It's how the dark ages got their start

The politicization of knowledge has a long inglorious history, one the Americans are bent on rediscovering

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology-based organization representing over 100,000 American scientists and citizens last week issued a grave report charging that the Bush administration is routinely corrupting scientific information to achieve partisan political aims.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (USC), formed in 1969 at MIT to combat the misuse of scientific information by policy makers at all levels of government, wrote that "the administration is distorting and censoring scientific findings that contradict its policies [and] manipulating the underlying science to align results with predetermined political decisions."

The accusation is not made lightly, nor is it fired off from the fringes. On the contrary, the list of signatories to the statement include 20 Nobel Laureates and 19 National Medal of Science winners, including a former chief scientist at IBM, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Columbia University, a former Science Advisor to the President, and a former president of the California Institute of Technology.

The organization received numerous reports from scientists working at federal government institutions alleging that "the Bush administration has suppressed or distorted the scientific analyses of federal agencies to bring these results in line with administration policy." The USC investigated the charges by reviewing the public record, obtaining government documents, and interviewing the parties involved, including many current and former government officials.

The resulting 46-page report entitled Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An investigation into the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science, makes for bedtime reading more frightening than anything Stephen King has ever dreamt up. The four main findings are these: "There is a well-established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush" officials in the critical fields of air pollutants, heat-trapping emissions, reproductive health, drug-resistant bacteria, endangered species, forest health, and military intelligence.

There is "a wide ranging effort to manipulate the government's scientific advisory system" including the appointing of under-qualified people to important advisory posts, and even putting non-scientists in senior positions in the president's scientific advisory staff, and "dismissing highly qualified scientific advisors."

Furthermore, "There is evidence that the administration often imposes restrictions on what government scientists can say or write about 'sensitive' topics," which is typically any topic that might "provoke opposition from the administration's political and ideological supporters."

And, finally, "there is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented."

On the topic of global warming, the report is particularly damning of the Bush administration. "Since taking office," the report says, "the Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine the public's understanding of the view held by the vast majority of climate scientists that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping gasses are making a discernible contribution to global warming."

The authors of the UCS report uncovered an internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) memo in which the White House and the Office of Management and Budget are found to be directly demanding major changes to a 2003 EPA report on climate change. In particular, the memo says the White House sought the deletion of temperature records covering 1,000 years in order to give more emphasis to "a recent, limited analysis [which] supports the administration's favored message." The memo also showed the Bush administration demanded the insertion of a discredited study of temperature change funded by the American Petroleum Institute. And it sought to eliminate the grand summary statement to the EPA report that said that "climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." After EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman was forced to leave, the entire section on climate change was removed from the report before its release to the public for discussion.

The charges the Nobel laureate scientists make against the Bush administration extend beyond the science of the day and into the institutions that create science. "World renowned institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health take decades to build a team of world-class scientific expertise and talent," the report says. "But they can be severely damaged in short order by scientifically unethical behaviour," of the kind the Bush administration has encouraged throughout the American scientific culture.

As if to underscore the scientists' worries, the US Congress' General Accounting Office recently completed a survey of 130 graduate programs in the sciences offered at American universities in which foreign students and scholars often enroll. The study found that the number of foreign students applying to graduate and post-graduate programs in the sciences is declining broadly and rapidly. Applications from Chinese students to New York University programs, for example, were down 50%, the dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences told the New York Times.

The culprit, according to university administration officials who deal directly with foreign students, is not only just tougher post-September 11 security measures, but also the waning appeal of the United States, and in particular, its scientific culture, as a destination for foreign scholars. News of the treatment of science and scientists by the Bush administration has obviously leaked out around the world. (Applications for Green Cards, the lottery system in which the US each year offers 55,000 lucky foreigners US citizenship, are also down sharply, reportedly by more than 55%.)

The scientists of the UCS released their report begging the media to publicize the grave dangers to scientific knowledge so that the public might put pressure on their representatives to alter the way science is treated by the administration. But no support of this sentiment on this side of the border will come from CanWest Global, the dominant force in all media in Canada. For example, Elizabeth Nickson, National Post columnist, dismisses real scientists and instead relies on Russian President Vladimir Putin's science advisor Andrei Illarionov, for her take on climate change. Nickson says Illarionov is "the most promising political thinker that Russia has thrown up...ever."

But, though he is Putin's science advisor, Illarionov has no science background. His undergrad work and PhD are in economics, as have been all his posts in Russian academia and government. Nonetheless, Nickson relies on the man who called the Kyoto Accord "the Auschwitz of our time" for her scientific understanding of climate change, over the word of 20 Nobel laureate scientists. "Kyoto is a death camp. Kyoto is an economic gulag for the world," Nickson quotes Illarionov in her column of February 27.

Her target in this is David Anderson, the federal minister of the environment, whose vaguely pro-Kyoto position "grows more untenable by the day," says Nickson. "In the East," she says, "one scientist after another refutes his preposterous claims about Kyoto." Perhaps so, but it's unlikely the Nobel laureate signatories to the UCS report recognize any of them as colleagues, or indeed, as scientists at all-beginning with this Illarionov character.

For Anderson's genuine attempt to wrestle with the hard science of climate change and the murky world of public policy, Nickson suggests we "not just terminate his sorry ass, OK? I choose firing squad." She yearns for a Russia of the past.

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