature editorial argues, "Official recognition for the Anthropocene would focus minds on the challenges to come." It asserts: "Humans may yet ensure that these early years of the Anthropocene are a geological glitch and not just a prelude to a far more severe disruption. But the first step is to recognize, as the term Anthropocene invites us to do, that we are in the driver's seat."

Building on a Nature news article from a week earlier, the editors offer this summary of the science:

Human activity is set to leave an indelible mark on the geological record. Deforestation, mining and road building have unleashed tides of sediment down rivers and onto the ocean floor. Fossil-fuel use and land clearance have already emitted perhaps a quarter as much carbon into the atmosphere as was released during one of the greatest planetary crises of the past, the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago. Now, as then, corals and other organisms are recording a global carbon-isotope shift. The increasing acidification of the oceans as they absorb carbon dioxide will dissolve carbonate from deep sediments, and what is likely to be the sixth great mass extinction in Earth's history will gather speed, adding vivid new markers to the record.

It's the technopolitical dimension, however, that characterizes the editorial. The editors want more than an apt scientific name; they want an apt scientific name that will generate action by reframing environmental issues.

They ask, is "it wise for stratigraphers to endorse a term that comes gift-wrapped as a weapon for those on both sides of the political battle over the fate of the planet?" Their answer is yes. "Official recognition of the concept would invite cross-disciplinary science." That's the scientific dimension. To that dimension they add an explicit technopolitical dimension: "And it would encourage a mindset that will be important not only to fully understand the transformation now occurring but to take action to control it."

Science magazine: "Fukushima Revives The Low-Dose Debate"

Front-page articles this week showed that Fukushima continues to command attention. On Wednesday, the New York Times offered "In Japan Reactor Failings, Danger Signs for the U.S." The Wall Street Journal offered "Fresh Tales of Chaos Emerge From Early in Nuclear Crisis." Now Science magazine has published a lengthy post-Fukushima analysis of the vexing challenges in developing scientific understanding of low-level radiation exposure.

"Radiation spiked 4 days after the first explosion," the article explains, but since then, "radiation levels have ebbed as short-lived radionuclides, such as iodine-131 with a half-life of 8 days, decay into stable isotopes." On the ground lie "small amounts of cesium-134 and cesium-137, isotopes with half-lives of 2 and 30 years respectively." Now "several thousand of Fukushima's 2 million residents have been thrust into the middle of a vigorous scientific debate about the health effects of long-term exposure to low levels of radiation."

Science summarizes some of that perennial debate's central questions:

Some researchers believe even unavoidable background radiation can be a factor in causing cancer. Others argue that tiny doses of radiation are not harmful. Some scientists even claim that low doses, by stimulating DNA repair, make you healthier—an effect known as hormesis.

There's hope, the article says, that despite difficulties like sample size and insufficient controls for various influences, studies in Fukushima "could help clarify the picture." The article summarizes the biophysics of radiation harm, mentions studies that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, laments inadequacies in studies of Chernobyl's effects, and cites animal experiments that seem to find low doses benign. It describes nascent post-Fukushima study efforts, and reports scientists' "hope [that] a respected entity will organize a high-quality research plan involving all levels of government."

But within an ending that recalls the perennial vexations of radiation-exposure studies, the article adds:

Some researchers doubt that any study in Fukushima, no matter how well devised, will reveal much. The radiation exposure of the general population "is too small to give a statistically significant increase in stochastic effects such as cancer," argues Ohtsura Niwa, professor emeritus of radiation biology at Kyoto University.

National Research Council re-emphasizes climate; Wall Street Journal editors silent

Late last week, the National Research Council published a report that warns, as the NRC's summary announcement puts it, that "the risk of dangerous climate change impacts is growing with every ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere." The NRC reiterated that a "pressing need" remains "for substantial action to limit the magnitude of climate change and to prepare to adapt to its impacts."

Early this week, the Washington Post published the editorial "Climate change denial becomes harder to justify." It appealed for the NRC report to be heeded—and it harshly criticized Republicans and others for not heeding.

About a century ago, Arthur Conan Doyle published the story "Silver Blaze," in which Sherlock Holmes identified "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." From a dog's silence during the disappearance of a race horse, Holmes inferred much.

But I'm no Sherlock Holmes, so all I can do—in recycling the old "dog that didn't bark" cliché—is report the dog that didn't bark: the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I have no idea why the WSJ's editors and opinion writers have remained silent about the NRC report, given that its tone and content constitute a direct challenge targeted precisely at them. (Nor, by the way, am I Holmes enough to explain why the WSJ's guide to climate change, as I think it was called, has disappeared from the online editorial page.)

The Post's editorial adds to the challenge to the WSJ. Here are three examples of its harshness:

• "[T]he Republican Party, and therefore the US government, have moved . . . far from reality and responsibility in their approach to climate change."
  
• "Seizing on inevitable points of uncertainty in something as complex as climate science, and on misreported pseudo-scandals among a few scientists, Republican members of Congress, presidential candidates and other leaders pretend that the dangers of climate change are hypothetical and unproven and the causes uncertain."
  
• "Climate-change deniers . . . are willfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three. And their recalcitrance is dangerous, the report makes clear, because the longer the nation waits to respond to climate change, the more catastrophic the planetary damage is likely to be—and the more drastic the needed response."
  

The Post's editorial concludes this way:

Every candidate for political office in the next cycle, including for president, should be asked whether they disagree with the scientific consensus of America's premier scientific advisory group, as reflected in this report; and if so, on what basis they disagree; and if not, what they propose to do about the rising seas, spreading deserts and intensifying storms that, absent a change in policy, loom on America's horizon.

If the Wall Street Journal editorial page should decide after all to accept a new battle in the technopolitical climate wars, I'll play the role of Dr Watson and report it.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• A prominent physician's call to arms in the New York Times to stand up to and defeat the nuclear industry.
  
• Pervez Hoodbhoy's analysis in Pakistan's Express Tribune of the significance of Osama Bin Laden's death
  
• Coverage in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal of the vindication of Einstein's general relativity by NASA's Gravity Probe B
  
• A New York Times profile of an influential right-wing historian and proponent of intelligent design
  
• Opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times and Nature that exemplify the right–left split on climate change
  

Helen Caldicott challenges physicists on the nuclear age

"Physicists had the knowledge to begin the nuclear age. Physicians have the knowledge, credibility and legitimacy to end it."

So asserts physician Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, in the New York Times op-ed "Unsafe at Any Dose." The headline reflects Caldicott's belief that there exists no threshold below which any radiation dose can be harmless to humans. It also alludes to the title of the book that began Ralph Nader's career a half-century ago: Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile.

"There's no group better prepared than doctors to stand up to the physicists of the nuclear industry," declares Caldicott. She continues:

Still, physicists talk convincingly about "permissible doses" of radiation. They consistently ignore internal emitters—radioactive elements from nuclear power plants or weapons tests that are ingested or inhaled into the body, giving very high doses to small volumes of cells. They focus instead on generally less harmful external radiation from sources outside the body, whether from isotopes emitted from nuclear power plants, medical X-rays, cosmic radiation or background radiation that is naturally present in our environment.

However, doctors know that there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation, and that radiation is cumulative. The mutations caused in cells by this radiation are generally deleterious. We all carry several hundred genes for disease: cystic fibrosis, diabetes, phenylketonuria, muscular dystrophy. There are now more than 2,600 genetic diseases on record, any one of which may be caused by a radiation-induced mutation, and many of which we're bound to see more of, because we are artificially increasing background levels of radiation.

For many years now, physicists employed by the nuclear industry have been outperforming doctors, at least in politics and the news media. Since the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, physicists have had easy access to Congress. They had harnessed the energy inside the center of the sun, and later physicists, whether lobbying for nuclear weapons or nuclear energy, had the same power. They walk into Congress and Congress virtually prostrates itself. Their technological advancements are there for all to see; the harm will become apparent only decades later.

Doctors, by contrast, have fewer dates with Congress, and much less access on nuclear issues. We don't typically go around discussing the latent period of carcinogenesis and the amazing advances made in understanding radiobiology. But as a result, we do an inadequate job of explaining the long-term dangers of radiation to policymakers and the public.

Caldicott sees "arguments about the safety of nuclear energy compared to alternatives like coal" and "optimistic predictions about the health of the people living near Fukushima" as "dangerously ill informed and short-sighted." If "anyone knows better," she asserts, "it's doctors like me."

She argues that Chernobyl's harm to present and future generations has been grossly understated and that nuclear accidents "never cease." It is not possible to imagine, she says, "how many cancers and other diseases will be caused in the far future by the radioactive isotopes emitted by Chernobyl and Fukushima."

Apparently she believes that Three Mile Island's harm has also been understated. She writes:

When patients come to us with cancer, we deem it rude to inquire if they lived downwind of Three Mile Island in the 1980s or might have eaten Hershey's chocolate made with milk from cows that grazed in irradiated pastures nearby. We tend to treat the disaster after the fact, instead of fighting to stop it from happening in the first place. Doctors need to confront the nuclear industry.

Nuclear power is neither clean, nor sustainable, nor an alternative to fossil fuels—in fact, it adds substantially to global warming. Solar, wind and geothermal energy, along with conservation, can meet our energy needs.

Two days after Caldicott's op-ed appeared, the Science Times section carried an article by the distinguished science writer William J. Broad. It, too, had a headline telegraphing its message: "Drumbeat of Nuclear Fallout Fear Doesn't Resound With Experts." The article doesn't entirely dismiss Caldicott's general outlook, but she isn't among the experts cited.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Osama bin Laden, and the future

"U.S. presses Pakistan for key answers," says the 4 May Washington Post's front-page, above-the-fold headline. The article tells of suspicions that Osama bin Laden could not have hidden "in plain sight without some level of official Pakistani knowledge or complicity."

Pervez Hoodbhoy—the polymath Pakistani physicist and author who has been cited frequently in this venue, most recently in a report from late March—has a lot to say about that.

His platform is the online Express Tribune, which calls itself "the first internationally affiliated newspaper in Pakistan," reports that it works with the International Herald Tribune—"the global edition of The New York Times"—and says that it "caters to the modern face" of its country.

Hoodbhoy's 4 May article "The curious case of Osama bin Laden" declares that today, "Pakistan's embarrassment is deep," given that its military and civilian leaders had often "emphatically stated that bin Laden was not in Pakistan," only to have it turn out that he was "comfortably smack inside the modern, peaceful, and extraordinarily secure city of Abbottabad."

Hoodbhoy points out that even "the famous and ferocious General Hamid Gul (retired)—a bin Laden sympathiser who advocates war with America—cannot buy into the claim that the military was unaware of bin Laden's whereabouts." Hoodbhoy quotes the general's view that "bin Laden being in Abbottabad unknown to authorities 'is a bit amazing.' "

Hoodbhoy charges that his government was playing a "cat and mouse game." He continues:

Bin Laden was the 'Golden Goose' that the army had kept under its watch but which, to its chagrin, has now been stolen from under its nose. Until then, the thinking had been to trade in the Goose at the right time for the right price, either in the form of dollars or political concessions. While bin Laden in virtual captivity had little operational value for al Qaeda, he still had enormous iconic value for the Americans. It was therefore expected that kudos would come just as in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Kuwaiti-born senior al Qaeda leader who was arrested in Rawalpindi, or Mullah Baradar, the Taliban leader arrested from Karachi.

Events, however, have turned a potential asset into a serious liability. Osama's killing is now a bone stuck in the throat of Pakistan's establishment that can neither be swallowed nor spat out. To appear joyful would infuriate the Islamists who are already fighting the state. On the other hand, to deprecate the killing would suggest that Pakistan had knowingly hosted the king of terrorists.

Now, with bin Laden gone, the military has two remaining major strategic assets: America's weakness in Afghanistan and Pakistan's nuclear weapons. But moving these chess pieces around will not assure the peace and prosperity that we so desperately need. They will not solve our electricity or water crises, move us out of dire economic straits, or protect us from suicide bombers.

Hoodbhoy closes by calling for bin Laden's death to be "regarded as a transformational moment by Pakistan and its military," for Pakistan to stop playing cat-and-mouse games, and for repudiation of the "policy of verbally condemning jihadism—and actually fighting it in some places—but secretly supporting it in other places." He declares that until "the establishment firmly resolves that it shall not support armed and violent non-state actors of any persuasion . . . Pakistan will remain in interminable conflict both with itself and with the world."

Wall Street Journal, New York Times cover Gravity Probe B

On Sunday, 1 May, Physical Review Letters accepted the paper "Gravity Probe B: Final results of a space experiment to test general relativity" by C. W. F. Everitt et al. It may be another reminder of the decline of science coverage at the Washington Post that of the three major East Coast national newspapers, only the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times covered this experiment's completion. (The Post did cover the enabling satellite launch in 2004, a much earlier time in the newspaper industry's rocky internet era.)

The NASA online bulletin "NASA's Gravity Probe B Confirms Two Einstein Space-Time Theories" summarizes the technical news:

NASA's Gravity Probe B (GP-B) mission has confirmed two key predictions derived from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which the spacecraft was designed to test. The experiment, launched in 2004, used four ultra-precise gyroscopes to measure the hypothesized geodetic effect, the warping of space and time around a gravitational body, and frame-dragging, the amount a spinning object pulls space and time with it as it rotates. GP-B determined both effects with unprecedented precision by pointing at a single star, IM Pegasi, while in a polar orbit around Earth.

Experienced science writers produced the news articles, neither of which made its paper's front page: Robert Lee Hotz at the WSJ and Dennis Overbye at the Times. Besides reporting the science, both described the half-century techno-drama involved. Hotz's piece appeared under the headline "Good Thinking, Einstein: Researchers Spent $750 million—and 52 Years—Affirming the Theory of Relativity." Overbye's piece appeared under the headline "52 Years and $750 Million Prove Einstein Was Right."

A passage from Overbye summarizes the extraordinarily long history of the experiment:

For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement . . . capped a career-long journey.

The experiment was conceived in 1959, but the technology to make these esoteric measurements did not yet exist, which is why the experiment took so long and cost so much. The gyroscopes, for example, were made of superconducting niobium spheres, the roundest balls ever manufactured, which then had to be flown in a lead bag to isolate them from any other influences in the universe, save the subversive curvature of space-time itself.

Shortly before the probe's launching, [Everitt] said the project had been canceled at least seven times, "depending on what you mean by canceled." It was finally sent into orbit in 2004 and operated for some 17 months, but not all went well.

Hotz lists the project's problems: "During decades of trial and error, the Stanford University scientists overcame engineering glitches, launch delays, budget fights, solar flares, faulty data and seven federal investigations." He continues:

NASA threatened to cancel the project so many times that researchers could complete their work only through a $500,000 contribution from the founder of Capital One Financial Corp., Richard Fairbank—a son of one of the physicists who conceived the experiment . . .—and help from the Saudi royal family.

Both articles quote Everitt's summary statement: "We have managed to test two of the most profound effects of general relativity and do so in a new way. We completed this landmark test of Einstein's universe, and Einstein survives."

David Barton, US history, intelligent design

The "position of intelligent design," asserted David Barton, who was profiled above the fold on the 5 May New York Times front page, "is now embraced by an increasing number of contemporary distinguished scientists."

Maybe surprisingly, the Times's profile never actually engages or even mentions intelligent design, creationism or evolution. But it could. That intelligent-design assertion comes instead from his 2008 historical essay "The Founding Fathers on Creation and Evolution."

The Times's online headline telegraphs the profile's history focus: "Using History to Mold Ideas on the Right." The profile begins as follows:

ALEDO, Tex.—In an unmarked office building in this ranching town, among thousands of Revolution-era documents and two muskets with bayonets, David Barton might seem like a quirky history buff. But the true ambition of this slender man in cowboy boots is to use America's past to remake its future, and he has the ear of several would-be presidents.

Mr. Barton is a self-taught historian who is described by several conservative presidential aspirants as a valued adviser and a source of historical and biblical justification for their policies. He is so popular that evangelical pastors travel across states to hear his rapid-fire presentations on how the United States was founded as a Christian nation and is on the road to ruin, thanks to secularists and the Supreme Court, or on the lost political power of the clergy.

Through two decades of prolific, if disputed, research and some 400 speeches a year on what he calls the forgotten Christian roots of America, Mr. Barton, 57, a former school principal and an ordained minister, has steadily built a reputation as a guiding spirit of the religious right. Keeping an exhaustive schedule, he is also immersed in the nuts and bolts of politics and maintains a network of 700 anti-abortion state legislators.

Many historians call his research flawed, but Mr. Barton's influence appears to be greater than ever. Liberal organizations are raising the alarm over what they say are Mr. Barton's dangerous distortions, including his claim that the nation's founders never intended a high wall between church and state.

The profile also reports that

• The possible Republican presidential candidates who seek Barton's advice include Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Rep. Michele Bachmann.
  
• Many "professional historians dismiss Mr. Barton, whose academic degree is in Christian education from Oral Roberts University, as a biased amateur who cherry-picks quotes from history and the Bible."
  
• Among his critics is Derek H. Davis, director of church–state studies at the Baptist Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who says, "The problem with David Barton is that there's a lot of truth in what he says" but "the end product is a lot of distortions, half-truths and twisted history."
  
• Barton served for nearly a decade as vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party.
  
• During his teaching years, Barton's subjects were math and science.
  

Snapshot: right–left climate-science dynamics

The Los Angeles Times biography page for Jonah Goldberg, a National Review contributing editor, calls him "one of the most prominent young conservative journalists on the scene today," with a syndicated newspaper column offering "a fresh perspective to the typical right-left debate."

Goldberg's most recent column and an editorial in the current issue of Nature, when seen side by side, typify the right–left divide about human-caused climate disruption.

For its own rendition of Goldberg's column, the Los Angeles Times chose the headline "Cooling on global warming." The piece begins by asserting that "the fight against climate change has fizzled" and that "climate change is dead as a major political issue for the foreseeable future." With some gloating, Goldberg observes: "Recent polling shows that Americans care about the economy more—a lot more—than global warming. Skepticism about the existence of a problem or its scope has been rising in the US and Europe. When a Pew poll in January asked voters what their biggest priorities were, climate changed ranked second to last."

Meanwhile, in an editorial headlined "Storm warning," Nature's editors argue that "political hostility over global-warming policy in the United States is causing collateral damage." They worry that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will be thwarted by "partisan battles" in its project to create a new National Climate Service. They continue:

The idea is simple and worthwhile. NOAA wants to collect various climate research and reporting activities under a single umbrella, which it says will make the government machine operate more efficiently and improve the quality of data released to the public—everything from the results of satellite monitoring and climate models to regional forecasts of drought and floods. Months before the spate of storms in April hammered midwestern and southern states, for example, NOAA warned of a higher likelihood of flooding and extreme weather associated with a La Niña circulation in the Pacific Ocean.

The editors lament that "somehow this has become a partisan issue—227 Republicans voted to approve [an] amendment to bar spending on the climate service during the appropriations debate back in February. It seems that many are determined to conflate the word 'climate' with the contentious debate over global-warming policy."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

• Continued discussion of the developing world's interest in open access
• Contrasting views on courts and carbon dioxide, as seen in a pair of commentaries
• A case study of alarmism in the news: a Washington Post front-page story
• Reactor cancellations raising doubts about new nuclear plants, as seen in three national newspapers
• Continued discussion of the potential role of science and science-mindedness in Egypt's future

SciDev.net, Thomas Jefferson, and open access to new knowledge

Please indulge some long-view historical context for a report that builds on last week's posting "Open access, citation statistics, and the spread of knowledge."

It's the spread-of-knowledge dimension that calls to mind how, in 1809, the scientist who presided over the physicist Benjamin Franklin's American Philosophical Society wrote a letter that historians remember under the name "the republic of science." The letter's author was just completing his second term in his other office, the US presidency. In that capacity, Thomas Jefferson was writing to lament a disruptive intrusion by politics into the work of the international science enterprise—the republic of science.

Jefferson cited "the nature of the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them." He continued:

These societies are always in peace, however their nations may be at war. Like the republic of letters, they form a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth, and their correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation. Vaccination has been a late and remarkable instance of the liberal diffusion of a blessing newly discovered. It is really painful, it is mortifying, to be obliged to note these things, which are known to every one who knows any thing, and felt with approbation by every one who has any feeling.

David Dickson serves as director of the developing world's SciDev.net, an organization instituted, as Jefferson might have put it, for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered by scientists anywhere. In a 15 April commentary headlined "Open access: not just about citations," Dickson has engaged the recurring debate—reported on last week—about the relationship between open access and citation statistics. He has discerned in that debate a potential for interruption to the international spread of new knowledge—calling to mind Jefferson's letter, even if Dickson probably doesn't find it "mortifying to be obliged to note" the problem, and even though the impediment is economics, not politics.

Dickson's commentary's thumbnail encapsulation says, "Focusing on the 'citation advantage' of open access misses its value in getting science information in the hands of those who need it."

He begins by declaring that, thanks to the economics of scientific publishing, "support in the scientific community for the principle OA [open access] represents—that all scientific publications should be made freely available, at least in electronic form—has outstripped individual scientists' willingness to put that principle into practice." He calls authors' fees "a particular obstacle for scientists in developing countries."

This economic disincentive for OA works with the one discussed last week. As Dickson now puts it, "most scientists still prefer, where possible, to publish in established journals with high citation rates—a proxy for quality of scientific publications." He worries that the "study published last month by Philip Davis of Cornell University ... has been widely interpreted as throwing OA into further doubt, by questioning what is generally perceived as a major benefit of OA publishing—the 'OA citation advantage.'" He worries that "even by 2020, only about one quarter of scientific articles will be freely accessible."

Dickson worries too about the effect of the press release for the Davis study. The headline proclaimed, "Paid access to journal articles not a significant barrier for scientists." The thumbnail summary said, "New research paper ... shows that scientists have adequate access to paid journal content since free access to journal articles does not increase their citations."

And there's the problem. There's the potential, as Dickson sees it, for harm to "the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them." The debate that these results have triggered, writes Dickson, "sidesteps consideration of the full value of OA journals" to the spread of new knowledge. He continues:

This lies not merely in how they benefit science specialists, but also in making scientific research widely available to those who can neither afford high subscription rates for specialist journals, nor get access to scientific libraries—but whose work or personal interest depend on having access to the global pool of scientific knowledge....

Those who benefit from OA include many scientists in the developing world, where most university and research institution libraries remain heavily underfunded.

Then there are students, who are equally keen to follow new scientific developments. And finally there are all those who put scientific research to practical use—including members of the public, as well as professional groups such as healthcare workers.

As Davis has said, "there are many benefits to the free access of scientific information"—a point long argued by OA advocates, even if a citation advantage may not prove to be one of them.

To bolster his argument, Dickson cites the recent PLoS Medicine article "Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development." It argues that "the sharing of knowledge discovery across borders and the building of a global knowledge commons is increasingly important for solving problems that we all face." He agrees with it that "standards for assessing journal quality and relevance are generally based on 'Northern' values that often ignore development needs" and marginalize local science.

Dickson declares in conclusion that putting the "social value of science into measurable terms is much more difficult than the relatively simple calculations of citation rates."

WSJ v. NYT on American Electric Power v. Connecticut

Though it's not news that opinion in the Wall Street Journal often mismatches opinion in the New York Times, sharply diverging views might merit reporting from the two papers concerning this week's US Supreme Court case American Electric Power v. Connecticut.

Plaintiffs including several states and New York City are suing corporations responsible for a quarter of the electric power industry's carbon dioxide emissions. They seek abatement of what they believe are contributions to global warming.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, two former Justice Department officials from the George H. W. Bush administration disapprove of the suit. David B. Rivkin Jr and Lee A. Casey assert that the "rank absurdity of plaintiffs' claims should be obvious to the justices, who should rule decisively that the federal courts do not possess constitutional jurisdiction over climate change cases."

The two call the suit political—and have filed an amicus brief. They disbelieve the plaintiffs' fundamental motivation. Pressing often-heard claims of scientific authority, they write:

It is difficult to imagine a subject less susceptible to judicial resolution. Climate change is a well-established and natural phenomenon. The Earth's climate has changed dramatically over time. In the 19th century, for example, the northern hemisphere began to emerge from a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age. The extent to which man-made emissions like carbon dioxide may contribute to this process of periodic change, and to more recent warming trends, remains unclear.

What is clear is that the entire human population produces carbon emissions, and industrialized economies have done so on a significant scale since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution more than two centuries ago. It is impossible to determine whether emissions by any particular power plant—or US electricity production as a whole—have affected warming trends and, if so, how. Nor can we surmise what party is responsible in whole or in part for the particular plaintiffs' alleged injuries. The law requires more than a guess.

Rivkin and Casey cite a "fundamental reason why these lawsuits must be dismissed: Federal courts can only decide cases where the complaining parties have actually been injured by the defendants' own actions and an effective remedy can be framed in a judicial order."

But a New York Times editorial agrees with a lower court:

As the Second Circuit writes, [the plaintiffs] "may seek their remedies under the federal common law," including made by justices. The Supreme Court has upheld a lawsuit preventing the discharge of sewage that made the Mississippi River unfit. It has upheld limits of noxious emissions of sulfur from copper foundries in Tennessee that were destroying Georgia forests. There are other clear-cut precedents.

The appellate court's opinion closes by paraphrasing a Supreme Court opinion from almost 40 years ago. New federal regulation may pre-empt the federal common law of nuisance, but, until then, federal courts are empowered to address the public nuisance caused by major, undisputed and destructive sources of greenhouse gases.

Rivkin and Casey also disbelieve, by the way, in the applicability of those interstate sewage and sulfur examples:

Federal common law nuisance actions have been generally limited to cases where activities in one state, such as creating air or water pollution, have a direct and identifiable harmful impact in another state. The federal courts have stepped into such cases because the states have no other mechanism to resolve disputes that may be too limited in scope to warrant congressional action.

The Times editors say that because "there is no federal regulation of this problem in force, it is fortunate that there is a line of Supreme Court precedents back to 1901 on which the plaintiffs can build their challenge." They continue:

When this lawsuit began seven years ago, one of the defendants' main defenses was that, because the Clean Air Act and other laws "address" carbon dioxide emissions, Congress has "legislated on the subject" and pre-empted the suit. The pre-emption claim was spurious when they made it and remains spurious now.

A Wall Street Journal news report about the case doesn't say when to expect a decision. Neither does a New York Times article posted online just after the Supreme Court heard the case, though its headline obviously means to telegraph a surmise: "States' Emissions 'Nuisance' Argument Seems to Fall on Deaf Ears in Supreme Court."

Alarmism in the news, cont.

This report has nothing whatsoever to do with science, but everything to do with alarmism in the news—a problem and challenge having lots to do with science. (Some examples: radiation, space weather, asteroids, cell phones' alleged health effects and—I'm not making this up—whether last month's "super moon," when the full moon appeared abnormally large, could cause natural disasters.)

Above the fold on the Washington Post's 20 April front page appeared what's probably a bit of a case study in news-reporting alarmism: the story of Mrs. Obama's airplane's landing incident.

As a non-aviator, my own amateur surmise when I first heard of the incident via broadcast media was that the danger was being way overblown. So even without the prompting of James Fallows's blog posting at the Atlantic—"Michelle Obama's Plane Was Not in 'Danger'"—I'd have been skeptical of the headline appearing on at least one paper edition of the Post: "Jet with first lady escapes close call: Presidential plane had to abort landing after error by controller, officials say." (The story's online version may be evolving.)

But Fallows, as it happens, is a reasonably experienced aviator, not to mention a veteran critic of some of his colleagues in the national media—for example, in his book Breaking the News. He calls out this line from the Post story: "A White House plane carrying Michelle Obama came dangerously close to a 200-ton military cargo jet and had to abort its landing at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday as the result of an air traffic controller's mistake, according to federal officials familiar with the incident." Fallows observes that two paragraphs later, the article reports that the Federal Aviation Administration has already said that there was never any danger.

He continues:

As FAA spokesmen said, and as the NYT made clear in a much calmer-toned story (the WSJ calm too), the maneuvers required of Mrs. Obama's plane—doing "S-turns" to slow down as it neared the airport, and then "going around" for another approach when it became clear that the first plane wouldn't get off the runway in time—are routine and the farthest things from emergency procedures. A mistake, yes. A near-miss, no.

Last month, the Post had a similar alarmist story about National Airport's sleeping controller forcing planes to "land on their own." (The online version of the story has been changed from the one I talked about in that post, to a calmer lead.) It was obviously bad then to have no one on duty in the tower, and it was bad this time that the planes got closer than they should have. But there was nothing in this new situation to justify the assertion that the planes got "dangerously close." I hope that by the time you see the online version this story will have been changed too.

Newspaper reporters and editors work fast on short deadlines. Among their duties, obviously, are two that conflict:

• To avoid deciding too much for the public, which can mean allowing stories to convey more alarm than might later seem to have been wise.
• To exercise judiciousness, which can mean preventing stories from conveying the degree of alarm that might later seem to have been wise.

No doubt it's easier to calibrate alarm when the story—as in many science-related cases—lacks real-time immediacy. But in my view the calibration of alarm is nevertheless an important issue for everyone who cares about science and the media.

Reactor cancellations said to affect nuclear power prospects generally

Leaving aside the question's mixed-metaphor problem, can the wheels really fall off of a renaissance?

All three of the big East Coast national newspapers reported this week that, thanks to Fukushima and changes in the economics of electricity production, NRG Energy is abandoning plans to add two new reactors to its two-reactor South Texas Project nuclear station, 90 miles southwest of Houston.

The Washington Post's wire-service article reported that support "for new nuclear projects in the US has eroded in the aftermath of the nuclear crisis in Japan, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll conducted earlier this month" and that of "dozens of proposals for new nuclear reactors ... submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission" only "a handful of projects remain active."

A Wall Street Journal business article called NRG's announcement "the most tangible evidence, to date, of fallout in the US from the nuclear accident in Japan." (Might be another ill-fitting metaphor in that one, actually.) Besides noting that NRG was planning on reactors designed by Toshiba, the WSJ article reported that the company was also "depending on financial assistance from Tokyo Electric Power Co., owner of the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex."

Matthew Wald's New York Times article concluded with this passage, which sums up all three papers' view of the implications of the NRG-Texas news:

The public's appetite for nuclear power projects resembles the situation right after the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, said Charles A. Zielinski, a lawyer in Washington who is a former chairman of the New York State Public Service Commission. Companies now factor in the prospect of higher construction costs, mixed with a slack demand.

The South Texas Project "may have been on the fence already, and Fukushima pushed it over," Mr. Zielinski said.

Tom Smith, an organizer in Austin with Public Citizen and a longtime campaigner against the project, cited higher construction costs and uncertainty after the Fukushima accident.

"The wheels are starting to fall off the nuclear renaissance," he said.

Science, Tahrir Square, Bruce Alberts

David Ignatius's 21 April Washington Post column asserted that America should "spend more to support the democratic revolution in Egypt and less to seek a military solution in Afghanistan." Ignatius advocates "helping the Tahrir Square revolutionaries build a strong new country that can lead the rest of the Arab and Islamic world toward a better, saner future."

Does science have a role?

The April Physics Today article "Freedom, fairness, and funds give hope to Egypt's scientists" reported optimism about science in Egypt's future. In February, the "Science and the Media" posting "Scientist president for Egypt?" reported on a Nature Middle East commentary about the the Nobel chemist Ahmed Zewail's prospects to become Egypt's president.

That discussion appeared in the "House of Wisdom" blog of Mohammed Yahia, NME's editor, who this week posted "Bruce Alberts on the future of science." That new posting begins:

Celebrated American biochemist Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science and author of the Molecular Biology of the Cell, which is pretty much the standard cell biology textbook in most universities, visited the American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt, where he gave a talk to students, media and members of the public about the role of science in the future.

The over-packed room listened intently as Alberts spoke of how no democracy can function properly without what Indian prime minister Nehru once called "the scientific temper."

"Science and technology can make a major difference for national development," said Alberts. He stressed that scientists must have a more prominent role as the young people go out to rebuild Egypt after 30 years of authoritarian rule.

Alberts is following through with actions to back up his own past words.

"I consider science education to be critically important to both science and the world," he wrote in a 21 March 2008 editorial at the beginning of his tenure as editor-in-chief of Science, "and I shall frequently address this topic on this page." That editorial asked, "Might it be possible to encourage, across the world, scientific habits of mind, so as to create more rational societies everywhere?" Alberts urged that rather "than only conveying what science has discovered about the natural world, as is done now in most countries, a top priority should be to empower all students with the knowledge and practice of how to think like a scientist." He added, "Scientists share a common way of reaching conclusions that is based not only on evidence and logic, but also requires honesty, creativity, and openness to new ideas."

A few weeks later in another editorial, he continued his ambitious expansiveness concerning the potential of science and scientists to change the world. "[E]veryone can benefit when scientists take on practical problems," he wrote, asserting that in fact the "future success of humanity may depend on learning to use the tools of science—including the collection of objective evidence on what works and why—at all levels of decision-making." He advised that "scientists will need to develop much deeper connections with the rest of society." He reported that he had "repeatedly witnessed the innovation that arises from recruiting scientists and outstanding practitioners to work together, using scientific approaches to tackle important problems."

In late 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed what an article in Science called "three prominent scientists as special envoys to assess the potential for scientific partnerships with Muslim-majority countries," which the article said was "the first concrete step in a broader US effort to expand the role of science in diplomacy." The three new envoys were

• Egyptian-born Ahmed H. Zewail, the Caltech Nobel laureate chemist,
• Algerian-born Elias Zerhouni, the radiologist and former NIH director, and
• Alberts, the former National Academy of Sciences president.

The appointments were said to build upon President Obama's earlier speech at Cairo University that had called for a new beginning in relations with the Muslim world.

So it's plain that Bruce Alberts, anyway, believes there's a role for science in the post-Tahrir democratic transformation that Ignatius hopes to see take place in Egypt with constructive American involvement.

Here's the rest of that Nature Middle East "House of Wisdom" blog posting about Alberts's visit:

[Alberts said] "Scientists can't stay in their universities anymore. They must go out all across Egypt. Often, only local scientists will have the credibility required to rescue a nation from misguided local policies and beliefs."

Alberts is an example of a scientist who has gone out to change the world. He has been very active in using science and technology to bring development on southeastern Asia. He is also one of the most prominent science diplomats, becoming one of the first three science envoys from Obama in his reach-out efforts to the Muslim world.

Alberts talked of the importance of an overhaul to science education as Egyptians rebuild their state. "Science education is not just about learning words of science—but about participating as scientists do, even from as early as when they are five years old."

He also stressed the need to "support the statuses of teachers" since they are primarily responsible to produce a new successful generation. "No democracy can work when people don't understand. They must be educated to analyze the choices being made for them by politicians." Modern technology can be used to educate people with the increasing popularity of social networks.

During the talk, Alberts drew several parallels between the future and opportunities of Egypt and those of India, who is quickly emerging as one of the important science centres of the world.

"As in India, science and technology can be harnessed to improve the livelihoods of people, even among the rural poor."

While talking to the young audience after the talk, Alberts stressed the important role of young people and said he went down to Tahrir Square, the epicentre of Egypt's 25 January Revolution, and met with some of the young people who participated in the events that led to the overthrow of Egypt's authoritarian government. "I'm a big believer in empowering young people to address their problems. The culture of science, such as honesty, tolerance and respect for logic will be critical for Egypt's future."

Anyone who knows me would expect to see this report tied together with some reference or other to a scientist who long ago occupied the White House, Thomas Jefferson. Here it is:

Some people, no doubt with good reason, express deep skepticism about American intrusiveness overseas, and maybe they're right when they assert that Jefferson would have counseled isolationism. But it is also true that Jefferson found the fundamental principles underlying good government nearly congruent with those underlying science. Maybe Alberts can't help. I don't know. But those principles can.

• A math-favoring article and math-disparaging letters in the Washington Post
• Data from Fermilab that could change the standard model, as reported in the New York Times
• A writer's disappointed rejection of his former anti-nuke colleagues
• Support for science from a conservative New York Times columnist

Washington Post both boosts and bashes math

Have the letters editors at the Washington Post been listening to the Jimmy Buffett adolescent-cynic song "Math Sucks"?

Their news-editor colleagues recently ran on the front page an article headlined "Algebra II Movement Multiplies: More States Require Course, Citing It as Link to Students' Success." It's just a news report, not a National Academy study. But it tries hard to bear out that headline while respecting the fact that correlation isn't causation.

Yet the opinion editors chose to run three letters in reply: two mocking the article, and one asserting what it called a better idea.

The article reports that "Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success, according to research that has launched a growing national movement to require it of graduates," and that in recent years, "20 states and the District have moved to raise graduation requirements to include Algebra II, and its complexities are being demanded of more and more students." The article describes the organizations pushing the movement, tells of worries that the new requirements are causing some kids to quit school, and offers a special focus on efforts in Arkansas.

As to the correlation-causation problem, the article stipulates that "whether learning Algebra II causes students to fare better in life, or whether it is merely correlated ... isn't clear." In reporting on an Educational Testing Service study, it carefully notes the authors' "warning that many factors come into play."

Yet one of the three negative letters—the one suggesting courses in statistics instead—scolds both the article and the movement for blindness to the nonequivalence of correlation and causation. Another letter simply ridicules math education. The writer smirkingly describes his plans to teach his toddler granddaughter quantum electrodynamics and string theory. The third letter writer boasts that while he can't do algebra, he is "financially solvent, [has] a healthy savings account and [has] no credit debt at a time when so many of [his] algebraically superior peers are unable to understand the basics of balancing a checkbook or maintaining a household budget."

Maybe it's just me, with my lifelong bias—common intuition, really—but I believe the study of foreign languages and math, besides supplying useful skills, generally trains the intellect. I agreed with the news editors who placed the article on the front page. And I was surprised at the disdainful responses that the letters editors selected, almost in the spirit of "Math Sucks."

"Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths"

As of the morning of 7 April, neither the Wall Street Journal nor the Washington Post had reported the news from Dennis Overbye's 6 April New York Times article "At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths." Overbye's opening paragraphs require quoting:

Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.

The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab's Tevatron, once the world's most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.

"Nobody knows what this is," said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. "If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century."

One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.

Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature—in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by—that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.

Either could shake what has passed for conventional wisdom in physics for the last few decades. Or it could be there is something they do not understand about so-called regular physics.

Overbye goes on to quote and paraphrase from the "mixture of awe and skepticism" he has encountered among physicists worldwide. He emphasizes that the "key phrase, everyone agrees, is 'if it holds up.' " A paper is being posted online, Overbye says, and is also being submitted to Physical Review Letters. He closes with the ironic observation that this is all happening "just as the Tevatron—and perhaps Fermilab itself—is being shut down for budget savings."

Best-selling author criticizes anti-nuke former colleagues

Here's another report about the nuclear ideology wars. In a recent issue of the Guardian in the UK, the best-selling author George Monbiot offers a commentary headlined "The Unpalatable Truth Is That the Anti-nuclear Lobby Has Misled Us All," with a stand-first summary saying, "I've discovered that when the facts don't suit them, the movement resorts to the follies of cover-up they usually denounce."

He calls his discovery "deeply troubling," and charges that the "anti-nuclear movement to which [he] once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health." He takes some responsibility: "The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice."

Monbiot reports that an epiphany—not his word, but probably apt—took place in the aftermath of a public debate involving Dr. Helen Caldicott, whom he calls "the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner." She made claims that seemed to need supporting. Her response to his request for sources, he says, left him "profoundly shaken." Here's a key passage:

First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made. But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so—all 423 pages. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.

I pressed her further and she gave me a series of answers that made my heart sink—in most cases they referred to publications which had little or no scientific standing, which did not support her claims or which contradicted them. (I have posted our correspondence, and my sources, on my website.) I have just read her book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. The scarcity of references to scientific papers and the abundance of unsourced claims it contains amaze me.

Monbiot continues by analyzing, at some length, reports that have grossly overstated the health effects of Chernobyl. He condemns a pattern: "Failing to provide sources, refuting data with anecdote, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar."

He suggests a connection: "These are the habits of climate-change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don't suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced."

And he offers this conclusion:

We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right.

Conservative David Brooks advocates science even during austerity

Literally, this is a report about only one statement in one New York Times column on the US financial crisis. But that one statement might have implications for science in a time of fiscal austerity.

David Brooks likes science and often engages it. Besides his twice-weekly column, he writes blog postings at the Times. A recent one, headlined "More Tools for Thinking," explored which "scientific concepts everyone's cognitive toolbox should hold."

It must be stipulated that Brooks can sometimes provoke certain conservatives to skepticism about his conservative bona fides in what is, after all, the New York Times. Just to cite one example from a Google-able wealth of them, Rush Limbaugh once called him "the quasi-, the supposed conservative columnist" at the Times.

But consider these paragraphs from the opening of Brooks's 8 April column, his second in a row promoting what he promotes here:

The best thing about the long-term budget proposal from Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is that it forces Americans to confront the implications of their choices. If voters want taxes that amount to roughly 18 percent of G.D.P., then they are going to have to accept a government that looks roughly like what Ryan is describing.

The Democrats are on defense because they are unwilling to ask voters to confront the implications of their choices. Democrats seem to believe that most Americans want to preserve the 20th-century welfare state programs. But they are unwilling to ask voters to pay for them, and they are unwilling to describe the tax increases that would be required to cover their exploding future costs.

Raising taxes on the rich will not do it. There aren't enough rich people to generate the tens of trillions of dollars required to pay for Medicare, let alone all the other programs. Democrats, thus, face a fundamental choice. They can either reverse President Obama's no-new-middle-class-taxes pledge, or they can learn to live with Paul Ryan's version of government.

As these paragraphs show, among serious people, David Brooks must be taken as a conservative—must be taken as one who sees a need to curtail federal spending quite drastically. That's why I want to quote a single statement from his second Paul Ryan–endorsing column in a row: "[T]he economic challenge from China and India demands that we spend more on Pell grants, scientific research, early childhood education and other investments in human capital than Ryan proposes."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Science in the political controversy emanating from Wisconsin, as seen on the New York Times opinion page
  
• Two new articles from the Pakistani polymath physicist and social commentator Pervez Hoodbhoy
  
• The argument that public nuclear fears should be taken more seriously, as
  presented in a Nature commentary
  
• Recent egregiousness, most notably at CNN, in the realm of nuclear hysteria
  
• The advent of the periodical Nature Climate Change
  

New York Times, Krugman draw science into Wisconsin contentiousness

In a newly developing dimension of Wisconsin's turbulent political contentiousness about government employment, Republicans are seeking access to a prominent scholar's e-mail messages. A New York Times editorial and Times columnist Paul Krugman have not only harshly criticized the tactic, but have highlighted analogies to recent political contentiousness about climate science.

William Cronon serves as a professor of history, geography, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and as president of the American Historical Association. In recent blog postings and in a 22 March Times op-ed, he has criticized Wisconsin Republicans for "seeking to reverse civic traditions that for more than a century have been among the most celebrated achievements not just of their state, but of their own party as well."

Cronon charges that Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott Walker, "has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War," and compares Walker to the late Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Even before Cronon's op-ed appeared, Wisconsin Republicans had filed a freedom-of-information request demanding access to any of his university e-mail messages that might contain certain words or phrases, including Republican, Scott Walker, union and rally.

The 28 March Times opinion pages engaged all of this with:

• A mixed set of letters to the editor, one of which condemned the McCarthy comparison as "shameful" and a "disgrace."
  
• The editorial "A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin," for which the Times's online teaser said, "State Republicans target a distinguished historian for criticizing the union-busting law."
  
• The Krugman column "American Thought Police," for which the teaser alleged a "chilling effect of right-wing attacks on scholars."
  

It's probably noteworthy that by implication, the editorial's opening classifies climate scientists as "liberal academics":

The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian  . . These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.

The editorial closes by asserting that professors "are not just ordinary state employees" and by citing the conservative federal judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who has noted that state university faculty members are "employed professionally to test ideas and propose solutions, to deepen knowledge and refresh perspectives." The editors declare that a "political fishing expedition through a professor's files would make it substantially harder to conduct research and communicate openly with colleagues" and that the effort "makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous."

The Krugman column makes similar arguments, but replaces the Cuccinelli example with that of the controversy over e-mail correspondence among scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK—"Climategate," to use a connotatively freighted name. Krugman calls the Cronon affair "one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become."

Krugman stipulates that technically, "Republicans may be within their rights," but concludes by asserting that what's at stake "is whether we're going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding." He asserts that "Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down," and declares that it's "up to the rest of us to see that they don't succeed."

Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, cont.

Readers of Physics Today may remember Pervez Hoodbhoy, the polymath Pakistani physicist and social commentator, for his August 2007 article "Science and the Islamic world: The quest for rapprochement." Recently Hoodbhoy published a pair of physics-related political articles in prominent online English-language periodicals:

"Pakistan can't handle Fukushima" summarizes the Japanese disaster, criticizes Pakistan's lack of a proper nuclear-safety culture, and argues that until "nuclear fusion power becomes available after some decades, Pakistan, like other countries, must rely on a mix of oil, gas, hydro, coal, solar, wind, and other renewables."

Hoodbhoy predicts that in a disaster, the "rich and the fortunate would succeed; the rest would not. Unlike the orderly and disciplined evacuation of post-tsunami Fukushima, all hell would break loose as millions would try to flee. Looters would strip everything bare, roads would be clogged, and vital services would collapse." He warns, "Japan's nuclear disaster should open our eyes." And he declares, "It is time to down-size Pakistan's nuclear fission power production."

The lengthy "Pakistan's nuclear bayonet" reviews Pakistan's nuclear-weapons history, of course with substantial attention to relations with India. The article explains that Pakistan's "nukes generate income" because proliferation-worried "international financial donors are compelled to keep pumping in funds."

Hoodbhoy asks, "But can our nukes lose their magic? Be stolen, rendered impotent or lose the charm through which they bring in precious revenue? More fundamentally, how and when could they fail to deter?" He continues: "A turning point could possibly come with Mumbai-II. This is no idle speculation. The military establishment's reluctance to clamp down on anti-India jihadi groups, or to punish those who carried out Mumbai-I, makes a second Pakistan-based attack simply a matter of time."

Hoodbhoy's concluding paragraph requires quoting:

An extremist takeover of Pakistan is probably no further than five to 10 years away. Even today, some radical Islamists are advocating war against America. But such a war would end Pakistan as a nation state even if no nukes are ever used. Saving Pakistan from religious extremism will require the army, which alone has power over critical decisions, to stop using its old bag of tricks. It must stop pretending that the threat lies across our borders when in fact the threat lies within. . . . Pakistan needs peace, economic justice, rule of law, tax reform, a social contract, education and a new federation agreement.

Colin Macilwain in Nature: Concerns over nuclear energy are legitimate

With important exceptions, charges Colin Macilwain in a Nature column, nuclear experts commenting on Fukushima have been "defensive, selective, condescending towards public fears and . . . ultimately counterproductive." He believes that "legitimate" technical analysis has been "largely drowned out by the flood of technical reassurance offered by nuclear scientists and engineers in the wake of the disaster."

Macilwain cites three problem areas requiring, in his view, better attention: multiple reactors at the same site and insufficient seriousness about moving to safer reactor designs and about replacing on-site water storage of spent fuel rods.

Macilwain also offers a physics-history theory about what he believes he's seeing:

[T]he scientific establishment and those whose careers are invested in nuclear power have sought to convince the public that 'science' supports nuclear power. Too many specialists have assured us of the general safety of nuclear power without adequately addressing specific concerns.

Some of this loyalty is deep rooted, I fear, in the development of the atomic bomb, which greatly embellished the standing of the scientific establishment with governments. Not long afterwards, many senior physicists embraced 'atoms for peace'. Having interrogated nature, and established the means to harness some of its terrible powers, they wanted to prove themselves 'useful'. Such a culture influences those who follow—and can take generations to wear off.

In closing, he declares that the "real risk of nuclear power is that active human intervention has to be maintained, come rain, shine, war or political upheaval. That, and the threat of a downside too terrible to contemplate."

CNN anchor adamant: Fukushima radiation threatens US

With due respect to Colin Macilwain's caution (please see the earlier accompanying report) against condescension towards public nuclear fears, a certain level of nuclear hysteria has inevitably persisted since the tsunami, with highlights—probably the wrong word—that may merit at least brief attention.

Earlier in March, the columnist Amy Goodman not only brandished Hiroshima in the nuclear-power discussion, but falsely conflated Fukushima and the tsunami that actually caused the devastation. The run on both radiation detectors and potassium iodide pills that had begun even then in the US now seems particularly noteworthy in the nuclear-hysteria realm.

According to a recent New York Times article, post-Fukushima demand "quickly outstripped supplies and the limited capacity to produce more." One company's orders for Geiger counters grew by more than an order of magnitude.

But something now circulating on the web may beat that story when it comes to irrationality about the more than 5000 miles of ocean separating Japan from the US west coast—and this story involves not misinformed citizens, but Nancy Grace, a CNN journalist with two advanced degrees in law. Andrew Revkin's Dot Earth blog posting "Radiation + Cable Anchor + Science = ?" at the New York Times site begins:

If you are brave enough to want to see a horrifying example of how science fares in the infotainment arena, watch the following excerpt from CNN's HLN network last Monday. The network claims to be about both "news and views." I think the word news should be dropped for now.

Revkin links to the brief clip, which shows anchorwoman Grace hectoring a meteorologist concerning what she sees as an imminent radiation threat crossing the Pacific to harm Americans. The meteorologist strives mightily to keep this bizarre, impromptu debate grounded in factual reality. Revkin calls the exchange "astonishing." For my own part, I'll just add that in decades of paying close attention to science in the news, I've never seen anything remotely like this clip.

New periodical: Nature Climate Change

Here's the first line of an e-mail message from the organization that publishes Nature and many other science periodicals: "Dedicated to publishing the most significant and cutting-edge research on the impacts of global climate change and its implications, the first issue of Nature Climate Change is now published and available free to view online."

And here are a few indicators of what prospective readers can expect:

Volume 1 Issue 1 features most prominently the research paper "Global radiative forcing from contrail cirrus," which Nature Publishing Group blurbs this way:

Aviation is responsible for 2 to 14 percent of human-induced climate change, making it a subject of considerable public and political interest. A global modeling study quantifies the climate effect of aircraft condensation trails and the clouds that form from them, and shows that they may be causing more warming today than all of the aircraft-emitted carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the start of aviation.

A commentary in the first issue argues that "public understanding of climate science deserves the strongest possible communications science to convey the practical implications of large, complex, uncertain physical, biological and social processes." The article promises to "identify the communications science that is needed to meet this challenge and the ambitious, interdisciplinary initiative that its effective application to climate science requires."

The research paper "Perceptions of climate change and willingness to save energy related to flood experience" examines the hypothesis that "individuals who have direct experience of phenomena that may be linked to climate change would be more likely to be concerned by the issue and thus more inclined to undertake sustainable behaviours."

The first issue of this ambitious new periodical also offers what it calls a special feature on "opening the future":

How will our choices shape the future? That's a question researchers are keen to answer, and with a new approach to how the climate community develops scenarios, they are coming that bit closer to answering it. Mason Inman reports on the new scenario development taking place in the climate research community, which is akin to switching from Windows, a closed-source operating system, to an open-source system such as Linux, and will make it much easier for researchers to figure out how to create the kind of future we want—and how to avoid the futures we fear.

Nature Climate Change invites registrations for table-of-contents e-mail alerts.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Like the broader population in Egypt, scientists there are brimming with optimism following the popular uprising that resulted in the February toppling of Hosni Mubarak's decades-long stronghold.

"We were all part of the protests," says Yasser Kadah, a professor of biomedical engineering at Cairo University. "There is a general sense of relief. We feel that in the times to come things will be much better." Maged Al-Sherbiny, vice minister of science and technology since 2007, is especially pleased about the relative peacefulness of the revolution in his country. "In Libya they are killing demonstrators by air fighters. That is totally crazy," he says. Egypt is going to be "a very good model for the region of how things can change."

Al-Sherbiny notes that many demands are already being met: "Corrupt parts of government have been removed and are in jail or under trial. Money taken will be recovered. There will be a new constitution. Future presidents will be limited to two terms—there will be no running the country for 30, 40 years."

Transforming the country

People can talk freely now, says Kadah. "Basically, the focus at the universities was to maintain security and stability. We had leaders who did not care about the quality of education. They were making sure no one demonstrated or talked about things that were not good for the regime." Previously, he says, the feeling was that knowing the right people, not making an effort, is what would get you a job. "Now students feel they have opportunity. They don't have to know the right people. There is a sense of fairness. I think this will transform the whole country."

Kadah and others note that professors at public universities earn about $400 to $1000 a month. But at several new campuses in which the government had sometimes been playing a much stronger role, including handpicking faculty, the salaries could be higher by an order of magnitude or more. Kadah adds, "I have to support my research—I buy equipment out of my personal money. We do not have funds at the university to do that." Until now, says Hassan Talaat, a physicist at Ain Shams University in Cairo, "to make a decent income, you either go to the Gulf area or leave to work at a private university. You can barely get by with a faculty income as it is now [at Egyptian public universities]."

Elections are planned for September. And everyone—scientists, politicians, Egyptian expatriates, intellectuals from different political parties—is discussing how to move forward. The discussions have "no formal structure," says Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian American geologist who is director of Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing. El-Baz went to Egypt to "congratulate these kids that made the revolution." In the US, he says, "we had a technological revolution with the Apollo program"—for which El-Baz trained astronauts and worked with NASA to select lunar landing sites. "In Egypt, they have had an information revolution. They know everything, instantly." Broadly, according to El-Baz, the first priorities are to help the poor in Egypt, to initiate a program to eradicate illiteracy, and to invigorate innovation. The people "don't really know about science, but they want science and technology institutions to have the respect and the funds they deserve," he says.

Science priorities

"A lot of people came [together] to talk about their perspectives," says Yasser Khalil, a professor of nuclear engineering at Alexandria University and the administrative director of SESAME, the international synchrotron light source being built in Jordan. "One common theme was that we have to put stress on education. The more we spend on education, the more we gain later."

Within public universities, demands are likely to include the selection of administrators by faculty vote instead of by government appointment, higher salaries, and a new policy for running the education system. Another question, says Talaat, will be how to finance research. "These will be the four items of major concern to universities."

Al-Sherbiny, who in addition to his ministerial post is an immunology researcher, a member of the SESAME council, and president of Egypt's Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, is optimistic that research and universities will fare well in the future. The science and technology ministry set priorities four years ago, he says. "We know what needs to be done. These plans faced funding problems but now, with science and technology"—as the recognized engine for the economy—"becoming part of the major priorities we can push ahead."

The national science and technology plan Al-Sherbiny refers to has four thrusts, each with the potential for local impact: energy and renewable energy; water desalination; agriculture, including development of wheat, rice, and cotton crops and aquaculture; and treatment of common diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and certain cancers.

In 2007 Egypt launched a "science decade," through which it collaborates with a different country each year. "We look at strengths and identify areas of common interest for people to work together," says Al-Sherbiny. Egypt has begun sending more students to Germany, the inaugural partner. And with its 2008 partner, Japan, it founded a new joint university in Egypt. Italy and France were the partners in 2009 and 2010, respectively. The US is supposed to be this year's partner, but Al-Sherbiny says that with the political upheaval, joint activities are in limbo.

Now, with Amr Salama, an engineer, former university president, and previous science minister named interim science minister in a March cabinet reshuffle, Al-Sherbiny says the country's science and technology strategy will be updated. "We want to make the transformation with as little pain as possible, and to create the best future for our youth," he says. "It all comes to money at the end of the day. It will be very important to increase resources." In recent years, he says, Egypt has put from 0.2% to 0.4% of its gross domestic product into research. "We would hope for at least 1%."

"Don't blink an eye"

Not surprisingly, hand in hand with optimism about the future come worries about heading down the right path. For Khalil, one worry is the possibility that the military may not keep its promise to hand back authority to civilians. Talaat notes that things have moved very swiftly, and "it would have been easier to negotiate with a weakened government than with the armed forces." For his part, Al-Sherbiny is not worried about the temporary military control of the country. "They are on our side," he says. Rather, he worries about a derailing of the new process due to war erupting somewhere in the region or to "people pointing fingers at each other instead of moving forward."

"There is still a lot of dust in the air," says Talaat. "It's like having someone who has been imprisoned for a long time, and now he is free. But he is not prepared. He cannot answer right away what he wants to do."

El-Baz says he did not see "even a hint of pessimism. My advice is, keep forging ahead, don't blink an eye. Egypt has been like a snail. If they sit on things, corruption will creep back in." He notes that when asked to be on an advisory board, his answer was "Forget it. Don't go back to the generation that made a mess. Ask us questions, but do not depend on us." In 2006 El-Baz, then 68 years old, wrote an article on the Arab world's "generation of failure." He says he is "delighted that this young generation is a different beast. If they do see roadblocks, they do not see why they can't remove them."

Toni Feder

• The Wall Street Journal's early post-Fukushima call for calm concerning nuclear power's future
• Two Washington Post columnists' early post-Fukushima condemnation of nuclear power
• A Wall Street Journal columnist's prediction that environmentalists will revert to opposing nuclear power
• Conflation of Hiroshima devastation and Fukushima harm in an Amy Goodman commentary
• Congressional Republicans' hardening climate-consensus disbelief as assessed in a Nature editorial

Nuclear misgivings proliferate following Japan's disaster; Wall Street Journal calls for calm and perspective

"The fragile bipartisan consensus that nuclear power offers a big piece of the answer to America's energy and global warming challenges may have dissolved in the crippled cores of Japan's nuclear reactors." So began the 14 March, above-the-fold, front-page New York Times article "US Nuclear Push May Be Impeded."

Also on 14 March, the Chicago Tribune published "Japan's Crisis May Have Already Derailed 'Nuclear Renaissance,'" a story line picked up by at least one of the Tribune's network of other newspapers. And Cokie Roberts, in her regular Monday morning Q&A on NPR's Morning Edition, predicted renewed nuclear misgivings in America. Though she didn't mention engineers or scientists, she dwelled in particular on popular mistrust of authorities, including utilities and government regulators, when it comes to nuclear power.

The Times reports that "even staunch supporters of nuclear power are now advocating a pause in licensing and building new reactors in the United States to make sure that proper safety and evacuation measures are in place," and that "environmental groups are reassessing their willingness to see nuclear power as a linchpin of any future climate change legislation." The Times piece states that although President Obama "still sees nuclear power as a major element of future American energy policy . . . he is injecting a new tone of caution into his endorsement."

The views of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell in the matter are being reported widely. The Times notes his caution that "the United States should not overreact to the Japanese nuclear crisis by clamping down on the domestic industry indefinitely" and says as well that "Republicans have loudly complained that the Obama administration did just that after the BP oil spill last spring."

The Times piece also quotes Representative Edward J. Markey (D-MA), whom it identifies as "a skeptic of nuclear power who nonetheless supported expansion of nuclear power" in recent legislation. Markey reportedly said, "The unfolding disaster in Japan must produce a seismic shift in how we address nuclear safety here in America."

The 14 March Wall Street Journal opinion page focuses on this question of renewed nuclear misgivings, and calls for calm and perspective.

The lead editorial carries the headline "Nuclear Overreactions," with a call-out declaring, "Modern life requires learning from disasters, not fleeing all risk." The editorial begins as follows:

After a once-in-300-years earthquake, the Japanese have been keeping cool amid the chaos, organizing an enormous relief and rescue operation, and generally earning the world's admiration. We wish we could say the same for the reaction in the US, where the troubles at Japan's nuclear reactors have produced an overreaction about the risks of modern life and technology.

Part of the problem is the lack of media proportion about the disaster itself. The quake and tsunami have killed hundreds, and probably thousands, with tens of billions of dollars in damage. The energy released by the quake . . . is equivalent to about 336 megatons of TNT, or 100 more megatons than last year's quake in Chile and thousands of times the yield of the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima. The scale of the tragedy is epic.

Yet the bulk of US media coverage has focused on a nuclear accident whose damage has so far been limited and contained to the plant sites. In simple human terms, the natural destruction of Earth and sea have far surpassed any errors committed by man.

The editorial laments that "more than other energy sources, nuclear plants have had their costs increased by artificial political obstacles and delay. The US hasn't built a new nuclear plant since 1979, after the Three Mile Island meltdown, even as older nuclear plants continue to provide 20% of the nation's electricity." It reports that the "Tennessee Valley Authority is a couple of years away from completing a reactor at Watts Bar after years of effort" and that "proposals for 20 new reactors to be built over the next 15 to 20 years are in various stages of review in the multiyear approval process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission." America's "much-ballyhooed 'nuclear renaissance,'" the editorial predicts, is "a long way off, and it will be longer after events in Japan."

The piece ends with a few paragraphs about technological risk. "Modern civilization is in the daily business of measuring and mitigating risk, but its advance requires that we continue to take risk. It would compound Japan's tragedy if the lesson America learns is that we should pursue the illusory and counterproductive goal of eliminating all risk."

The editorial also points to an op-ed by William Tucker atop the facing page, "Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl," where the call-out says that the "containment structures appear to be working" and that "the latest reactor designs aren't vulnerable to the coolant problem at issue here." Tucker emphasizes that the "crisis seems to have been triggered by the failure of diesel generators that provided electricity to cool the reactors once they were shut down," and that the op-ed "explains that this weakness has been corrected in new nuclear plant designs."

Tucker, author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America's Energy Odyssey (Bartley, 2008), offers in his op-ed, a technical explanation of "exactly what is happening in Japan and what we have to fear from it." Here's the ending:

If a meltdown does occur in Japan, it will be a disaster for the Tokyo Electric Power Company but not for the general public. Whatever steam releases occur will have a negligible impact. Researchers have spent 30 years trying to find health effects from the steam releases at Three Mile Island and have come up with nothing. With all the death, devastation and disease now threatening tens of thousands in Japan, it is trivializing and almost obscene to spend so much time worrying about damage to a nuclear reactor.

What the Japanese earthquake has proved is that even the oldest containment structures can withstand the impact of one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history. The problem has been with the electrical pumps required to operate the cooling system. It would be tragic if the result of the Japanese accident were to prevent development of Generation III reactors, which eliminate this design flaw.

Washington Post columnists reject nuclear power

Beneath the grossly understated headline "Slow The Nuclear Rush," a large box on on the Washington Post op-ed page for 15 March pairs the columns of Anne Applebaum and Eugene Robinson. Apparently the editor who wrote that overall headline only skimmed the two columns, for the accurate verb isn't "slow."

Applebaum calls not for slowing the nuclear rush, but for killing it. "If the competent and technologically brilliant Japanese can't build a completely safe reactor," she asks, "who can?" Nuclear power, she declares, is safe, "except, of course, when it is not." She seems unimpressed that nuclear-power science and technology are evolving and that future nuclear plants would incorporate new features and approaches. At the end, she declares her "hope that a near-miss prompts people around the world to think twice about the true 'price' of nuclear energy, and that it stops the nuclear renaissance dead in its tracks."

Robinson calls for neither slowing nor stopping the nuclear rush; he simply declares that nuclear power can't be made safe. The headline on the paper version of his column captures this view: "No fail-safe option." Nuclear power, he asserts, looks "like a bargain with the devil," and nuclear fission "is an inherently and uniquely toxic technology." He does stipulate that it's possible to engineer nuclear plants that would never suffer breakdowns like those being seen in Japan, but he asserts that it "is also true that there is no such thing as a fail-safe system. Stuff happens." Robinson continues:

The problem with nuclear fission is that the stakes are unimaginably high. We can engineer nuclear power plants so that the chance of a Chernobyl-style disaster is almost nil. But we can't eliminate it completely—nor can we envision every other kind of potential disaster. And where fission reactors are concerned, the worst-case scenario is so dreadful as to be unthinkable.

In a curious comment, Robinson allows that it "seems unlikely that the Fukushima crisis will turn into another Chernobyl, if only because there is a good chance that prevailing winds would blow any radioactive cloud out to sea." Questions: Is wind direction really a criterion for deciding whether or not to liken the crisis to Chernobyl? Or should that judgment address what the plant does or doesn't put into the wind in the first place?

Robinson ends his column this way:

As President Obama and Congress move forward with a new generation of nuclear plants, designs will be vetted and perhaps altered. We will be confident that we have taken the lessons of Fukushima into account.

And we will be fooling ourselves, because the one inescapable lesson of Fukushima is that improbable does not mean impossible. Unlikely failures can combine to bring any nuclear fission reactor to the brink of disaster. It can happen here.

Wall Street Journal columnist predicts environmentalist reversal on nuclear power

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr has a long record of deep skepticism about human effects on climate. His 16 March column predicts that the disaster in Japan will—and the following isn't how he puts it—kill the nuclear renaissance because environmentalists will stupidly reverse their recent advocacy of nuclear power.

Jenkins's column might merit summarizing. He may disbelieve the global warming consensus, but he shares some views with many who advocate nuclear power.

He expresses respect and appreciation for the on-scene nuclear responders in Japan, but declares that for "the things that matter most—life and safety—the nuclear battle has been a sideshow." To prove that point, he offers a series of contrasts.

He contrasts the loss of thousands in the tsunami with the human costs, so far, of the nuclear crisis: "[O]ne worker at one nuclear plant is known to have died in a hydrogen explosion and several others have exhibited symptoms of radiation poisoning."

He offers an environmental degradation contrast:

An infinity of contaminants—sewage, fuels, lubricants, cleaning solvents—have been scattered across the Earth and into aquifers. Radiation releases, meanwhile, haven't been a serious threat to anyone but the plant's brave workers.

Then he contrasts Chernobyl with the current crisis. He calls Chernobyl "a uniquely bad nuclear accident" that killed 59 firemen and workers and that, thanks to "the failure to evacuate or take other precautionary steps," caused "1,800 thyroid cancer cases among children, though fewer than a dozen deaths." He continues:

Now think about Japan. It suffered its worst earthquake in perhaps 1,100 years, followed by a direct-hit tsunami on two nuclear plants. Plenty of other industrial systems on which the Japanese rely—transportation, energy, water, food, medical, public safety—were overwhelmed and failed. A mostly contained meltdown of one or more reactors would not be the worst event of the month.

Jenkins closes with a question about environmentalists who "haven't opted for [the] escapism [of] insisting wind and solar" can suffice in the future, and who "have quietly recognized that the only alternative to fossil energy is nuclear." He asks, "If they believe their climate rhetoric, will environmentalists speak up in favor of nuclear realism or will they succumb to the fund-raising and media lure of antinuclear panic?"

He closes with his own answer: "In the unlikely event the world was ever going to make a concerted dent in CO₂ output, nuclear was the key. Let's just guess this possibility is now gone, for better or worse."

Nuclear "worst piece I have seen so far"

This past Thursday in a regional daily, I found what I cherish as the most irresponsible piece of nuclear-power hysteria I've seen so far: "Calling time on the nuclear age" by Amy Goodman of the radio show Democracy Now.

In this of all weeks, please consider the difficulty of exceeding all others in spreading that hysteria. After all, we live in a country many thousands of miles across the sea from Japan, yet druggists suddenly can't keep potassium iodide on the shelves in California.

This piece was crying out for a good rebuttal, but Mark Lynas, a UK science writer, ruined part of my fun by beating me to it.

When I googled for the Goodman piece, I bumped immediately into Lynas's blog posting entitled "Rebuttal of Amy Goodman scaremongering op-ed on Japanese nuclear crisis." Concerning the worst piece I have seen so far, Lynas had already written, It's "the worst piece I have seen so far."

As Lynas explains, Goodman offers questionable technical comments and worse. But as he also explains, those aren't the reason she wins the prize.

Goodman wins the prize right in her opening, where she quotes an August 1945 news report on Hiroshima's devastation, asserts that it "could well describe the scenes of annihilation in northeastern Japan today," and declares that given "the worsening catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, [the 1945] grave warning to the world remains all too relevant."

You read that correctly. It's a compounded offense. Not only does Goodman brandish Hiroshima in a nuclear-power debate, she falsely conflates Fukushima and the tsunami that actually caused the 2011 devastation.

At the end of her column, Goodman reverts to this conflation. "The nuclear age dawned not far from Fukushima," she writes, "when the United States became the sole nation in human history to drop nuclear bombs on another country, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians." To Goodman, this constitutes a "warning" for all of us about nuclear power. As Lynas asks, "Does she understand that it is physically impossible for a nuclear power station to explode like a nuclear weapon?"

It's often said that participants in political debates must condemn, immediately and on principle, attempts of one side to liken the other to Hitler or the Nazis. Probably nuclear-power advocates have long since learned a similar principle: If the opponents drag in Hiroshima, blow the whistle.

Nature editorial rebukes Republicans

In a Washington Post op-ed last fall, Sherwood Boehlert, former chairman of the House Science Committee, called on his "fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become [their] party's line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities."

Apparently that plea has been spurned. A recent Talking Points Memo posting, for example, pointed out that all 31 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have declined "to vote in support of the very idea that climate change exists."

Now the editors of Nature are energetically rebuking the Republican party. Under the headline "Into ignorance," they lament Congress's handling of the issue of the Environmental Protection Agency and greenhouse-gas emissions. Their editorial charges that at a 14 March subcommittee hearing, "anger and distrust were directed at scientists and respected scientific societies. Misinformation was presented as fact, truth was twisted and nobody showed any inclination to listen to scientists, let alone learn from them."

The editors call this "an embarrassing display, not just for the Republican Party but also for Congress and the US citizens it represents." At one point the editors catalog some more criticisms:

One lawmaker last week described scientists as "elitist" and "arrogant" creatures who hide behind "discredited" institutions. Another propagated the myth that in the 1970s the scientific community warned of an imminent ice age. Melting ice caps on Mars served to counter evidence of anthropogenic warming on Earth, and Antarctica was falsely said to be gaining ice. Several scientists were on hand—at the behest of Democrats on the subcommittee—to answer questions and clear things up, but many lawmakers weren't interested in answers, only in prejudice.

Near the end, the editors assert that it "is hard to escape the conclusion that the US Congress has entered the intellectual wilderness."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• A rationale for revamping federal research as outlined in a Nature commentary
  
• Media coverage of a congressional hearing on climate
  
• Hands-on engineering competitions for science outreach to students
  
• A pair of articles about global vulnerability to solar effects
  
• A pair of celebrations of women in science around the world
  

Daniel Sarewitz in Nature: Transform civilian research on DOD model

Has "the nation's civilian research and development enterprise . . . been built on a foundation of hidden assumptions and unsubstantiated claims"? According to Daniel Sarewitz's latest column in Nature, that's the implication of the famous 2005 observation by John Marburger, President Bush's science advisor. Marburger declared that "the framework . . . that we use to evaluate policies and assess strength in science and technology" is "primitive."

Sarewitz is based in Washington, DC, but is co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. He argues that although we haven't realized it, in the nation's technoscience efforts of past decades, the Department of Defense has had the winning formula—unlike the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and NASA.

He characterizes the DOD formula this way: "close and persistent ties [with] private industry," plus investments "in emerging fields such as computer science, sub-atomic and solid-state physics, and materials science," leading to "waves of innovation" that have "created whole industries that helped to fuel the US economy." He sees both ARPA-E, with its focus "on high-risk R&D and collaborations between universities and private firms," and recent NASA,with its new outreach to private-sector spaceflight, as confirmations of his view.

Sarewitz closes by asserting what he calls "an inescapable reality":

The civilian research agencies were designed as temples of scientific excellence and technological prowess, but they lack the institutional architecture of the cold-war military-industrial complex, and are ill-structured to create and sustain essential links between knowledge generation, technological innovation and desired social outcomes. It is not a matter of basic versus applied research, but of insular versus integrated approaches. If this is truly our generation's Sputnik moment, it will take more than money. The United States must transform its science enterprise to enhance links between research and its application to national needs.

The question of balance in climate reporting, cont.

How should the New York Times, or any newspaper, report climate-science claims like those made by Representative Morgan Griffith of Virginia, a freshman Republican, at a March 8 congressional hearing? If opponents have tried time and again to rebut the claims, and if the claims nevertheless keep recurring without apparent engagement of the rebuttals, should an impartial reporter say so? (And if the reporter does say so, can the congressman's side then justly assert some symmetrical, corresponding call?)

The hearing carried the formal name "Climate Science and EPA's Greenhouse Gas Regulations." In the Times article "At House E.P.A. Hearing, Both Sides Claim Science," John Broder reports that Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on energy and power "demanded the hearing in the hope of slowing the inexorable progress [of] the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, which enjoys the near-unanimous support of the Republican House majority." Broder explains:

The measure would overturn the E.P.A.'s finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pose a threat to public health and the environment and would bar the agency from writing any regulations to control them. The bill's sponsors say that the climate science behind the finding is dubious and that the proposed rules would have a devastating impact on the economy.

Here's how Broder reported Rep. Griffith's comments:

[Rep. Griffith], and an avowed skeptic on climate change, noted that ancient temperature records indicate periods of warming during the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations and again during the rise of the Vikings, and wanted the scientists to explain just how warm it got during those eras.

Mr. Griffith also wanted to know why the ice caps on Mars were melting and why he had been taught 40 years ago in middle school that Earth was entering a cooling period.

"What is the optimum temperature for man?" he asked. "Have we looked at that? These are questions that, believe it or not, I lay awake at night trying to figure out."

The scientists promised to provide written answers.

"That's a list of nonsense that has already been dealt with and debunked a bazillion times," responded one blog posting. It went on to criticize Broder for failing to say so, and offered a link to a web site that catalogs answers to commonly heard objections like the congressman's. At the liberal blog Science Progress, a posting called "A science-free Congress" calls the hearing part of an effort "to overturn a science-based determination absent any scientific justification for doing so."

At RealClimate, Gavin Schmidt found the prospect of the hearing important enough to undertake "Live-blogging the climate science hearings," the headline on the RealClimate posting that he offered in advance. There he began by predicting that as "usual, this hearing will likely be long on political grandstanding and short on informed discussion."

Neither the Washington Post nor the Wall Street Journal covered the hearing at all.

Engagement model: Student robotics as sport

If you like the bidirectional "engagement model" of technoscience outreach—as opposed to the "deficit model" merely involving unidirectional information conveyance—you might want to read a recent Wall Street Journal piece by Robert P. Crease, the Stony Brook professor who writes the "Critical Point" science-and-society column for Physics World.

It's a book review. Crease presents Neal Bascomb's The New Cool as the story of a burgeoning hands-on high school robotics program called FIRST, which seeks to change large numbers of American teenagers' tendency to worship sports and entertainment idols while not even knowing the name of a single living scientist.

But FIRST—For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology—doesn't try to teach the names of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene, or, for that matter, Henry Petroski (who has been called a Carl Sagan of engineering). Instead, it means to enthrall teenagers in hands-on robotics engineering competitions.

Still, the inventor Dean Kamen (insulin pump, Segway) is centrally involved. Crease explains that Kamen launched FIRST two decades ago "to bring some sports-like hoopla to science and engineering" and notes that while "the initial event, in 1992, drew 28 entries . . . this year's competition has nearly 2,000 teams in three leagues for elementary, middle and high schools." Crease says Bascomb's book is "about the ways in which Mr. Kamen has used robotics to create a cachet of geekiness among students"—and that Bascomb presents it not as a science-outreach story, but as a sports story.

"It is inspiring," Crease writes, "to see these kids work so hard and achieve a certain level of engineering expertise and high-school celebrity." Crease reports Bascomb's focus on a robotics team from "a suburban public high school of about 2300 students that struggles with apathy, drugs and dropouts." The students engage a competition requiring them to design and build robots to collect balls from a slippery surface. Crease declares that the book "offers a lesson in how American kids can thrive when faced with daunting challenges."

But Crease concludes with an anecdote illuminating the daunting overall science-outreach challenge. At a FIRST event, he writes, Kamen "brought out rapper Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas," gave him a FIRST cap, and "suggested that if Will wanted to look truly cool he should wear it a few weeks later during the group's half-time show at the Super Bowl."

"I watched the game and the half-time performance," Crease continues. "Didn't notice the cap, did you? There's still work to do."

Holdren, Beddington: "Celestial Storm Warnings"

Two news commentaries late this week asked readers to add space weather to their worry lists.

With a relatively lower media profile, the Washington Post's "Capital Weather Gang" blog offered the first part of a series of posts aimed at informing readers about the space-weather threat. With a relatively higher media profile, the science advisers to President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron published the op-ed "Celestial Storm Warnings" in the International Herald Tribune.

John P. Holdren and John Beddington cautioned that "the world's reliance on electronic technology—and therefore vulnerability to space weather—has increased substantially since the last peak" of solar activity roughly a decade ago, and that with another peak expected in 2011-2012, it's important now "to identify, test, and begin to deploy the best array of protective measures practicable, in parallel with reaching out to the public with information explaining the risks and the remedies."

And indeed the authors do some of that explaining. "From sporadic solar flares to ethereal shimmering aurora," they write, "manifestations of severe space weather have the power to adversely affect the integrity of the world's power grids, the accuracy and availability of GPS, the reliability of satellite-delivered telecommunications and the utility of radio and over-the-horizon radar." They cite the possibility of consequences "on the order of $2 trillion during the first year in the United States alone," with recovery taking from 4 to 10 years.

"History is rife with warnings," they declare, and then they do some itemizing. They list an 1859 disruption of compasses and telegraphy, a 1921 space-weather incident that "wiped out communications and generated fires" in the American northeast, a 1989 geomagnetic storm that "caused Canada's Hydro-Quebec power grid to collapse within 90 seconds, leaving millions of people in darkness for up to nine hours," and two intense storms in 2003 that "traveled from the Sun to Earth in just 19 hours, causing a blackout in Sweden and affecting satellites, broadcast communications, airlines and navigation." One study, they say, foresees how a "loss of power could lead to a cascade of operational failures that could leave society and the global economy severely disabled."

Holdren and Beddington stipulate that with recent science, "we now have a better understanding of the causes and frequency of these events." But they warn that "scientists also indicate that the severity of future storms could be much greater than those experienced in recent decades, pointing to the critical need for careful monitoring of the Sun and its effects on the Earth."

They mention "wide-ranging" international "cooperation and data sharing in the space-weather domain." They report that much "can be done to reduce risks," with possibilities that include "back-ups for crucial systems such as GPS, tougher protective shielding for satellites . . . blocking devices to harden power grids, and replacements for aging scientific satellites . . . to provide advanced warnings." They close with an assurance that "commitment on both sides of the Atlantic" exists for taking the needed steps.

Another recent space-weather article might also merit mention—for the way that it's hyped. In the UK, MailOnline this week offered "Get ready for a 'global Katrina': Biggest ever solar storm could cause power cuts which last for MONTHS." The piece begins by asserting that the "world is overdue a ferocious 'space storm'" and that "mankind is now more vulnerable to a major solar storm than at any time in history."

International views of women in science

A pair of international views of women in science appeared this week: the annual L'Oréal–UNESCO Awards for Women in Science and the posting "Women in science in the Arab world" at Nature Middle East's "House of Wisdom" blog.

L'Oréal–UNESCO celebrated its 2011 honorees in a full-page ad on the back of the 8 March Science Times section of the New York Times. "Unesco and L'Oréal are convinced," the ad says, "that science is the source of progress for society and that women have an essential role to play in that progress." The honorees are Anne l'Huillier, an atomic physicist in Sweden; Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, a chemist in China; Faiza Al-Kharafi, a chemist in Kuwait; Silvia Torres-Peimbert, an astrophysicist in Mexico; and Jillian Banfield, an American geophysicist.

Faiza Al-Kharafi's name also appears in the "House of Wisdom" posting. It identifies her as president of Kuwait University and vice-president of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. "Today is the 100th anniversary of the International Women's Day," the posting begins, "and there is no better time to celebrate the amazing influence that some women scientists are having in the Arab world."

The posting offers three more examples: Nadia El-Awady is the founding president of the Arab Science Journalists Association and the first Arab president of the World Federation of Science Journalists. The posting notes that during "the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, she was on the front lines as a revolutionary protester." Nagwa Abdel Meguid, an Egyptian geneticist, was the first Arab L'Oréal honoree. She's reportedly known "for her research in same-blood marriages (very popular in the Arab region) and their effect on the higher rate of birth defects and genetic disorders."

Finally, Hayat Sindi, "the first woman from the Gulf States to receive a PhD in biotechnology from Cambridge University," is "a nanotechnology researcher working to deliver affordable point-of-care diagnostic solutions to the developing world through the not-for-profit Diagnostics For All," and "has invented a machine combining the effects of light and ultrasound for use in biotechnology."

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.