Peter
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Motivation
Give credit where credit is due. I must confess that Al Gore and his crusade to stop climate change/global warming, with all its consequent lies and stupidity, inspired me to create this blog.
Peter
Peter
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The Corruption Of Climate Science
We have said this before, the science behind the concept of man-caused (anthropogenic) global warming has been corrupted. Here is a partial explanation of how this has happened.
Peter
September 24, 2008
Corrupted science revealed
Jerome J. Schmitt (source)
Outsiders familiar with the proper workings of science have long known that modern Climate Science is dysfunctional. Now a prominent insider, MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen, confirms how Al Gore and his minions used Stalinist tactics to subvert, suborn and corrupt a whole branch of science, citing chapter and verse in his report entitled "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?" His answer: A resounding "NO!"
Detailing the corruption, he names a series of names. Until reading this I did not know that
"For example, the primary spokesman for the American Meteorological Society in Washington is Anthony Socci who is neither an elected official of the AMS nor a contributor to climate science. Rather, he is a former staffer for Al Gore." Page 5
Although a bit lengthy, this very important report is highly readable and revealing. While some of the paragraphs are a bit technical, I encourage AT readers to wade through them because their purpose is to provide specific examples of how a radical cabal is forcing scientists to ignore or amend measurements that undermine the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Scientists are literally forced to include sentences in their papers that indicate their support of AGW, even if these sentences are non-sequiturs, or even if they conflict with the overall thrust of the paper. In this way, Al Gore's uneducated political commissars are able to deliver the "consensus" he so craves.
How is this possible you might ask? Prof. Lindzen gives considerable background history.
However, having been an undergraduate and graduate student in the hard sciences, and later a research collaborator with dozens of industrial scientists and university professors, perhaps I can shed some further light. Today's scientists get to the top of their field by extreme dedication to their specialty involving inordinate focus and concentration that cannot tolerate distractions. The best scientists are constantly "at home" at their lab bench, with their instruments, analyzing data, teaching a few promising students and preparing publications. Most scientists interact intensively only with other specialists in allied fields ("geeks").
Many scientists are naturalized citizens from Asia and Eastern Europe, unfamiliar and intimidated by American politics and government, to which they are dependent upon for visas and grant support. Although all stereotypes are unfair to individuals, there is some truth to the one of the shy, retiring, absent-minded professor. His or her absent-mindedness is most likely due to intense cogitation on a difficult scientific problem. Their dealings with one another are only possible by maintaining extreme standards of honesty, integrity and open-mindedness to scholarly debate in search of the truth. The very qualities that make them good scientists and scholars thus leave them ill-equipped to deal with the raucous, underhanded, disrespectful, politically-motivated radicals unleashed upon them by Al Gore and his fifth column for a "hostile takeover" of their scientific institutions.
I naively thought that the National Academy of Sciences could impose some quality-control on an errant discipline. Prof. Lindzen notes that event this august body has been penetrated by eco-activists by exploiting loopholes in its nominating procedures.
Fortunately, in science "truth will out". The long term faith of the American public in science, a trust built up since WWI is at stake. Next it will be important to see whether a prominent scientific journal publishes this revelation.
As an aside, for those who have wondered how leftist cabals were able in the 60's and 70's to take over our universities' humanity departments, the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities, Prof Lindzen's report lays bare the template for radicalization.
Posted at 11:58 AM Email Permalink Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/corrupted_science_revealed.html at October 01, 2008 - 05:17:42 PM EDT
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Peter
September 24, 2008
Corrupted science revealed
Jerome J. Schmitt (source)
Outsiders familiar with the proper workings of science have long known that modern Climate Science is dysfunctional. Now a prominent insider, MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen, confirms how Al Gore and his minions used Stalinist tactics to subvert, suborn and corrupt a whole branch of science, citing chapter and verse in his report entitled "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?" His answer: A resounding "NO!"
Detailing the corruption, he names a series of names. Until reading this I did not know that
"For example, the primary spokesman for the American Meteorological Society in Washington is Anthony Socci who is neither an elected official of the AMS nor a contributor to climate science. Rather, he is a former staffer for Al Gore." Page 5
Although a bit lengthy, this very important report is highly readable and revealing. While some of the paragraphs are a bit technical, I encourage AT readers to wade through them because their purpose is to provide specific examples of how a radical cabal is forcing scientists to ignore or amend measurements that undermine the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Scientists are literally forced to include sentences in their papers that indicate their support of AGW, even if these sentences are non-sequiturs, or even if they conflict with the overall thrust of the paper. In this way, Al Gore's uneducated political commissars are able to deliver the "consensus" he so craves.
How is this possible you might ask? Prof. Lindzen gives considerable background history.
However, having been an undergraduate and graduate student in the hard sciences, and later a research collaborator with dozens of industrial scientists and university professors, perhaps I can shed some further light. Today's scientists get to the top of their field by extreme dedication to their specialty involving inordinate focus and concentration that cannot tolerate distractions. The best scientists are constantly "at home" at their lab bench, with their instruments, analyzing data, teaching a few promising students and preparing publications. Most scientists interact intensively only with other specialists in allied fields ("geeks").
Many scientists are naturalized citizens from Asia and Eastern Europe, unfamiliar and intimidated by American politics and government, to which they are dependent upon for visas and grant support. Although all stereotypes are unfair to individuals, there is some truth to the one of the shy, retiring, absent-minded professor. His or her absent-mindedness is most likely due to intense cogitation on a difficult scientific problem. Their dealings with one another are only possible by maintaining extreme standards of honesty, integrity and open-mindedness to scholarly debate in search of the truth. The very qualities that make them good scientists and scholars thus leave them ill-equipped to deal with the raucous, underhanded, disrespectful, politically-motivated radicals unleashed upon them by Al Gore and his fifth column for a "hostile takeover" of their scientific institutions.
I naively thought that the National Academy of Sciences could impose some quality-control on an errant discipline. Prof. Lindzen notes that event this august body has been penetrated by eco-activists by exploiting loopholes in its nominating procedures.
Fortunately, in science "truth will out". The long term faith of the American public in science, a trust built up since WWI is at stake. Next it will be important to see whether a prominent scientific journal publishes this revelation.
As an aside, for those who have wondered how leftist cabals were able in the 60's and 70's to take over our universities' humanity departments, the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities, Prof Lindzen's report lays bare the template for radicalization.
Posted at 11:58 AM Email Permalink Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/corrupted_science_revealed.html at October 01, 2008 - 05:17:42 PM EDT
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Sunday, July 20, 2008
A Case Study In How The Quest For Funding Tarnishes Science
I must add this article now and preserve and share it. It has relevance to the on-going debate surrounding the myth of man-caused global warming, how it came to be, and why it persists. The fact that the scandal described in the following article originated at my alma mater is an aside. This issue affects all scientists and all of science. I welcome comments. (source)
Peter
Can of Worms
The UW’s worst scientific scandal in decades exposes the ways that external funding has increased the vulnerability of two of the university’s most valuable assets — its integrity and its graduate students.
By John Allen
On September 20, 2006, Irwin Goldman received an e-mail with good news — “exceptional news,” he wrote at the time — he’d never expected to hear, at least not from anyone at UW-Madison. Graduate student Amy Hubert PhDx’08 had made a breakthrough in her research, successfully identifying the piece of DNA in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans that corresponds with a gene called laf-1.Laf-1 is important in sex determination among nematodes, which are typically hermaphroditic. Those that have a single laf-1 gene mutation develop as females. Those that have two die — thus “laf,” which stands for “lethal and feminizing.”No one ever said a worm’s life is easy.But, then, neither is a graduate student’s, and Amy Hubert’s has been harder than most.
Seven months earlier, she was working and studying in the lab of Elizabeth Goodwin, then a leading researcher in C. elegans genetics, when Goodwin was accused of scientific misconduct — essentially of misrepresenting her work in an application for federal funding. It was one of the most serious scandals in UW science, and even today, those connected to it are reluctant to talk about it. The university launched an investigation, and Goodwin soon resigned. UW-Madison had to give up thousands of grant dollars and still faces the possibility of sanction by the federal government.
The chief evidence against Goodwin came from Hubert and her graduate student colleagues, and the aftermath of the scandal has taken nearly as heavy a toll on them as it did on Goodwin. Of the seven people working in her lab — six graduate students and one research specialist — five are no longer at UW-Madison. Hubert hopes to complete her doctorate soon, which would make her the first member of the lab to do so.Her success may illustrate her academic skill, but the fact that she’s the only one from that team nearing graduation to date shows something else: the vulnerable position in which graduate students find themselves in the modern scientific world of grant-based research. Wholly dependent upon their faculty mentors for educational, financial, and career support, grad students lead a perilous life. And the increasingly competitive struggle among professors to win research grants only makes that peril more acute.
Chasing Phantoms
C. elegans is a model organism, one of a handful of species that scientists study closely to learn about general biological principles. There are a few others: several bacteria and yeasts, Arabidopsis plants, fruit flies, zebra fish, rats, and mice. Nematodes are useful as a model organism because they’re among the simplest creatures to possess a nervous system, they can be frozen and thawed without damaging their viability, and they reproduce rapidly — even more quickly than fruit flies. Nobel Prize-winner Sydney Brenner pioneered studies of C. elegans in the 1970s, making it a relatively recent entry into the roster of model species. As a result, says CALS associate dean Irwin Goldman PhD’91, “the C. elegans community is still relatively small and tight-knit.”That closeness is highlighted at WormBase, an online database that keeps records of the researchers who are working on C. elegans, cross-referencing mentors to protégés. Sydney Brenner, for instance, is listed as WB (WormBase) Person77. He was the mentor for David Hirsh, WBPerson259, a professor at Columbia who mentored Judith Kimble, WBPerson320. A biochemistry professor at UW-Madison, Kimble supervised Elizabeth Goodwin, WBPerson213, when she was a postdoctoral fellow. And Goodwin was the mentor to WBPerson3474, Amy Hubert.Hubert came to UW-Madison in 2001 from the north-central Kansas town of Concordia. Like many graduate students, she’d earned her previous degree elsewhere — a bachelor’s at the University of Kansas. She’d been attracted to the UW by its reputation as a leader in genetics, but she didn’t join Goodwin’s lab until spring 2002.“I liked Betsy [Goodwin] as an adviser,” Hubert says. “She was very friendly, very hands-on, always checking in with us about how our work was going.”
Goodwin was then one of the rising stars of the UW’s genetics department. “She was an extremely good citizen,” says Phil Anderson, another C. elegans expert (WBPerson21) and a professor of genetics. “She did more than her fair share of committee work, and she was very involved socially. She entertained prospective graduate students and helped recruit new faculty. She brought a genuine sense of joy to working here.”Goodwin’s lab was then one of only two or three in the world that were doing such advanced research into sex determination among nematodes, aiming to shed light on the importance of sexual reproduction in evolution. She was developing a hypothesis that laf-1 affected sex determination in C. elegans because it encoded a strand of “small RNA” — ribonucleic acid — instead of a conventional protein, which most genes encode. Such a discovery would have been a major coup, had she been able to prove it.“Within the last five or ten years,” says Anderson, “small RNAs have become very fashionable in research. There’s been a lot of exciting progress around small RNAs, and there’s a lot of mystery there.”But Hubert quickly lost conviction that Goodwin’s small RNA hypothesis was the right track. “When I first joined the lab,” she says, “I was getting the same results that Betsy and the others were. But I began to see that the laf-1 mutants weren’t all matching the prediction. Some of the results were just — well, they weren’t all that strong.”
While Goodwin continued to pursue the small RNA hypothesis, Hubert turned to more traditional approaches. She decided to revisit the question of laf-1’s identity by continuing to map its location in the C. elegans genome. “And the more mapping I did, the more it showed me that laf-1 was in a different spot from where everyone else [in the lab] was looking.”“Amy’s a real geneticist, while the rest of us were molecular biologists,” says one of her former lab partners, Mary Allen MS’06. “She was willing to take a long time and go back through the laf-1 work from the beginning, redoing the experiments and looking for inconsistencies. She was willing to go through the tedious process of looking at each generation of worms to see the phenotypes. I can remember her spending up to twelve hours in the lab, even on Saturdays. It was a lot of hard work, and a lot of time, but it paid off for her.”It was this difference of opinion that ultimately saved Hubert’s career at the UW. When the Goodwin affair blew up at the beginning of 2006, Hubert’s colleagues, whose work had all been intertwined with Goodwin’s search for small RNA, saw their years of labor vanish.“The project that Betsy was so committed to turned out to be a phantom,” says Anderson. “Laf-1 does not encode small RNA. And because that was a phantom, it wasn’t producing results, and it never would. The students who were chasing this phantom, they weren’t making any progress. Amy had the foresight — almost from when she first joined the lab — she had the good sense to challenge Betsy on this. She went back to the tried-and-true methods of mapping the DNA. Because of that, she was able to survive Betsy’s departure. That’s why she was able to make her breakthrough.”
Trying to Do Good
The Goodwin affair became public on February 23, 2006, when Goodwin resigned from the UW, bringing to a close three months of tension and quiet recriminations that had infected the members of her lab. She slipped quietly out of town and hasn’t spoken publicly about the allegations since, leaving her lawyers to respond to the charges. But her departure didn’t bring the affair to a close. In many ways, the difficulties were just beginning.The misconduct allegations leveled against Goodwin were, according to Bill Mellon, associate dean of the graduate school and head of the UW’s research compliance, among the most serious he’s heard in his twenty-nine years at UW-Madison, and certainly the most serious involving a tenure-track faculty member. But the university couldn’t just drop the issue upon Goodwin’s departure.“We had an obligation to investigate the charges,” says Mellon. “There were at least two federal grant applications involved, a renewal and an application for new funding, and we have to show the government that we’re serious about our honesty and the honesty of our scientists. So we had to carry out a long and detailed process — and I must say, Professor Goodwin’s absence made the process all the more difficult.”
Without Goodwin to answer the charges or explain her actions, investigators have struggled to determine just how far the damage goes. Mellon is confident that Goodwin wasn’t guilty of fraud — “she used the federal money to run the experiments she said she was going to run,” he says — and so far, no one has challenged the validity of the articles Goodwin has published. But the university had to report its findings to the federal government, and it hasn’t yet heard what the government’s Office of Research Integrity has to say about the Goodwin case.Still, if the process has been difficult for the university, it’s been even harder on Goodwin’s former students.At the time of the allegations, Goodwin’s lab employed six graduate students — Hubert, Allen, Garett Padilla MS’06, Chantal Ly MS’06, Sarah La Martina ’00, MS’06, and Jacqueline Baca — and one research specialist, Maya Fuerstenau ’04. In November 2005, Padilla discovered a discrepancy in the data that Goodwin was reporting in her grant renewal application. The application made it appear that the lab was producing favorable results, when in fact the data were incomplete, inconclusive, or worse. He brought this to the attention of his colleagues and to Goodwin.“At first, all we saw was that the data were wrong in one figure on one of the grants,” says Hubert. “After Garett talked to Betsy about it, she told him it was just a mistake, that the data had been placeholders. But the more we looked, the more we saw that seemed wrong. She was saying some experiments had been done that hadn’t been, and the figures that were being used to illustrate her results weren’t the correct figures. The conclusions she gave, in some cases, weren’t correct. Things had been relabeled, and we concluded that it couldn’t have just been a mistake. It had to be deliberate.”
The graduate students then faced a difficult decision — whether to report Goodwin to the university, knowing that, if they were wrong, it would ruin their relationship with their mentor and boss, and if they were right, it would destroy the research they’d been conducting for years.“We had a lot of discussion about what to do,” says Allen. “A lot of discussion. We were grappling with a big decision, and some people were afraid that they’d have to start over.”Eventually, however, the students came to a unanimous decision. “When we looked at it, though, there wasn’t really a choice,” says Hubert. “We wanted to believe [Goodwin]. We felt she was trying to do good for the lab. But we had to report it.”In December, they informed Mike Culbertson, chair of the genetics department. He reported the allegations to Mellon, and Mellon asked Irwin Goldman from CALS and Paul DeLuca, an associate dean of the School of Medicine and Public Health, to begin an informal inquiry to determine if there was any merit to the students’ allegations.
“We met with the students and with the professor, and we looked at the grant proposal and the data provided by the students, and it seemed clear that there was some attempt at deception,” says Goldman. “Betsy was giving one set of numbers to NIH [National Institutes of Health] and another to the students. This was clearly not a frivolous accusation.”While Goldman and DeLuca were gathering information, the lab environment was deteriorating. “We didn’t really know what was going on,” says Hubert. “We had spoken with the investigators, but were asked not to speak about Betsy to anyone else. At the same time, she was free to defend herself, and we had the feeling that she was bad-mouthing us around the department, saying that we were making mountains out of molehills and that we were out to get her. For a while, we got the feeling that we were the ones who were in the wrong.”As the situation progressed, the students felt increasingly betrayed and isolated. “It’s like there were two Betsys,” says Hubert. “The one who was my friend and who was so helpful, and then the one who had done this thing on her application. I couldn’t believe they were the same person. I still can’t.”
Goldman and DeLuca issued their recommendation to Mellon, reporting their opinion that the students’ charges had merit. Mellon then referred the matter to a formal investigative committee. And just as they began their work, Goodwin resigned. The committee finished its work a month later, concluding in a report to the Office of the Chancellor that Goodwin was guilty of the charges the students had leveled. The UW submitted its report to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, and returned what remained of her grant money.Within a few weeks, news about the misconduct spread through both the local and the scientific community, as major stories appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal and in the journal Science.“Once the report was delivered, I think it was clear that we’d been in the right,” Hubert says.But if they were vindicated, they were hardly safe. In reporting their mentor’s misconduct, they’d endangered their own careers as well.
Heroes
For Irwin Goldman, the key to the Goodwin affair isn’t ultimately what happens to Goodwin, but rather what happens to her former students. Hubert and her colleagues, he says, “displayed professional heroism. They put their careers at great personal risk for the sake of scientific integrity. That’s exactly the kind of people we want to attract into the sciences. These students risked a lot for the truth. They didn’t deserve to suffer for the actions of their mentor.”And yet when the students decided to come forward, it seemed likely that they would be punished nearly as severely as Goodwin. When she resigned and the university forfeited her funding, her lab closed down. That meant the students were out of work — no salaries, no tuition reimbursement, and perhaps worst of all, no research. That would mean no progress on their degrees, and possibly starting over. That, Goldman feels, is a poor reward for honesty.Unlike undergrads, graduate students are often more like apprentice academics, breaking into careers in science and research. Many parts of the university, including the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, where Goldman works, are dependent upon them for carrying out research. Protecting these students from dishonest faculty isn’t just an issue of justice, he maintains; it’s a matter of the UW’s self-interest.“We have almost a thousand graduate students in this college alone,” he says. “We try to get the best students to want to spend five or more years here. And if we want to attract and keep them, we have to care about them and their vulnerability.”
So Goldman convinced his colleagues within CALS to guarantee that Goodwin’s students would receive funding for at least the remainder of the semester, and he began looking for avenues through which they could continue their studies. For Hubert, who was far advanced in her work, he found a home in the lab of Phil Anderson. Another student, Jacqueline Baca, who was nearer the beginning of her work, was also placed in a different lab. But the others, facing the realization that they would have to start over, left the UW. Allen left Madison to study worms under Tom Blumenthal at the University of Colorado-Boulder; Ly and La Martina found laboratory jobs in other states; and Padilla departed for law school.“We can’t give [students] back the time that they lose,” says Bill Mellon, “but we can try to protect them from financial disaster.”That’s what Goldman set out to do. After Goodwin resigned, he began work drafting a policy for CALS that would protect graduate students in the event of scientific misconduct by their mentors. It demands that the college “use its best effort to secure funding for CALS graduate students, including Research Assistants, Fellows, and Trainees, and research associates whose positions and funding may be jeopardized by his/her good faith disclosure of scientific misconduct.” Adopted last year, the policy “is the only one I know of in the country,” says Goldman, and it’s since become a model for a university-wide attempt to improve the grad-student safety net.
“If there’s a hero in all this, it’s Irwin,” says Anderson. “He not only did everything he could to do right by Betsy’s students, but he also pushed the rest of us to try to do right by them.”Still, there’s only so much that a college can do to protect its students from faculty upheaval. The policy only covers scientific misconduct, not any of the other ways that a professor might depart — death, for example, or by taking a position at another university or in government or industry. In those cases, the students are still left to scramble.“It’s depressing,” says Goldman, “and perhaps it’s a flaw in the university system that’s developed over the last hundred and fifty years. But we’re doing our best to protect these students, because they’re the future of science.”
Competition at the Mall
The root of all science may be, as that plaque outside Bascom Hall suggests, the spirit of untrammeled inquiry, but the fundamental basis of research in today’s world is money — in particular, grant money. This is what creates the temptation toward misconduct, and what makes protecting graduate students so difficult. Phil Anderson knows this well. In November 2007, he was going through the renewal application process for the one grant that keeps his lab running — a process that had consumed nearly all his time for more than two and a half months. The good news, he says, is that the application was finished; the bad news is that it was two weeks late, which, fortunately, the reviewers at the National Institutes of Health didn’t hold against him.A committee of perhaps thirty NIH scientists will judge that application, though it’s likely that only a couple will examine it closely. Though the committee members are competent researchers in their own right, the highly specialized nature of modern studies makes it unlikely that any of them will be as well versed in Anderson’s area of research as he is. That’s what creates the opportunity to falsify data on an application.“I’ve thought about Betsy a lot through this process,” he says. “What she did, I believe, happened because of the extreme pressure we’re all under to find funding.”
According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), UW-Madison is now the American university with the second-highest total of extramural research grant money — $905 million a year, when it’s all added up from every school, college, and department. That’s an average of $440,000 per faculty member, with some 90 percent of that money in the science and engineering fields. While that may seem like a lot of money, a great many things depend upon those grants, and the pressure to get them is severe. Take, for example, Anderson’s lab. The grant he’s applying for, an extension of the one that has funded his research for the last fourteen years, is worth $1.8 million during a four-year span. The university takes a share of this — some 48.5 percent — as overhead, what it calls facilities and administrative (F&A) costs. The rest, then, must pay for supplies: computers and microscopes and slides, not to mention C. elegans worms and the means to keep them alive and breeding. And it must pay for everyone who works in Anderson’s lab — his one assistant and three graduate students, covering their salaries and tuition reimbursements, and their own research, which will aid Anderson’s, but will also serve as the basis for the dissertations and other publications that will launch their academic careers.Should Anderson’s grant application fail, his salary will continue, but everything in the lab will shut down — the students and assistant will be laid off, the research halted, the worms discarded.“All of these things are paid for from outside sources,” he says. “In a way, the university is sort of like a big mall, and we’re all independent shops. We’ve got to come up with our own funding if we want to keep operating.”
But the competition is fierce and getting fiercer. There is a continual stream of new researchers — UW-Madison graduated 648 PhDs in 2005–06 alone — many of whom will seek funding for studies, and, as Anderson says, “you don’t get money for filling in the gaps; you have to be a pioneer” to be certain of winning a grant.In 2000, about one in every three applications for a grant from either NSF or NIH was successful. By 2007, that fraction had dropped to one in five. “For the most part, those are good scientists,” says Anderson. “They want to expand knowledge, and for most of them, there’s only one source of funding — the federal government. When they’re turned down, there’s no place else to go.”And that’s where the difficulty comes in for protecting graduate student whistle-blowers. It’s one thing for the university to guarantee that their funding won’t be eliminated should their professor be guilty of malpractice; it’s another to find the dollars to replace that funding once it’s lost. As he looks at pushing to make Irwin Goldman’s CALS plan a university-wide policy, Bill Mellon realizes that it will need more than morality. It will need money.“We’ll probably have to set up some sort of misconduct relief fund,” he says. “Fortunately, this sort of thing is very rare. But we’ll have to be prepared.”Such preparation is necessary, because the pressure to win extramural funding is so strong. Anderson believes that Goodwin is hardly the only scientist guilty of exaggerating to win a grant.“We’re all guilty of marketing ourselves, of casting our research in the light that makes it seem the most certain and revolutionary,” he says. “But the cardinal sin of science is misrepresenting one’s data. Openness, honesty, and fidelity to our data — those are what make science work.”
Forward
Two years after Elizabeth Goodwin’s resignation, her lab is still empty. It produces no income for the university, nor any research or educational benefits.Phil Anderson is still waiting to hear from the National Institutes of Health as to whether they’ll confirm his grant. His students’ futures — not to mention his own career advancement, and his research into nematode genetics — depend on the NIH’s answer. Irwin Goldman’s graduate student protection plan is likely to become university-wide policy this spring. “Morally, no one has any objections to it,” Bill Mellon says. “There may be a few tweaks here and there, but I expect it to pass this March.”At the same time, Mellon, who must shepherd the policy through approval by the faculty senate, has had his own grants to renew — his application for funding to study hormone action and vitamin D was due in February.And once Amy Hubert successfully defends her dissertation, she will walk across the stage and trade her nematodes for a sheepskin. According to Allen, Hubert is “a natural teacher,” and so she plans to take her career out of Madison and into someplace with less emphasis on lab results.“I’m hoping to get a position at a small college, where I can focus on teaching more than research,” Hubert says. “I’d still like to have my own lab, but I want to spend my time teaching and actually being in a lab, rather than holed up in an office writing grants. I don’t want that to be my whole job.”
John Allen is senior editor for On Wisconsin.
Peter
Can of Worms
The UW’s worst scientific scandal in decades exposes the ways that external funding has increased the vulnerability of two of the university’s most valuable assets — its integrity and its graduate students.
By John Allen
On September 20, 2006, Irwin Goldman received an e-mail with good news — “exceptional news,” he wrote at the time — he’d never expected to hear, at least not from anyone at UW-Madison. Graduate student Amy Hubert PhDx’08 had made a breakthrough in her research, successfully identifying the piece of DNA in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans that corresponds with a gene called laf-1.Laf-1 is important in sex determination among nematodes, which are typically hermaphroditic. Those that have a single laf-1 gene mutation develop as females. Those that have two die — thus “laf,” which stands for “lethal and feminizing.”No one ever said a worm’s life is easy.But, then, neither is a graduate student’s, and Amy Hubert’s has been harder than most.
Seven months earlier, she was working and studying in the lab of Elizabeth Goodwin, then a leading researcher in C. elegans genetics, when Goodwin was accused of scientific misconduct — essentially of misrepresenting her work in an application for federal funding. It was one of the most serious scandals in UW science, and even today, those connected to it are reluctant to talk about it. The university launched an investigation, and Goodwin soon resigned. UW-Madison had to give up thousands of grant dollars and still faces the possibility of sanction by the federal government.
The chief evidence against Goodwin came from Hubert and her graduate student colleagues, and the aftermath of the scandal has taken nearly as heavy a toll on them as it did on Goodwin. Of the seven people working in her lab — six graduate students and one research specialist — five are no longer at UW-Madison. Hubert hopes to complete her doctorate soon, which would make her the first member of the lab to do so.Her success may illustrate her academic skill, but the fact that she’s the only one from that team nearing graduation to date shows something else: the vulnerable position in which graduate students find themselves in the modern scientific world of grant-based research. Wholly dependent upon their faculty mentors for educational, financial, and career support, grad students lead a perilous life. And the increasingly competitive struggle among professors to win research grants only makes that peril more acute.
Chasing Phantoms
C. elegans is a model organism, one of a handful of species that scientists study closely to learn about general biological principles. There are a few others: several bacteria and yeasts, Arabidopsis plants, fruit flies, zebra fish, rats, and mice. Nematodes are useful as a model organism because they’re among the simplest creatures to possess a nervous system, they can be frozen and thawed without damaging their viability, and they reproduce rapidly — even more quickly than fruit flies. Nobel Prize-winner Sydney Brenner pioneered studies of C. elegans in the 1970s, making it a relatively recent entry into the roster of model species. As a result, says CALS associate dean Irwin Goldman PhD’91, “the C. elegans community is still relatively small and tight-knit.”That closeness is highlighted at WormBase, an online database that keeps records of the researchers who are working on C. elegans, cross-referencing mentors to protégés. Sydney Brenner, for instance, is listed as WB (WormBase) Person77. He was the mentor for David Hirsh, WBPerson259, a professor at Columbia who mentored Judith Kimble, WBPerson320. A biochemistry professor at UW-Madison, Kimble supervised Elizabeth Goodwin, WBPerson213, when she was a postdoctoral fellow. And Goodwin was the mentor to WBPerson3474, Amy Hubert.Hubert came to UW-Madison in 2001 from the north-central Kansas town of Concordia. Like many graduate students, she’d earned her previous degree elsewhere — a bachelor’s at the University of Kansas. She’d been attracted to the UW by its reputation as a leader in genetics, but she didn’t join Goodwin’s lab until spring 2002.“I liked Betsy [Goodwin] as an adviser,” Hubert says. “She was very friendly, very hands-on, always checking in with us about how our work was going.”
Goodwin was then one of the rising stars of the UW’s genetics department. “She was an extremely good citizen,” says Phil Anderson, another C. elegans expert (WBPerson21) and a professor of genetics. “She did more than her fair share of committee work, and she was very involved socially. She entertained prospective graduate students and helped recruit new faculty. She brought a genuine sense of joy to working here.”Goodwin’s lab was then one of only two or three in the world that were doing such advanced research into sex determination among nematodes, aiming to shed light on the importance of sexual reproduction in evolution. She was developing a hypothesis that laf-1 affected sex determination in C. elegans because it encoded a strand of “small RNA” — ribonucleic acid — instead of a conventional protein, which most genes encode. Such a discovery would have been a major coup, had she been able to prove it.“Within the last five or ten years,” says Anderson, “small RNAs have become very fashionable in research. There’s been a lot of exciting progress around small RNAs, and there’s a lot of mystery there.”But Hubert quickly lost conviction that Goodwin’s small RNA hypothesis was the right track. “When I first joined the lab,” she says, “I was getting the same results that Betsy and the others were. But I began to see that the laf-1 mutants weren’t all matching the prediction. Some of the results were just — well, they weren’t all that strong.”
While Goodwin continued to pursue the small RNA hypothesis, Hubert turned to more traditional approaches. She decided to revisit the question of laf-1’s identity by continuing to map its location in the C. elegans genome. “And the more mapping I did, the more it showed me that laf-1 was in a different spot from where everyone else [in the lab] was looking.”“Amy’s a real geneticist, while the rest of us were molecular biologists,” says one of her former lab partners, Mary Allen MS’06. “She was willing to take a long time and go back through the laf-1 work from the beginning, redoing the experiments and looking for inconsistencies. She was willing to go through the tedious process of looking at each generation of worms to see the phenotypes. I can remember her spending up to twelve hours in the lab, even on Saturdays. It was a lot of hard work, and a lot of time, but it paid off for her.”It was this difference of opinion that ultimately saved Hubert’s career at the UW. When the Goodwin affair blew up at the beginning of 2006, Hubert’s colleagues, whose work had all been intertwined with Goodwin’s search for small RNA, saw their years of labor vanish.“The project that Betsy was so committed to turned out to be a phantom,” says Anderson. “Laf-1 does not encode small RNA. And because that was a phantom, it wasn’t producing results, and it never would. The students who were chasing this phantom, they weren’t making any progress. Amy had the foresight — almost from when she first joined the lab — she had the good sense to challenge Betsy on this. She went back to the tried-and-true methods of mapping the DNA. Because of that, she was able to survive Betsy’s departure. That’s why she was able to make her breakthrough.”
Trying to Do Good
The Goodwin affair became public on February 23, 2006, when Goodwin resigned from the UW, bringing to a close three months of tension and quiet recriminations that had infected the members of her lab. She slipped quietly out of town and hasn’t spoken publicly about the allegations since, leaving her lawyers to respond to the charges. But her departure didn’t bring the affair to a close. In many ways, the difficulties were just beginning.The misconduct allegations leveled against Goodwin were, according to Bill Mellon, associate dean of the graduate school and head of the UW’s research compliance, among the most serious he’s heard in his twenty-nine years at UW-Madison, and certainly the most serious involving a tenure-track faculty member. But the university couldn’t just drop the issue upon Goodwin’s departure.“We had an obligation to investigate the charges,” says Mellon. “There were at least two federal grant applications involved, a renewal and an application for new funding, and we have to show the government that we’re serious about our honesty and the honesty of our scientists. So we had to carry out a long and detailed process — and I must say, Professor Goodwin’s absence made the process all the more difficult.”
Without Goodwin to answer the charges or explain her actions, investigators have struggled to determine just how far the damage goes. Mellon is confident that Goodwin wasn’t guilty of fraud — “she used the federal money to run the experiments she said she was going to run,” he says — and so far, no one has challenged the validity of the articles Goodwin has published. But the university had to report its findings to the federal government, and it hasn’t yet heard what the government’s Office of Research Integrity has to say about the Goodwin case.Still, if the process has been difficult for the university, it’s been even harder on Goodwin’s former students.At the time of the allegations, Goodwin’s lab employed six graduate students — Hubert, Allen, Garett Padilla MS’06, Chantal Ly MS’06, Sarah La Martina ’00, MS’06, and Jacqueline Baca — and one research specialist, Maya Fuerstenau ’04. In November 2005, Padilla discovered a discrepancy in the data that Goodwin was reporting in her grant renewal application. The application made it appear that the lab was producing favorable results, when in fact the data were incomplete, inconclusive, or worse. He brought this to the attention of his colleagues and to Goodwin.“At first, all we saw was that the data were wrong in one figure on one of the grants,” says Hubert. “After Garett talked to Betsy about it, she told him it was just a mistake, that the data had been placeholders. But the more we looked, the more we saw that seemed wrong. She was saying some experiments had been done that hadn’t been, and the figures that were being used to illustrate her results weren’t the correct figures. The conclusions she gave, in some cases, weren’t correct. Things had been relabeled, and we concluded that it couldn’t have just been a mistake. It had to be deliberate.”
The graduate students then faced a difficult decision — whether to report Goodwin to the university, knowing that, if they were wrong, it would ruin their relationship with their mentor and boss, and if they were right, it would destroy the research they’d been conducting for years.“We had a lot of discussion about what to do,” says Allen. “A lot of discussion. We were grappling with a big decision, and some people were afraid that they’d have to start over.”Eventually, however, the students came to a unanimous decision. “When we looked at it, though, there wasn’t really a choice,” says Hubert. “We wanted to believe [Goodwin]. We felt she was trying to do good for the lab. But we had to report it.”In December, they informed Mike Culbertson, chair of the genetics department. He reported the allegations to Mellon, and Mellon asked Irwin Goldman from CALS and Paul DeLuca, an associate dean of the School of Medicine and Public Health, to begin an informal inquiry to determine if there was any merit to the students’ allegations.
“We met with the students and with the professor, and we looked at the grant proposal and the data provided by the students, and it seemed clear that there was some attempt at deception,” says Goldman. “Betsy was giving one set of numbers to NIH [National Institutes of Health] and another to the students. This was clearly not a frivolous accusation.”While Goldman and DeLuca were gathering information, the lab environment was deteriorating. “We didn’t really know what was going on,” says Hubert. “We had spoken with the investigators, but were asked not to speak about Betsy to anyone else. At the same time, she was free to defend herself, and we had the feeling that she was bad-mouthing us around the department, saying that we were making mountains out of molehills and that we were out to get her. For a while, we got the feeling that we were the ones who were in the wrong.”As the situation progressed, the students felt increasingly betrayed and isolated. “It’s like there were two Betsys,” says Hubert. “The one who was my friend and who was so helpful, and then the one who had done this thing on her application. I couldn’t believe they were the same person. I still can’t.”
Goldman and DeLuca issued their recommendation to Mellon, reporting their opinion that the students’ charges had merit. Mellon then referred the matter to a formal investigative committee. And just as they began their work, Goodwin resigned. The committee finished its work a month later, concluding in a report to the Office of the Chancellor that Goodwin was guilty of the charges the students had leveled. The UW submitted its report to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, and returned what remained of her grant money.Within a few weeks, news about the misconduct spread through both the local and the scientific community, as major stories appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal and in the journal Science.“Once the report was delivered, I think it was clear that we’d been in the right,” Hubert says.But if they were vindicated, they were hardly safe. In reporting their mentor’s misconduct, they’d endangered their own careers as well.
Heroes
For Irwin Goldman, the key to the Goodwin affair isn’t ultimately what happens to Goodwin, but rather what happens to her former students. Hubert and her colleagues, he says, “displayed professional heroism. They put their careers at great personal risk for the sake of scientific integrity. That’s exactly the kind of people we want to attract into the sciences. These students risked a lot for the truth. They didn’t deserve to suffer for the actions of their mentor.”And yet when the students decided to come forward, it seemed likely that they would be punished nearly as severely as Goodwin. When she resigned and the university forfeited her funding, her lab closed down. That meant the students were out of work — no salaries, no tuition reimbursement, and perhaps worst of all, no research. That would mean no progress on their degrees, and possibly starting over. That, Goldman feels, is a poor reward for honesty.Unlike undergrads, graduate students are often more like apprentice academics, breaking into careers in science and research. Many parts of the university, including the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, where Goldman works, are dependent upon them for carrying out research. Protecting these students from dishonest faculty isn’t just an issue of justice, he maintains; it’s a matter of the UW’s self-interest.“We have almost a thousand graduate students in this college alone,” he says. “We try to get the best students to want to spend five or more years here. And if we want to attract and keep them, we have to care about them and their vulnerability.”
So Goldman convinced his colleagues within CALS to guarantee that Goodwin’s students would receive funding for at least the remainder of the semester, and he began looking for avenues through which they could continue their studies. For Hubert, who was far advanced in her work, he found a home in the lab of Phil Anderson. Another student, Jacqueline Baca, who was nearer the beginning of her work, was also placed in a different lab. But the others, facing the realization that they would have to start over, left the UW. Allen left Madison to study worms under Tom Blumenthal at the University of Colorado-Boulder; Ly and La Martina found laboratory jobs in other states; and Padilla departed for law school.“We can’t give [students] back the time that they lose,” says Bill Mellon, “but we can try to protect them from financial disaster.”That’s what Goldman set out to do. After Goodwin resigned, he began work drafting a policy for CALS that would protect graduate students in the event of scientific misconduct by their mentors. It demands that the college “use its best effort to secure funding for CALS graduate students, including Research Assistants, Fellows, and Trainees, and research associates whose positions and funding may be jeopardized by his/her good faith disclosure of scientific misconduct.” Adopted last year, the policy “is the only one I know of in the country,” says Goldman, and it’s since become a model for a university-wide attempt to improve the grad-student safety net.
“If there’s a hero in all this, it’s Irwin,” says Anderson. “He not only did everything he could to do right by Betsy’s students, but he also pushed the rest of us to try to do right by them.”Still, there’s only so much that a college can do to protect its students from faculty upheaval. The policy only covers scientific misconduct, not any of the other ways that a professor might depart — death, for example, or by taking a position at another university or in government or industry. In those cases, the students are still left to scramble.“It’s depressing,” says Goldman, “and perhaps it’s a flaw in the university system that’s developed over the last hundred and fifty years. But we’re doing our best to protect these students, because they’re the future of science.”
Competition at the Mall
The root of all science may be, as that plaque outside Bascom Hall suggests, the spirit of untrammeled inquiry, but the fundamental basis of research in today’s world is money — in particular, grant money. This is what creates the temptation toward misconduct, and what makes protecting graduate students so difficult. Phil Anderson knows this well. In November 2007, he was going through the renewal application process for the one grant that keeps his lab running — a process that had consumed nearly all his time for more than two and a half months. The good news, he says, is that the application was finished; the bad news is that it was two weeks late, which, fortunately, the reviewers at the National Institutes of Health didn’t hold against him.A committee of perhaps thirty NIH scientists will judge that application, though it’s likely that only a couple will examine it closely. Though the committee members are competent researchers in their own right, the highly specialized nature of modern studies makes it unlikely that any of them will be as well versed in Anderson’s area of research as he is. That’s what creates the opportunity to falsify data on an application.“I’ve thought about Betsy a lot through this process,” he says. “What she did, I believe, happened because of the extreme pressure we’re all under to find funding.”
According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), UW-Madison is now the American university with the second-highest total of extramural research grant money — $905 million a year, when it’s all added up from every school, college, and department. That’s an average of $440,000 per faculty member, with some 90 percent of that money in the science and engineering fields. While that may seem like a lot of money, a great many things depend upon those grants, and the pressure to get them is severe. Take, for example, Anderson’s lab. The grant he’s applying for, an extension of the one that has funded his research for the last fourteen years, is worth $1.8 million during a four-year span. The university takes a share of this — some 48.5 percent — as overhead, what it calls facilities and administrative (F&A) costs. The rest, then, must pay for supplies: computers and microscopes and slides, not to mention C. elegans worms and the means to keep them alive and breeding. And it must pay for everyone who works in Anderson’s lab — his one assistant and three graduate students, covering their salaries and tuition reimbursements, and their own research, which will aid Anderson’s, but will also serve as the basis for the dissertations and other publications that will launch their academic careers.Should Anderson’s grant application fail, his salary will continue, but everything in the lab will shut down — the students and assistant will be laid off, the research halted, the worms discarded.“All of these things are paid for from outside sources,” he says. “In a way, the university is sort of like a big mall, and we’re all independent shops. We’ve got to come up with our own funding if we want to keep operating.”
But the competition is fierce and getting fiercer. There is a continual stream of new researchers — UW-Madison graduated 648 PhDs in 2005–06 alone — many of whom will seek funding for studies, and, as Anderson says, “you don’t get money for filling in the gaps; you have to be a pioneer” to be certain of winning a grant.In 2000, about one in every three applications for a grant from either NSF or NIH was successful. By 2007, that fraction had dropped to one in five. “For the most part, those are good scientists,” says Anderson. “They want to expand knowledge, and for most of them, there’s only one source of funding — the federal government. When they’re turned down, there’s no place else to go.”And that’s where the difficulty comes in for protecting graduate student whistle-blowers. It’s one thing for the university to guarantee that their funding won’t be eliminated should their professor be guilty of malpractice; it’s another to find the dollars to replace that funding once it’s lost. As he looks at pushing to make Irwin Goldman’s CALS plan a university-wide policy, Bill Mellon realizes that it will need more than morality. It will need money.“We’ll probably have to set up some sort of misconduct relief fund,” he says. “Fortunately, this sort of thing is very rare. But we’ll have to be prepared.”Such preparation is necessary, because the pressure to win extramural funding is so strong. Anderson believes that Goodwin is hardly the only scientist guilty of exaggerating to win a grant.“We’re all guilty of marketing ourselves, of casting our research in the light that makes it seem the most certain and revolutionary,” he says. “But the cardinal sin of science is misrepresenting one’s data. Openness, honesty, and fidelity to our data — those are what make science work.”
Forward
Two years after Elizabeth Goodwin’s resignation, her lab is still empty. It produces no income for the university, nor any research or educational benefits.Phil Anderson is still waiting to hear from the National Institutes of Health as to whether they’ll confirm his grant. His students’ futures — not to mention his own career advancement, and his research into nematode genetics — depend on the NIH’s answer. Irwin Goldman’s graduate student protection plan is likely to become university-wide policy this spring. “Morally, no one has any objections to it,” Bill Mellon says. “There may be a few tweaks here and there, but I expect it to pass this March.”At the same time, Mellon, who must shepherd the policy through approval by the faculty senate, has had his own grants to renew — his application for funding to study hormone action and vitamin D was due in February.And once Amy Hubert successfully defends her dissertation, she will walk across the stage and trade her nematodes for a sheepskin. According to Allen, Hubert is “a natural teacher,” and so she plans to take her career out of Madison and into someplace with less emphasis on lab results.“I’m hoping to get a position at a small college, where I can focus on teaching more than research,” Hubert says. “I’d still like to have my own lab, but I want to spend my time teaching and actually being in a lab, rather than holed up in an office writing grants. I don’t want that to be my whole job.”
John Allen is senior editor for On Wisconsin.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Global Warming Science Consensus? Not At All
At some point it seems the only scientists who will remain believers in man-caused global warming will be those who make their living promoting the concept. What will it take for politicians salivating over the opportunity to raise tax revenue from "carbon emissions" to realize they are wrong? When will the public wake up to the hoax that is man-caused global warming, and let their political leaders know they are not buying into the scam? Let us hope it is soon, before even more harm is done.
Peter
AND FINALLY: HOW MANY SCIENTISTS DOES IT TAKE TO OVERTURN A SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS?
Financial Post, 17 May 2008
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/17/32-000-deniers.aspx
By Lawrence Solomon
Question: How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming? The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming. The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as - and was - the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations - virtually every nation in the world - including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world's environmental groups came too - they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action."
To a scientist in search of truth, 47 is an impressive number, especially if those 47 dissenters include many of the world's most eminent scientists. To the environmentalists, politicians, press at Rio, their own overwhelming numbers made the 47 seem irrelevant.Knowing this, a larger petition effort was undertaken, known as the Heidelberg Appeal, and released to the public at the Earth Summit. By the summit's end, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal. These scientists - mere hundreds - also mattered for nought in the face of the tens of thousands assembled at Rio. The Heidelberg Appeal was blown away and never obtained prominence, even though the organizers persisted over the years to ultimately obtain some 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners.
The earnest effort to demonstrate the absence of a consensus continued with the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change - an attempt to counter the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Its 150-odd signatories also counted for nought. As did the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in 2000, signed by more than 1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the world's poor.
Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because "increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
"The petition drew media attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focussed on presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization to discredit the petition and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be phony - such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer in a TV series - were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialled.
Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Oregon petition was blown away. But now it is blowing back. Original signatories to the petition and others, outraged at Kyoto's corruption of science, wrote to the Oregon Institute and its director, Arthur Robinson, asking that the petition be brought back. "E-mails started coming in every day," he explained. "And they kept coming. " The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends. "We decided to do the survey again."Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who's who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity.
The response rate was extraordinary, "much, much higher than anyone expected, much higher than you'd ordinarily expect," he explained. He's processed more than 31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000 or so to go - most of them are already posted on a Web site at petitionproject.org. Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against global warming alarmism? "I hope the general public will become aware that there is no consensus on global warming," he says, "and I hope that scientists who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren't alone."At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn't be done by poll, he explains. "The numbers shouldn't matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them."
Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists that descended on Rio in 1992.Is this enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming? The press conference releasing these names occurs on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington.
Copyright 2008, Financial Post
Peter
AND FINALLY: HOW MANY SCIENTISTS DOES IT TAKE TO OVERTURN A SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS?
Financial Post, 17 May 2008
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/17/32-000-deniers.aspx
By Lawrence Solomon
Question: How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming? The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming. The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as - and was - the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations - virtually every nation in the world - including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world's environmental groups came too - they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action."
To a scientist in search of truth, 47 is an impressive number, especially if those 47 dissenters include many of the world's most eminent scientists. To the environmentalists, politicians, press at Rio, their own overwhelming numbers made the 47 seem irrelevant.Knowing this, a larger petition effort was undertaken, known as the Heidelberg Appeal, and released to the public at the Earth Summit. By the summit's end, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal. These scientists - mere hundreds - also mattered for nought in the face of the tens of thousands assembled at Rio. The Heidelberg Appeal was blown away and never obtained prominence, even though the organizers persisted over the years to ultimately obtain some 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners.
The earnest effort to demonstrate the absence of a consensus continued with the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change - an attempt to counter the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Its 150-odd signatories also counted for nought. As did the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in 2000, signed by more than 1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the world's poor.
Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because "increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.
"The petition drew media attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focussed on presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization to discredit the petition and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be phony - such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer in a TV series - were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialled.
Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Oregon petition was blown away. But now it is blowing back. Original signatories to the petition and others, outraged at Kyoto's corruption of science, wrote to the Oregon Institute and its director, Arthur Robinson, asking that the petition be brought back. "E-mails started coming in every day," he explained. "And they kept coming. " The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends. "We decided to do the survey again."Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who's who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity.
The response rate was extraordinary, "much, much higher than anyone expected, much higher than you'd ordinarily expect," he explained. He's processed more than 31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000 or so to go - most of them are already posted on a Web site at petitionproject.org. Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against global warming alarmism? "I hope the general public will become aware that there is no consensus on global warming," he says, "and I hope that scientists who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren't alone."At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn't be done by poll, he explains. "The numbers shouldn't matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them."
Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists that descended on Rio in 1992.Is this enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming? The press conference releasing these names occurs on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington.
Copyright 2008, Financial Post
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
What Is Meant By Truth And Science?
Time saving truth from falsehood and envy. (Francois Lemoyne, 1737)What do we mean by truth and science? Here is how wikipedia defines it:
"Science (from the Latin scientia, 'knowledge'), is the effort to understand, or to understand better, how nature works, with observable physical evidence as the basis of that understanding. It is done through observation of phenomena, and/or through experimentation that tries to simulate events under controlled conditions. It incorporates the philosophies of naturalism and employs reasoning.
In its most fundamental sense, modern science is a process by which we try to understand how the physical world works and how it came to be that way."
In its most fundamental sense, modern science is a process by which we try to understand how the physical world works and how it came to be that way."
AND
The meaning of the word truth extends from honesty, good faith, and sincerity in general, to agreement with fact or reality in particular.[1]
Prominent Scientist Says Climate "Forecasts Are Political, Not Scientific"
The following is an essay by a very prominent biological Professor, Scientist, and author, Dr. Daniel Botkin. Note that he is not a "climatologist", or a meteorologist, but he has studied, observed, and reported on life in many forms and how it responds to climate change. He explains how and why he is disturbed and highly skeptical of how modern computer climate models are being used for political purposes, to influence and control public behavior. He is concerned about science being mis-used, and he is worried about how this will impact society.
I wish he would express his distaste for the hype and hysteria surrounding the man-caused global warming issue more strongly, but even someone with his impeccable credentials apparently dare not rock the boat too much. Heaven forbid, he might be labelled a "denier".
Peter
Daniel Botkin has been a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1979. Currently Dan is Professor Emeritus, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Called one of the one of the preeminent ecologists of the 20th century.” (see http://egj.lib.uidaho.edu/egj19/short1.html ). he has been on the faculty of UCSB since 1979; for six years he was chairman of the University’s Environmental Studies Program. He is also President and Founder of The Center for the Study of the Environment, A Non-Profit Research and Educational Corporation.
Source:http://www.danielbbotkin.com/archives/category/global-warming-and-life
Science and soothsaying
Published originally in the International Herald TribuneDecember 28, 2007
by Daniel B. Botkin
NEW YORK:
Now that the Bali conference is over and climate scientists have warned us again about the dire predictions of their climate models, a question remains: Will their forecasts come true? Given the current international focus on global warming, you would think that, in 10, 15 or 20 years, many people will want to know whether today’s predictions proved accurate.
But, in fact, people rarely look back to see if their old forecasts were on the mark. Foretelling the future has always been difficult and almost always wrong. Charles Mackay, in his wonderful 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” observes that the so-called necromancers of earlier centuries who purported to divine the future were grouped with the worst alchemists. Today, however, computers seem to have undermined our natural skepticism. Many of us put our faith in complex software that most of us cannot understand.
My own experience makes me skeptical of how environmental forecasting is being used. In 1991, several colleagues and I drew national and international attention when we used a computer model to forecast possible effects of global warming on an endangered species. Our computer program forecast that the Kirtland’s warbler, the first songbird in America ever subjected to a complete census, would likely face extinction by 2010. Its habitat, jack pine trees, would be unable to thrive in conditions that climate computer programs forecast for southern Michigan, the only place and only trees where the bird nested.
The computer told us these declines should be measurable even in the year we made the forecast. We suggested that measurements of jack pine growth be started to verify the forecasts and to see whether the potential effects of global warming on the diversity of life were actually occurring. People could have started going to southern Michigan to check out our forecasts 16 years ago. Nobody did. I tried to get funding to do this, but no government agency or private foundation was interested.
Even today, amid the furor over global warming, no one is rushing out to verify that it does indeed threaten the Michigan jack pine. (But, happily, independent action by the government, the Audubon Society and private individuals has brought the Kirtland’s warbler back from the brink of extinction.)
What could explain the lack of interest in verifying a dated computer forecast? After all, computer forecasts are the basis for the current alarm. Did people perhaps decide that a 16-year-old forecast had to have been based on inferior methods?
But wait a minute. Given the usual progress of science, won’t forecasting methods in the future always be better than in the past? What this suggests is that today the primary uses of, and interest in, such forecasts are political, not scientific - that scientists as well as politicians are using forecasts for political and ideological purposes to influence public behavior here and now.
The question is not really whether the forecasts are scientifically valid, but how much impetus they can provide to influence society.
It wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s, when research into global warming was just beginning, it seemed impossible that people could change the global environment; the Earth was just too big. Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, considered the possibility in detail in the mid-19th century and decided it was impossible because the mass of living things amounted to less than a drop in the bucket compared to the weight of all the materials in the oceans, atmosphere, soil and rocks.
In the 1970s, however, scientists began to realize that life had in fact greatly changed the Earth’s environment, starting more than a billion years ago. At the same time, evidence was building that burning fossil fuels was increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. In 1957, Charles Keeling began the first continuous measurements to study carbon-dioxide change over time at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. By 1973, he reported at a landmark conference at Brookhaven National Laboratory on “Carbon and the Biosphere” that carbon dioxide showed a definite increase in 15 years, consistent with releases from burning fossil fuels. For those of us working on these issues, the scientific and environmental implications were vast.
Global environmental change began to become a political issue in the 1980s. Climatologists and astrophysicists showed that a nuclear war could put so much dust in the air that disastrous cooling would occur, the infamous nuclear winter. With the end of the Cold War, the focus shifted to global warming. At that time, climatologists explained that their computer models were crude approximations of the real atmosphere and pushed the limit of computer technology, requiring months of computing for a single simulation. You could accept either the results of these crude models or the less-formal projections by the most experienced meteorologists. The primary focus continued to be on the implications of what we knew.
In 1988, in a move that marked a shift to the politicization of forecasts, Congress asked the Environmental Protection Agency to report on the potential effects of global warming. Computer forecasting became much more complex; output from the huge climate models became input into ecological models. My projection for the little warbler was part of that work. The attempt was to be more realistic, but the result was that forecasts became more difficult to verify and also more alarming, thus drawing more and more public attention.
Thinking over this history, I see three primary uses of environmental computer forecasts: to understand the implications of what we know (Can living things change the global environment?); to know the future; and to influence public behavior. Only the first can be strictly scientific. The third is wandering farther and farther away from science.
Since proving the validity of long-term forecasts is difficult and the ultimate tests would take years, and since many scientists are alarmed at the dire scenarios, my colleagues are beginning to talk about whether it is O.K. to exaggerate and push forecasts that are not currently provable if the only way to get societies to act is to frighten people. I think it is not O.K. It is a short-term view, and even if it works, it will inevitably debase science and scientists.
Soothsayers have always tried to persuade people that they could predict the future. What is new today is that the incredibly powerful tools of science - nuclear weapons, flights to the moon, computers, iPods - have such huge implications for civilization that they may contain the seeds of their own destruction.
Thirty years from now, we will probably not be interested in today’s specific computer forecasts, but we may have lost our faith in science, a deeper and, to me, a more important problem.
—————
Additional information about the Kirtland’s warbler forecast:
The scientific paper for the original forecast is:
Botkin, D. B., D. A. Woodby, and R. A. Nisbet, 1991, Kirtland’s Warbler Habitats: A Possible Early Indicator of Climatic Warming, Biological Conservation 56 (1): 63-78.
Those interested in the forecasting method can download the computer model of forest growth, JABOWA, from website www.naturestudy.org and play around with it. The software is pretty easy to use, and you can grow your own forest, log it, test it against various global warming climate regimes, etc. It isn’t as sophisticated a computer game as you can get today, but it is ecologically realistic and is used in research around the world.
And if you really want to get into the science part of this in depth, there are other scientific papers, including:
Botkin, D. B., and R. A. Nisbet, 1992, Forest response to climatic change: effects of parameter estimation and choice of weather patterns on the reliability of projections, Climatic Change 20: 87-111.
Botkin, D. B. and R. A. Nisbet, 1992, Projecting the effects of climate change on biological diversity in forests, pp. 277 - 293 in R. Peters and T. Lovejoy, (Eds.) Consequences of the Greenhouse Effect for Biological Diversity, Yale University Press, New Haven.
I wish he would express his distaste for the hype and hysteria surrounding the man-caused global warming issue more strongly, but even someone with his impeccable credentials apparently dare not rock the boat too much. Heaven forbid, he might be labelled a "denier".
Peter
Daniel Botkin has been a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1979. Currently Dan is Professor Emeritus, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Called one of the one of the preeminent ecologists of the 20th century.” (see http://egj.lib.uidaho.edu/egj19/short1.html ). he has been on the faculty of UCSB since 1979; for six years he was chairman of the University’s Environmental Studies Program. He is also President and Founder of The Center for the Study of the Environment, A Non-Profit Research and Educational Corporation.
Source:http://www.danielbbotkin.com/archives/category/global-warming-and-life
Science and soothsaying
Published originally in the International Herald TribuneDecember 28, 2007
by Daniel B. Botkin
NEW YORK:
Now that the Bali conference is over and climate scientists have warned us again about the dire predictions of their climate models, a question remains: Will their forecasts come true? Given the current international focus on global warming, you would think that, in 10, 15 or 20 years, many people will want to know whether today’s predictions proved accurate.
But, in fact, people rarely look back to see if their old forecasts were on the mark. Foretelling the future has always been difficult and almost always wrong. Charles Mackay, in his wonderful 1841 book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” observes that the so-called necromancers of earlier centuries who purported to divine the future were grouped with the worst alchemists. Today, however, computers seem to have undermined our natural skepticism. Many of us put our faith in complex software that most of us cannot understand.
My own experience makes me skeptical of how environmental forecasting is being used. In 1991, several colleagues and I drew national and international attention when we used a computer model to forecast possible effects of global warming on an endangered species. Our computer program forecast that the Kirtland’s warbler, the first songbird in America ever subjected to a complete census, would likely face extinction by 2010. Its habitat, jack pine trees, would be unable to thrive in conditions that climate computer programs forecast for southern Michigan, the only place and only trees where the bird nested.
The computer told us these declines should be measurable even in the year we made the forecast. We suggested that measurements of jack pine growth be started to verify the forecasts and to see whether the potential effects of global warming on the diversity of life were actually occurring. People could have started going to southern Michigan to check out our forecasts 16 years ago. Nobody did. I tried to get funding to do this, but no government agency or private foundation was interested.
Even today, amid the furor over global warming, no one is rushing out to verify that it does indeed threaten the Michigan jack pine. (But, happily, independent action by the government, the Audubon Society and private individuals has brought the Kirtland’s warbler back from the brink of extinction.)
What could explain the lack of interest in verifying a dated computer forecast? After all, computer forecasts are the basis for the current alarm. Did people perhaps decide that a 16-year-old forecast had to have been based on inferior methods?
But wait a minute. Given the usual progress of science, won’t forecasting methods in the future always be better than in the past? What this suggests is that today the primary uses of, and interest in, such forecasts are political, not scientific - that scientists as well as politicians are using forecasts for political and ideological purposes to influence public behavior here and now.
The question is not really whether the forecasts are scientifically valid, but how much impetus they can provide to influence society.
It wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s, when research into global warming was just beginning, it seemed impossible that people could change the global environment; the Earth was just too big. Charles Lyell, the father of modern geology, considered the possibility in detail in the mid-19th century and decided it was impossible because the mass of living things amounted to less than a drop in the bucket compared to the weight of all the materials in the oceans, atmosphere, soil and rocks.
In the 1970s, however, scientists began to realize that life had in fact greatly changed the Earth’s environment, starting more than a billion years ago. At the same time, evidence was building that burning fossil fuels was increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. In 1957, Charles Keeling began the first continuous measurements to study carbon-dioxide change over time at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. By 1973, he reported at a landmark conference at Brookhaven National Laboratory on “Carbon and the Biosphere” that carbon dioxide showed a definite increase in 15 years, consistent with releases from burning fossil fuels. For those of us working on these issues, the scientific and environmental implications were vast.
Global environmental change began to become a political issue in the 1980s. Climatologists and astrophysicists showed that a nuclear war could put so much dust in the air that disastrous cooling would occur, the infamous nuclear winter. With the end of the Cold War, the focus shifted to global warming. At that time, climatologists explained that their computer models were crude approximations of the real atmosphere and pushed the limit of computer technology, requiring months of computing for a single simulation. You could accept either the results of these crude models or the less-formal projections by the most experienced meteorologists. The primary focus continued to be on the implications of what we knew.
In 1988, in a move that marked a shift to the politicization of forecasts, Congress asked the Environmental Protection Agency to report on the potential effects of global warming. Computer forecasting became much more complex; output from the huge climate models became input into ecological models. My projection for the little warbler was part of that work. The attempt was to be more realistic, but the result was that forecasts became more difficult to verify and also more alarming, thus drawing more and more public attention.
Thinking over this history, I see three primary uses of environmental computer forecasts: to understand the implications of what we know (Can living things change the global environment?); to know the future; and to influence public behavior. Only the first can be strictly scientific. The third is wandering farther and farther away from science.
Since proving the validity of long-term forecasts is difficult and the ultimate tests would take years, and since many scientists are alarmed at the dire scenarios, my colleagues are beginning to talk about whether it is O.K. to exaggerate and push forecasts that are not currently provable if the only way to get societies to act is to frighten people. I think it is not O.K. It is a short-term view, and even if it works, it will inevitably debase science and scientists.
Soothsayers have always tried to persuade people that they could predict the future. What is new today is that the incredibly powerful tools of science - nuclear weapons, flights to the moon, computers, iPods - have such huge implications for civilization that they may contain the seeds of their own destruction.
Thirty years from now, we will probably not be interested in today’s specific computer forecasts, but we may have lost our faith in science, a deeper and, to me, a more important problem.
—————
Additional information about the Kirtland’s warbler forecast:
The scientific paper for the original forecast is:
Botkin, D. B., D. A. Woodby, and R. A. Nisbet, 1991, Kirtland’s Warbler Habitats: A Possible Early Indicator of Climatic Warming, Biological Conservation 56 (1): 63-78.
Those interested in the forecasting method can download the computer model of forest growth, JABOWA, from website www.naturestudy.org and play around with it. The software is pretty easy to use, and you can grow your own forest, log it, test it against various global warming climate regimes, etc. It isn’t as sophisticated a computer game as you can get today, but it is ecologically realistic and is used in research around the world.
And if you really want to get into the science part of this in depth, there are other scientific papers, including:
Botkin, D. B., and R. A. Nisbet, 1992, Forest response to climatic change: effects of parameter estimation and choice of weather patterns on the reliability of projections, Climatic Change 20: 87-111.
Botkin, D. B. and R. A. Nisbet, 1992, Projecting the effects of climate change on biological diversity in forests, pp. 277 - 293 in R. Peters and T. Lovejoy, (Eds.) Consequences of the Greenhouse Effect for Biological Diversity, Yale University Press, New Haven.
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