Corps. Making Uncertainty, Scientists Fight Back

[rhoenix]

Science is under attack. With corporations manufacturing uncertainty to undermine studies that hurt their bottom lines and the sequester cutting billions in funding for scientific research, you’d think the American science community would be hunkered down in their labs avoiding outside interference at all costs.

A new project of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the Center for Science and Democracy, is encouraging scientists to do just the opposite. The center encourages scientists to speak out and help others to better understand scientific information and to distinguish evidence from political positioning. We spoke with the Center’s director Dr. Andrew Rosenberg by phone this week. This is an edited version of our conversation.

Theresa Riley: In Bill’s conversation with public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, they talk about a “war on science” that is being waged by industries to prevent and weaken regulations. In Heads They Win, Tails We Lose, a report released last year, UCS investigators showed how widespread the practice is. What tactics do they use?

Andrew Rosenberg: In the political arena, there are lots of avenues where corporate influence comes in. Sometimes it’s directly lobbying elected officials. For example, on fracking, Common Cause found that the industry has spent almost $750 million over the last decade lobbying to try to ensure that regulation isn’t increased, that the federal government stays out of fracking — even, to some extent, in the monitoring and evaluation of impacts of fracking. And that’s unfortunately a pretty common picture. On medical devices it’s a similar sum, $700 million, to lobby on behalf of medical devices and pharmaceuticals to try to keep the rules as business friendly as possible. People understand that there’s lobbying. I’m not sure they understand the magnitude.

A second way is creating a false and parallel science. Of course, that’s quite dramatic on climate change, where there’s been very extensive funding, particularly from the energy industry, of so-called climate change skeptics. I think it’s less well known that that occurs in many other fields, particularly the testing of chemicals, such as toxic contaminants, formaldehyde and silica, where the industry is creating a body of science, ostensibly of science that says, “Well, really this isn’t such a problem.”

One of their tactics is to create groups that are labeled things like Safer Chemicals for a Healthy World — I’m making that one up, but there are actual groups like this. You find out they’re funded by The American Chemistry Council (and they’re funded by the chemical industry). They cast doubt and continually challenge scientific results. Formaldehyde is a good example. The formaldehyde industry is continually challenging evidence that shows that formaldehyde is a carcinogen in the crafting of EPA regulations and product safety regulations.

Riley: In some cases, they go as far as suing scientists. For instance, Markowitz and Rosner tell Bill that in the 1970s and ’80s, the lead industry went after researchers like Herbert Needleman who had uncovered the fact that even low levels of lead were damaging children. They accused him of scientific misconduct and filed charges against him. It took several years for him to prevail.

Rosenberg: Attacking scientists unfortunately, directly and personally, has become part of the toolbox for industry and for political groups. We have instances of attacking scientists in court (as in the lead example), but in the digital age it’s become “let’s subpoena all the private emails of scientists and we’ll find something in there that will cast doubt on the results.”

For example in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP asked for help from some scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to try to estimate how much oil was leaking into the Gulf, because the government estimates seemed to be low. So these scientists came up with methods to figure out a better way to calculate how much was spilling before they capped the well and showed that the amount of oil was very much larger than had been initially estimated.

BP subsequently went to court to subpoena their private emails to cast doubt on their results. They needed to know the actual amount of oil to figure out how to cap it, but then after the fact it pertained directly to [their] liability. So they really went after these guys to cast doubt on their results by saying, “Well, gee, in the email traffic, one of the scientists said to the other, ‘I’m not sure I think that’s quite right. Maybe we ought to try it a different way,’ and ‘I’m not sure we can rely on this result’” — the usual process of science that goes on in any analysis now becomes a weapon in court, and, in addition, is not only demoralizing, but potentially expensive. It certainly dampens the enthusiasm for scientists to get involved in issues. We’ve seen that with climate change, too. It’s not a new phenomenon; it’s still going on.

Riley: What role does the media have in this, particularly in terms of facilitating the production of uncertainty and, ultimately, the undermining of the truth.

Rosenberg: We live in a very noisy media environment and there are huge changes in news and media, as you know better than I. If somebody wants to know something about fracking and they type it into Google or Bing they get a whole bunch of information and it’s really hard for someone who’s not working in the field to sort through that information and know what its provenance is. I think that’s true for many people in the media who are writing about this as well. All of this effort to undermine or misrepresent science affects the media too, because certain media outlets are spinning their own opinion pages and then cherry picking the science. We’ve done a report on News Corp reporting on climate science, for the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal and for Fox News. It becomes easier for people to hammer away at their position because they’re able to go to think tanks that are funded with a particular bent, Heartland being the classic case.

I also think the media still has a tendency to say, “We’ve got to have a balanced view, so let’s get one person who thinks climate change is occurring or thinks that there’s a problem with formaldehyde and we’ll find somebody who doesn’t, and disagrees,” as if it’s an adversarial system in court and these are expert witnesses. But that’s not what happens in the science community. Yes, people challenge each other, but then you ask, “what’s the weight of the evidence.” It’s not a courtroom where you present alternatives in that way. That’s problematic and it gets disseminated very broadly on digital media.

Riley: In 2009 when President Obama took office, he called for comprehensive scientific integrity reform in federal departments and agencies. How is he doing?

Rosenberg: There is good policy in many agencies. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — and this isn’t because I used to work at NOAA — did an outstanding job, as I think is noted in the report you mentioned earlier, in creating a scientific integrity policy. They enabled scientists to speak out.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House has said they stand behind scientific integrity policies. But the real challenge now is making sure that the implementation follows those policies. And there it’s a little harder to be quite so laudatory. I think they did a great job of putting the policies in place. We worked very intensively with many of the agencies to help provide guidance, since it was critically important in our scientific integrity program. But the implementation of those policies in some places, like USDA, FDA and others, has lagged. There are still concerns in Department of Interior and its many various departments. I think there’s an opportunity for improvement.

Riley: Last month, in a speech at an event marking the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences, President Obama told scientists, engineers and doctors that his goal is to reach for a level of private and public research and development investment that we haven’t seen since the height of the space race. At the same time, the sequester is expected to take a significant toll on scientific research with numerous federal agencies and organizations now facing the possibility of huge cuts to their budgets. Some examples of that are the National Institutes of Health (NIH) expecting $1.6 billion in cuts, the National Science Foundation (NSF) possibly shrinking by $283 million, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science estimating a $9.3 billion cut across the board in R&D this year. How concerned should we be about these cuts?

Rosenberg: We should be very concerned. I’m not sure that outside the science community it’s well known that the competition for NIH and NSF grants is really intense, meaning that there’s intense scrutiny of every grant proposal. If you add to that now a reduced pool of money, then those success rates become really shockingly low, like less than 10 percent, I believe. That means that many scientists will have difficulty continuing their programs. Some people would say, “Oh well, maybe they should just be funded by private industry or private funding.” That’s all well and good but it’s totally different from a basic research enterprise of an NSF or an NIH, where people are doing the basic, fundamental, underlying research, not to immediately produce a product, but because it helps our understanding of the world. So that’s one area that is frightening.

But we also need to remember the applied science agencies like NOAA, NASA and USGS and others that are doing the basic daily scientific work for the country, everything from weather forecasts, climate forecasts, monitoring of water tables and the research that goes along with those things, understanding weather systems and understanding hydrologic systems, understanding fisheries — the area that I worked in for many years. You start to cut that research, which is also taking a very large hit, and that means our understanding gets weaker as the challenges are only increasing. It’s not as if the issues of trying to maintain the health of the oceans is diminishing, we need that applied scientific research for climate impacts and a whole range of other things.

One of the great things about the U.S. science enterprise and why it was so powerful is because it was valued not just with dollars but in the way that scientists were allowed to operate with much less hierarchy and with much greater freedom than many other places. We’re going to lose that if we continue not only with the sequester but also with this scrutiny of grants, restrictions on travel and attacks on scientists.

About damn time, if you ask me.

[General Havoc]

About damn time for what? This is a fight that's been going on for sixty years. I've been getting to hear about it weekly from the various catastrophists I can't seem to get rid of since 2005. What's the news here? What steps are being taken?

[rhoenix]

About damn time for what? This is a fight that's been going on for sixty years. I've been getting to hear about it weekly from the various catastrophists I can't seem to get rid of since 2005. What's the news here? What steps are being taken?

What I took from the article is that instead of simply accepting that this has been happening for the past half-century plus, more awareness is being raised about it.

After all, if this trend continues, the United States will only fall behind other countries in terms of how much scientific discovery and research is accomplished per year. Rosenberg's comments appear to reflect this awareness.

[General Havoc]

One day I will figure out what everyone thinks is so virtuous about "raising awareness". Because I just don't see it.

Billions of insoluble problems afflict the world every day. Absent a proposed solution or active suggestion for what to do about it, what exactly is being accomplished by "raising awareness" of another one? Particularly in a subject wherein it is physically impossible for most people to do anything about it one way or the other.

I'm not trying to attack anyone or tell people to shut up. This is just something I see all the time and I don't understand it at all. Literally everyone who has ever tried to raise my awareness about a subject has done so either for reasons completely opaque to me or to overtly make things my fault instead of theirs. What in the hell is the point of it all? What exactly is being accomplished by repeatedly reciting lintanies of woes beyond making ourselves feel better or smarter at the listener's expense?

Again, I'm not trying to attack anyone, but I honestly don't understand it at all.

[rhoenix]

One day I will figure out what everyone thinks is so virtuous about "raising awareness". Because I just don't see it.

Billions of insoluble problems afflict the world every day. Absent a proposed solution or active suggestion for what to do about it, what exactly is being accomplished by "raising awareness" of another one? Particularly in a subject wherein it is physically impossible for most people to do anything about it one way or the other.

The same could be said politically for homosexual rights, women's rights, bigotry, oil spills, the reasons behind ill-fought wars and other issues that still affect us today. Because we have not found proper solutions for preventing or fully stopping those things with a guarantee of success, does that mean we should simply shrug and accept them as normal until we do?

Societal shifts in perception are begun by "raising awareness," though I grant it has to catch the public's attention in some way or for some reason first, otherwise it remains background noise.

I refuse to accept that entities with money can freely muddy the waters for science and scientific discovery they find might adversely affect their income in some way in this country. That road leads to the US falling behind other countries in terms of science and engineering.

EDIT: I saw you added other stuff, so I'll reply to that too.

I'm not trying to attack anyone or tell people to shut up. This is just something I see all the time and I don't understand it at all. Literally everyone who has ever tried to raise my awareness about a subject has done so either for reasons completely opaque to me or to overtly make things my fault instead of theirs. What in the hell is the point of it all? What exactly is being accomplished by repeatedly reciting litanies of woes beyond making ourselves feel better or smarter at the listener's expense?

This I can only answer by pointing to social psychology, which Frigid could speak to far better than I. In our society, for something to change, enough people have to agree that it's a problem. Once critical mass occurs, it becomes political pressure as a force to attempt change. This has been done successfully with a number of issues, including (but certainly not limited to) women gaining the right to vote in this country, homosexual rights as a concept to be protected, and even the infamous "save the whales" stuff.

I grant that you might have an overabundance of such things where you are Havoc, but a number of those movements did begin around where you live.

[General Havoc]

You see this is exactly what I don't understand. I ask what the virtues of raising awareness are, and people react like I denied the existence of the problem, or caused it in the first place. Nobody got women the vote or passed civil rights laws by complaining about it to others, they did these things by going out and DOING them. Literally nobody on the fave of the earth thinks that it is a good idea for corporations to smother scientists except the corporations themselves. So why the hell is it such a virtue to sit around and complain about how shitty a situation is in the hopes that we will annoy someone else into fixing it?

[rhoenix]

You see this is exactly what I don't understand. I ask what the virtues of raising awareness are, and people react like I denied the existence of the problem, or caused it in the first place. Nobody got women the vote or passed civil rights laws by complaining about it to others, they did these things by going out and DOING them. Literally nobody on the fave of the earth thinks that it is a good idea for corporations to smother scientists except the corporations themselves. So why the hell is it such a virtue to sit around and complain about how shitty a situation is in the hopes that we will annoy someone else into fixing it?

Well, I personally have the goal of becoming a scientist, and one of the reasons is to help combat this issue by learning, discovering, and sharing this with others.

Your underlying point appears to be (and please, correct me if I'm misinterpreting it) is that nobody should bother talking about an issue unless they have a solution for it. If this is so, given that not everyone is capable of understanding those issues and crafting solutions for them, but most people are at least capable of observing the effects of those issues, is it not reasonable to "raise awareness" of an issue in the hopes of attracting minds capable of examining and resolving the issue?

[Josh]

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01 ... awareness/

It's that time of year where Havoc and I agree on something.

Glad that's out of the way.

[rhoenix]

Fair enough - I can examine those points and take them to heart. For my part, I'll be voting for candidates I see as supporting expanding America's engineering and scientific base, and working on doing so myself. That's what I can do personally for this issue, anyway.

[General Havoc]

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01 ... awareness/

It's that time of year where Havoc and I agree on something.

Glad that's out of the way.

I... I'm afraid...

[Josh]

Don't worry. By average there's only one more instance coming this year.

[Hotfoot]

Human beings are by nature creatures of habit. We'll, as a whole, keep on in our ways, for good or ill, unless something comes along to cause us to change. If we don't know something is a problem, we won't act as though it was a problem. This is something that has been demonstrated by actions such as the Canadian Anti-Rape ad campaign. Yes, it's blindingly obvious to most of us that the things brought up in those ads is rape, and it's something most everyone should know, but apparently it wasn't. Making that clear and raising awareness provably dropped rapes in the areas the ads ran.

So clearly, somehow it works.

Yes, there are plenty of people who will hear something, pay it some lip service, and forget about it in a week. It happens. And clearly we can't possibly act on every single thing that would improve lives, we'd have nothing else to do. Still, acting as a signal booster to get it to people who otherwise don't know, or providing moral support and commiseration with the people actively in those fields itself is useful, because it helps them keep going, especially when they're facing burnout from working in particularly draining areas.

For people who have been dealing with issues for years, facing depression, desperation, and loneliness, to turn around and know that several people support you in what you're can be truly empowering, even if they do nothing more than say "thank you" or "good job". Sure, money or manpower is better, but if I feel that there are something like a dozen or a hundred worthwhile causes that deserve consideration and advancement, how many of them am I expected to back and to what degree in order to be considered a "part" of those causes? How much of my life must I dedicate to these things before I can be considered to be helping? What must I do? What is the bare minimum of action I must take before I qualify as a "true" member of a cause or group? Will $5 a year do it? 5 minutes of time to leave a message with my representatives via phone or email? Must I donate 10% of my income, perhaps 10-20 hours a week?

I rankle under the idea that I or anyone should have to "prove" their commitment to a cause or ideal, lest they not be a "true" member of it. What I choose to donate to is frankly private with regards to how much time OR money I put into them, and should we start shaming people for not doing "enough", we are doing little service to the causes we support, because we will drive people away from them.

If you're going to knock signal boosting and raising awareness because some people aren't going to "do anything" and just feel better about themselves, you're rather missing the point, because it's not about them. If you think that's the only kind of person that there is, and you're judging the people who don't do "enough", you run the risk of falling prey to the singular error of elitism that drives people away, the concept that unless everyone else is as good as you, they're useless.

[Josh]

I'd class that as a different form of awareness-boosting, though. It's actually pointing to activities that most of the people do, and clarifies the appropriate behaviors during those activities. For another example, I have no objection to raising the awareness of how campers should not start forest fires. Showing people that mishandling their campfire or tossing a butt on the ground can burn down like a gazillion acres puts personal responsibility into the equation. The effects are tangible and hell that was the kind of stuff I occasionally worked with in my old job.

Anti-litter projects, all that sort of thing I'd class as functional awareness raising because it's actually calling on people to be responsible for their own actions and the outcomes thereof. On the other hand, awareness raising for the sweatshops of Asia aren't going to convince people not to buy Apple or Nike products or bring about substantive changes to their policies, so they tend to be marginally useful at best.

[Hotfoot]

I'd class that as a different form of awareness-boosting, though. It's actually pointing to activities that most of the people do, and clarifies the appropriate behaviors during those activities. For another example, I have no objection to raising the awareness of how campers should not start forest fires. Showing people that mishandling their campfire or tossing a butt on the ground can burn down like a gazillion acres puts personal responsibility into the equation. The effects are tangible and hell that was the kind of stuff I occasionally worked with in my old job.

Anti-litter projects, all that sort of thing I'd class as functional awareness raising because it's actually calling on people to be responsible for their own actions and the outcomes thereof. On the other hand, awareness raising for the sweatshops of Asia aren't going to convince people not to buy Apple or Nike products or bring about substantive changes to their policies, so they tend to be marginally useful at best.

Yeah, except, at the same time, you can say the same damn things about the anti-litter and wildfire things that you can about Apple's business practices. Because just like people will still buy apple products, people will still be absolute dumbasses about nature. The stories I can tell you man, the fucking stories.

You assume that because there are lots of people who don't care that there is NOBODY that will care about these things, and that's just flatly wrong. Change starts somewhere, maybe it won't go anywhere, but are you really going to claim that because change is slow and progress is hard we shouldn't even try? If that's the case, then why are you even arguing right now? Because all this argument seems to amount to is "Hey, everyone, just give up, don't bother, it's not worth it, there's people who are pricks and we should just let them run rampant and do their stupid shit and not make any noise about it. Go about your days."

Right now, apps are coming out to allow you to scan a product and see if gives money to a group you don't like. Even if only a few people use it, it's movement. It may be slow, it may be initially ineffectual, but as waves come and go, it can make a difference, but only if it's still on the "problem radar", so to speak.

To simply write things off because there's not an immediate solution or crisis-level resources thrown at it seems just foolish. NASA's been getting budget cuts for years now, and people are screaming that they should be disbanded completely. What's something that helped to start turn it around? An Astronaut tweeting from space. Neil DeGrasse Tyson going on multiple television shows as a new public face of science. People going around and talking and drawing people in, increasing interest and spreading awareness of the value of space research.

People posting their support of marriage equality of Facebook? News outlets reported on it. Discussion was started. Polls were taken to see if it was just a fad or a growing trend in the US, and the legislators look at those polls and see which way the wind is blowing. It's not all because one person changes their icon, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

[Josh]

Kindly don't speak to what I assume, please. I've never said that I don't think some people care, if they didn't there wouldn't be these campaigns in the first place.

What I'm saying is that given the fact that we're bombarded with messages of what we should care about, it tends to blur together into a hodgepodge of things we're obligated to care about, while doing very little substantive for. The problem is that we have no metric by which to sort out what's actually achieving the effect. Take your Facebook/gay marriage example- I'd argue that the far greater driver has been that the demographic representing the majority of opposition is literally dying out, while the upcoming generation has had gay equality presented from a variety of angles, including the fact that gay people are far more able to be out of the closet in many places, which means more personal exposure. My own feelings on the issue got a lot more starkly defined the more it went from an abstract 'Who cares who's fucking who?' to having it involve people I know, respect, and care about.

You could say that awareness efforts drove that, and maybe you're right. But we have no way of establishing firmly what's what, and I vastly prefer people taking actions that actually have direct, tangible effects. Take my Apple example, sure there are apps and so on, but how mainstream will they become? How effective will it be overall? Or will we just see the usual corporate PR shuffle, ad campaigns paid for out of what amounts to corporate petty cash to pretend to do a good thing while simply moving the problem out of sight until the next time it gets blown open? I'd prefer that we move toward actions that actually have teeth in them rather than attempting the latest boycott, which pretty much never works.

[Hotfoot]

Kindly don't speak to what I assume, please. I've never said that I don't think some people care, if they didn't there wouldn't be these campaigns in the first place.

What I'm saying is that given the fact that we're bombarded with messages of what we should care about, it tends to blur together into a hodgepodge of things we're obligated to care about, while doing very little substantive for. The problem is that we have no metric by which to sort out what's actually achieving the effect. Take your Facebook/gay marriage example- I'd argue that the far greater driver has been that the demographic representing the majority of opposition is literally dying out, while the upcoming generation has had gay equality presented from a variety of angles, including the fact that gay people are far more able to be out of the closet in many places, which means more personal exposure. My own feelings on the issue got a lot more starkly defined the more it went from an abstract 'Who cares who's fucking who?' to having it involve people I know, respect, and care about.

People have been gay in this world since the inception of people. Until recently, being gay was something you kept as a closely guarded secret because of the bigotry of the rest of the country, which could range from you being shunned by your family to you being beaten to death. Once the message of "It's not a choice, it's a natural part of life and they are as human as the rest of us" started to filter through, people became more accepting. This is in particular a case where "Raising Awareness" was one of the largest factors in the solution, because spreading the truth about homosexuality is sort of the point in and of itself. Yes, there are people set in their ways that won't change, but there are people who aren't who will. Yes, it came from multiple angles and involved a lot more, but at the core of it was the spreading of knowledge of the issue, how it hurt gay people and others at the same time.

You could say that awareness efforts drove that, and maybe you're right. But we have no way of establishing firmly what's what, and I vastly prefer people taking actions that actually have direct, tangible effects. Take my Apple example, sure there are apps and so on, but how mainstream will they become? How effective will it be overall? Or will we just see the usual corporate PR shuffle, ad campaigns paid for out of what amounts to corporate petty cash to pretend to do a good thing while simply moving the problem out of sight until the next time it gets blown open? I'd prefer that we move toward actions that actually have teeth in them rather than attempting the latest boycott, which pretty much never works.

If you asked me in the 90's how useful the various pro-homosexuality movements were, I'd say not very at the moment. Yet they existed and gained momentum and were ultimately vital to the progress we have today. Sweeping social change is slow, and I know in this day and age anything that takes more than a year can seem glacial, but that's no reason to write these things off.

If you try to tell me though that it's ultimately not going to achieve anything, as you have been, I'm going to not bother listening because you're doing little but sniping from the sidelines. It's not constructive criticism that will help anyone, it's simply feckless fit-throwing because there's not change now, and if we don't have the ability to ring up the legislators and make them make a bill right this second, or have the corporations change their money grubbing ways, there's little point.

Except there is. Not everyone has to be on board, not everyone has to listen, but as you spread the truth and show it to people, the more it grows and resonates, and the more work gets done, and the more facts you have, and the more you can show to the people in question on the fence, and the harder it gets for them to say "so what?". Yes, there are a lot of causes out there right now. Yes, there are many problems in our world. Yes, it's hard to get focused on any one of them sometimes, so you have to pick and choose. So does every single person who is capable of aiding in these causes. Eventually, they are going to get people behind them and get things done. There are a lot of people in the world, after all, and even if it's not you, you might be able to spread the message to someone who will take up the banner because it resonates with them.

And that's not useless.

[Josh]

Alright, you make good points. Thanks for the discussion.