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Presidential science adviser John Holdren vowed to defend the Obama administration's science and technology budget request for fiscal 2012 against anticipated congressional efforts to make further sweeping reductions in federal spending. Speaking to the annual S&T policy forum of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on 5 May, Holdren predicted that certain federal R&D programs—including basic research at the Department of Defense, carbon capture and storage and fusion research at the Department of Energy, and the multiagency US Global Change Research Program—will likely be especially targeted for reductions by lawmakers looking to cut the budget.

"The president remains committed to robust growth in key dimensions of S&T," Holdren said, pointing to President Obama's commitment to double the basic research programs at DOE, NSF, and NIST over 10 years and his goal of raising the total amount of spending by government and industry on R&D to 3% of US GDP. Holdren said that Obama had reiterated the need for "a coherent energy and climate policy that entails large investments in both mitigation and adaptation" during a 3 May conversation with Holdren.

"Virtually all international cooperation comes under scrutiny when budgets are tight, because many members of Congress do not believe that international cooperation in science and technology benefits the United States," Holdren said. "We believe that our very strategically focused investments in these domains are of great benefit to the US and to the world. We plan to defend those investments, but you can expect some arguments."

Holdren said he also expects budget cutters to go after the social sciences programs at NSF, the peer-reviewed research programs at the US Department of Agriculture, and the basic research programs of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.

On another topic, Holdren praised the performance of Japanese authorities in sharing with US counterparts information concerning the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in the aftermath of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. "I would say that the level of transparency has been extraordinarily good, really," he said, responding to a questioner. "We have had representatives from the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] in place with the Japanese team, managing the situation from very early in the game. We have gotten extraordinarily detailed reports multiple times daily from the Japanese authorities, and we've been in continuous contact by phone and conference call with the leaders of the Japanese operation."

Holdren said that he and Energy Secretary Steven Chu had convened "an informal group" of experts in nuclear accident prevention and mitigation immediately following the accident. Consulting daily during the initial weeks of the crisis, those advisers continue to hold twice weekly teleconferences, and have been "interacting intensively with the Japanese authorities," he said.

"I think basically we know everything they know," Holdren said of the Japanese nuclear authorities. "One of the problems in this kind of situation is that nobody knows everything we need to know because it's extremely difficult to operate and observe in a high radiation environment."

Holdren said that the administration intends to comply for the most part with a 2011 funding law provision that prohibits NASA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from cooperating with China on S&T matters. But Holdren, who is also director of OSTP, said the administration will ignore the congressional restriction in cases where it might "infringe on the president's constitutional prerogatives to conduct foreign diplomacy." Without elaborating, Holdren noted that "some of the things that we are doing with China we believe that if we curtailed them, would infringe on those constitutional prerogatives."

David Kramer

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• The growing public discussion about the reportClimate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate
  
• Newt Gingrich's conservative support for science funding
  
• A prominent biodiversity scientist's perspective on environmentalism, climate and energy
  
• The nuclear industry's future prompts discouraging views in the New York Times
  
• Disagreement between Wall Street Journal opinion writers and a teachers' union leader on education reform
  

Matthew Nisbet's controversial climate report

As many in the physics community know, Matthew C. Nisbet holds faculty positions in both communication and environmental science at American University in Washington, DC. Here's a collage of excerpts from the already voluminous public discussion, mainly online so far, of his new report, Climate Shift: Clear Vision for the Next Decade of Public Debate.

"So now greens are in the post-mortem stage, and, not shockingly, it's a sensitive subject," wrote Bradford Plumer, an associate editor at the New Republic, in the 21 April article "Blame Game: Has the green movement been a miserable flop?" Plumer continued:

Matthew Nisbet ... [has] released a hefty 84-page report trying to figure out why climate activism flopped so miserably in the past few years. Nisbet's report is already causing controversy: Among other things, he argues that, contrary to popular belief, greens weren't badly outspent by industry groups and that media coverage of climate science wasn't really a problem.

Ezra Klein's Washington Post blog quoted Plumer, and then said of Nisbet's report, "Reading through it, I started to wonder if there was another option worth considering. Maybe none of the theories about what went wrong are correct. It's quite possible that climate activists basically did a competent job: After all, they did get a big, complicated bill to the 20-yard-line in a legislative body that rarely passes big, complicated bills—and they just got unlucky."

Nature's 21 April editorial "Home truths: A new report offers useful insight into the continuing stalemate over global warming" declared that the Nisbet report "shines light on some uncomfortable truths" and "should be essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in the climate-change debate." The editors emphasize that it "effectively dismantles three of the most common reasons given by those who have tried, and failed, to garner widespread support for policies to restrict greenhouse gases." The editors continued:

First—the failure of the US Senate to pass a cap-and-trade bill in 2010 cannot be blamed directly on the financial lobbying muscle of the conservative movement and its allies in industry. In 2009, the report says, although a network of prominent opponents of cap and trade, including ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, spent a total of US$272 million lobbying policy-makers, environmental groups in favour of cap and trade mobilized $229 million from companies such as General Electric and other supporters to lobby for environmental issues. Indeed, the effort to pass cap and trade, Nisbet notes, "may have been the best-financed political cause in American history".

Second—most of the mainstream media coverage of climate change gets it right. During 2009 and 2010, Nisbet writes, around nine out of ten news and opinion articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN's online site reflected the consensus scientific position. The Wall Street Journal regularly presented the opposite view in its opinion pages, but eight out of ten news items still backed the science.

Third—conservative media outlets such as Fox News and controversies such as the coverage of e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom have a minimal impact on public attitudes to climate change, because such influences tend to only reinforce the views of those who already hold doubts.

The failure of cap and trade in the United States, Nisbet concludes, was not down to poor communication, but was due to framing the issue of greenhouse-gas emissions as a problem that could be solved by a specific policy. More useful, he says, would be to present climate change as an issue that needs to be addressed at many levels, similar to public health or poverty. Those, of course, are far from ideal models—but we live in far from ideal times.

At the New York Times's Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin has now offered two postings about the report and the discussion surrounding it.

He begins the first posting, "Beyond the Climate Blame Game," by reporting that on "the tiny patch of American public discourse reserved for the global warming debate ... a week of blogitation over a sprawling report examining failed efforts to pass a climate bill has started to give way to constructive discussion." Revkin explains that Nisbet's report "explores who had the biggest advantage—in money and media spin—in the fight over a cap-and-trade climate bill, along with cultural issues, like the deep liberal tilt among scientists, that flavor how such battles are waged." He links to several other blog discussions, quotes the views of several formal reviewers, mainly from academe, and offers what he calls "a few overarching observations about the report, the fate of the climate bill, American attitudes on energy and the influence of environmental and anti-regulatory forces in Washington."

Revkin says that his second posting, "Two Views of Climate Cause and Effect," is "for anyone wishing to dig in deeper on missteps and next steps on the climate challenge." He offers replies received from Nisbet and from Joe Romm of the Climate Progress blog, whom Revkin calls "one of Nisbet's staunchest critics." The replies address questions from Revkin "related to the overall question of influence, effort and outcomes after nearly a decade aimed at producing a comprehensive climate bill centered on carbon trading."

Conservatives for science funding, cont.

As reported in January, the conservative columnist George F. Will, addressing kindred spirits concerning the federal budget, cited the National Academies' Gathering Storm reports and declared that federally funded research has become "what canals and roads once were—a prerequisite for long-term economic vitality." Shortly later he wrote in support of STEM education. Now a Wall Street Journal columnist, David Wessel, has likened the conservative Newt Gingrich to President Obama when it comes to support for science.

Wessel's 28 April column, headlined "Republicans Split Over Research Spending," reports that Gingrich is accusing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), "chairman of the House Budget Committee and leader of the quest to shrink government . . . of a big mistake: Spending too little on medical and scientific research." He quotes Gingrich on the lack of wisdom in scanting science: "It's essentially like saying I want to save money on your car [so] we're not going to change the oil. And for about a year I can get away with it, then the engine will freeze, and we have to change the engine." Wessel emphasizes: "In making the case for more government investment in research, [Gingrich] sounds like Barack Obama."

Wessel joins in with his own support as well when he asks readers to "ponder these facts":

Federal spending on payments for individuals (everything from housing subsidies to health care) has doubled over the past 30 years, as a share of the economy. Defense spending fell when the Cold War ended, but has been climbing for a decade.

Yet everything else—including all spending intended to pay off in the future—has been flat, setting aside the temporary Obama fiscal stimulus. Of the $3.5 trillion the federal government spent in 2010, only 1.6% went to non-defense physical capital, R&D, education and training, the White House budget office says. That's half the size of the share for this spending in the early 1970s.

Wessel also invokes business leaders' support of federal science funding:

Many corporate executives side with Messrs. Gingrich and Obama. Along with calling for lower taxes and less regulation, they've been arguing—to quote a recent statement signed by the Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs—for "federal investment to prepare our children with world-class educations and to support the scientific and technology research and innovation infrastructure that enable the private sector to create jobs."

The columnist sums things up this way: "It's a reminder that in the debate over government-spending priorities, the differences aren't exclusively between the two parties, but sometimes within them."

Jesse Ausubel's environmental outlook

Please consider the environmental reconnaissance projects that Jesse H. Ausubel has contributed or helped contribute to biodiversity science, and then please consider his outlook on environmentalism—including energy and climate—overall. The four projects:

1. The Census of Marine Life has completed a ten-year investigation of diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life.
2. The International Barcode of Life project has collected more than a million specimens and has defined the DNA bar codes for more than 95 732 species.
3. Edward O. Wilson's Encyclopedia of Life calls itself a "global partnership between the scientific community and the general public" with the goal of making "freely available to anyone knowledge about all the world's organisms."
4. The Deep Carbon Observatory is a "multidisciplinary, international initiative dedicated to achieving a transformational understanding of Earth's deep carbon cycle"; it "deploys ships to drill deep holes, runs a fleet of helicopters to install instruments on every volcano on earth, and develops new apparatus to test the deep physics and chemistry of carbon."

Ausubel, of Rockefeller University, serves as vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nicholas Wade profiled him on the front page of this week's Science Times section in the New York Times.

Ausubel, Wade reports, believes that technology will, in general, protect rather than harm the environment. Wade continues:

Over the long run, [Ausubel] notes, the economy requires more efficient forms of energy, and these are inherently sparing of the environment. Cities used to use wood for heat and hay for transport fuel. But the required volumes of wood and horse feed soon led to more compact fuels like coal and oil.

Coal in turn is giving way to natural gas in a process that Mr. Ausubel calls decarbonization, the replacement of carbon-rich fuels with hydrogen-rich ones. The ultimate fuel source, in his view, is nuclear power, with reactors set to produce electricity by day and hydrogen, the fuel for battery-powered cars, by night. He sees little that might thwart the mighty process of decarbonization, even given setbacks like Japan's nuclear crisis. "The energy system absorbs shocks even as big as Fukushima," he says.

As a program officer with the National Academy of Sciences, Mr. Ausubel worked with senior scientists who had broad experience in running international environmental programs. He was involved in planning the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change meeting but has viewed the panel's subsequent reports with reserve. Climate change went from being a small to a major issue. "And then the expected happened," he said. "Opportunists flowed in. By 1992 I stopped wanting to go to climate meetings."

Because of decarbonization, Mr. Ausubel believes that the growth of carbon dioxide emissions will be limited. "The computer models of the climate system aren't good enough and never will be. I tend not to be frightened because I think the natural evolution of the energy system is away from carbon," he said.

Wade explains that it was Ausubel's "belief that technology is generally relieving the pressure on the terrestrial environment that led to his interest in marine life" and the oceans—because they seemed to be being left under pressure. When Ausubel started the Deep Carbon Observatory in 2009, Wade writes, he had long been interested in the idea "that oil and gas are produced by deep-earth microbes feeding on natural sources of methane," which led to the idea "that oil wells might be naturally replenished from vast sources of carbon deep in the planet." This line of thinking originated with the Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold.

Wade continues:

Whether Dr. Gold's ideas are correct, the behavior of carbon in the deep earth is an issue of considerable scientific moment. The deep earth is full of microbes that lead a largely independent existence from those on the surface. This dark world, flourishing but largely unknown, could have been the origin of life on earth and may influence it in many other ways. There is reason to think the deep earth contains hidden reservoirs of carbon—meteorites of the type that formed the primitive earth are 3 percent carbon, but the detectable abundance of carbon is only 0.1 percent. Discovery of a hidden carbon reservoir in the deep earth, especially if it is connected with the origins of oil and gas, could change estimates of energy supplies.

At the end of the profile, Wade sums up by noting that Ausubel "does not belong to the Jeremiah school of environmentalists who prophesy imminent doom unless their words are heeded." He quotes Ausubel: "The credibility of the environmental movement as a whole is less than its members wish it to be, and a lot of that has come from overdoing it on various issues."

New York Times sees nuclear slowdown

Under the headline "Despite Bipartisan Support, Nuclear Reactor Projects Falter," the New York Times reports that six years after Congress authorized
$17.5 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors, market conditions and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster have stalled the nuclear industry, and nearly half of the fund remains unclaimed.

"Even supporters of the technology," writes Matthew Wald, "doubt that new projects will surface any time soon to replace those that have been all but abandoned." He cites Neil Wilmshurst, a vice president of the Electric Power Research Institute, who "said the continued depressed price of natural gas had clouded the economics of new reactors" and "predicted that construction activity would 'go quiet' for two to five years." Wald reports that of "the four nuclear reactor construction projects that the Energy Department identified in 2009 as the most deserving for the loans, two have lost major partners and seem unlikely to recover soon."

The situation also involves the politics of carbon dioxide emissions, Wald says:

The initial $17.5 billion was approved during the Bush administration, but President Obama has also embraced the idea of marrying nuclear power to solar, wind and "clean coal" to reach his administration's goal of generating 80 percent of American electricity from those sources by 2035. Mr. Obama's call for new loan guarantees came when the administration was seeking Republican votes in the Senate for a limit on carbon dioxide emissions, but he has stuck with the loan guarantees even after prospects for such legislation died after last fall's midterm elections.

Wald does report some optimism in the federal government:

Officials at the Energy Department, which administers the loans, said they were confident that other developers would come forward and apply for the guarantees. Jonathan M. Silver, the executive director of the loan programs office, said, "There is a significant queue of nuclear power plants in house that we will and are working on."

"They may just go forward under a different time frame," he said, but he declined to estimate how many years it would be before the government could reach its goal of providing loan guarantees to six to eight reactor projects.

Mr. Silver said that by the time a reactor could be finished and brought on line, market factors might be more in the industry's favor. "There are so many variables in this equation, taking a snapshot may be less relevant than watching the whole movie," he said.

And near the end, Wald paraphrases Michael J. Wallace, a former nuclear industry executive: "With a carbon tax no longer appearing likely, he said a new kind of help, like a federal 'clean energy' standard that would set a quota for nuclear and renewable electricity, might be needed."

But overall, Wald conveys doubt about nuclear industry prospects.

Randi Weingarten's hard month at the Wall Street Journal

Followers of—and participants in—the education wars might want to know that Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers since 2008, has been having a hard time on the Wall Street Journal opinion page.

In a 26 March "Weekend Interview" article under the headline "Weingarten for the Union Defense," a member of the WSJ's editorial board presented her as a hard-core opponent of good sense. He noted that recent documentaries have "highlighted how teachers unions block or stifle education reforms to the detriment of the low-income minority kids who populate the nation's worst schools." He charged that donations from the unions "go overwhelmingly to Democrats, and the role that member dues play in the wider liberal movement can be seen in teachers union support for everything from abortion rights to single-payer health care to statehood for Washington, D.C." He wrote:

And so it goes. Ms. Weingarten insists that teachers unions are agents of change, not defenders of the status quo. But in the next breath she shoots down suggestions for changes—vouchers, charter schools, differential teacher pay and so on—that have become important parts of the reform conversation. She seems to conceive of her job as the one William F. Buckley Jr. ascribed to conservatives in the 1950s: To stand athwart history yelling "Stop!"

A few days later, two letters to the editor appeared. The shorter letter complimented "the vast majority of America's teachers [as] both highly competent and highly dedicated." The longer letter began, "Jason L. Riley's 'The Weekend Interview With Randi Weingarten' (March 26) is truly frightening. As long as Ms. Weingarten leads the teachers union and speaks for any sizeable cross-section of teachers, our public education system will get worse before it gets better."

Early this week Weingarten asserted her own voice directly, via an op-ed under the headline "Markets Aren't the Education Solution." Though "market-based reforms" have been "promoted by the so-called reformers in the United States," she wrote, they have little in common with policies in educationally successful nations. She charged that "the evidence clearly shows that a heavy reliance on charter schools, performance pay, overuse of standardized tests and ignoring poverty won't adequately prepare our children for college, career and life."

She added: "With supreme certainty and blind zeal, market-based reformers are doubling down on an agenda that has failed to produce the transforming gains they promised. They disparage and delegitimize any gains that traditional public schools as well as their teachers (and their unions) have delivered for kids." She cited a Stanford University study's discouraging findings on charter schools and a Vanderbilt University study's discouraging findings on merit pay. She endorsed "countries like Finland, Singapore and South Korea," which "emphasize teacher preparation, mentoring and collaboration" and "revere and respect their teachers" rather than "demonize them." In a comment sure to gather special notice from some of the WSJ's opinion-page readers, she expressed admiration for countries that "offset the effects of poverty through on-site wraparound services such as medical and dental care and counseling" in public schools.

A few days later, four letters appeared under the headline "Accountability Is the Crux of Serious School Reform." All four criticized Weingarten.

The first came from Joel Klein, who served as chancellor of New York City public schools from 2002 to 2010. He wrote, in part:

Top-performing countries revere teachers because they get great results (that's why they're top performing). Those countries recruit teachers from the top of their graduating classes, insist on excellence and don't protect underperformers. America does precisely the opposite, largely recruiting from the bottom half of our graduates and protecting even the worst of them. . . . As long as unions continue to protect low-performing teachers, the solution for America's families is to give them choices so they can escape dead-end schools staffed by poor teachers.

The other three complete Weingarten's hard month at the WSJ. Here is one excerpt apiece:

1. "Let's examine why U.S. spending on elementary and secondary schools is 50% more than in Finland and Korea—two countries which Ms. Weingarten claims have things to teach us—while our kids are learning less."
2. "The real demon is the union-backed tenure system which keeps bad teachers in the classroom."
3. "Instead of a one-scale-fits-all pay approach, teachers, at least the good ones, should benefit from a more competitive labor market in which school administrators could offer salaries commensurate with expected student performance rather than being determined by an arbitrary salary scale."

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:

• 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.

Steve Corneliussen's topics this week:

• Research funding for 2011 as seen in some Sunday Washington Post opinions
  
• Emphatic alarm in a Post commentary about anthropogenic global warming
  
• The latest installment in the New York Times's Radiation Boom series
  
• The proposal to give the present geological epoch an anthropomorphic name
  
• A New York Times front-page report about disrespect for the teaching profession
  
• Raymond Orbach's trenchant Science magazine defense of 2011 research funding
  

Research funding defended in Washington Post

"On the Sunday Opinions page today," begins a 27 February Washington Post editorial, "we publish alarms from a number of advocates for federal programs endangered by Republican budget cutting. We sympathize with many of the appeals. But we also recognize that the United States is facing a fiscal challenge that, if unaddressed, threatens US prosperity and global leadership."

The editors ask, "So how should priorities be set?" Among their answers:

Third, government should promote economic growth. That means maintaining ports, roads, rails, subways and airports; educating the next generation; and supporting science. But grandiose projects such as trips to Mars or high-speed rail to Las Vegas will have to wait.

The Sunday Opinions page offers seven opinions, each in a blurb a bit less than half the length of a standard op-ed. Two will particularly interest scientists.

General James L. Jones, now a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and formerly national security adviser to President Obama, focuses on "America's severe economic and national security vulnerability to dependence on foreign oil." Citing "the Defense Department's successful record developing transformative technologies through its DARPA program," and advocating "ARPA-E to advance high-risk, high-reward technologies that enhance our national security," Jones writes:

While new energy production technologies must ultimately be driven by the private sector and competitive markets, only the federal government has the rational incentive to make the early, up-front investments in the real technology breakthroughs—such as durable electricity storage, advanced modular nuclear reactors and the development of new transportation fuels.

ARPA-E enjoys several unusual but critical institutional attributes—independent hiring authority to bring in the best minds from academia and the private sector, autonomous decision-making ability, and the capacity to take risks. These attributes are vital to achieving success in our globalized, 21st-century economy and should become increasingly more commonplace throughout the rest of our government.

Another of the opinion blurbs comes from Thomas Mason and Persis Drell, directors of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, respectively. They write:

Fully half of U.S. economic growth since 1945 can be attributed to investments in science and technology. Our colleagues Paul Alivisatos, Eric Isaacs, Sam Aronson and Michael Kluse—the other directors of the Department of Energy's Multi-program National Laboratories—agree that the competitive advantage the United States retains in technological innovation would be seriously jeopardized by extensive cuts to research proposed in House Resolution 1 for fiscal 2011. These reductions ignore the fact that innovation—not trade policies or labor costs—is the most important factor in global economic competitiveness and continued American prosperity.

The dramatic proposed cuts came just weeks after Congress extended the America Competes Act (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science). This bipartisan legislation was a statement that even in difficult times a priority should be placed on federally funded research tied to innovations that spawn new products and companies.

The United States still has the ability to compete successfully, but only if we invest in the scientific talent and infrastructure critical to fueling the private sector's need for new technologies. Whether it's a smartphone, a new drug or a battery that powers an electric car from Washington to Indianapolis, publicly supported research is almost always an essential contribution in the discovery chain.

Science will not be exempted from the sacrifices that have to be made across the entire federal budget. The challenge is to prioritize these reductions in a more thoughtful way that does not result in lasting damage to America's capacity for innovation.

Just as we cannot fix an overweight plane by removing an engine, we should not attempt to fix a deficit problem by removing America's ability to compete.

Five-alarm climate change

If the question of degree of alarm in climate discussion matters, then an article prominently placed on the front of the 27 February Washington Post Sunday Outlook section merits attention. Here's the teaser atop the print version: "The world is running out of time to stop climate change, says activist Mike Tidwell. So he's preparing for a future of food riots, freakish weather—and fending for himself."

Tidwell is executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, which calls itself "the first grassroots, non-profit organization dedicated exclusively to fighting global warming in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C." He begins by reporting that he has partly supplemented and partly replaced his personal environmentalism with deadbolt locks on his doors, a generator in his garage, and a "starter kit to raise tomatoes and lettuce behind barred basement windows." He's "not a survivalist or an 'end times' enthusiast," he stipulates, but "just a realist" when it comes to climate change, because "we're running out of time."

He vividly cites recent examples of extreme weather—and attributes every one of them to climate change. He borrows Winston Churchill's words from just before World War II: "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

Tidwell explains that those "consequences explain the generator in my garage and why I'm reinforcing my basement windows to protect emergency supplies," and adds: "This may seem like a stunt, or a sign that this frustrated environmentalist has finally lost it. But I'm not crazy. Just wait. The mega-storms and social disruptions on the horizon will be the best proof of that."

Here's a typical passage:

On the security side, it was the global food riots of 2008 and 2010 that led me to replace the 50-year-old locks on all my doors last fall. I'm not normally the paranoid type, but when extreme weather alternately baked and flooded wheat fields in Australia and Russia, helping to jack up grain prices more than 40 percent worldwide and leading hungry people to protest from Mexico to Mozambique to Serbia, I took notice. After all, the many climate effects we're already seeing—massive wildfires, bigger hurricanes, astonishing Arctic ice melt—all result from just 1.2 degrees of planetary warming since 1900. Now scientists at the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say the planet could warm another five degrees by the end of this century.

If that happens, Iowa is done for. Corn and wheat will wither and die on a scale never before seen. That's because heat-triggered mega-droughts will intensify across much of America's "continental interior" regions, scientists say, as flooding increases elsewhere. Iowa and much of the Heartland will resemble a scrub desert.

How will we feed ourselves adequately if our breadbasket is a desert? Answer: We won't, and there will be social unrest as a result.

Tidwell also reports that he "even took [his] first-ever lesson in firearms use last December" and that he's "not planning to join the Earth Liberation Front or some such militia." However, he asks, "wouldn't even a level-headed person want to be ready to defend his family if climate chaos goes to the max?"

If you consider his actions alarmist, he says, he "can't really blame you," for he'd "be confused about climate change, too, if [he] got most of [his] information from the half-asleep news media, much less the committed disinformers at Fox News and the Heritage Foundation." He offers a question for skeptics: "Why would private insurance companies lie about climate change? Already, Allstate has stopped selling new homeowners' policies in coastal Virginia and Maryland because the warming Atlantic Ocean is bringing larger hurricanes to the region."

Tidwell predicts:

Our trees are going to keep falling in ways we've never seen before. Our streets are going to flood. Our neighborhood bridges will wash out. Our roofs will sag from freak snowstorms and bake from unimaginable heat. And our power will keep going out, no matter how many "service improvements" Pepco makes. We've waited too long to avoid all this.

He ends by noting that ten years ago, he put solar panels on his roof "as an act of love for the planet." Now he's "making new changes, focused on [his] immediate loved ones. The era of consequences, at every conceivable level, has entered our world. Ready or not."

Medical physics returns to New York Times front page

The 28 February New York Times front page offers another very long article in the Times's Radiation Boom series examining "issues arising from the increasing use of medical radiation and the new technologies that deliver it." The online headline this time: "X-Rays and Unshielded Infants."

"Radiation Boom" articles begin with horror stories. This time it's about "the discovery that the tiniest, most vulnerable of all patients—premature babies—had been over-radiated" at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

The articles also advocate increased regulation. Today's lengthy piece moves from the opening horror story to what it calls "broader questions about the competence, training and oversight of technologists who operate radiological equipment that is becoming increasingly complex and powerful." The Times asks, "If technologists could not properly take a simple chest X-ray, how can they be expected to safely operate CT scanners or linear accelerators?"

The article continues:

With technologists in many states lightly regulated, or not at all, their own professional group is calling for greater oversight and standards. For 12 years, the American Society of Radiologic Technologists has lobbied Congress to pass a bill that would establish minimum educational and certification requirements, not only for technologists, but also for medical physicists and people in 10 other occupations in medical imaging and radiation therapy.

Yet even with broad bipartisan support, the association said, and the backing of 26 organizations representing more than 500,000 health professionals, Congress has yet to pass what has become known as the CARE bill because, supporters say, it lacks a powerful legislator to champion its cause.

In December 2006, the Senate passed the bill, but Congress adjourned before the House could vote. At the time, the House bill had 135 co-sponsors.

"I would think the public would be outraged that Congress was sitting on what could reduce their radiation exposure," said Dr. Fred Mettler, a radiologist who has investigated and written extensively about radiation accidents.

Individual states decide what standards, if any, radiological workers must meet. Radiation therapists are unregulated in 15 states, imaging technologists in 11 states and medical physicists in 18 states, according to the technologists association. "There are individuals," said Dr. Jerry Reid, executive director of a group that certifies technologists, "who are performing medical imaging and radiation therapy who are not qualified. It is happening right now."

Under the subheading "Children Are Most at Risk," the article explains that because "their cells divide quickly, children are more vulnerable to radiation's effects" and that "as new ways are found to use radiation in diagnosing and treating injuries and disease, children face an ever-increasing number of radiological procedures." The Times cites a recent finding "that by the age of 18, the average child will have already received more than seven radiological exams." Moreover, it says, in "premature infants, minimizing radiation exposure is especially important because they may require multiple radiological exams for problems like underdeveloped respiratory systems."

The article eventually notes that "[f]ull-body X-rays of babies are rarely done" and that "Dr. Donald Frush, chief of pediatric radiology at the Duke University School of Medicine, said that failing to properly cone, or collimate, the radiation was rare."

Under the subheading "Push for Continuing Education," the article reports that supporters of the proposed CARE legislation emphasize its continuing-education requirement. The Times adds that a "continuing-education provision might have prevented the over-radiation of 76 patients at a hospital in Missouri—a state that does not regulate its radiological workers. The medical physicist there had selected the wrong calibration tool to set up a highly sophisticated linear accelerator."

The article ends by quoting Dr. Steve Goetsch, a medical physicist in California who runs training programs: "In my profession, there is very little room for error and no room for unqualified personnel."

The Anthropocene

A 28 February New York Times editorial intrigues readers concerning a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: "The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?"

The special issue offers 13 articles. Here's the abstract of the introductory piece:

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.

The Times editorial begins by setting context, first mentioning human-history eras like the Renaissance, then contrasting them with geological time scales. "Humans existed when the Pleistocene ended and the Holocene began, 11 500 years ago," the editors observe. "Among scientists, there is now serious talk that the Holocene has ended and a new era has begun." They note that it was Paul Crutzen, who shared a Nobel Prize for work on the chemical mechanisms that affect the ozone layer, who first used the term Anthropocene, in 2000.

The editors argue that there's "a strong case that the Anthropocene begins with the Industrial Revolution, around 1800, when we began to exert our most profound impact on the world, especially by altering the carbon content of the atmosphere." Their ending may merit quoting:

Other species are embedded in the fossil record of the epochs they belong to. Some species, like ammonites and brachiopods, even serve as guides—or index fossils—to the age of the rocks they're embedded in. But we are the only species to have defined a geological period by our activity—something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact of objects from outer space, like the one that defines the upper boundary of the Cretaceous.

Humans were inevitably going to be part of the fossil record. But the true meaning of the Anthropocene is that we have affected nearly every aspect of our environment—from a warming atmosphere to the bottom of an acidifying ocean.

New York Times front page: scorning teachers

Whatever may or may not need saying about teachers' unions, surely teachers' perceptions of their profession merit attention, possibly including the anecdotal kind that the question received in the 3 March New York Times.

"One of the astounding things about the rhetoric sweeping through statehouses across the United States," says a letter to the editor, "is the notion that teachers, of all people, are overpaid and selfish. Teachers continue to be just as underpaid and committed as they were before this insidious discourse was introduced." The letter echoes some of what's in the front-page article "Teachers Wonder, Why the Heapings of Scorn?"

The article begins by focusing on Erin Parker, a second-year high school science teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. She feels "punched in the stomach" when she encounters this comment: "Oh you pathetic teachers. . . . You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage."

She earns $36 000. She owes $26 000 on student loans. She owns no car and can't begin to think of buying a house. She's going to head for Colorado, where she'll live with her parents so she can afford to keep teaching.

Then the article states its main point:

Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers—Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy—education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

The article reports extensively on the politics of education reform, but also reports the views of a math teacher and a science teacher. It quotes Lindsay Vlachakis, 25, a high school math teacher in Madison: "I put my heart and soul into teaching. When people attack teachers, they're attacking me."

And finally it quotes Anthony Cody, who "taught middle-school science for 18 years and now mentors new teachers in the Oakland, California, school district":

"What we need in these schools is stability," said Mr. Cody, 52, who writes a blog about teaching. "We need to convince people that if they invest their career in working with these challenging students, then we will reward them and appreciate them. We will not subject them to arbitrary humiliation in the newspaper. We will not require they be evaluated and paid based on test scores that often fluctuate greatly beyond the teacher's control."

Orbach in Science: Bill would "end America's legendary status" as world science leader

Raymond L. Orbach, who served as undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy for President George W. Bush, asserts in a 4 March Science magazine commentary that a funding bill for the present fiscal year passed on 19 February in the House of Representatives "would effectively end America's legendary status as the leader of the worldwide scientific community, putting the United States at a distinct disadvantage when competing with other nations in the global marketplace."

The signed opinion piece, called an editorial in Science's lexicon, first appeared online on 24 February. In it, Orbach asks legislators instead to sustain "the bipartisan commitment to double the science research budgets of the National Science Foundation, the DOE Office of Science, and the National Institute for Science and Technology over 10 years"—as "supported by both Presidents Bush and Obama" and as "affirmed as recently as last December in the America COMPETES Act."

The bill's spending cuts, Orbach writes, "would have a devastating effect on an array of critical scientific research." He cites the Office of Science generally, as well as cuts at its Office of Biology and Environmental Research "that would all but eliminate . . . the hope for developing transportation fuels derived from plant cellulose." He also condemns cuts for Energy Frontier Research Centers that "support activities based at 28 universities and 16 national laboratories." He emphasizes, and elaborates on, the threats to the national laboratories generally.

Orbach closes by granting that the "budget deficit is serious" but stipulates that "escaping from its clutches requires economic growth as well as budget reductions." He offers the reminder that well "over half of US economic growth in the past century can be traced to investments in science and technology."

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:

• Poor countries' loss of open access to scientific publications, as discussed at SciDev.Net and in The Lancet.
  
• Major newspapers' coverage of NASA's recent announcements concerning exoplanets.
  
• Some joshing of physicists in a New York Times letter to the editor.
  
• The Kepler satellite observatory's search for exoplanets, as discussed on the New York Times front page.
  
• Support for science education in a recent column by the conservative George F. Will.
  
• Many high-school biology teachers' lack of classroom forthrightness concerning evolution, as reported in Science magazine.
  

Commentary in The Lancet: Open access in the developing world, cont.

Though the general context is biomedicine, not physics, a commentary in The Lancet (free registration required) under the headline "Big publishers cut access to journals in poor countries" may merit attention from members of the physics community who follow the issue of open access in scientific publishing.

The 22 January commentary has already drawn attention at SciDev.Net, which calls itself "a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing reliable and authoritative information about science and technology for the developing world." There, a brief recent summary reports that in 2001, "publishing companies that include Elsevier, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, and Springer, signed up to the Health InterNetwork for Access to Research Initiative (HINARI)," which became "the main system providing free access to scientific journals in low-income countries."

The SciDev.Net summary continues:

In a deal negotiated by the WHO, they agreed to remain part of the system until at least 2015.

HINARI was not intended to solve the problem of access to scientific knowledge. . . . Yet it transformed the work of institutions in the developing world, enabling researchers to contribute to the knowledge needed to improve public health and reduce poverty.

But earlier this year, researchers in Bangladesh were told they no longer have free access to 2,500 journals through the system. Institutions in Kenya and Nigeria received similar messages, while scientists in other countries report being unable to access some journals as far back as 2007. According to the WHO [World Health Organization], 28 low-income countries are now excluded from HINARI.

Giving free access to low-income countries costs publishers virtually nothing . . . but cutting access can damage their image and trigger a backlash. Crucially, [the Lancet commentary's authors] say, it highlights that publishers are disconnected from the goals of governments and institutions working for development.

And indeed the full commentary piece in The Lancet begins, "The world's main system for allowing free access to scientific journals in low-income countries seems to be falling apart as big publishers withdraw." The authors, Tracey Pérez Koehlmoos and Richard Smith, call this development "a major step backwards for science, health, and development in low-income countries" and declare that "universal open access—to all journals in all countries—is the only long-term sustainable solution for access to scientific information in low-income and middle-income countries."

The commentary reports that around "4800 institutions in 105 countries have had access to some 7000 journals, including all the most prestigious publications," meaning "that institutions in poor countries had better access to journals than some leading universities in the rich world."

The commentary authors hammer hard in this passage:

Our immediate response is that this is an ungracious and ill-advised move on behalf of the publishers, reminiscent of when Elsevier was exposed as running arms fairs and then had to quit the business. In exchange for a few dollars, these publishers risk creating a torrent of ill-will against them from the excluded countries, authors around the world, and quite possibly their own staff. Pharmaceutical companies have learned the hard way that buccaneering tactics in poor countries do not work and will not be tolerated, and the consequence is severe damage to their image, brands, and products. Unlike the drug industry, which does incur distribution costs, the big commercial publishers can give free access to low-income countries at virtually no cost to themselves, something that seems to have passed them by on the basis of this latest decision.

Near the end, the commentary invokes a wider view of open access:

The companies have also taken this step at a time when the not-for-profit open-access movement is gathering pace. The Public Library of Science will soon be publishing 2% of all science, technology, and medicine papers through PloS One, obliging the Nature Publishing Group and other publishers to start something similar. True open access is the long-term answer to access to scientific studies in low-income and middle-income countries in a way that HINARI can never be.

The authors note that some "critics have rejoiced at this blow to HINARI because they think, perhaps rightly, that it will hasten the arrival of universal open access." In closing, they declare that they "share that aspiration, but temper our belief with the knowledge that universal open access is still something for the future."

Exoplanets: New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal

Do American newspapers value important astronomy news? Here's some anecdotal evidence: All three major East Coast national papers gave serious coverage to NASA's Wednesday exoplanet announcements, with front-page stories in the New York Times and Washington Post, and with a page 3 Robert Lee Hotz writeup in the Wall Street Journal.

Dennis Overbye in the Times, continuing from his previously discussed front-page article about the exoplanet-discovering Kepler satellite observatory, begins by summarizing the news:

Astronomers have cracked the Milky Way like a piñata, and planets are now pouring out so fast that they do not know what to do with them all. /blq

In a long-awaited announcement, scientists operating NASA's Kepler planet-hunting satellite reported on Wednesday that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially tripling the number of known planets.

Of the new candidates, 68 are one and a quarter times the size of the Earth or smaller—smaller, that is, than any previously discovered planets outside the solar system, which are known as exoplanets. Fifty-four of the possible exoplanets are in the so-called habitable zones of stars dimmer and cooler than the Sun, where temperatures should be moderate enough for liquid water.

Both the Times and the Post quote the astronomer Debra Fischer from Yale, who was not a member of the Kepler team. She declared that Kepler has "blown the lid off everything we thought we knew about exoplanets."

Here are some other quotations from the articles, beginning with this one from the WSJ:

"We are clearly finding out for sure now that smaller planets are more common than bigger planets," said astrophysicist Jonathan Fortney at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

From the Times:

"It boggles the mind," said the Kepler team's leader, William Borucki, of the Ames Research Center in Northern California.

Also:

"For the first time in human history, we have a pool of potentially rocky habitable-zone planets," said Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who works with Kepler. "This is the first big step forward to answering the ancient question, 'How common are other Earths?'"

At a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington on Wednesday, Mr. Borucki noted that the Keple telescope surveys only one four-hundredth of the sky. If it could see the whole sky, he said, "we would see 400,000 candidates."

Yet another from the Times:

Summarizing the news from the cosmos, Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, a veteran exoplanet hunter and a mainstay of the Kepler work, said, "There are so many messages here that it's hard to know where to begin."

He called the Borucki team's announcement "an extraordinary planet windfall, a moment that will be written in textbooks. It will be thought of as watershed."

From the Post:

"If Earth-sized planets are common, then it's likely that life is common on the planets around their stars," Borucki said. "This is really our first step in man's exploration of surrounding galaxies in terms of life and the extent of life that might be there."

Maybe it's often necessary to fault the media for inadequate science coverage, but maybe these three papers have done pretty well by astronomy this time.

Astronomer, writer kid physicists in New York Times letter

In reply to a New York Times editorial about the demise of the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, the astronomer Jay M. Pasachoff and the writer Naomi Pasachoff have published a letter to the editor observing that the closure is not only sad, but might also be unwise. They wrote:

When, in 1993, Congress shut off funds for the superconducting supercollider being built underground in Texas, many of the newly unemployed physicists found jobs on Wall Street. Wouldn't you rather have the nation's physicists smashing protons than designing and smashing collateralized debt obligations?

New York Times front page: Kepler observatory, "Goldilocks" planets

News about NASA's Kepler satellite observatory appeared in Dennis Overbye's front-page New York Times article "Gazing Afar for Other Earths, and Other Beings" on 31 January—in advance of astronomers' scheduled 2 February release of a "closely kept list of 400 stars that are their brightest and best bets so far for harboring planets, some of which could turn out to be the smallest and most Earth-like worlds discovered out there to date."

Overbye adds that the planets on this list "represent the first glimpse of riches to come in a quest that is as old as the imagination and as new as the iPad," and that over "the next two or three years, as Kepler continues to stare and sift, astronomers say, it will be able to detect planets in the 'Goldilocks' zones, where it is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water."

In this lengthy article, heavily illustrated after the "jump" to an interior page, Overbye presents Kepler as only an early part of "a multidecade quest—employing ever more sophisticated and expensive spacecraft—for planets and life beyond Earth." In what may be an example of excessive alarm in science news reporting, he suggests a special purpose for this quest: humanity "will eventually lose Earth as its home, whether because of global warming or the ultimate plague or a killer asteroid or the Sun's inevitable demise. Before then, if we want the universe to remember us or even know we were here, we need to get away."

He summarizes the history of exoplanet discovery since the first in 1995, and then describes Kepler's mission: "Its gaze is fixed on a patch of sky about 20 full moons across near the Northern Cross, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, containing about 4.5 million stars. . . . The job is simply to measure the brightness of 156,000 of those stars every half-hour, looking for the repeated dips caused by planet crossings, or 'transits.'"

Overbye also explains the statistical nature of the findings: "Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University, the deputy science team leader for Kepler, said it could be that they will wind up with, say, 100 planets they are 80 percent sure of, which could translate to 80 planets—useful for a census, not so helpful if you're looking for a place to live."

Though it doesn't come at the end, the quotation Overbye secured from the UC Berkeley astronomer Geoffrey Marcy could have served as the capper: "We will find Earth-size planets in habitable zones."

George Will speaks up for STEM education

An earlier report described criticisms that followed George F. Will's forceful advocacy of federal research spending and the principles of the Gathering Storm reports. Will's Washington Post column's rejection of the climate consensus, it was charged, not only disqualifies him from supporting science generally, but renders him a general proponent of anti-science.

Question: Will more such criticism follow his recent column echoing scientists' alarm about education, in particular STEM education?

Will begins with a sardonic epigraph—a quotation from Norman Augustine, who led creation of the Gathering Storm reports: "Since 1995 the average mathematics score for fourth-graders jumped 11 points. At this rate we catch up with Singapore in a little over 80 years . . . assuming they don't improve." The column argues for greater state flexibility in meeting national educational goals—and for national metrics, since sometimes states define proficiency down. In the process, Will praises Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Also in the process, Will offers a three-paragraph-long litany of discouraging data of the kind familiar to all who follow the STEM issue. A sample sentence from this litany: "Among the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations, only four (Mexico, Spain, Turkey and New Zealand) have dropout rates higher than America's, whose 15-year-olds ranked 23rd in math and 25th in science in 2006." Another: "A National Academy of Sciences report says that in 2000, more foreign students than American students were studying engineering and the physical sciences in US graduate schools."

Whatever Will's views on climate science, surely it's useful for him to raise his conservative voice in support of improving STEM education.

Science magazine: Creationism not defeated after all?

The headline on a commentary in the 28 January issue of Science telegraphs the message from the authors, two Penn State political scientists: "Defeating Creationism in the Courtroom, But Not in the Classroom."

Michael B. Berkman and Eric Plutzer begin by recalling the Pennsylvania court case Kitzmiller v. Dover, in which "creationists lost decisively" when a court held that intelligent design is "an effort to advance a religious view via public schools"—and is not science. However: "We suggest," write Berkman and Plutzer, "that the cheering was premature and the victory incomplete."

Under the subheading "Systematic Undermining of Science," the authors continue:

Creationism has lost every major U.S. federal court case for the past 40 years, and state curricular standards have improved. But considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America's classrooms. . . . The data reveal a pervasive reluctance of teachers to forthrightly explain evolutionary biology. The data further expose a cycle of ignorance in which community antievolution attitudes are perpetuated by teaching that reinforces local community sentiment.

The authors "estimate that 28% of all biology teachers consistently implement the major recommendations and conclusions of the National Research Council: They unabashedly introduce evidence that evolution has occurred and craft lesson plans so that evolution is a theme that unifies disparate topics in biology." They write also that at "the opposite extreme are 13% of the teachers surveyed who explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least 1 hour of class time presenting it in a positive light." They continue:

But if mainstream science and the modern creationist movement each have their classroom allies, they still account for only about 40% of all high school biology teachers. What of the majority of teachers, the "cautious 60%," who are neither strong advocates for evolutionary biology nor explicit endorsers of nonscientific alternatives? Our data show that these teachers understandably want to avoid controversy. Often they have not taken a course in evolution and they lack confidence in their ability to defend it.

The article reports three "especially common" strategies teachers use "for avoiding controversy," and declare that "each has the effect of undermining science." They explain, and then summarize this way:

The cautious 60% may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists. The strategies of emphasizing microevolution, justifying the curriculum on the basis of state-wide tests, or "teaching the controversy" all undermine the legitimacy of findings that are well established by the combination of peer review and replication. These teachers fail to explain the nature of scientific inquiry, undermine the authority of established experts, and legitimize creationist arguments, even if unintentionally.

For this national situation in which, as the authors put it, many students "are not afforded a sound science education," Berkman and Plutzer cite research to bolster suggestions for several countermeasures. These include "continued participation in federal law suits," curricular and standard-establishing involvement by scientists and scientific organizations, and an "increased focus . . . on preservice teachers." The authors predict that "[b]etter understanding of the field should provide [teachers] with more confidence to teach evolution forthrightly, even in communities where public opinion is sympathetic to creationism."

They also suggest that "[m]ore effectively integrating evolution into the education of preservice biology teachers may also have the indirect effect of encouraging students who cannot accept evolution as a matter of faith to pursue other careers." They elaborate:

Effective programs directed at preservice teachers can therefore both reduce the number of evolution deniers in the nation's classrooms, increase the number who would gladly accept help in teaching evolution, and increase the number of cautious teachers who are nevertheless willing to embrace rigorous standards. This would reduce the supply of teachers who are especially attractive to the most conservative school districts, weakening the cycle of ignorance.

Berkman and Plutzer close by asserting that improved teacher training "offers our best chance of increasing the science literacy of future generations."

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:

• An Orlando Sentinel commentary charging that "doomsday scenarios" are environmentalists' "marketing plan of choice"
  
• A Science magazine commentary about the National Academies' report Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation
  
• An analysis of three newspapers' coverage of news that 2010 and 2005 were the hottest years on record
  
• Coverage of a sports event with seismographic implications
  
• A Columbia Journalism Review article on the press and the climate
  

Orlando Sentinel commentary on alarmism in science news

Breathless newspaper stories about Earth-threatening asteroids, black hole producing particle accelerators, and other supposed menaces provoke the alarm of the public and the indignation of scientists. Along those lines, a commentary from the 13 January Orlando Sentinel might be worth discussing.

I should note that I got the commentary from two old friends. One, a lawyer, is an outright denier of human-caused climate disruption who has long since stopped listening very closely to my questions about his certitude. The other, an anesthesiologist, is a milder skeptic, but not mild in his condemnations of what he sees as unwarranted alarmism.

The Sentinel's Mike Thomas begins the commentary "Exaggerated Predictions About Global Warming Hurt the Cause" with a bit of sarcasm:

Federal scientists reported Wednesday that 2010 tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record, unless of course you were in Florida last month, in which case it was one of the coldest Decembers on record.

It's not easy scraping windshield ice with a plastic spatula.

The feds should wait until August to release these how-hot-was-it updates. They might have more impact if people weren't reading them while socked in at O'Hare for 15 hours.

Thomas himself actually understands that temperature rise globally can cause cold-weather extremes regionally. "But for years," he charges, "the message from the climate-change community is that we are on an unrelenting march to hell. Some scientists have made very specific predictions of doom based on models that have nowhere near that kind of accuracy. And now they are looking pretty silly."

His first example: "James Hansen, a climatologist and activist at NASA, predicted in 1986 that 2001 would be the hottest year in 100,000 years." (I wonder how Hansen would respond.)

Then: "Another leading climate scientist, Michael Oppenheimer, wrote in 1990 that America's heartland would be ravaged in drought, leading to food riots."

Then: "English scientist David Viner said in 2000 that winter snow would be a 'very rare and exciting event' and that, 'Children just aren't going to know what snow is.'"

Further along:

The media loves this stuff. In 2000, the Chicago Tribune reported: "The four horsemen of this global Apocalypse are Thaw, Drought, Storms and Floods, carrying in their wake hunger, disease, devastation and death."

Oh my!

Doomsday scenarios are the marketing plan of choice when it comes to environmental issues.

Thomas goes on to charge that concerning the Gulf oil spill, scientists "replaced peer-reviewed research with whatever speculation would get them attention." He declares: "Crying wolf draws attention to an issue in the short term. But credibility wears thin over time." And he cites a Gallup poll that he says showed that "almost half of Americans now believe the danger of global warming has been exaggerated, up from 31% in 1997 when the question was first asked." People "do not see the world going up in flames," he asserts.

Thomas's conclusion requires quoting verbatim:

Of course, the climate-change community can't accept the responsibility for this. So it blames the lies and distortions of the dreaded deniers. I disagree because this issue was theirs to lose. They overreacted to critics, they didn't tolerate dissent and instead of trying to educate the public on the nuances of weather, they turned climate science into a modern-day Book of Revelation.

I don't doubt that having billions of people burning fossil fuel impacts the climate. I question how that impact is being quantified into specific predictions and, more important, how it then is being marketed. It's time for a change in strategy.

Boosting Minorities in Science

In this week's invited editorial in Science, Freeman A. Hrabowski III uses a wealth of statistical data in a call for "Boosting Minorities in Science." Hrabowski is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He chaired the committee that wrote the National Academies report Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America's Science and Technology Talent at the Crossroads. Three key excerpts from his editorial:

• In 2006, underrepresented minorities, including African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, constituted only 9% of the nation's science and engineering labor force, while accounting for nearly 30% of the population.
• The United States will need to quadruple the number of underrepresented minorities with undergraduate degrees in [STEM] disciplines. A good place to start is retaining those minority undergraduate students who begin their studies in pursuit of degrees in STEM fields. . . . An urgent task for colleges and universities is to redesign first-year STEM classes to encourage active learning and collaboration.
• Just as important for minority students are social support and mentoring. Some are the first in their families to go to college; others simply feel isolated. . . . Best practices include precollege summer programs, substantive early research experiences, academic support, social integration, and faculty involvement.

Hot 2010: Wall Street Journal spin diverges

In a line graph sourced to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, the 13 January New York Times illustrates the news that's told in prose in the Times article "Figures on Global Climate Show 2010 Tied 2005 as the Hottest Year on Record." The graph covers the years 1880 to 2010, showing a steady upward trend in average global temperature from below 57°F to a high of just over 58°F, reached in 2005 and again last year.

Quite similar articles appear in the Washington Post and, online, in the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece, however, incorporates what scientists at RealClimate have condemned as "the false objectivity of balance."

This excerpt from the Times captures the main content of all three articles:

Two agencies, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reported Wednesday that the global average surface temperature for 2010 had tied the record set in 2005. The analyses differ slightly; in the NOAA version, the 2010 temperature was 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit above the average for the 20th century, which is 57 degrees.

It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average; the last below-average year was 1976. The new figures show that 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001.

The Times article adds that the "earth has been warming in fits and starts for decades, and a large majority of climatologists say that is because humans are releasing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere." It quotes David R. Easterling, a National Climatic Data Center scientist: "The climate is continuing to show the influence of greenhouse gases."

The Post article quotes Daniel J. Weiss, who, as the Post puts it, "directs climate strategy for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank." Weiss says, "Hopefully, this new data will finally convince congressional climate-science deniers that global warming is real and that action is urgent. . . . To reject this latest evidence is like ignoring strange spots on a chest X-ray and continuing to smoke."

The WSJ article quotes Easterling and reports as well that these "latest findings were seen by some as further evidence of a link between human activities and global warming." Note that phrase "by some." The WSJ adds:

Not all scientists agreed. John Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said natural long-term variability in climate, rather than greenhouse-gas emissions, could play a greater role in warming.

In addition, Dr. Christy said, "If greenhouse gases are causing warming, the climate system is not very sensitive to carbon dioxide because the warming is not very dramatic."

The Geophysics of Football

Remember those books and articles on the physics of this or that sport? Football fans have been marveling at an especially dramatic touchdown run in a professional playoff game in Seattle against New Orleans. That's where geophysics comes in. Here's what the Wall Street Journal reported in a blurb headlined "The Touchdown That Shook the Earth":

Marshawn Lynch's 67-yard touchdown run on Saturday can now literally be described as "earth-shaking." Geophysicists at the University of Washington's Pacific Northwest Seismic Network say that a seismic reader by Qwest Field picked up activity around 4:43 p.m. PT—just as Mr. Lynch reached the end zone. John Vidale, director of the PNSN, made the connection with the game. "It's a little bit unusual," he says, "But it's pretty clear that this was the fans going wild in the stadium."

A Seattle sports news website, in a story headlined "Marshawn Lynch's Playoff Clinching Run Registered a Minor Earthquake," included a seismograph printout. The ESPN sports site's article "Ground Shook on Marshawn Lynch TD" focused on the seismic network director:

Vidale said a seismic monitoring station located about 100 yards west of the stadium registered seismic activity during Lynch's run. The shaking was most intense during a 30-second stretch about the time Lynch broke free from the line of scrimmage, finished off his touchdown and celebrated in the end zone with his teammates. After that, Vidale said, the shaking died down, but it took about a minute for the shaking to completely fade away. This was the first time Vidale has taken a look at the monitoring station near the stadium. He said the station that picked up the tremors is mostly concerned with monitoring the two-level viaduct highway that runs along the Seattle waterfront and the seawall.

Columbia Journalism Review considers state of climate-science reporting

A recent Columbia Journalism Review article reports on and muses about the recent state of popular-press climate-science reporting.

It begins by noting the decline in media coverage following the Copenhagen conference and the Climategate scandal. The world's English-language output went down by 30% between 2009 and 2010, it says, with 22% fewer reporters involved. In the US a study of the major networks and large newspapers "found similarly precipitous declines."

The author, Curtis Brainard, observes that some journalists "have grown rightfully piqued by those who blame the media almost exclusively for the public's poor understanding of climate change"—and also by attacks on their integrity and on their work. Concerning that frustration, Brainard quotes Tom Yulsman, co-director of the University of Colorado's Center for Environmental Journalism: "If you read any number of partisan climate bloggers who claim to carry the torch of scientific truth, we're mostly stupid, we're hopelessly biased, we're carrying water for warmist scientists, or we're stenographers who copy down whatever the denialists have to say because we're too dumb to know what false balance is."

The article also engages the phenomenon of what it calls "vicious criticism from the left"—for instance from Joe Romm, the physicist and former Energy Department official who became livid in a recent blog post (discussed in an earlier report) proclaiming that the climate denier George F. Will has no business supporting any science of any kind. Brainard offers as an example of this criticism a Romm blog post headlined "And the 2010 Citizen Kane award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to." Brainard declares that "the tenor of [Romm's] posts and the conversations he inspires frequently verge of the same kind of fantastical accusations that the 'other side' made famous."

Brainard also engages studies that have taken "a closer look at climate coverage in order to determine exactly what is and isn't a problem." One study found that IPCC sea-level-rise stories in US and UK newspapers were generally accurate, for example.

The article quotes an important point from Andrew Revkin of the Dot Earth blog at the New York Times:

The core of the climate problem lies in the reality that the world doesn't have the energy options it needs for a smooth ride toward roughly 9 billion people by mid-century, all seeking decent lives.

So good reporters, those always eager to get to the root causes of a problem (being "radical" in the most precise sense of that word), will still track climate science. But they will devote more time and effort to diving deeper on energy policy, habits and innovations—whether unraveling counterproductive subsidies, pointing out the lack of money for path-breaking research, or revealing examples of social and financial innovations percolating around the world—any one of which could make a big difference if the information gets out and around.

Brainard closes by noting that climate-science reporting "will always displease somebody."

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:

• Neil deGrasse Tyson's New York Times letter on physics education and the late Richard Holbrooke's achievements.
  
• A Washington Post report about a Fox News policy on reporting climate science.
  
• A Nature editorial about science and hype in the internet age.
  
• Coverage in the New York Times of anthropologists' redefinition of the place of science in their profession.
  
• A former NASA engineer's blast at Obama space policy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
  

Neil deGrasse Tyson: physics training for diplomats

"True science literacy," writes the astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson in a New York Times letter, "is less about what you know and more about how your brain is wired for asking questions." The letter responds to the article "Richard C. Holbrooke, 1941–2010: Strong American Voice in Diplomacy and Crisis" by telling how Tyson learned of the special role of physics in the late diplomat's education.

Tyson says that when he gave Holbrooke a tour of the newly opened Rose Center for Earth and Space and Hayden Planetarium in 2000, he "could not help notice how fluent [Holbrooke] was in the depth and breadth of his cosmic curiosity." It turned out that Holbrooke had studied physics before switching to politics. Tyson continues:

I could not resist asking him whether that exposure to physics made a difference in his career as a diplomat, especially in tense, war-torn areas of the world that are resistant to negotiated peace settlements.

He answered emphatically "yes," citing the physics-inspired approach of sifting for the fundamental drivers of a cause or phenomenon—stripped of all ornament. To get there, one must assess how and when to ignore the surrounding details, which can give the illusion of importance, yet in the end, are often irrelevant distractions to solutions of otherwise intractable problems.

Mr. Holbrooke's career was a living endorsement for more scientifically literate peace negotiators in the world.

Fox News, RealClimate, and "balance" in climate-science reporting

The debate continues over the nature of journalistic "balance" in climate-science reporting.

Fox News Channel's top Washington editor, according to a Washington Post report, has "ordered the network's reporters to couple any mention of global climate change with skepticism about the data underlying such a scientific conclusion."

The Post cites the group liberal Media Matters. Here's the heart of the Post's article:

Media Matters for America said the internal e-mail from Bill Sammon, Fox News's Washington bureau chief, called into question the network's impartiality in reporting on climate change. In an e-mail sent last December to Fox News's journalists in the wake of a global conference on climate change, Sammon asked Fox journalists to "refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies."

The Post adds that "Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters' head of research, said the latest e-mail showed that Fox News was attempting to create a false impression of the climate issue by giving a 'fringe' minority of global-warming skeptics equal weight with those who have concluded the planet is growing warmer."

Fox News famously calls itself "fair and balanced." This latest incident calls to mind an often-cited, five-year-old posting from the scientists at RealClimate under the headline "The False Objectivity of 'Balance.'" Here's the heart of that posting:

We here at RC continue to be disappointed with the tendency for some journalistic outlets to favor so-called "balance" over accuracy in their treatment of politically controversial scientific issues such as global climate change. While giving equal coverage to two opposing sides may seem appropriate in political discourse, it is manifestly inappropriate in discussions of science, where objective truths exist. In the case of climate change, a clear consensus exists among mainstream researchers that human influences on climate are already detectable, and that potentially far more substantial changes are likely to take place in the future if we continue to burn fossil fuels at current rates. There are only a handful of "contrarian" climate scientists who continue to dispute that consensus. To give these contrarians equal time or space in public discourse on climate change out of a sense of need for journalistic "balance" is as indefensible as, say, granting the Flat Earth Society an equal say with NASA in the design of a new space satellite. It's plainly inappropriate. But it stubbornly persists nonetheless.

Nature's teaching moment: NASA microbiology controversy

This story about science and hype in the internet age started with NASA's publicizing of a paper in Science called "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus." The story continued with a good bit of journalistic and blogosphere controversy, all of it accelerated by NASA scientists' avoidance of real-time Internet discussion of serious objections to their paper.

Now a Nature editorial is using the incident to promote the idea that "blogs and online comments can provide valuable feedback on newly published research" and to urge scientists "to adjust their mindsets to embrace and respond to these new forums for debate."

In a New York Times report, Dennis Overbye summarized the controversy:

The announcement that NASA experimenters had found a bacterium that seems to be able to subsist on arsenic in place of phosphorus—an element until now deemed essential for life—set off a cascading storm of criticism on the Internet, first about alleged errors and sloppiness in the paper published in Science by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues, and then about their and NASA's refusal to address the criticisms.

The result has been a stormy brew of debate about the role of peer review, bloggers and the reliability of NASA.

Here's the Science paper's abstract:

Life is mostly composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Although these six elements make up nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids and thus the bulk of living matter, it is theoretically possible that some other elements in the periodic table could serve the same functions. Here, we describe a bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae, isolated from Mono Lake, California, which substitutes arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth. Our data show evidence for arsenate in macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins. Exchange of one of the major bioelements may have profound evolutionary and geochemical significance.

"Profound evolutionary and geochemical significance"? For more than one participant in the controversy, that calls to mind the 1996 incident in which NASA announced that it had found microbe fossils in a Mars meteorite. Both Overbye and the Nature editorial cite the blog posting of Rosie Redfield of the University of British Columbia. Her hit rate has gone from hundreds per week to almost 90 000, Overbye says. Her opening paragraph:

Here's a detailed review of the new paper from NASA claiming to have isolated a bacterium that substitutes arsenic for phosphorus on its macromolecules and metabolites. . . . NASA's shameful analysis of the alleged bacteria in the Mars meteorite made me very suspicious of their microbiology, an attitude that's only strengthened by my reading of this paper. Basically, it doesn't present ANY convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA (or any other biological molecule).

Nature's editors see the incident as a teaching moment. They're harsh about the researchers' claim that further discussion must take place only in peer-reviewed forums: "In the face of worldwide attention on their paper, which NASA and the team deliberately courted, the researchers have stuck their heads in the digital sand."

The editors assert that "a prompt and explicitly provisional response from the authors would have been a better approach, particularly given the way they encouraged the original attention." They add: "Nature strongly encourages post-publication discussion on blogs and online commenting facilities as a complement to—but not a substitute for—conventional peer review."

And Nature's editors conclude:

Bloggers and online commentators have an important part to play in the assessment of research findings, and many researchers' blogs, in particular, contain better analyses of the true significance of a scientific finding or debate than is seen in much of the mainstream media. Science journalists who repeated NASA's claims on the arsenic bacterium and did not tap into the widespread criticisms, did little to defend themselves from claims of reporting by press release. Blogging scientists, meanwhile, should remember that such informal forums do not excuse insults and casual discourtesy towards colleagues—especially those being urged to respond.

In the end, the scientific truth will prevail, as it usually does. In the meantime, researchers must accept some harsh truths about the speed and spread of digital criticism.

Anthropologists in "turmoil": Is their field a science?

Three recent New York Times headlines tell a story. On a Nicholas Wade article: "Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift." On an anthropology journal editor's letter: "The Definition of Science." On Wade's follow-up piece: "Anthropology Group Tries to Soothe Tempers After Dropping the Word 'Science.'"

The long-range plan of the American Anthropological Association, Wade reports, used to state the formal intention "to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects." Last month the group's executive board revised that statement to say, "The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects." The board appended a list of subdisciplines that includes political research. The board also removed two other occurrences of the word science.

Though the association's "statement of purpose" still describes anthropology as a science, the change has, according to Wade, "reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines—including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists—and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights."

Wade describes the reaction of Peter Peregrine, president of the Society for Anthropological Sciences:

[Peregrine] attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. "Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought," [Peregrine] said.

Wade reports that the association has now "issued a statement of clarification, saying it recognizes 'the crucial place of the scientific method in much anthropological research.'"

Homer Hickam blasts Obama space policy

Homer Hickam, the storytelling former NASA engineer who wrote Rocket Boys, Back to the Moon, and The Dinosaur Hunter, also contributes the occasional Wall Street Journal op-ed about NASA. His 14 December WSJ piece criticizes US space policy, and offers some harsh personal criticism in the process.

Hickam begins by praising recent non-NASA American space successes involving an unmanned US Air Force mini-shuttle and a private company's cargo spacecraft. "All of which raises the question," he says: "What's NASA up to these days? The answer: Not much."

He blames the Obama administration, and he names names. President Obama? "Doesn't seem to care." John Holdren, the physicist who serves as the president's science adviser? "Prone to apocalyptic climate-change visions." Charles Bolden, NASA's leader? "Never led anything more complex than a six-person shuttle crew." NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver? "Known primarily for touting herself as the 'Astromom' while trying to convince dubious contributors to pay the Russians to fly her into space."

Hickam recalls when presidents appointed what he calls "real managers to head NASA such as Jim Webb, a hard-headed businessman and government insider who knew how to get things done." Now, he says, NASA's best engineers can only "attend meetings, create PowerPoint charts, and count the days until retirement."

Hickam proposes that if the Senate wants to change the situation, "here's three things it can do": fund private companies to take over American spaceflight, "convince the president to install new management at NASA," and establish a moon base.

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 letter in Nature urging scientists to replace reluctance with engagement concerning Wikipedia.
  
• A commentary in Slate scolding scientists for mishandling the problem of a disproportion of Democrats within science.
  
• James Fallows's blog posting cautioning about too much alarm over Chinese students' test scores.
  
• Chester Finn's Wall Street Journal op-ed sounding the alarm about Chinese students' test scores.
  
• A New York Review of Books commentary about the future of information, including open access in scientific publishing.
  

Time for science to embrace Wikipedia?

Wikipedia will be a decade old next month. What's its standing these days in the scientific community? Nature's editors this week gave a stage for answering to two scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK.

In Nature's 9 December Correspondence department—letters to the editor—the two proclaim that "the time has come for scientists to engage more actively with Wikipedia" and that its "user-friendly global reach offers an unprecedented opportunity for public engagement with science."

Wikipedia, they declare, has become "the first port of call for people seeking information on subjects that include scientific topics. Like it or not, other scientists and the public are using it to get an overview of your specialist area." For "society's sake," the two conclude, "scientists must overcome their reluctance to embrace this resource."

Daniel Sarewitz: "A democratic society needs Republican scientists"

Daniel Sarewitz codirects the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, writes a monthly column for Nature, and is based in Washington. This week in a commentary in Slate, he gave all of science a harsh political scolding.

Sarewitz charges the science community with gross, harmful inattention to side effects arising from science's huge partisan imbalance. He cites a Pew Research Center poll from July 2009: 55% of US scientists are Democrats, but only around 6% are Republicans.

Why this matters, he says, can be seen in the case of human-caused climate disruption, concerning which "beliefs are astonishingly polarized according to party affiliation and ideology," as shown in statistics that he recites. Sarewitz asks:

Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain? Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride?

Sarewitz notes that for two decades, "evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of wealth." Since most Republicans hate such policy responses, Sarewitz writes, "No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science."

He continues:

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?

The scolding goes beyond the charge of gross, harmful inattention to side effects arising from the partisan imbalance. Sarewitz also charges that Democrats "seem to have convinced themselves that they are the keepers of the Enlightenment spirit, and that those who disagree with them on issues like climate change are fundamentally irrational."

But the scolding goes equal-opportunity when Sarewitz writes:

Meanwhile, many Republicans have come to believe that mainstream science is corrupted by ideology and amounts to no more than politics by another name. Attracted to fringe scientists like the small and vocal group of climate skeptics, Republicans appear to be alienated from a mainstream scientific community that by and large doesn't share their political beliefs. The climate debacle is only the most conspicuous example of these debilitating tendencies, which play out in issues as diverse as nuclear waste disposal, protection of endangered species, and regulation of pharmaceuticals.

Sarewitz's remedies include platitudes like these two suggestions: "foster greater confidence among Republican politicians about the legitimacy of mainstream science" and "cultivate more informed, creative, and challenging debates about the policy implications of scientific knowledge."

But he warns that the citizenry's generally high level of trust in science "could well be forfeit in the escalating fervor of national politics, given that most scientists are on one side of the partisan divide." If that trust is lost, he warns, "it would be a huge and perhaps unrecoverable loss for a democratic society."

At the end, Sarewitz offers another remedy: scientists should stop cherishing obsolete "myths of a pure science insulated from dirty partisanship." Moreover, it will do no good, he asserts, simply to issue more calls for improved science literacy. The issue "is legitimacy, not literacy. A democratic society needs Republican scientists."

James Fallows: "Don't go nuts" on Chinese test scores

James Fallows recently returned from a multiyear spell reporting in China about China. He's a national correspondent for the Atlantic, where one of his 7 December blog postings carries the headline "On Those 'Stunning' Shanghai Test Scores." Fallows cautions: Take "this seriously, and recognize that China is moving ahead in many, many ways. But recognize the fallibilities in this study, and don't go nuts."

Fallows emphasizes something that the New York Times front-page news story pointed out. As he puts it, the "5000+ students who were tested in China's biggest and most modern city may or may not be indicative of broader progress throughout the country. . . . Anyone who has had experience with schools and testing in China will want to know more about how these tests were administered, supervised, and scored."

He stipulates that he's "happy for people to be as startled as possible by these results" because anything "that will direct attention to American fundamentals—education, infrastructure, research, that sort of tedious thing" might spur useful action. "But on the merits," he asserts, "it's worth applying a version of Reagan's old 'trust, but verify' approach toward the Soviet Union."

He quotes at length "an overnight reaction from a scientist at a major U.S. university, who explains some detailed cautions against giving too much weight to the results." This unnamed scientist begins by calling the reaction of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan "breathless" and "quite overblown." The scientist offers a technical analysis based on statistical principles, and at the end offers this:

Perhaps the real educational deficiency here is in the sophistication with which our chattering and leadership classes understand statistics and the limitation of standardized tests in measuring student, school, and national educational system achievement. Not to mention what constitutes a good education and how it serves broader goals of national development.

Chester Finn: Chinese students' test scores alarming

"We must face the fact that China is bent on surpassing us, and everyone else, in education," writes Chester E. Finn Jr in an 8 December Wall Street Journal op-ed. The headline: "A Sputnik Moment for US Education: China delivers another wake-up call to those who think American schools are globally competitive." Finn is a former US assistant secretary of education, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The news peg, as Finn reports it, is that on "math, reading and science tests given to 15-year-olds in 65 countries last year, Shanghai's teenagers topped every other jurisdiction in all three subjects." The New York Times front-paged that news on the day before Finn's op-ed appeared. The Times story quoted Finn and described the test as the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Times described OECD as "a Paris-based group that includes the world's major industrial powers."

Finn's op-ed begins, "Fifty-three years after Sputnik caused an earthquake in American education by giving us reason to believe that the Soviet Union had surpassed us, China has delivered another shock." He sustains that tone. Three excerpts:

Americans would be making a big mistake to suppose that Shanghai's result is some sort of aberration. If China can produce top PISA scorers in one city in 2009—Shanghai's population of 20 million is larger than that of many whole countries—it can do this in 10 cities in 2019 and 50 in 2029. Or maybe faster.

[The US is] not getting worse. But we're mostly flat, and our very modest gains were trumped by many other countries.

[U]ntil this week we could at least pretend that China wasn't one of those countries that was a threat. We could treat Hong Kong as a special case—the British legacy, combined with prosperity. We could allow ourselves to believe that China was only interested in building dams, buying our bonds, making fake Prada bags, underselling everybody else, and coating our kids' toys with toxic paint, while neglecting its education system. . . . [W]e could comfort ourselves that their curriculum emphasized discipline and rote learning, not analysis or creativity. Today that comfort has been stripped away.

Finn reports that OECD calls Shanghai a "leader in reform" and cites concrete reasons for the success: a "near universal education system, its competitiveness (measured by student admissions to universities and to the best secondary schools), a very high level of student engagement, a modern assessment system, an ambitious curriculum, and a program to intervene in weak schools."

He closes by wondering if the news will get America "beyond excuse-making, bickering over who should do what, and prioritizing adults over children."

Harvard's Darnton, open access, and the long view

As director of Harvard's library, Robert Darnton has a vantage point for taking the long view of the information age. What he perceives may well merit attention by anybody following the evolution of scientific publishing in general, and open access in particular. This week, on the free side of the subscription wall at the New York Review of Books, Darnton offers a long essay.

Nearly three years ago, the New York Times reported that Harvard would "soon begin posting research and articles produced by its faculty on the Internet free of charge." Arts and sciences professors had "voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that would commit Harvard to open access—the movement to speed the exchange of knowledge by freely distributing research on the Web." (Are a formally published paper and its underlying research really identical? The Times didn't say.) The Times quoted an e-mail message from Darnton: "The chorus of 'yeas' was thunderous. I hope this marks a turning point in the way communications operate in the world of scholarship."

Four months ago, in a Times book review that amounted to a historical essay on the balance between intellectual property rights and the rights of the commons, Darnton framed his long view. He declared that if "we reassessed our history . . . we would reassert our citizenship in a Republic of Letters that was crucial to the creation of the American Republic—and that is more important than ever in the age of the Internet." He quoted Thomas Jefferson: "The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind." He quoted Benjamin Franklin: "That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."

Darnton has been developing a long view for a long time. His long NYRB essay details it. He covers a lot of territory.

He discusses Harvard's "general policy of opening up our library to the outside world and sharing our intellectual wealth" and research libraries as places "where rare books and e-books can be brought together."

He observes that more "printed books are produced each year than the year before," and that if "the history of books teaches anything, it is that one medium does not displace another, at least not in the short run," and that "it may be that the new technology used in print-on-demand will breathe new life" into the book.

He laments that "research libraries are going through hard times—times so hard that they are inflicting serious damage on the entire world of learning," and that between 1986 and 2005, "the prices for institutional subscriptions to journals rose 302 percent," while the consumer price index went up by only 68 percent.

He asks, "How many professors in chemistry can give you even a ballpark estimate of the cost of a year's subscription to Tetrahedron (currently $39,082)?" And: "What physicist can come up with a reasonable guess about the average price of a journal in physics ($3368) . . . ?"

Darnton never specifically acknowledges that some scientific publishing is nonprofit, but he criticizes scientific publishers generally. For example:

In 2009, Elsevier, the giant publisher of scholarly journals based in the Netherlands, made a $1.1 billion profit in its publishing division, yet 2009 was a disastrous year for library budgets. Harvard's seventy-three libraries cut their expenditures by more than 10 percent, and other libraries suffered even greater reductions, but the journal publishers were not impressed. Many of them raised their prices by 5 percent and sometimes more. This year, the publishers of the several Nature journals announced that they were increasing the cost of subscriptions for libraries in the University of California by 400 percent. Profit margins of journal publishers in the fields of science, technology, and medicine recently ran to 30–40 percent; yet those publishers add very little value to the research process, and most of the research is ultimately funded by American taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health and other organizations.

He energetically advocates the expansion of open access:

Professors expect services from their libraries, even if they never set foot in them and consult Tetrahedron or The Journal of Comparative Neurology from computers in their labs. A few, however, have stared the problem in the face and seized it by the horns. In 2001 scientists at Stanford and Berkeley circulated a petition calling for their colleagues to submit articles only to open-access journals—that is, journals that made them available from digital repositories free of charge, either immediately or after a delay.

The effectiveness of such journals had been proven by BioMed Central, a British enterprise, which had been publishing a whole series of them since 1999. Led by Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate who is now director of the National Cancer Institute, American researchers allied with the Public Library of Science founded their own series, beginning with PLoS Biology in 2003. Foundations provided start-up funding, and ongoing publication costs were covered by the research grants received by the authors of the articles. Thanks to rigorous peer review and the prestige of the authors, the PLoS publications were a great success.

According to citation indexes and statistics of hits, open-access journals were consulted more frequently than most commercial publications. By 2008, when the National Institutes of Health required the recipients of its grants to make their work available through open access—although it permitted an embargo of up to twelve months—cracks were appearing everywhere in the commercial monopoly of publishing in the medical sciences.

Darnton goes on to assert that if "the monopolies of price-gouging publishers are to be broken, we need more than open-access repositories. We need open-access journals that will be self-sustaining." He calls for the reversing of "the economics of journal publishing by covering costs, rationally determined, at the production end instead of by paying for an exorbitant profit in addition to the production costs at the consumption end." He describes the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) as a new "attempt to create a coalition of universities to push journal publishing" in the right direction.

Darnton also examines the legal wrangling over Google Book Search, and the implications. He asks, "Do we want to settle copyright questions by private litigation? And do we want to commercialize access to knowledge?"

He calls for a "Digital Public Library of America," or DPLA. Google, he says, has "demonstrated the possibility of transforming the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves, into an electronic database that could be tapped by anyone anywhere at any time." Darnton asks, "Why not adapt its formula for success to the public good—a digital library composed of virtually all the books in our greatest research libraries available free of charge to the entire citizenry, in fact, to everyone in the world?" He offers examples of smaller-scale initiatives that might suggest that a DPLA could succeed.

Darnton concludes with this summation of his long view:

Should the Google Book Search agreement not be upheld by the court, its unraveling would come at an extraordinary moment in the development of an information society. We have now reached a period of fluidity, uncertainty, and opportunity. Things have come undone, and they can be put together in new ways, subordinating private profit to the public good and providing everyone with access to a commonwealth of culture.

Would a Digital Public Library of America solve all the other problems—the inflation of journal prices, the economics of scholarly publishing, the unbalanced budgets of libraries, and the barriers to the careers of young scholars? No. Instead, it would open the way to a general transformation of the landscape in what we now call the information society. Rather than better business plans (not that they don't matter), we need a new ecology, one based on the public good instead of private gain. This may not be a satisfactory conclusion. It's not an answer to the problem of sustainability. It's an appeal to change the system.

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.