The Guardian , Scientists accuse US of manipulating research
The Bush administration is guilty of misrepresenting scientific knowledge and misleading the public, a group of America's most senior scientists claimed yesterday.
They said the government had manipulated information to fit its policies on everything from climate change to whether Iraq had been trying to make nuclear weapons.
The open letter from the independent Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said: “When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions.
“This has been done by placing people who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees; by disbanding existing advisory committees; by censoring and suppressing reports by the government's own scientists; and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice.”
The letter was signed by 60 senior US scientists, including 20 Nobel prize winners, such as the physicists Steven Weinberg and James Cronin and the biologists Eric Kandel and Harold Varmus.
“We are not … taking issue with the administration's policies. We are taking issue with the administration's distortion of the process with which science enters into its decisions,” Kurt Gottfried, a professor of physics at Cornell University and chairman of the UCS, told reporters.
Russell Train, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under the former Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, said that during his tenure: “I do not recall ever receiving a suggestion, let alone an order, from the White House as to how I should make a regulatory decision. How times have changed.”
Neal Lane of Rice University in Houston and a former science adviser to ex-president Bill Clinton, said scientific findings were being kept from decision-makers.
“I am afraid that our leading policymakers simply don't know what they don't know, given the manipulation of the science advice process,” he said.
Last night, the White House denied the accusations. “I can assure you that this is an administration that makes decisions based on the best available science,” said a White House spokesman, Scott McClellan.
The UCS letter was published on the same day as a new report from the National Academies of Science, which expressed serious concern that the US government's plans to deal with climate change could be scuppered by a lack of funds.
The US equivalent of Britain's Royal Society, the NAS focused on the Bush administration's latest plans for the environment, coordinated by the US climate change science programme (CCSP).
The NAS conceded that the new research plans were a significant improvement on the CCSP's original strategy, which was the focus of much international criticism when it was published in November 2002.
At the time, scientists around the world said that the draft strategy flew in the face of international climate change research. It ignored existing science and a great deal of its planned research would merely repeat work that had been done already.
The strategy had followed the US withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol, which commits countries to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
It also raised fears among environmentalists that the US would refuse to play its part in addressing the problems associated with climate change.
The NAS reviewed the draft strategy and gave the CCSP a chance to improve its plans. Yesterday's report is an evaluation of these revisions.
“The plans are quite good now actually, it has been quite responsive to the scientific community,” said Diana Liverman, director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and a co-author of the NAS report. “But the academy's concerns are mostly about whether the resources will actually be there to implement it. And if the resources aren't there, which bits of it are going to be implemented?”
Linda Mearns of the national Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, agreed: “I think it does indicate that they have been certainly pressured by the criticism by the scientific community.”
Writing in today's Guardian Life section, Prof Liverman said scientists in the US were increasingly complaining of political interference with their work. She outlines the increasing suppression of research that goes against government policy on global warming. “To be a scientist working on climate change in the US is to be frustrated by the backlash against environmental science, research budget cuts and by the American media's general lack of interest in environmental issues,” she writes.
One group of scientists had federal lawsuits filed against them by lobby groups for producing reports on the effects of climate change across the US.
The UCS has long been critical of the Bush administrations attitude to climate change. “The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease if the public is to be properly informed about issues central to its well being,” its letter said.
