Gov. Jindal -- "Stop being the stupid party"

Gov. Bobby Jindal yesterday wagged his finger at the rampant anti-intellectualism among his fellow Republicans. Politico reports

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on Monday called on Republicans to “stop being the stupid party” and make a concerted effort to reach a broader swath of voters with an inclusive economic message that pre-empts efforts to caricature the GOP as the party of the rich.

...“It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,” Jindal said. “It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

Wow, really? Excuse me while I clean up the coffee that just shot out of my nose and onto my keyboard.

This would be the same Gov. Jindal that signed a law in Louisana supporting the teaching of creationism.

"That law" is the Louisiana Science Education Act, which is named for what it is designed to destroy. Jindal signed it last year, clearing the way for creationism to be taught in biology class.

... the voice of reason cuts no ice with Jindal anyway, at least on this issue. He refused to veto the bill last year, ignoring the pleas not only of Satterlie's group, but the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a slew of other learned bodies and even his old genetics professor from Brown University.

The force behind the bill was the Louisiana Family Forum, a group of Christian soldiers that few politicians would wish to cross, given that polls suggest a startlingly high number of Americans refuse to accept that mountains of scientific evidence prove the truth of evolution.

While some politicians might kowtow to the forum out of expediency, Jindal does not appear to be one of them. He actually appears to believe this stuff. Darwin or Genesis? You pays your money and you takes your choice, so far as the Louisiana Science Education Act is concerned.

This would also be the same Gov. Jindal who used his 2009 Republican response to the State of the Union speech to belittle the federal government for allocating money to the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor volcanoes.

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government. $8 billion for high speed rail projects such as magnetic levitation line from Las Vegas to Disney Land. And $140 million for something called ‘volcano monitoring.’ Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, DC.

And he's now criticizing Republicans for "being the stupid party."

Gov. Jindal has made a career of talking down to voters. It's a mark of his contempt for voters that he expects them to forget this now.

More from the House Science? Committee

Apparently, it takes a special kind of crazy to earn a Republican seat on the House Science Committee.

Previously, we were treated to Rep. Todd Akin's (R-MO and indefatigable Senate candidate) ruminations on women's magical abilities to ward off pregnancy when "legitimately" raped--"The female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down."

Now we hear from Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA and a doctor no less), who sees the hand of Satan in the theory of evolution. TPM reports Rep. Broun sermonizing

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. And it's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior.

You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

Another colleague, Rep. Sandy Allen (R-FL), also discounts evolution in favor of "biblical terms of how we came about," while another, Rep. Dana Rohrabacker (R-CA) has mused about "clearing the rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases."

It's hard to imagine a stronger refutation of the notion of intelligent design than these four.

"Serious lapse of ... judgement and ethics" by climate researcher

Dr. Peter Gleick, a renowned climate expert on water issues and President of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security posted a blog on the Huffington Post, confessing to obtaining internal information from the Heartland Institute under false pretenses and then distributing that information.

In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else's name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues.

As Dr. Gleick undoubtedly knows, the conduct of science depends on ethical behavior and above all on a reputation for honesty. No one observes us in our laboratories or pouring over survey results, and even with peer review of the final product, much of what scientists do comes down to a matter of trust.

Indeed, part of the strategy of the Heartland Institute and others is to erode that trust by whatever means necessary.

Sadly, Dr. Gleick's deceit has helped that effort far more than the Heartland Institute could have dreamed.

As frustrating as it can sometimes be, science isn't a discipline where you can fight fire with fire. Scientific ethics can't be a sometimes thing.

Update (11:40 a.m., 2/21/12):While Dr. Gleick's actions were shameful, it's hard to have much sympathy for the Heartland Institute, which repeatedly exulted in the release of private e-mails and documents from others.

Diminishes us all

The New York Times reports on the disreputable and fraudulent actions of a Dutch researcher.

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability.

The identified offenses may have occurred in another discipline and another country, but they damage the scientific enterprise everywhere.

In principle, all of the studies that scientists conduct and publish should be replicable. In practice though, replication rarely occurs, is often impossible, and seldom gets attention or credit if it is conducted. Because of this, the modest amounts of credibility and respect that scientific conclusions muster owe greatly to scientists' reputations for reporting research accurately. Put another way, much (possibly too much) of science relies on trust.

Sadly, researchers like this particular Dutch psychologist treat science as a confidence game. Equally sadly, the psychologist has a lot of company in the scientific community.

Not so cool news

So much for skeptics' arguments (wish) that the Earth's climate is cooling. NASA has released a new analysis.

The first decade of the 21st century was the warmest ever on Earth according to data released by scientists at NASA.

The U.S. space agency's data also revealed that 2009 was the second warmest year since temperature records began in 1880, and only narrowly cooler than 2005, the warmest year ever.

Interested readers can also look at the NASA news release.

UPDATE (1/26/10): Ever careful, Pino makes the excellent point that the article describes the last decade as the warmest "ever" and is also unclear about 2005's place in history. The NASA article that is linked describes these records properly.

Ultimately we must accept climate change

Too much social discourse is directed at magnifying disagreement and disparaging the motives and intellect of others. In Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversey, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Mike Hulme takes the position that reasonable people can and do disagree; he then sets off to examine the disagreements and the reasons.

Hulme explores numerous areas of disagreement and organizes his chapters around specific areas. He begins with three mostly (though not entirely) science-oriented sources of disagreement, which involve our conceptualization of climates and climate change, the development of scientific thought regarding climate change, and what science can and cannot tell us. From there, he moves onto disagreements regarding economics, religion, fears, communication strategies, development, and government action. The book ends with a provocative chapter about rethinking climate change.

My own nerdy biases initially drew me into the first chapters, especially the history of scientific thought regarding climate change. Hulme points out that scientific acceptance of the notion that climates change is relatively recent, dating only to the 19th century. Widespread scientific acceptance of the theory of anthropogenic climate change on human time scales is newer still. Although components of the theory, such as the greenhouse effect, were developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it wasn't until the last quarter of the century that broad elements of the scientific began to broadly accept anthropogenic global warming.

However, accepting the likelihood of anthropogenic global warming is only a scientific preliminary. For effective public policy, we need to know much more, including how strong the link between human activities and climate change is, when and how fast systemic changes are likely to occur, how the effects will be distributed, and what the possibilities are for catastrophic changes. As we move into these important areas, the scientific disagreements become larger, and the opportunities for other sources of disagreement to influence scientific discourse also grow.

At a first reading, I was initially disappointed with most of the follow-on, non-scientific "disagreement" chapters. The chapters work well enough in listing and explaining many ways that people can disagree about things. However, they do not explain which disagreements really matter and whether there are fundamental and connecting sources to the disagreements. There are interesting arguments and insights along the way, but much of the material reads like a middle-of-the-road undergraduate term paper--"it could be this (source A), it could be that (source B)," and so on.

Different readers will nonetheless appreciate different things in these chapters. As an economist, I enjoyed an outsider's take on my profession's disagreements. The discussion of development challenges was also very good, especially in reminding us of how many times smart, careful, and concerned people from Malthus to the Club of Rome have predicted doom only to discover that humans have innovated, adapted, and prospered within the then-existing environmental constraints.

The deeper rationale behind these chapters, though, became clearer after reading the final chapter. A central point of that chapter and ultimately of the book is that climate change is here, and the notion of climate change can't be undone. Climate has changed and will change, and humans, to some extent, are affecting this change. Once we accept this, we cannot "unknow" anthropogenic climate change.

Another crucial point in the chapter is that we are unlikely to "solve" the climate change "problem" in any conventional sense in our lifetimes. "Solving a problem" implies meeting a particular objective; in the case, of climate change, what would that be? Suppose that science could give us the magic key to setting the planet's climate--where would we set it? Do we want a pre-industrial climate, a 20th century climate, something warmer, something cooler. Also, (and this is the part where the non-science chapters come in) which objectives do we adopt?

Hulme instead advocates for the more sensible position of living with climate change. To be clear, he does not mean this in a fatalistic sense or as a call for a "do nothing approach." Hulme does mean that we must accept that human activities affect the global climate and that those activities have consequences that impede other objectives. He reminds us that our behavior and policy setting should focus on those objectives rather than the fact of climate change.

Unsafe in any mode

More and more covered-up government science keeps emerging from earlier this decade--science that could have saved lives. This time it's research by the Department of Transportation on the dangers of driver distraction. The New York Times reports

In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel.

They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.

But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress.

Data, we don't need no stinkin' data. BTW, that would be the then Republican-controlled Congress and especially the House Appropriations Committee headed by Rep. Bill Young.

Researchers at the time estimated that cell phone use was responsible for nearly 1,000 traffic deaths per year and almost a quarter of a million accidents.

Perhaps even more importantly, researchers were concluding that "hands-free" devices were about as unsafe as regular cell phones.

As cell phone use has grown and the number of distracting features has multiplied, the safety problems have likely increased. Moreover, research was squelched at a time when behavior might have been easier to change.

Readers who are interested in the documents that were too dangerous to see can find them at the Times web-site. Those who want to cut to the chase can go to the last two pages where the DOT concludes

A significant body of experimental research indicates that both hand-held and handsfree cell phones increase the risk of a crash. Indeed, there is little if any difference between hand-held and hands-free phones in contributing to the risk to themselves
and others.

Limiting use to hands-free phones while driving will not solve the problem. In either operational mode, we have found that the cognitive distraction is significant enough to degrade a drivers’ performance. We therefore recommend that drivers not use wireless communication devices, including text messaging systems, when driving, except in an emergency.

Moreover, legislation that only forbids the use of handheld cell phones while driving will not be effective since it will not address the problem. In fact, such legislation may erroneously imply that hands-fkee phones are safe.

Study results as told to

Bloomberg reports how Eli Lilly & Co. and other drug companies "ghostwrote" manuscripts for doctors to submit to scientific journals.

Eli Lilly & Co. officials wrote medical journal studies about the antipsychotic Zyprexa and then asked doctors to put their names on the articles, a practice called “ghostwriting,” according to unsealed company files.

Lilly also engaged in other unethical practices.

Lilly employees also compiled a guide to hiring scientists to write favorable articles, complained to journal editors when publication was delayed and submitted rejected articles to other outlets, according to documents filed in drug overpricing suits against the Indianapolis-based company, the largest manufacturer of psychiatric medicines.

Lilly was not alone.

In May 2008, Whitehouse Station, New Jersey-based Merck agreed to pay $58 million to 29 states and stop ghostwriting articles to resolve claims that its advertisements for the withdrawn painkiller Vioxx hid the drug’s health risks.

...Pfizer paid $60 million to 33 states in October to settle claims it improperly marketed its Bextra and Celebrex pain relievers. New York-based Pfizer agreed to halt off-label marketing of the medicines and stop ghostwriting about them. It withdrew Bextra in April 2005. Celebrex is still on the market.

...In 1996, Wyeth hired Excerpta Medica Inc., a New Jersey- based medical communications firm, to write 10 articles promoting drugs aimed at treating obesity...

As despicable as the drug companies' behavior was, it pales in comparison to the medical shills who abetted this practice.

Universities regularly flunk and expel students who engage in academically dishonest practices, such as turning in other people's papers from paper mills and fraternity files. As the Bloomberg article indicates, universities need to look more closely at their own faculty members regarding the same practices.

Swine flu precautions

Besides avoiding someone who coughs while reading Charlotte's Web, the Centers for Disease Control has practical advice on how to avoid Swine Flu and how to care for household members who are sick.

Mars farts, Earth on edge

"Pull my finger."

In the science department, the Washington Post and other papers are reporting that scientists detected an eruption of methane on Mars and have interpreted it as a "sign of life."

Funny, my wife used the same words when she detected an eruption of methane from me after I had fallen asleep in front of the TV.

In an informal poll, all the Earth men I spoke to thought the news from Mars was terribly funny. The Earth women? Not so much.