That is:  I did something I do for the kind of sick thrill you get passing a wreck on the highway -- checking out Megan McCardle's self parody of a blog over at The Atlantic Monthly's site. (the lack of link is deliberate; I don't like to link to things I don't recommend.  If you are curious, there is this thing called Google that can probably get you where you want to go.)

There I find she recommends, in near ecstatic terms a new site called Culture 11,* (huh?) promoted as a conservative version of Slate, which launched yesterday. ( McCardle's praise --"Full disclosure:  I'm fairly close to its editorial staff.  Fuller disclosure:  it's still pretty awesome." -- gives you a bit of a sense of why I am loathe to send the unwary over to wallow in such prose.)

So, in the John Cole school of reading this stuff so you don't have to, I actually went over to check out this new haven of thought and letters.  There, I searched every last article they have up so far, all twenty seven as of the time of writing this.  There were some notable howlers -- see Conor Friedersdorf's Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism for a hilarious account of, among other things, the dilemma of a conservative on a blind date confronted by a woman who may or may not accept "basic conservative and libertarian truths."

(Again: fair warning.  Leave aside the argument such as it is.  You have to be willing to stomach sentences like "As a dating dilemma, this is easily solved.  Ask her questions!"  There.  Proceed at your own risk.  Tom Wolfe, conservative though he surely is, knows style and its absence.  He would equally surely wince at the asserted claim of kinship.)

And so on...but really, the point of this post is not simply that someone, somewhere is saying something stupid on the internet.  Rather, it is to point out one reason why conservative claims of intellectual authority have worn so thin.

They ignore science.  There is no science at Culture 11 at all.  Not as a category; not squeezed into headings like "Education" or "Ideas."  The one article under the heading "Technology" provides an interesting brief against the privatization of city services, but basically includes no actual explanation of the technological problem under review -- how to design and build a city-provided wifi network.

Other than that, nothing.  And it's not that there is a dearth of science and public life stories of interest within the context of conservative politics, after all.  Just today, the Republican National Convention platform committee published their document, which calls for a complete ban on embryonic stem cell research.  That might be worth a comment, no?

How about the argument between the parties about the appropriate resource and technological response to the problem of the US energy mix and supply?

What about some hard thinking about the numbers behind and the moral values inherent in the McCain campaign's health policy advisor's statement that the emergency room counts as insurance for the uninsured?

I am not suggesting that I expect anyone from that side of aisle to write stuff I agree with.  I'm not even expecting them to make good cases for the points of view I'm guessing they'll adopt.  But these are in fact big, obvious issues that matter not just to a scientific community, but to the public at large in the midst of deciding who should be our next president.

And yet, the entire site is designed, at least for now, to suggest that questions with a scientific or technical core don't rise to the level of significance worthy of a conservative intelligentsia's attention.  By contrast, Slate has a whole section devoted to health and science, two editors devoted to the care and feeding of that section and about a post a day, sometimes more, to keep the site populated.  I'm not saying I love all their stuff (though when they publish a former student, I do).  But they cover the story; they do so in an opinionated way, writing as public intellectuals. They take this stuff seriously.

I suppose I am picking on a brand new publication, the brain child of a plucky band of brothers (of both genders) rushing into the breach of the defenses of the liberal media.  But it still seems to me both striking and telling that a set of would-be leaders of right-wing public intellectualism would find nothing in science to engage.

I do not think that they achieve such lofty unconcern simply because doing science is hard, though it is, nor that writing well about science is hard, for all that I have scars to remind me that just how hard.

Rather, it is because, IMHO of course, in the broadest sense, it is much harder to spin science than it is, say, the consequences of impotent bellicosity over Georgia.

To put it another way, one near and dear to Boston Celtics fans:  I think the right dodges science when it can because it can't handle the truth.

You may take all this as the official announcement, rather than the earlier leaks, that Inverse Square is back from vacation.

*This link provided because even though I think the site is basically worthless, it seems to me hard to write a post about a web-location without pointing to it.  A foolish consistency and all that...

This may be a bit of home-institution boosting, and I haven't done any due diligence on this press release, but still, this is promising news out of Daniel Nocera's lab at MIT.  It is also a perfect example why Obama's emphasis on alternatives to oil and coal is the better choice of governing philosophies for US energy policy, and McCain's oil now, oil forever approach is not.

Nocera and his post doc, Matthew Kanan have taken a long look the process of photosynthesis that enables plants to extract usable energy from sunlight.  They've come up with a two-step process that can split ordinary, neutral pH water into hydrogen and oxygen to supply the feedstocks for fuel cells that could supply electricity to power cars, homes or whatever.  The key to the idea is the use of solar-generated electricity to power the electrolysis taking place in the Nocera lab's device.  More detail in the press release, and Nocera's general description of this line of research here

There is, as always, the caveat:  this is a research finding, not an industrial process.  It will take time and significant engineering creativity to turn this advance into a major source of energy and a partial replacement for carbon-based fuels -- if it ever gets there.

But this is the necessary initial step.  You don't get alternative energy unless you do the research.  You can't do the research if you can't get funding.  It is difficult -- though to be sure, as this finding shows, not impossible -- to pay for this work when you have a disinterested or actively hostile, petroleum-addicted President and administration.  A President Obama would do so -- candidate Obama has already made that very clear as recently as yesterday, whatever the national press thought of the important news of the day.  A President McCain, delivering on candidate McCain's promise to develop all available domestic sources of oil....not so much.

Here's the MIT press release making the point for me:

The success of the Nocera lab shows the impact of a mixture of funding sources - governments, philanthropy, and industry. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.

You don't get what you don't pay for.

And as a lagniappe, this bit of barely informed editorializing:  the reason McCain's approach is wrongheaded is not just that there it encourages the use of polluting sources of energy instead of pursuing clean or cleaner sources; it's not that there is some mystical reward to using a renewable source as opposed to a notionally available, notionally cheap(ish) nonrenewable source -- this isn't a tree - hugger argument.  No, it's wrong because it increases the liklihood that the transition we will have to make someday to a non-oil based economy will come harder, more expensively, and more destructively than it needs to, or would under a more science - friendly approach.  The real energy question is when and how much do you want to pay the piper.

That is:  McCain hasn't noticed, though he has surely been told, that oil is something of a mug's game,  coming under pressure from both supply and demand sides.  Between peak oil and the rise of major developing nations -- economies that remained tied to oil are buying into not just an increasingly high price for their energy, but also a significant, and I would bet, on nothing more than a hunch, an increasing risk of oil shocks, major disruptions in supply  and/or price over the next decades.

That, as much as the absolute cost of energy as a share of any economic activity, is what ought to scare people, (if my hunch is correct).  Major uncertainty is a very expensive quality; when the probability collapses into a particular damaging event, the impact on real people's real lives is profound.  Why on earth should we place ourselves more in the path of such an oncoming train than we have to.

And one last note -- as I've given Marc Ambinder some eminently deserved grief (hey--if he can assert his judgment as fact, so can I) for his blithering yesterday about why he isn't talking about energy, he has a solid post about Obama's economic message today that contains a bit of content reporting and a bit of process analysis.  Nothing fancy, but just an example of a beat reporter writing a clear and useful little story from within his defined territory.  Credit where credit is due.

Brad did say that he thought that writing about energy and its discontents did fit the brief for this blog, so, with permission from that august source...here's how Marc finished off his sterling performance of yesterday:

While we've been focusing on the race card, the Republican echo chamber has been sounding full tilt about Barack Obama's Jimmy Carter-esque turn as advice columnist to Americans about energy. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity spent part of their broadcast mocking Obama for urging Americans to inflate their tires to help conserve gasoline.

Obama had a point, and the auto industry recommends the same thing as do governors Schwarzenegger and Crist, but nevermind; the ridicule fix is in. An effective GOP shot.

I suppose the author of a "reported blog on politics" gets to judge whether a campaign tactic is effective. But look how he characterized Obama's comment. Jimmy Carter-esque advice. And a quick trip to Youtube certainly shows that the echo chamber was indeed in full cry.

Now look at what Ambinder didn't tell us. He didn't tell us that the point Obama was making was not simply that you could save some gas with properly inflated tires -- but that McCain's energy "plan" (sic) is so feeble that its oil drilling proposals would have no effect at all for a decade, while the risible gas tax holiday would save the individual driver as much as...wait for it...properly inflating your tires.

So how come McCain's snark, which has the merit of, in essence, encouraging people to waste gas and cash, gets the approving nod, and Obama's on point policy jab--also couched as a snark, gets no mention. Because the GOP echo chamber told Ambinder what to cover.

If you do want to see the substance of Obama's response to the McCain energy fantasy -- really, it's not a plan, it's a couple of really bad ideas that we can only hope will be no worse than ineffective -- read on, from the prepared remarks for yesterday's economic security rally.

I understand the politics. In a country desperate for action, ideas like a gas tax holiday or expanded oil drilling in the waters off our coasts are popular. And I’ll say this – if there were real evidence that these steps would actually provide real, immediate relief at the pump and advance the long-term goal of energy independence, of course I’d be open to them. But so far there isn’t.

As good as they sound, the history of gas tax holidays is that the prices go up to fill in the gap, and the big winners end up being the retailers and oil companies – not the American people. That’s what happened when we had a gas tax holiday in Illinois that I supported, and that’s why we ended up repealing it. It didn’t work. And it would also drain the federal highway fund of billions of dollars and cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

When it comes to offshore drilling, even Senator McCain has acknowledged that it won’t provide short-term relief. In fact, if we started drilling today, we wouldn’t see a drop of oil for seven years, and even then it would have little if any impact on prices.

Meanwhile, the oil companies currently have the rights to drill on 68 million acres of land and offshore areas that they haven’t touched. I believe that before we give the oil companies any more land, it’s time we tell them to start drilling on the land they already have or turn it over to someone who will, because we need that oil. We should also invest in the technology that can help us recover more oil from existing fields. And we should also look to our substantial natural gas reserves to tap a source of energy that’s already powering buses and cars here and around the world.

In the long-term, however, we have to remember that these domestic resources are finite. Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling, America still has only 3% of the world’s oil reserves. Senator McCain may believe otherwise, but that is not a real solution to our energy crisis.

Three rapid thoughts:

1. What else did anyone expect him to say? If he comes out embracing, or even tolerating gay adoption, he loses the election in July, IMHO -- given what such a stand would do to his support, such as it is, among the 20% or so of the GOP base made up of social and religious conservatives.

2. Just to make the absurdity of his fumbling explanation a little more obvious, someone in the media should ask him, pressing him for a specific answer: would he prefer unmarried, single parent adoptions as long as the man or woman were straight, to placing children in two-parent, same-sex couples?

3. Most seriously: this is another case of McCain being either ignorant -- unaware of the scientific data on the question he addresses -- or else being simply expedient (what a polite word!), willing to sacrifice children in order to win an election. McCain said

I’m running for president of the United States, because I want to help with family values. And I think that family values are important, when we have two parent — families that are of parents that are the traditional family.

The rest of his answer is similarly incoherent, but the point he seems to be trying to make is that there is a moral and social benefit that accrues when only male-female couples raise children. Unfortunately, as a matter of empirical investigation, this is wrong. Consider:

A study released in May 2007 by the Department of Justice (Canada), Children's Development of Social Competence Across Family Types, points out that "A few studies suggest that children with two lesbian mothers may have marginally better social competence than children in 'traditional nuclear' families, even fewer studies show the opposite, and most studies fail to find any differences."^[32]

There are a host of other studies confirming and broadening this conclusion. There are a few that challenge it. Strangely, they all seem to derive from groups that have a polemical interest in that outcome.

The inference becomes more clear when you consider the question McCain was actually asked: is it better for children to linger in foster care or to be raised in two parent, same gender families? To him, no. In the real world, where children without parents actually live -- not just moral feeling, but the data suggest (strongly) otherwise.

UPDATE: Arrrgh. More apologies to all here. Brain bubbles affected my attribution of small pox vaccination to Jonas Salk, who, of course, invented the first effective polio vaccine. Edward Jenner performed the first smallpox vaccinations with a cowpox preparation in 1796. I conflated the two in my head as I have been thinking about the fact the difficulties faced in eradicating polio, compared with the success of the anti small pox campaign -- which in fact formed the prompt for this post on the latest reported polio case in Pakistan. I regret the error.

________________________________

Why oh why can't we have a David Brooks-free press corps, at least when it comes to bloviating about science?

In his most recent column, Brooks writes (under the pretentious and meaning-free headline, "The Luxurious Growth") that the research community has grown "more modest about what we are close to knowing and achieving."

That is, Brooks is once again channeling what "science" thinks -- and he's wrong, of course.

Headline writers may have made the kinds of claims he decries, that genetics would soon explain all of human behavior, but I can't recall any scientist involved in, say, the genetics of alcoholism, claiming a single gene-behavior connection. Instead, fifteen seconds on Google turns up lots of statements like this.

Alcoholism is a complex, genetically influenced disorder. Multiple phenotypes – measurable and/or observable traits or behavior – contribute to the risk of developing alcoholism, particularly disinhibition, alcohol metabolizing patterns, and a low level of response (LR) to alcohol.

In other words: scientists have known as they do their research that individual studies of particular measurable and or observable phenomena will not produce a synoptic view of any complex behavior. Brooks knows this too. After all, with a magisterial air of explaining the hard truths to resistant materialists, he writes that

It’s now clear that one gene almost never leads to one trait. Instead, a specific trait may be the result of the interplay of hundreds of different genes interacting with an infinitude of environmental factors. must know this too -- I can't believe he's that bloody ignorant, though perhaps I'm just too much of a polyanna here.

Again -- this is a revelation only to those who haven't been paying attention for years. And I do think that Brooks knows that as well. But if he does, that means he has an ulterior motive for claiming that once arrogant science has learned humility -- and he does, the usual one that data-averse ideologues acquire: nasty scientists who seek material explanations are evil:

Starting in the late 19th century, eugenicists used primitive ideas about genetics to try to re-engineer the human race. In the 20th century, communists used primitive ideas about “scientific materialism” to try to re-engineer a New Soviet Man.

And Jonas Salk, that commie, used his "primitive ideas" to invent a smallpox polio vaccine, the key step in what has become the first ever may yet, I hope, become the second eradication of a human viral pathogen....and so on; this is an old and stupid back and forth.

Brooks wants to say that there are other sources of insight into the human condition -- that "novels and history can still produce insights into human behavior that science can’t match."

I'm not sure what he means by "match," in this case. I suppose we don't need science to say that happy families are all alike (you sure about that, Leo?) or that England's Catholic King James II fell not due simply to his religion but because of his political ineptitude. But such insights, no matter how valuable are of a different quality, a different explanatory timber, than that which has investigated, for example, something as material and as essential to the human condition as the evolution of tool use.

But again -- I fear it gives Brooks too much credit to engage the debate at this level. His goal is not to examine honestly the power and limits of scientific inquiry into human nature. The goal is to devalue the enterprise to the point that inconvenient facts can be ignored. Brooks gives the game away about half way through the piece. He writes that

There is the fuzziness of the words we use to describe ourselves. We talk about depression, anxiety and happiness, but it’s not clear how the words that we use to describe what we feel correspond to biological processes. It could be that we use one word, depression, to describe many different things, or perhaps depression is merely a symptom of deeper processes that we’re not aware of. In the current issue of Nature, there is an essay about the arguments between geneticists and neuroscientists as they try to figure out exactly what it is that they are talking about.

Brooks takes as evidence of ignorance the fact that different disciplines argue about terms. By that token, as of 1900, the state of play on the nature of matter would have led us to conclude the issue was intractable. Chemists had used the concept of atoms as real material objects to enormous theoretical and practical advantage since the days of Dalton and Berzelius -- that is for a century or so.

Histories written from a physicists point of view, by contrast, commonly date the confirmation of the reality of atoms from Einstein's 1905 papers on molecular dimensions and on Brownian motion. So -- I guess for a century all those chemists had no idea what they are talking about.

In fact, of course, there are valuable, vital working definitions of depression, and they are involved in the still imperfect, but real body of knowledge that identifies clinical depression as a material illness of the brain. That understanding is what permits interventions -- chemical and surgical -- that dramatically reduce human suffering in many cases. Cherry picking disciplinary debates may give the appearance of deep disagreement - but doing so, as Brooks does, is really just garden-variety intellectual dishonesty. Put it another way: acknowledging limits to knowledge is not the same thing as denying the power of the same body of knowledge up to that limit.

But, of course, that's what Brooks needs to do if he is to make his real point:

This age of tremendous scientific achievement has underlined an ancient philosophic truth — that there are severe limits to what we know and can know; that the best political actions are incremental, respectful toward accumulated practice and more attuned to particular circumstances than universal laws.

Nice sleight of hand, eh? Brooks is back to his most comfortable role, masquerading as the honest broker, while anyone in hearing better hang on to his/her wallet. The con takes place in incremental steps. Limits to knowledge become "severe" -- that is, forseeably unsurmountable. Sez who? Sez Mr. Brooks, of course. Trust him -- he speaks so nicely and has a marvelous tan.

And then...we are supposed to pass over the lack of logical connection...that due to such scientific lacunae, it is a philisophical truth (no limits to knowledge for those emerging from the cave, eh?) that political incrementalism is best.

This is more than a logical idiocy. It is historical nonsense as well. Incrementalism is good sometimes -- perhaps most of the time. But consider: It would have been respectful, of course, not to dismiss the loving succour of King George III, but John Adams, no incrementalist at the moment of truth, persuaded his compatriots otherwise. Humans have owned slaves since earliest human memory; surely, respect for accumulated practice makes the 14th amendment a travesty. Peculiar circumstances can be invoked to justify polygamy and child marriage -- and yet it seems possible to object on a range of more abstract and universal grounds, and so on....

That is -- Brooks wants to be able to pick and choose, based on criteria known only to him, what change meets some ill-defined criteria of respect and particularity. This is nothing more than a cartoon version of what some conservatives say conservatism is about (though the last few years might give an honest man pause about the incompatibilty of this flavor of conservatism and power). Brooks would rather not have to defend it in detail (see revolution, American in the paragraph above), so instead he comes up with a parody of scientism and hopes that it sounds grand enough to deflect scrutiny.

As Delong says so often, why, oh why, can't we do better than this codswallop.

That is all.

Image: Vincent van Gogh, "Sorrow," 1882. Location: Wallsall Museum and Art Gallery, the Garman Ryan Collection. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Step one: receive an intelligent and positive cite in Time Magazine for his book on the singular importance and dangers of element number 6. If you want to understand the basics and real significance of climate change, read Eric's book.

Step two: Rush Limbaugh goes ballistic at the notion that capitalism might work.

For some reason, perhaps because he has shifted his substance abuse from prescription narcotics to petroleum, Rush seems to hate the free market that has driven oil prices up -- and hence, as every ec. 101 textbook will tell you -- has shifted behavior among energy consumers. He would rather, as Eric writes in his brutally funny response to Rush, support the vicious, dictatorial states and sponsors of terrorism that own so much of the world's oil than see his fellow Americans reduced to riding bicycles or taking the bus.

This tempest in a teapot (dome?) illustrates a point this blog tries to make over and over again. It pays to be able to do the numbers. We all know that price changes alter consumer choices. We know that oil in particular and energy in general is traded in a global market. We know, or should, about the concept of peak oil . We can reason our way to the likely impact that increased demand and slowing then reversing production increases will have on our energy mix, our economy, and the wealth of nations. Rush can play a farcical King Canute as long as he wants, but he can no more hold back the flow of numbers, of the hard fact of supply and demand than the old Dane could restrain the tide.

The oddity in all this -- or perhaps the revealing detail, is that Rush's rhetoric is his usual song to the common man. But, as we learn here, there is a simpler reason to explain his howls of pain and rage at the thought of 4 buck a gallon gas that has nothing to do with any notional common touch. The old deaf (recovering, we hope) drug addict drives himself around in a Maybach 57S -- no doubt a truly wonderful automobile. It must hurt, however, even for a man as rich as Limbaugh, to fill the tank of a $450,000 behemoth that scores 10 miles to the gallon in the city.

I'm sorry -- but I somehow don't see Eric Roston as the effete elitist out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans here. But then, I don't see how a tax dodging Senator with seven homes, $200,000+ monthly credit card spending, a growing domestic staff, and a married-into inherited fortune worth more than 100 million behind him is somehow more of a regular guy than that other Senator who rose out of a broken home through education and talent to the realms of upper-middle class comfort. Just me, I guess.

In any event: Good job, Eric! By the quality (sic) of your enemies may we recognize your worth.

Image: Johannes Christiaan Schotel, "Low Tide in a Bay with a Moored Vessel and Fishing Boats," Early nineteenth century. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This, on top of his recently renewed call for the twofer environmental and economic foolishness of a gas tax holiday, makes it clear, to me at least, where Senator McCain actually stands on the issue of global warming.

Not to beat a horse I long sinced blogged to near-death here, but if you are even remotely serious about the issue of global warming (not to mention, being a "leader") you don't look for ways to encourage people to burn more oil.  You can't have it both ways (or rather, if you are anything but a straight talking, honest kind of guy, you can try, but annoying folks like me will point out the contradiction).

So -- for anyone tempted to back McCain because of his environmental commitments -- remember the last time we trusted a plausible sounding, straight shooting kind of fella on this issue, look at the other promises McCain is making, and think long and hard when you find yourself all alone in the voting booth.

Image:   Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky, "Moonlit Seascape with Shipwreck," nineteenth century.  Source:  Wikimedia Commons.

Actually, while I enjoy a good, well prepared, someone-with-not-enough-to-do, professional grade snark as well as the next blogger, I fear that the author, DHinMI, is being a bit unfair here. [Of course s/he's being unfair. It's a blog, bozo! It's a sarcastic bit of fun for the morning! Get a life. --ed.)

No, no -- not unfair to McCain; he's fair game, and if he didn't want to be twitted for his age, he should have won in 2000.

No, what impressed me about this gallery is the degree to which the technology and experience at the end of the 19th century was so much more like our own than it was like that of the generation of the founders a century before.

Look at the photos on offer: Long distance communications; mass transport; medicine, (not really represented in this gallery) which, for all the easy humor, at least had the germ theory, a grasp of infection and the need for sterile conditions in hospital operating suites, new energy sources, organized, professional, government run emergency services, mass visual media, and, perhaps above all, electricity with which to make so much of the rest go.

Compare this, as I once heard the great physicist and teacher Philip Morrison do, to the situation in 1800. Whale oil as the primary source of light with which the reading and writing public could extend their work into the night. Slow transport, entirely powered by one's own body, one's horse, or by wind or water. Debridement and then amputation as the primary therapy for infected wounds. Communication beyond line of sight/hearing proceeding at the same rate as the transport of other goods: slow, slow, slow. And so on.

Morrison, in the lecture I heard, went into detail about the operations of a major wheat growing operation in the upper midwest in 1900. The web existed -- or rather a web, a network; telegraph communications enabled the farm's owners to follow grain prices around the world on a daily basis. Rail transport meant that the threshed wheat from that farm could enter that global market in a timely way.

Chicago, the nearest major city, was home to 1.6 million people. All those people consumed with a vengeance: in the landmark Marshall Field complex on and around State St. in the first decade of the twentienth century, the famous department store employed 12,000 people, doing 25 million dollars in retail and twice that, 50 million in wholesale business around the world. The technology needed to permit such enormous agglomerations of people advanced too -- Chicago's supply of indoor plumbing required continuous tending, culminating in the opening of its new, model sewage system in 1900, centered on a canal that could carry 600,000 cubic feet of water per minute.

All of which means that Morrison's wheat farmer, some miles out of town, was, all of a century ago, completely innocent of HTML and the joys of a 3G iPhone -- but was nonetheless enmeshed in a global system of information exchange and commerce, mass produced consumer goods and entertainment (even recorded music, via the mass market business in player pianos that boomed with new technology in the 1890s and 1900s).

To put it another way: I can imagine myself adapting pretty readily to life in my current home of Boston in 1900. 1800? Not so easy, I think.

So, channeling a little bit of that remarkably clear thinker, the late and missed Professor Morrison, it's always tempting to think that what's happening right now is so new, so wonderful, that it is without precedent in human experience. But there has been a whole lot of such experience over time, and sometimes at least, the newness of technology is in the ease of what it enables, and not in its pure, raw, novelty. That is: a question one should ask of the past is not just "how far?" but "how near?"

(Not that any of this, of course, makes me want a president more comfortable with a Hollerith calculating machine than the device on which I compose this.)

Image: Camille Pissarro, "Place du Havre, Paris," 1893. Location: Art Institute of Chicago. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Kevin wrote:

Thoughts from a Cancer Biology graduate student (8+ / 0-)

I'm new to the site, but I just thought i'd throw my two cents in here. I'm finishing up my PhD in Molecular Cancer Biology at Duke University and I hope to give you some insight as to how bad things are getting in the scientific community. When i first entered graduate school in 2002, nearly 25 percent of all new grants were being funded by the NIH. Now, slightly more than 10 percent are. This has led to limited job opportunities for graduating students, a smaller group of professors holding a larger piece of the NIH pie (fewer new ideas and perspectives on complex and longstanding problems), and will surely have long lasting consequences on the ability to recruit new brilliant minds as the job market continues to decline.

I urge all to speak to your congressmen, and speak up about a problem many will talk about and few will actually do anything for. You can also find out more information at the American Association for the Advancement of Science website www.AAAS.org.

Technology is at the heart of almost all new invention. At a time when we need great thinkers to solve problems inherent in the U.S. and clearly the rest of the world (i.e. global warming, petroleum dependency, health sciences research and yes, even our countries defense capabilities) the Bush administration has taken away funding and slowed the progress that we've been moving towards in all these areas. Unless steps are taken soon, our ability to solve these problems will be greatly compromised in order to pay for a war we dont need, and tax cuts we cant afford.

Pay close attention to the key number in Kevin's post: there has been a nearly 60% drop in grants funded by the NIH over the education of one graduate student. Similar cutbacks are occuring at other major science and engineering funding agencies.

Everything Kevin says about the consequences of such a decline is true: fewer grad students; fewer jobs for newly graduated researchers (not to be confused with graduated beakers); shrinking incentives for technically or mathematically skilled undergraduates to consider science or engineering basic research as a career, and so on.

The larger consequences follow on with shocking speed. It takes a long time -- decades -- to build up a research infrastructure. Labs, space, machines -- but above all people who have ideas and time and room enough to pursue ideas that don't work out (most of them) and the few that do. (Take a look at this NOVA program about Judah Folkman for the virtues of persistence and the absolute necessity of an ongoing flow of grad student and post doc money to produce important results.)

As Kevin argues, it takes much less time -- years, maybe a decade, to unravel the technical capacity to do research. To take an example from the engineering side of things. As late as 1973, with the launch of Skylab, the United States possessed the ability to lift large payloads into orbit, and to carry manned missions as far as the moon, all using one of the true monuments of 20th century technology, the Saturn V rocket. That was the moon rocket's last flight. Within a few years, though much of the infrastructure of the moon missions remained, the core manufacturing capacity to build more such rockets was lost.

The consequence: Skylab was designed to remain safely in orbit until 1981, two years past the scheduled debut of the Space Shuttle, which would be deployed to dock with America's space station (yup, we had one thirty five years ago), and move the facility to a higher orbit.

Then Skylab's parking orbit deteriorated early, in 1979. The shuttles, behind schedule, were unavailable. The last Saturn Vs had already long since been mothballed and placed, in some cases, on museum display. The production line had been shut down for almost a decade. A decade after landing men on the moon, the US had exactly no space vehicles capable of carrying humans to near earth orbit.

And now, even though the shuttle does exist, we lack anything approaching the heavy life capacity the US space program possessed forty years ago. Hence the very costly, unlikely-to-finish-anytime-soon Ares rocket development project, now scheduled for first flight in 2015, forty three years after the last American walked on the moon.

That is: to put it in the words of that noted analyst of science policy, Joni Mitchell,

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til its gone

To return to the core theme of this post, this blog, and Kevin's comment: John McCain's priorities for federal spending put science funding in deep danger. If we continue to gut funding for basic science research and education, we face the loss not just of specific projects left undone, but of the capacity to do the cutting edge science and technological investigation that is the foundation of our prosperity and our national security.

Usually I illustrate this blog with fine art. But this clip from a seminal work in American motion picture history seems more appropriate somehow.

By way of background: over the last eight years of Republican power, of the George Bush administration's misrule, science in America has come under attack in several ways. Among them:

1: Official denialism, censorship, government sanctioned lies and misrepresentations so thorough as to rise to the level of falsehood. See Seth Shulman's account; Chris Mooney's book; and anything from the wealth of reporting on climate change deceit, reproductive health nonsense, and the disastrous conflation of religious ideology with public health and HIV prevention world wide.

(Those last two links are to Elizabeth Parisi's blog and just-about-available book, both titled The Wisdom of Whores. The book is at the top of a growing pile of well written books about crucial topics accreting on my desk. I'll blog more about Elizabeth's and several others over the next few weeks -- important stuff here).

2. Going further in the same vein -- when inconvenient results could not be suppressed, the Bush administration turned to a more direct solution, blocking further research that might yield ideologically unacceptable research. The lengths to which this "I Can't Hear You" twitch can go can be seen in this 2005 decision to pull out of Agent Orange research in Vietnam.

3. Delegitimizing science through active public disdain. My bile will probably force a separate blog post on an issue I've already screamed about -- but this quote from GOP Congressman John Duncan captures the theme pretty well:

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems "rather elitist" that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. "I don't think it's something we should abandon," he said of abstinence-only funding.

(Acute readers will notice the depressing similarity between Duncan's statement and the one discussed here.)

John McCain has participated in his party's and its leaders sins against reason. Examples range from his support for the same abstinence funding Congressman Duncan so eloquently defended, to his support for "teaching the controversy" (sic) thus admitting Intelligent Design (sic) into the classroom -- but that's not the key reason to think that his administration will be hostile to science (though such pandering does not inspire much hope, to be sure).

That is, McCain has been willing to go along to get along with the party -- and nothing in his gas tax holiday idiocy suggests that he has the interest or willingness to think critically about technical questions, nor to listen to those who do.

But that said, the real test of McCain's attitude towards science as a would-be President comes where it always does in government. That is to say:

Follow the money.

Here's the last bit of background: our once dominant international lead in science and engineering training, basic education and research funding has suffered significantly over the last eight years.

To take the NSF as a proxy for science funding as a whole, the appropriation for FY 2002 (the first for which Bush II was responsible) was 4.789 billion dollars, while the current, FY 2008 number comes only to 6.06 billion -- an increace of 1.217 billion nominal dollars or a cumulative increase of 25.4% over seven years. That is essentially flat when inflation is factored in, and the year over year number for 2007-2008 actually lags behind current inflation.

Other areas of government supported research fare even worse. You don't want to be a DOE supported particle physicist right now -- nor one trying to solve our energy dependence through fusion research.

So the question for would-be President McCain is: what will you do to reverse the current decline in funding for basic and applied science and engineering research?

The answer is nothing -- or worse.

How do I know this, given the near complete lack of detailed science plans on the McCain '08 policy page?

Because of this speech, delivered on April 14 and billed as a major address on his approach to the economy. He said...

"I promise you, if I'm elected President, I won't leave office without balancing the federal budget. And I won't do it with smoke and mirrors."

Then: "I won't balance the budget by allowing the President's income and investment tax cuts to expire. When we passed those tax cuts, we increased spending as well. That's unacceptable ... "

Next up, (in this speech delivered the next day): "I will also send to the Congress a middle-class tax cut -- a complete phase-out of the Alternative Minimum Tax to save more than 25 million middle-class families more than 2,000 dollars every year."

And finally (from McCain's website) " A greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success in Iraq."

Now for a simple exercise in counting on one's fingers.

2007 budget authority for the Iraq conflict topped 133 billion (or more than 20 times NSF's budget. (Put another way: we could double basic science spending in this country for what we spent for about 17 days of the conflict.)

McCain wants to spend more -- not to mention the increase in the general military budget he also envisions.

Eliminating the AMT will cost the government an enormous sum -- as much as 1.2 trillion dollars over the next decade.

Retaining the Bush tax cuts for the top 1 percent of American taxpayers eliminates the possibilty of recovering lost revenues or covering the cost of new spending commitments made elsewhere in the McCain "plan" (sic).

And finally, achieving a balanced budget means that McCain will have to find the cash to cover a deficit that in the first six months of FY 2008 alone is running over 311 billion dollars (very roughly 10 percent of the budget for the entire year).

One last detail: discretionary domestic spending in FY 2007 (the last year with comprehensive data) -- everything from roads to midnight basketball to science but excluding defense and veterans spending -- came to 522 billion dollars.

So to put all this stuff in one tightly wrapped package:

To deliver on his commitments on taxes, defense and fiscal responsiblity, John McCain would have to eliminate all discretionary spending -- including the few tens of billions spent on science R & D.

There is, of course, no real world political calculation that would permit that to happen. But McCain's priorities are very clear -- trillions for defense; trillions more for tax cuts. For the rest, as he put it himself, "the best way to protect the tax cuts and balance the budget is to stop spending money on things that are not the business of government and on programs that have outlived their usefulness or were never useful to begin with."

In that context, does anyone think that basic science, graduate student fellowships, young investigator grants and all the rest will survive at anything like current levels -- much less with funding increases to catch up even to what has been lost to inflation over the last presidency?

This post has gone on too long.

Why so many words when I could simply have said, "It's the arithmetic, stupid." Whatever else John McCain would do as President, advancing the cause of science in America is not plausibly one of them.

I'll leave it to the reader to dwell on the economic and national security consequences of such a choice

*For the record the most comprehensive study to date, performed under contract for the US Department of Health and Human Services, found that

The impact results from the four selected programs show no impacts on rates of sexual abstinence. About half of all study youth had remained abstinent at the time of the final follow-up survey, and program and control group youth had similar rates of sexual abstinence. Moreover, the average age at first sexual intercourse and the number of sexual partners were almost identical for program and control youth.

Image: Gustave Courbet, "The Wrestlers," 1853. The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project. The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Source: Wikimedia Commons

So -- I am in the middle of an ever-growing post to respond to Steven Postrel's comments on this post, and I just can't get it done before red wine and rib steak have their way with me tonight. Tomorrow -- I almsot promise.

But I can't leave the blog to grow yet more lonely, so to keep the climate change thread going, let me draw your attention to this truly depressing report from PBS's invaluable series, Frontline.

What struck me about the program when I caught it on broadcast was the reminder that in 2000, George Bush ran to the left of Al Gore on controlling carbon emissions, promising a hard cap on emissions to respond to the imminent danger of global warming.

It took just months, as Frontline documents with a devastating interview with the EPA commissioner of the time, former New Jersey Gov., Christine Todd Whitman, for Bush, ably prodded by Dick Cheney, to reverse course and abandon any pretense of caring about climate change for what has turned out to be two terms as the worst president in American history.

The significance of this report lies beyond its worth as a depressing exercise in recent/contemporary history. John McCain has garnered support, or at least praise, for his seeming commitment to the reality of climate change and the need for action to control the human-produced carbon pollution that is broadly understood as the prime engine of global warming.

But people inclined to buy the rather thin gruel that McCain has offered so far (at least on his website) should have heard a warning shot when McCain called for a gas tax holiday, as I blogged here. There is no way to reconcile a measure that provides incentives to drive with a genuine commitment to controlling carbon emissions.

And then I saw the Frontline report (titled "Hot Politics" by the way), and I realized that I had been baited and switched before, by the man who has designated McCain as his political heir. Trust this man on climate science at your own (and your children's, and everyone else's) risk.

Usually, I illustrate this blog with fine art. But there is really only one possible artistic commentary here.

Enjoy:

The answer: a couple of things.

First, the piece had lots of numbers, but very little in the way of useful, contextual quantitative analysis.

For example, it would have been nice to know the ratio of the risk of serious complications of the vaccine to risk of the disease itself. That is, after all, the crux of most of the argument vaccine exempters make.

Second, the piece refers to the herd immunity concept, but never explains it -- which is crucial, because the public health question (as opposed to the child abuse one) turns on the point at which refusal to immunize creates a big enough unvaccinated habitat in which a given illness starts to pose a risk to folks other than those who have chosen to risk disease rather than a shot.

Make no mistake -- this piece does document, however imperfectly, a real problem. It catches the essence of the stupidity on the march in our rich, unprecedentedly healthy society in this passage:

It is the absence, or close to it, of some illnesses in the United States that keep some parents from opting for the shots. Worldwide, 242,000 children a year die from measles, but it used to be near one million. The deaths have dropped because of vaccination, a 68 percent decrease from 2000 to 2006.

“The very success of immunizations has turned out to be an Achilles’ heel,” said Dr. Mark Sawyer, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. “Most of these parents have never seen measles, and don’t realize it could be a bad disease so they turn their concerns to unfounded risks. They do not perceive risk of the disease but perceive risk of the vaccine.”

But the third, and the real point of this post, is that there is a really big hole in the NY Times story: nowhere does the author mention that a current candidate for the Presidency of the United States has very recently made this problem worse.

Last month, John McCain said the following, according to ABC News:

"It’s indisputable that (autism) is on the rise amongst children, the question is what’s causing it. And we go back and forth and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines."

McCain said there’s "divided scientific opinion" on the matter, with "many on the other side that are credible scientists that are saying that’s not the cause of it."

There is, of course, precisely the opposite of "strong evidence" that the vaccines cause autism. The NYT piece did point to the vaccine/autism panic as one wellspring for the movement to avoid vaccination, writing this:

Alexandra Stewart, director of the Epidemiology of U.S. Immunization Law project at George Washington University, said many of these parents are influenced by misinformation obtained from Web sites that oppose vaccination.

“The autism debate has convinced these parents to refuse vaccines to the detriment of their own children as well as the community,” Ms. Stewart said.

You would think that the fact that someone running for President is spouting the same myth, would register here. It has been less than a month since McCain exposed either his ignorance or his willingness to pander to an angry voter.

Whatever the source of his remarks, they provide direct demonstration of how credulity and intellectual sloth undermine science -- and in this case, directly contribute to an evolving public health threat. It's not good journalism to ignore elephants like this hanging around the edges of your story.

Beyond that: we've been lucky so far.

Measles is rare now, and likely to stay so in North America.

But outbreaks will continue to occur, and one may hit in an unlucky pocket of susceptibility to the diesease.

Meanwhile, other diseases have been getting more common. Pertussis, (aka whooping cough, for readers of a certain age), the "P" in the DPT shot is on the rise, with incidence rising fifteen fold in the last quarter-century, to over 25,000 cases in the US in 2004.

Sometime, probably not that far off, a kid or kids are going to die of entirely preventable illness because someone thought it was too damn risky to immunize their children.

Maybe they heard Senator McCain tell them that credible scientists thought so too. He should know better. And if he doesn't know, then he should recognize his ignorance, and shut the hell up.

In my dreams.

Image: Louis-Léopold Boilly, "L'innoculation," 1807. Source, Wikimedia Commons.

(I think I have used this picture in an earlier post, but it works so well here, so why not?)

The larger point I keep sniffing around is the notion that this is what a real definition of science literacy means: it's not what facts you know (or think you know -- see this post for a gory view of truthiness in science). Rather -- its how you approach facts as you learn them, what sense you or I make of our experience that counts.

Counts -- there's the word again. Apparently uber-economist Martin Feldman, late of Ronald Reagan's administration and now professing to unsuspecting Harvard undergraduates, doesn't do that so good. He's got a nifty proposal to address the mortgage crisis in America -- a massively complex scheme of government intervention and subsidy (waittaminute -- ain't that for Atrios's DFHs?) that will, in the end, in the real world, add up to...

Bupkis. Tanta over at Calculated Risk has run the numbers. Putting the absolute best possible framework around Feldman's idea (he wants the feds offer a 15-year second mortgage loan at a highly subsidized rate, with a number of restrictions, to cover 20% of existing mortgages), Tanta works out what all the details actually mean.

You can mess about a bit with the assumptions in the examples worked out there, but the bottom line remains the same. The sucker don't work. Plausibly, it will increase monthly payments for many borrowers (total interest will go down; but the real-world economic crisis derives from the fact that folks can't pay what they owe now, not fifteen years down the road). One case study ends up with a home owner forced to buy 12 fewer lattes per year ... which, as Tanta notes, hardly advances the cause of economic stimulus.

Not to spill two many bytes on this -- after all, this is a proposal so dumb it has nowhere to go, despite the bar being set pretty low on stupid over the last several years -- but why is this so hard to figure out?  Feldman can in fact do his sums -- I'm sure.  Why not actually run a few tests against his hypothesis (subsidizing a fraction of mortgage interest costs will make a difference to the economy -- yes or no?) and quietly trashcan the idea himself, without wasting time the rest of us could use ...say ... meeting the book deadline whose breath I feel hot against my neck.

Count, man! Count.  (You'll still respect yourself in the morning.)

(h/t Atrios)

In this post I ridiculed Mike Huckabee's pulled-out-of-some-orifice energy independence "plan" -- the one where he proposed a one billion dollar prize (that's right -- a billion with a "b") for someone who could come up with a 100 mile per gallon car.

Now, this idea is fatuous on many levels, anathema, I think from both right and left perspectives. Mostly it is a loser because it misses the point: energy indpendence depends on much more than increased efficiency in a use that accounts for something under one quarter of all energy use in the country. Getting there wouldn't hurt -- to the contrary -- but it wouldn't solve the problem, or even come close. (For many reasons -- supply issues, oil being a resource that will begin to decline and has already been doing so for a long time from domestic sources; demand issues, given that a couple of billion folks in Asia want more of the stuff and so on; and more demand issues, given the fact that efficiency allows more people into the game, thus reducing the impact of gains on overall consumption; and so on.)

For more on energy use by sector, browse through the tables here for some interesting/depressing reading. Two things do stand out. Huckabee is right this far fuel efficiency is a problem, however feckless his solution might be. Efficiency totals for the American fleet of cars topped 20 mpg in 1990. As of 2005, total fleet efficiency had reached only 22.9. And second the SUV plague is a national security issue: over those same years, SUV efficiency went from 16.1 mpg in 1990 to a high of 17.6 mpg in 2001, and then back down to 16.2 mpg by 2003, where it has stayed. That's a drop of about 9 % in just two years. All those Hummers and Porsche Cayennes take their toll, I guess. Given that SUVs and light trucks account for over half of domestic car/truck sales that's just bad news. All numbers from the link above: the Energy Information Administration's Annual Energy Review for 2006.

All that said, the bottom line is that if you want to increase the efficiency of US ground transportation the fastest way is through regulation: increased CAFE standards, applied to all light transport, with no distinction made between cars and light trucks. That's something everyone knows, and no one --especially amongst the GOP orthodoxy -- wants to admit.

But this post is not about the "I don't wanna" idiocies of US energy/transportation policy. It's about 100 mpg cars. The reason Huckabee's offhand comment in a debate was not just stupid, but silly was that, of course, the technology to produce 100mpg cars does not need some Manhattan Project to generate breakthroughs to a brave new energy future. It's already here, and, as I pointed out in my original post -- there is one production >100 mpg sports car, the Tesla Roadster, about to be delivered to customers.

In that earlier post I noted that the 2008 model year is sold out. Since then, Tesla Motors has opened the waiting list for 2009 -- so if $5,000 (against a base price of $98,000) is burning a hole in your pocket, go for it.

But I must say that I was perhaps too triumphalist in my crowing over Huckabee's so-yesterday grasp of the technological possible. Tesla Motors has just deeply disappointed me. As the Wired's Autopia blog reported yesterday, the high performance engine, capable of propelling the two-seater from 0-60 in 4.0 seconds, overwhelmed two different transmission designs. So when the car actually ships in March (promises, promises) it will come with a temporary fix, a beast of a transmission that can handle all the power generated, but that cuts acceleration to a mere 5.7 seconds for the 0-60 run. A newly designed transmission to restore the promised performance is promised for later model run cars (and as a retrofit to the tortoises off the line first).

All together now: awwww.

Now, its true that cars that cost less than $30,000 -- the Nissan 350 ZX and the Ford Mustang GT for two -- could smoke the transmission hobbled Tesla on the flat. But loathe as I am to agree with Gregg Easterbrook on anything, he's right in the item in this column that ridicules the need for speed that is safe (and legal) only on the track.

Meanwhile Mike Huckabee's naive paean to salvation by the technological deus ex machina (two dead languages in the same sentence -- I'm cooking now) is simply a distraction from the real business of using policy incentives to change energy behavior. The big problem is not going to go away in the flash of a speeding Tesla, however delicious its technology may be.

And if you think that this was all an excuse to put up another couple of pictures of the car...you're right.

(And if you think that I, c. 50 y. 0. want to live my second childhood in one, you're right again.)

Images: Lesser Ury: "Paris, Sonnenaufgang," 1928. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Tesla Roadster, taken Sept. 27, 2006, licensed under Creative CommonsAttribution ShareAlike 2.0. Source: Wikipedia Commons.