In this week's review, Steve Corneliussen discusses coverage of Harold Lewis's global-warming-inspired resignation from the American Physical Society, Nature's coverage of the upcoming US midterm elections and their possible financial implications for science, a Wall Street Journal example of the media subsuming engineering within science, a New York Times column that cheered for expanded energy research, and the American Geophysical Union president's letter to the Washington Post about the Cuccinelli climate vendetta.
National newspapers ignore Harold Lewis's APS resignation
Searches of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal yield nothing concerning Harold Lewis, the 67-year member of the American Physical Society whose bitterly eloquent 6 October resignation letter has caused a blogosphere stir because of paragraphs such as this one:
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
Physics World, however, has posted a 14 October online news article summarizing Lewis's letter, his charges of financial corruption, and the subsequent APS press release. The article also reviews the 2009 effort of 160 APS members who sought changes in APS's public position on global warming. It adds the following as new news to accompany what's already in the letter and the press release:
Gavin Schmidt, a climate physicist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, denies Lewis's claim that research in climate change is congruent with financial gain. "People don't get paid to get results," he says. "Funding pays for postdocs, graduate students and equipment." Schmidt adds the issue raised by Lewis is "a manufactured story" to make people believe there is some discontent in the profession.
Lewis does, however, have some support among physicists. "[Lewis] is on target with the big picture," says Princeton physicist Will Happer, a leader of last year's effort to change the APS statement on climate change.
Nature: US research funding "heading for a cliff"
The 14 October Nature considers November's US elections and comes away gloomy.
Subheadlines lament that "NIH prepares for loss of political champions," that this will be a "chilly season for climate crusaders" and that a "policy row launches NASA into limbo."
An editorial declares that "on urgent issues such as climate and basic research, the mudslinging and mayhem have got to stop."
Another article reports that a newly released Republican policy document "is telling in both its emphasis and its omissions," in that the words tax, taxes, and taxpayer appear 56 times, and the words science, research, and education not at all.
And then there's the budget article "US midterm elections: Deficit poses threat to science." Its subheadline: "Research programmes in the United States seem to be heading for a cliff, no matter who wins in Congress."
Thanks to stimulus spending, this article says, US scientists have been "sitting pretty." But "going into the midterm elections, a different narrative is emerging," given that "Republicans are running on a platform to reduce the $1.4-trillion US deficit."
A Democratic loss, the article predicts, "would probably spell problems" for the envisioned continuation of America COMPETES, the "2007 act of Congress that set the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Energy's Office of Science on a path to double their funding over ten years."
The article reviews past bipartisan support for science, using the examples of the New York Republican Sherwood Boehlert and the Tennessee Democrat Bart Gordon. But if control changes, it observes, "Ralph Hall, a Texan Republican, is in line to take over"—and last spring, he "pushed for a three-year budget freeze for the agencies targeted for increases by COMPETES."
Doesn't take a rocket engineer, cont.
A posting last week considered a New York Times writer's esthetic, literary objections to the term STEM. At the end, I mentioned that although it doesn't take a rocket engineer to understand that engineers, mainly—not scientists—conceive, launch, and shepherd flights into space, the ubiquitous cliché remains "It doesn't take a rocket scientist."
As examples of the presumption that science subsumes engineering, I cited Washington Post and New York Times obituaries that explicitly described the departed as a rocket engineer, but that nevertheless carried headlines calling him a "rocket scientist."
Now, for an article in the 14 October Wall Street Journal, a headline editor has continued the journalistic tradition of subsuming engineering within science. The article's headline, both online and on paper:
Chile's Rescue Formula: '75% Science, 25% Miracle'
The key line from the article's text:
"It was 75% engineering and 25% a miracle," said topographer Macarena Valdes.
Tom Friedman extols Secretary Chu's energy innovation hubs
Thomas L. Friedman's 13 October New York Times column offers "a shout-out for [President] Obama's energy, science and technology team for thinking big." Friedman writes:
Soon after taking office, [the administration] proposed what Energy Secretary Steven Chu calls "a series of mini-Manhattan projects." In the fiscal year 2010 budget, the Department of Energy requested financing for "Energy Innovation Hubs" in eight areas: smart grid, solar electricity, carbon capture and storage, extreme materials, batteries and energy storage, energy efficient buildings, nuclear energy, and fuels from sunlight.
After explaining that only three hubs have received any funding, and that the funding is only partial, Friedman urges Congress to support all eight for five years at a total cost of $1 billion "so that we not only get graduate students, knowing the research money is there, flocking to these new energy fields" but we also "get the benefit of all these scientists collaborating and cross-fertilizing."
Friedman actually means not only scientists but engineers, of course. He describes Secretary Chu's vision:
The idea behind the hubs, explained Chu, is to "capture the same spirit" that produced radar and the first nuclear bomb. That is, "get Nobel Prize winners in physics working side by side with engineers"—not to produce an academic paper but "to solve a problem in a way that will actually be deployed" and do it much faster than the traditional academic model of everyone working in their own silo.
"We don't want incremental improvements," said Chu. "We want real leaps—game-changing" breakthroughs—like a 75% reduction in energy used in a commercial building through affordable design and software improvements. "America has shown we can do this," concluded Chu. "The scientists and engineers see the problem; they see the opportunity; they see what is at stake, and they want to help." That is why we should fully fund all eight now.
Friedman calls the vision a "focused moon shot on energy."
American Geophysical Union's president versus Virginia's attorney general
In a 10 October Washington Post letter to the editor, American Geophysical Union President Michael J. McPhaden has challenged Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's renewed legal campaign alleging fraud in climate research at the University of Virginia.
"I am dismayed," writes McPhaden, charging that since Cuccinelli "has stated publicly that he does not believe that human activities are responsible for global warming, his persistence raises concern that an elected official might be using the power of his office to pursue a personal agenda rather than to defend his state's interests. Political intervention in scientific debate harms the public good."
McPhaden concludes: "If political pressure squelches scientific research, climate change will not magically disappear, but the objective knowledge needed to inform good decisions will. The University of Virginia should continue to resist unwarranted pressure from the attorney general."
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.
