“It is … disturbing that so many lawmakers elected to the new U.S. Congress reject the overwhelming scientific consensus with respect to human-induced climate change. The question now facing the United States is not only how to effectively reinject the facts of climate science back into the core of this particular debate, but also how to ensure that food science underlies all legislative decisions.”

Alberts points out that last year the U.S. National Academy of Science—an NGO that produces reports about the scientific consensus on important issues so that politicians can make informed decisions—produced a series of reports which put the position that climate change is human made and poses significant risks to the worlds future.

“This conclusion is nevertheless challenged by numerous politicians as well as by a substantial fraction of the public.”

But the scientific method is a robust method of discovering the most likely reason for any given hypothesis.

Our Schools, Universities and Crown Research Institutes need to help build an understanding of the method and the benefits of relying on evidence gathered by it. This is because “a strong scientific consensus, such as that about climate change, must … form the basis for making wise personal and community decisions, representing by far the best bet for predicting the future consequences of present actions.”

The first line of the editorial is the most important for New Zealand:

“Over the long run, any Nation that makes crucial decisions while ignoring science is doomed.”

National is ignoring the science, research and evidence. The Government is building more motorways when we know public transport projects are generally cheaper, less polluting and more cost effective. It is ignoring social science research on beneficiaries. It is ignoring the science around water quality. It is ignoring the science about burning lignite.

Evidence based policy should be the goal of all Governments instead of the old route of only looking at policy based evidence this Government has chosen.

You can read the whole editorial here [PDF].

There is no denying the value of linking science and the business community, and in particular of supporting companies who are working to develop new ‘green’ technologies; intellectual property of all sorts that can be ‘exported’ for a much higher return than basic commodities; new cleaner production processes; better packaging methods and materials – the list goes on.

New Zealand for at least twenty years has been notorious for under-investing in research and development, both in the public and the private sector.  Since the government canned the 15% R&D tax credit that was available to incentivise research, in favour of funding their income tax cuts, it is high time they found a mechanism for putting something back.

What’s missing from the mix is much of a leg-up for ‘start-ups’ or businesses without a track record in research.  By focusing on the bigger players with a history of research and development, there is a danger of overlooking or failing to give necessary oxygen to the smaller, ‘under the radar’ operations who might then struggle to get their product or service to market, or be forced to go offshore for support (with the likelihood that the potential benefits of the income / IP will follow).

It is also a worry that $96m of the $321m package is ‘reprioritised’ money, money that has been “…reallocated from underperforming areas of the $750 million science, research and technology vote, though Mr Key would not identify the ineffective programmes when asked”.

We can draw our own conclusions a bit, however, reading that “Staff at the institute’s Environmental Health Group learned today [May 11^th]of proposals to cut 13 jobs from the unit. These proposed losses come on top of more than 20 other positions going at ESR this year through attrition and other redundancies and 35 job losses recently at AgResearch”.

Hmmm, do I get a whiff of robbing Peter to pay Paul?

At least since 1997, and the release of the first ‘State of the New Zealand Environment Report’ it has been clear that we are hopelessly short of good baseline environmental monitoring and research, that has compromised and continues to compromise our ability to manage the for ecological, social, economic or cultural wellbeing.

Giving more money to a select few players, with the expectation that will provided sustainable benefits, is redolent of very short term and narrowly ‘silo-ed’ thinking.  It’s time we looked at the much bigger picture, and perhaps once again we could be exporting good science and the value it produces, rather than continuing to export most of our scientists!

Ever since 1992 scientific advance, whether for economic, environmental or social benefit, has been impeded by scientists being forced to spend less time in the lab or in the field, and more time chasing a diminishing pot of funding. The CRI model took away security of funding from public science that had existed within the DSIR, despite the remarkably positive return on investment that the old model generated over decades.

We have seen less a contest of ideas, and more a contest to see who can write the most compelling funding applications.

Funding has also been typically disbursed on a one – to three year cycle, which has impeded the development of longer term research and development programmes.

Our scientists have too often found themselves in the ridiculous position of having to go offshore for peer review of research funding applications, because their peer groups in New Zealand are also their competitors for ‘contestable ‘ funds!

We have as a result become a country that has been exporting scientists rather than science.

The Taskforce recommendations agree that collaboration, not more competition, is the way forward for developing science and technology in New Zealand. This was also the view of the 2007 OECD review of our innovation system, which found it to be ‘too competitive and fragmented’

There is still a worryingly focus on monitoring financial rather than scientific performance. It needs to be recognised that sometimes a promising line of research will fail to deliver any outcome that may be developed into economic gain – this needs to be accommodated, to avoid a ‘risk averse’ culture of only doing ‘safe’ science becoming further embedded.

The challenge the report lays before the government is to properly fund the science sector in a way that provides surety of base funding, topped up by specific funding for projects. We need this change both to retain our current talent, and so that young people entering the science sector can see a clear career path to a senior science role, not a nudge sideways into a financial manager’s or marketers role.

Today the SMC has launched a new blog: what they call a “network of science blogs”:

Sciblogs debuts with 26 bloggers, including scientists from universities, Crown Research Institutes and private research organisations the length of the country. It will be the largest online hub for science-related content relevant to New Zealanders and act as a forum of discussion on the important issues facing society.

A full list of our bloggers can be found here.

“It’s a bit of an experiment for New Zealand where the blogosphere is dominated by political pundits and where the conversation can often turn nasty,” says Griffin, Manager of the Science Media Centre. “But we think there’s an appetite for intelligent comment on scientific issues and Sciblogs will be central to that.”

Ouch. I’d like to think that Frog’s posts include quite a bit of cross-over between science and politics. However, Sciblogs will be a great addition to the blogosphere.

Check it out: http://sciblogs.co.nz/

Also, DOC has recently started a blog from their staff which is worth a browse: http://blog.doc.govt.nz/

Why should we care about this? Because:

“If we understand the sources of the particles that nucleate clouds, and their relative abundance, we can determine their impact on climate,” said Pratt, lead author of the paper.

The effects of tiny airborne particles called aerosols on cloud formation have been some of the most difficult aspects of weather and climate for scientists to understand.

In climate change science, which derives many of its projections from computer simulations of climate phenomena, the interactions between aerosols and clouds represent what scientists consider the greatest uncertainty in modeling predictions for the future.

Climate models will always be a work in progress. If they were perfect, they would be replicas of the real thing.

Since the whole global warming debate in scientific circles has moved on from “are humans warming the planet”, for which there is ample evidence and general agreement, to the question “what are the risks and and how do we manage them”, this is an important piece of the scientific puzzle.

No doubt this work will spawn a rash of experiments to reproduce and refine the the results. I wish they’d just hurry up!

Photo Credit: NCAR

The rules for ministers say that employment matters are the province of the Chief Executive and his boss, the board. The minister should not interfere. It’s a good rule. But like most rules, slavish observance of it in all circumstances can make you look silly.

Jim Salinger is perhaps, to the public, NZ’s best known climate scientist. He is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a recipient of its collective Nobel prize in 2007. He is President of the Commission for Agricultural Meteorology at the WMO and an authority on the impacts of climate change on agriculture in Australia and New Zealand. His 200 published papers span the 30 year period when the world has been struggling with climate science and he is a recipient of the New Zealand Science and Technology Medal for communicating science. Many will have heard him on radio and TV commenting on the latest climatological information and its significance for our lives.

Professor Stephen Schneider, international climate expert and professor at Stanford, describes Jim as “the go to person for credible information on the climate of New Zealand and the world at large”; “a world class climatologist” and “the respected voice of NZ on all things climate change related”.

Yet on Thursday last he was sacked, not for bad science, but for communicating good science. Not for attacking government or NIWA policy, but for sharing the information in his area of expertise with the public of New Zealand – oh, without going through the right channels of his organisation. His crime was entirely procedural. Probably very irritating to his bosses who have to run the organisation, but hardly a crime against the public good.

The news has already been reported by Nature and incredulity is sweeping round the science community.

There are some who want to see this as a government inclined towards climate change denial trying to silence a scientist whose work continues to pile up the evidence to the contrary. I think this is a wrong analysis. It seems to me much more to be the insistence of a bureaucracy on procedures and channels that have nothing to do with good science and everything to do with control; versus a scientist impatient with bureaucracy. I simply don’t believe the government itself is trying to silence him.

But the fact that some take this interpretation is very dangerous to the government, and to New Zealand’s international reputation as a country of free speech and excellent science. That is why the minister has to step in, regardless of the rules.

Tuesday in the House I asked the Minister, “Is there ever a point where an employment issue justifies his intervention as Minister because of its potential effects on the quality of science and on New Zealand’s international reputation” and was this such a point? He replied that he had been briefed by the Chief Executive and the chair of the board and had advised them that it was not a matter for the minister.

What could he do, within the rules?

He could invite them back again, and ask for an assurance that all employment procedures had been followed to the letter. He could discuss with the board their science communications strategy. He could make it very clear that their jobs are on the line if they lose an employment case. He could make a statement about how much the government values our scientists.

I suspect he may come to regret not doing any of this.

John Key said in a speech in 2005 that he didn’t want NZ to keep exporting scientists and importing taxi drivers. This case won’t help him realise his dream.

Here’s the video of my question in the House:

About a week after the election, reassured by pre-election statements that there would still be an ETS, though it might be different, a major forestry company was about 12 hours away from concluding a sale of forestry credits. They had achieved a price of NZ$30/tonne. The legislation passed last August provided that the ETS comes into effect for forestry on 1 January ’08, though not for energy till ’10 or transport till ’11. That is still the law.

From 1 January ’09 foresters can apply to have NZ units credited to their account in the registry, and can then sell them.

Then Key announced, part way through the coalition negotiations, that the ETS might be “repealed”. The buyer immediately shot through. Now we have Gerry Brownlee announcing that there will still be an ETS (despite setting up a committee to consider whether a carbon tax would be better) but business is gun-shy now and no-one is going to commit investment based on that.

The interesting question is, what does “put on hold” mean for forestry? If companies apply on 1 January to have units transferred to their account for carbon sequestered during 2008 by their post-1989 forests, as the law provides, will those units be forthcoming? That is dependent on whether MAF has completed the work needed to rollout the mapping tool that allows foresters to prove that their land is eligible. They were on track to have this done in time to meet the requirements of the law; have they been told not to proceed?

If so, under what authority? You can’t suspend the law just by announcing it. I was fully expecting an amendment bill to come to Parliament before Christmas, changing the date of coming into force for forestry. That hasn’t happened. Just as well, as that would also “put on hold” the deforestation penalties for those who clear and don’t replant, and lead to a frenzy of land conversion for dairying, with more damage to our emissions profile. That would be ironic, as Nick Smith grandstanded constantly in the last Parliament, attacking the Labour government for mismanaging the question of forestry credits and causing a landslide of dairy conversions in the year before the penalty came into force.

Of all people, a key player in the financial markets which rely on rumour and reading the tea leaves as they make their daily trades, should understand the damage loose talk can do to business confidence.

My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process. That will start with a federal cap-and-trade system. We’ll establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020, and reduce them an additional 80% by 2050. Further, we’ll invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private-sector efforts to build a clean-energy future.

Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combatting climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.

Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.

When a Green Party MP says these things, it’s just the loony left who don’t understand science and should shut up and wait to see what the Aussies and the US are going to do. Meanwhile, the New Zealand government reopens the talking shop to debate whether the sun revolves around the earth.

The British Government Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, published in March, was blunt.

“The scientific evidence is now overwhelming; climate change is a serious global threat, and it demands an urgent global response. Hundreds of millions of people could suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the world warms.”

The review warned that “our actions now and over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century. And it will be difficult or impossible to reverse these changes”.

And these are the cautious, official pronouncements. Many scientists are much more apocalyptic. Alongside this overwhelming consensus, Mr Hide’s flippant naysaying was easy to laugh off when he was a gang of one. But for Mr Key to now give these views credibility risks making New Zealand a laughing stock as well.

National campaigned on reviewing the way New Zealand meets our Kyoto treaty obligations to reduce our carbon footprint. That’s fine. Act’s global warming denial policy was not part of the deal. Mr Key should spell this out pronto.

I would have said though that scientists are currently apoplectic rather than apocalyptic.  Climate change is a relatively easy thing to combat, if only we want to. We have already developed all the technological solutions we need. We just need to start using them. But first we need some greater responsibility shown by Hide.  If he is a scientist, as he claims, he should understand what a scientific consensus is and what it means.

It wasn’t that long ago in historical terms that Nicolaus Copernicus bucked the established western wisdom and asserted that the earth may in fact orbit the sun. He rightfully feared the retribution of the authorities and was careful to pay them tribute when he finally did publish shortly before his death. Although the evidence has been building for decades, only recently has academia began to get any traction in their criticism of neoclassical economics. This is, in my opinion, due to both their own temerity and to the failure of the fourth estate – the media – to do their homework.

The current economic meltdown is proving fertile ground for legitimate questions to be asked about the scientific rigour of the pseudo social science of economics.

In an article critical of the modelling used by the IEA in their World Energy Outlook 2008 released last week, Dr. Charles Hall fires another broadside at those who continue to lead us based on bad science:

Neoclassical economics and economists have reigned supreme despite their dismal track record of late, as evidenced by governments turning to the same economists who got us into the credit crisis situation to get us out. It used to work better: economies expanded simultaneously with an expansion of economic departments and economic theory. It looked like the theories worked, although since more and more oil was being pumped out of the ground perhaps any theory could ‘seemingly’ work. Capitalism may be a giant Ponzi scheme once fueled by ever more investors and ever more oil at its base, but this has ceased, most likely forever (see here for a definition of Ponzi scheme). The economic theories became ever more analytically elegant as they got further and further from reality. Our most prestigious economics departments not only did not teach very much about oil or grain or other sources of real wealth but increasingly not even about money. Rather their focus was far too often complex econometric models using rather stupid starting assumptions (e.g. Nadeau, 2008). Acceptance of graduate students was increasingly taken based on their math skills rather than their ability to understand real commodity paths. Wall Street followed the lead of our major economists. As we have seen in other disciplines, such as ecology, there has been massive conflation of mathematical and analytical rigor with scientific rigor.

The basic theories of neoclassical economics break many conventional rules of science: for starters the boundaries are wrong, the laws of thermodynamics are not respected and the whole edifice is based on “sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions” about the economy that were chosen based on an inappropriate physical analogy and that were analytically tractable (Leontief, 1981; Hall et al., 2001; Nadeau, 2008). In fact why should economics be a social science at all? Real economies are about the flow of real materials and the energy required for those flows and materials. Earlier economists (the physiocrats and the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo) understood the physical base for wealth and made no such foolish assumptions, nor should we.

Instead of the kind of economics that dominates today what we need is a biophysical approach to our economic system, one that is based on real physical and biological production and distribution possibilities (Cleveland et al., 1984; Hall and Klitgaard 2006). We would do well to understand and guide this transition.

Here in New Zealand, it’s high time we question the accepted wisdom that our leaders claim will lead us to the promised land. The neoclassical economic model is failing us. It is based on some pretty poor assumptions and defies the laws and rigour of science. Before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, let us consider in what ways this ill conceived paradigm has served us. But let us also question every assumption on which it is based, and expose each to a fresh light of enquiry.

Like Copernicus 500 years ago, we need to pluck up the courage to take our view of the world to the next level. A level that is more sustainable, more egalitarian, more humane.

40 lab rats were offered a choice between organic and conventional biscuits by Swiss and Austrian scientists.  The rats preferred the organic biscuits, which makes you wonder if rats are smarter than humans.

Those are some pretty lucky lab rats getting the biscuit tasting job rather than the one involving electrodes or pharmaceuticals. And the Swiss and Austrians have some fairly good bakeries too.

There have been plenty of reasons to oppose genetic engineering that I can agree with; control of the food chain by large scale agribusiness, overstated benefits, chemical use, commercialisation of life, monocropping, loss of seed stock biodiversity, reduced productivity…

However, the body of scientific opinion has been for quite a while that genetic engineering poses no significant risk to humans – the risk is small (but unquantified, and not easily quantifiable). By overstating or overemphasising that risk, the Greens end up looking quite stupid, and losing credibility among scientists. I think is a terrible shame, as the science is on the side of Greens and environmentalists on most other issues.

Shunda barunda has responded suggesting that the science behind GE is unsustainable:

GE is totally opposite to true sustainable management, it is simply trying to bend the rules of nature to suit unsustainable practice. It is the equivalent of making natural resources a slave to humanity.
True sustainable management is based on accepting certain limits to our ability or desire to manipulate the environment around us, and managing our production with techniques where both people and the environment benefit.

Paradox argues that the precautionary principle is an important scientific framework for considering the issue.

The science, as you imply, is ambiguous, “hard to quantify”. Doesn’t that mean there’s nothing much to say GM is dangerous, and nothing to say it isn’t?

Hence, the Greens advocate a precautionary approach, no?

And sidestepping from science to economics Greenfly observes:

Aside from the question of medicines, who will benefit most from the engineering of genes? Follow the money and you don’t end up in the hovel of a hungry person.

My two cents worth: As well as the economic and social risks with genetic engineering there are scientific risks that we need to consider from genetic engineering. For instance horizontal gene transfer is an important issue that we really need to know more about.  Likewise we need to consider the threat to biodiversity that GE poses, not just to food crops, but to our wider environment.

worldchanging.com shows how two views of the same data on climate change can lead to very different solutions. In one set of data it looks like transport is the problem.  In the next set it seems we need to take into account what it is that is being transported; all the stuff we use and consume.

The New York Times investigates the ethical questions around powerful new science technologies that are:

so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.

The BBC has an article arguing we need to reform the economics of food production and supply but to do that successfully we need to better understand the energy involved in putting food on our plates. For instance tomatoes grown in the US need four times as many calories to grow as the calorific value of the tomatoes provide eaters.

At some point, it no longer makes any sense to simultaneously export and import food high in embodied energy

Celsias discusses the economics of avoided deforestation – the practice of paying countries not to cut down old rainforests.

The overall cost to buy carbon credits would be lower than what developed nations would expect to pay to reduce emissions through regulation of industry, transportation and energy sources, said Brent Sohngen, a study co-author and professor of agricultural, environmental and development economics at Ohio State University…

“It would save American taxpayers money and provide a huge transfer of funding from one region of the world to another, giving developing countries a larger chunk of the world’s economic pie to use as they see fit

The Telegraph, via cyclicious, has the feel good tale of Welsh gold medal winner who got to the Olympics by cycling to school each day:

The young Miss Cooke and her father, himself a former competitive cyclist, shunned the bus to dash from their home in the village of Wick, in the rolling hills of the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales, to Brynteg Comprehensive School in Bridgend, where Tony Cooke taught physics

(Wasn’t that swim by Moss Burmester brilliant yesterday.  I wonder if he swam to school each day?)

The underlying assumption, of course, is that issues matter, that voters are fundamentally rational agents who vote for candidates based on a coherent set of principles. In other words, they assume that my political preferences reflect some mixture of ideology and selfish calculation. I’ll vote for the guy who best matches my geopolitics and tax bracket.

The problem, as political scientist Larry Bartels notes, is that people aren’t rational: we’re rationalizers. Our brain prefers a certain candidate or party for a really complicated set of subterranean reasons and then, after the preference has been unconsciously established, we invent rational sounding reasons to justify our preferences.

Jonah Lehrer is making a very similar case to that Drew Weston made in The Political Brain which it seems, according to the waiting list at the Parliamentary Library, everybody in Parliament is reading. Essentially it seems that even those of us who think we’re following politics and policy debates fairly closely are making up our minds when we vote on a set of influences that we may not even know are there. It seems our inner amphibian has a stronger control over our mind than we’re willing to acknowledge.

Well, it may be true but I’m going to irrationally continue to discuss politics and policies nonetheless. You’re all welcome to participate in the charade by continuing to read and comment.

The SMC is an independent source of expert comment and information for journalists covering science and technology in New Zealand. Here we feature the opinions of leading scientists on breaking news stories and provide background reports and tools for both journalists and scientists. Our aim is to promote accurate, bias-free reporting on science and technology by helping the media work more closely with the scientific community.

It’s a great idea, assuming that there is clear delineation between what is science and what is opinion. Journalists struggle to tell the difference at the best of times and often conflate them in their reporting. I just hope that they take advantage of the service on offer. The number of new (non-existent) scientific notations and non-existent organisations I see in the papers on a regular basis is staggering. With editing budgets being slashed and work outsourced, rigorous fact checking is becoming increasingly rare in the main stream media.

It would be a ray of light to get more science based facts into our reporting, so welcome SMC!

If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.

And then this today in the Dominion Post.

Please read the science. I think the evidence is so strong we would be ignoring it at our own peril and the peril of all living species.

Unfortunately while the climate change denial debate that we have on a regular basis here at frogblog has been a fun way to pass the time, passing time is increasingly exactly the problem.  It’s a shame that scientists like Pachauri need to step beyond their role as scientists and instead play advocates for the science that so many politicians are failing to act upon.  But it does indicate that the clear gravity of the story science is telling us.

The Heartland Institute has named five New Zealanders in a list of 500 scientists whose published research is alleged to undermine support for the idea that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, largely fossil fuel burning, is warming the globe.

The five scientists concerned are Associate Professor Chris Hendy (University of Waikato), Dr Matt McGlone (Science Team Leader, Landcare Research), Dr Neville Moar (retired DSIR,), Dr Jim Salinger (Principal Scientist, NIWA) and Dr Peter Wardle (retired DSIR, FRSNZ). Other eminent scientists around the world, also included in the list of 500, have publically distanced themselves from the Heartland statement. While the Heartland Institute is entitled to make what it will of their research, these scientists strongly object to the implication that they support Heartland’s position.

The scientists fully endorse the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as to global warming and its causes. Much of their work has been concerned with climate change over many thousands of years, which, while supporting the idea that climates have fluctuated in the past and have at times been warmer than now, does not in any way weaken the conclusions reached by the IPCC about recent changes.

I posted about it here, but did not want to name names or potentially offend anyone in New Zealand whose views I was not absolutely sure about. Today they have spoken out and have joined many of the scientists on the list in distancing themselves from the sceptics camp. Some on the list cannot distance themselves because they are already dead or never existed.

Get real people. The science is in.

I am horrified to find my name on such a list. I have spent the last 20 years arguing the opposite.

Dr. David Sugden. Professor of Geography, University of Edinburgh

I have NO doubts ..the recent changes in global climate ARE man-induced. I insist that you immediately remove my name from this list since I did not give you permission to put it there.

Dr. Gregory Cutter, Professor, Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University

Please remove my name. What you have done is totally unethical!!

Dr. Svante Bjorck, Geo Biosphere Science Centre, Lund University

They followed up yesterday with another post, giving the names of three more scientists from the list who refuse to speak out against the Heartland Institute – because they are dead. Also in that post were a few imaginary friends of Heartland – scientists that don’t even exist.

I wonder if Muriel Newman is in fact real? I blogged about her earlier when she gushed in her Dom Post article ‘Climate change, we didn’t do it.‘, no doubt after conferring with some the the Heartland’s imaginary scientists. Maybe she’s just Rodney Hide’s imaginary friend?

Take a moment to enjoy this gem, referring to the conference as the Skeptic Tank: