Sarewitz Butchers Brian's Song

UPDATE: The Policy Lass does the dozens on Sarewitz. 

Brian  has made an excellent statement of where the junction between science and politics must be if the world and your country and your local water supply is to survive. Eli will quote a couple of sentences here, but everybunny should re-read the entire thing, with the thought in their minds that Brian really does have his skin in the game, he is the real deal

It's not "science" that matters most at the intersection of science and policy but scientific consensus that does. If there's a well-established consensus with very few expert dissenters, then you've got factual conclusions as far as policymakers are concerned.  The consensus could be wrong of course, but that's not really relevant to policymakers - they don't have a choice of waiting for a perfect consensus because that won't happen.  What's missing from the commentary I've seen is that policymakers also don't have the choice of second-guessing the consensus by becoming their own Galileos. ..

Contrary to what scientists often say, the science can all-but-decide policy because some policy questions are easy.  Scientific predictions of climate change in the next century under business as usual emission scenarios run from "bad" to "potentially disastrous".  That's pretty much all we need to know from a policy perspective to conclude that we have to deal with it.  The question of how we deal with it isn't easy or exclusively a science question, but whether to deal with it was answered by science. 

Eli, has on occasion dealt with how journalists are also in the business of denying their responsibility to inform. We report, you decide is a cop out, because what is reported determines the decision

.  . . .a whole lot of other people appear to think that scientists are lousy communicators, and indeed, a whole lot of scientists agree and there are workshops, meetings and even, shudder, blogs, devoted to self improvement, or not. This goes into the file under missing the point.

 It's not that scientists are or are not lousy communicators (say that and Eli will lock you in a room with Richard Alley for example), but that journalists are lousy communicators. It's their fucking (emphasis added) job and they are screwing it up to a fare-thee-well. It ain't just climate either. What journalists produce often makes the average cut and paste student paper blush with modesty 

Which brings Eli to the latest from the Pielkesphere, a comment by Dan Sarewitz in Nature, telling science that it needs to become more Republican

The US scientific community must decide if it wants to be a Democratic interest group or if it wants to reassert its value as an independent national asset. If scientists want to claim that their recommendations are independent of their political beliefs, they ought to be able to show that those recommendations have the support of scientists with conflicting beliefs. Expert panels advising the government on politically divisive issues could strengthen their authority by demonstrating political diversity. The National Academies, as well as many government agencies, already try to balance representation from the academic, non-governmental and private sectors on many science advisory panels; it would be only a small step to be equally explicit about ideological or political diversity. Such information could be given voluntarily. 

Sarewitz views politics as informing science, rather than, as Brian points out, science informing politics.  Having crossed his eyes, he rushes downhill only to crash at the bottom advocating rebalancing the national academy with Republicans

To connect scientific advice to bipartisanship would benefit political debate. Volatile issues, such as the regulation of environmental and public-health risks, often lead to accusations of ‘junk science’ from opposing sides. Politicians would find it more difficult to attack science endorsed by avowedly bipartisan groups of scientists, and more difficult to justify their policy preferences by scientific claims that were contradicted by bipartisan panels. 

Again, Sarewitz confuses the relative merits of doing science and attacking science from a political soapbox.  Sarewitz does the Fox news thing.

Sarewitz, like his fanboy Pielke, lacks any critical understanding of politics. They take the political situation as given and legitimate, then direct all their criticism at the science community. Sarewitz is saying that the science community should be 'harnessed' to the beliefs and priorities of policymakers. The bunnies at RR are not about to tell scientists to bend themselves out of shape in order to make themselves relevant to the policy agendas of right-wing ideologues, science deniers, and political hacks of either party but we have always encouraged scientists to become politically more savvy and to learn to read political situations.

Increasingly over time it has become evident that, in the collision between climate science and the realities of Washington politics, the problem is overwhelmingly on the political side of the bridge and on one particular side of that in the US. This is an American problem something that Sarewitz does not appear to relaize. Scientists could benefit from learning to communicate better with civilians, but the US political arena has much deeper problems, primarily but far from exclusively on the right-wing side. Otherwise, given the heroic efforts of the climate science community to communicate via assessments, testimony, and otherwise, we would be farther along than we are.

But Sarewitz, Pielke, et al. just ignore all that and continue to beat up on the science community. It is seriously wrong-headed, really inexcusably wrong-headed in its failure to come up any learning curve on this after all this time.   But perhaps  a feature.  Sarewitz has a column in Nature, just as George Will has one in the Washington Post.

It's good work when you can get it.

Sarewitz' piece in Nature is drivel. Just clueless, and that's putting it diplomatically.

But wait, there's more . . .

Sarewitz doubles down
Pielke clucks in approval
Curry steps right into it

Maybe tomorrow Ethon will lend a hand.