Firing the watchmen

One of the most maddening things about this administration -- and there are many options to choose from -- is the insidious way they're hamstringing scientific research.

It's not just science denial.  That's bad enough.  Claiming that climate change, evolution, and the documented harmful effects of pollution are false has led to dreadful policy choices and (in the case of ecological malfeasance) put innocent lives at risk.

But they've found a sneakier way to deflect people's focus on reality; simply pull the plug on the projects that keep track of it.

This was done, to little fanfare and nearly zero coverage by the press, last week, to NASA's Carbon Monitoring System.  The project, which cost an estimated ten million dollars a year, not only kept track of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but studied sources and sinks for carbon worldwide (including methane, which is an increasing concern from thawing permafrost, and which has a higher greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide does).

So the powers that be have moved past arguing that the models are wrong, or the data flawed; they've simply stopped us from gathering the data in the first place.

[Image courtesy of NASA]

Daniel Jacob, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University, called this an "ironic" time to shut down the system.  There are two new, and more sensitive, carbon monitoring devices scheduled for launch -- one this year (to be mounted on the International Space Station), and one next (the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory), and these will now be tabled.  So Jacob finds it ironic because the funding is cut just before we added some tools to our kit that would allow far more refined measurements of the carbon levels in the atmosphere.  Me, I don't think it's ironic at all, I think it's pure cunning.  Stop the scientists from bolstering the data and their atmospheric models.  Prevent them from producing integrated theories that might make predictions leading to potential strategies for dealing with climate change.  It's like firing all the watchmen, and then acting surprised when your store gets robbed.

Or, as Paul Voosen put it, writing for Science:  "You can't manage what you don't measure."

There's no doubt about where this is all coming from; the pro-corporate, pro-fossil-fuel leanings of the current administration have never been in doubt.  Along the way, they've made sure that the voices of industry (Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, Rick Perry, Doug Domenech) are appointed to influential positions, and the voices of science are ignored, defunded, shut down, silenced, and harassed.  If you doubt the last-mentioned, look into the track record of Texas Representative Lamar Smith -- who, fortunately, is retiring this year, but who has spent damn near his entire career fostering doubt about climate change and other environmental issues, and making the lives miserable of any scientist who dares to claim the opposite.  Oh, he gives lip service to caring; earlier this year, Smith said he'd be fine addressing carbon dioxide levels and climate change -- but only if we do it by replacing fossil fuels with fusion technology.

Which doesn't exist yet, and which may not even be possible on a sufficient scale to provide the nation's energy needs.  And we'd only find out if it was feasible through scientific research, which Smith and his cronies have systematically shut down.

So the fossil fuel CEOs make money hand over fist, and then they buy the votes of politicians like Smith who are more concerned with their bank accounts than with the long-term habitability of the Earth.  And the scientists -- who, of all of us, have the most reason for sounding the alarm, and evidence to back them up -- are being sidelined.

All of this leaves me feeling helpless.  I know that optimists keep talking about a "Blue Wave" that's going to come in November and sweep away all of the elected officials who have become nothing more than Trump's professional ass-kissers.  Me, I'm not quite so sanguine.  Not only do we have a powerful, deeply entrenched corporate/industrial superstructure that is tickled pink by the environmental deregulation, pro-business tax legislation, and defunding of research, there's the dictatorship-style State-Sponsored Media that Fox News has become, presenting only the cheerful party line coming from the White House and ignoring anything that could be considered a criticism of the Dear Leader's agenda.  So you've got the rich and powerful pulling the strings, and a deluded and ignorant slice of Americans never hearing what the actual effects are -- and voting the same lobby-bought politicians back into power over and over and over.

I keep hoping that people will wake up, but I'm reminded of what one of my Environmental Science students wrote, many years ago, and which seems a fitting, if depressing, way to conclude: "It'd be nice if humans based their decisions on science, but that's not what most people do.  In this case, it's going to take something really horrible to bring people to their senses -- not just one drought, one storm, one killer heat wave.  People are so sunk in short-term expediency and long-term self-delusion that it's going to take a global-scale catastrophe for them to frown, and say, 'Wait.  Maybe this was a bad idea.'  And not only does that mean that it'll come at the cost of millions of lives, it may not happen until it's too late to do anything to stop it."

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

Killing public schools

One comment I hear every time budgets for public education are discussed is, "You can't fix the educational system by throwing money at it."

This pisses me off on a variety of levels.  First, there's the sense that funding public schools is randomly "throwing money," as if it's inherently irresponsible to provide adequate resources for educating the next generation of citizens.  Implicit in this is that schools will just waste the money anyhow, that school boards spend their time looking for frivolous ways to spend their state and federal funding.

The worst part, however, is that this convenient and glib little quip ignores the truth of a different adage: "You get what you pay for."  If you want to obtain and retain quality teachers, ensure that they have manageable class sizes that optimize student success, and give them the resources they need to deliver top-quality education, you have to pay for it.

And it's not like if you refuse to spend tax money to fund schools, then somehow the money magically stays in your pocket.  Taxpayers will pay either for supporting schools, or for the consequences of a generation of poorly-educated, disaffected young adults whose career choices are constrained by a lack of opportunities in public schools, or who have chosen to go to college and racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans that will take decades to repay.

All of which is why the proposed federal education budget is such a travesty.

The Washington Post calls this "Trump's education budget," which is a little doubtful, given that Trump gives every impression of having never written anything longer 140 characters, much less an actual budget proposal.  The specifics, honestly, have Betsy DeVos written all over them.  The Secretary of Education is a staunch believer in federal funding for private and religious schools -- which she refers to as "school choice" -- and for cutting damn near everything else to the bone.

Here are a few of the provisions of this proposal:

• cutting a total of $10.6 billion from the overall budget for education
• cutting funding for college work-study programs by half
• cutting over a hundred million dollars from programs supporting mental health services and programs providing enrichment, honors, and advanced coursework in middle and high schools
• ending a program to provide student loan forgiveness for college graduates who work in public service
• cutting $168 million from grants to states for career and tech programs
• cutting $72 million from programs for international education and foreign language training
• cutting $12 million from funding for the Special Olympics
• cutting $96 million from a program for adult literacy instruction

On the other hand, it:

• expands support for charter schools and private and religious schools by $400 million
• adds $1 billion to programs to push school districts to adopt "choice-friendly" policies

"It’s time for us to break out of the confines of the federal government’s arcane approach to education," DeVos said.  "Washington has been in the driver’s seat for over fifty years with very little to show for its efforts."

Betsy DeVos [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

DeVos, of course, is in no position to make that kind of judgment.  She has never worked in a public school, did not send her children to public school, and her main claim to fame, education-wise, is pushing a program in her home state of Wisconsin that funneled $2 billion to private and religious schools despite peer-reviewed studies showing that these programs do not work.  And the situation in Wisconsin is by no means unique -- other states have tried voucher systems, and by and large they have been a dismal flop.  Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times gives one example:

A study released last February by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Mills of Tulane University found that students in Louisiana’s expanded program lost ground in their first two years in the program.  Those performing at average levels in math and reading — that is, at about the 50th percentile — fell 24 percentile points in math and eight points in reading after their first year in the program.  In the second year, they improved slightly in math, though they still scored well below non-voucher students, and barely improved at all in reading.

So let's take those results, and make them national by mandate!  That'd be a great idea!

It doesn't take an expert to recognize the terrible effect that such a diversion of funds has on schools.  You'd think this would be enough for even the most diehard supporter of "school choice" to say, "Oh.  I guess I was wrong, then."

But no.  Data, facts, and evidence have no impact on a doctrinaire ideologue like DeVos, who honestly doesn't seem to give a damn if public schools fail.  In fact, if by her actions public schools do decline, in her mind it will just prove what she's claimed all along; that education in America is in a tailspin.

 Look, I've worked in education for thirty years.  It's not that I think we're perfect.  There's wastefulness, there is misspent money, and I have long decried the increasing focus on trivial content and preparation for standardized tests.  But the solution is not to cut funding to the bone.  Faced with revenue loss, public schools have only one real choice -- reducing staff.  Most of the rest of the line items in school budgets are earmarked or non-discretionary -- school boards have no choice in whether to include them.  The only big-ticket item that boards actually do have control over is salaries.  But since the salary per teacher is set contractually, there's only one option: lay people off.

Which means higher class sizes, cutting of electives, and loss of program.

Not that DeVos would ever admit this.  But look at the actual results of voucher programs and charter schools, nationwide -- not the spin that DeVos puts on it, but real numbers coming from studies such as the ones described by Hiltzik in The Los Angeles Times article linked above.

The conclusion is unequivocal.  And the budget being proposed will, if passed, be a death blow to the schools that can withstand it least -- poor, overcrowded, inner-city schools.

Remember that next time you see Betsy DeVos smile her smarmy smile and say that she's pro-child.

Protecting the arts from ideology

It's the end of first semester at my school, which means my Critical Thinking classes are finishing up and ready to move on, and I'm preparing to start with a whole new group in a week and a half.  The first semester students are currently working on their final papers, which is a critical analysis of how their thinking has changed since the beginning of the class.

I received one paper early -- they're not officially due until next Thursday -- and one paragraph from it stood out.  The student wrote:

One thing that has become apparent to me through this course is that you can't separate critical thinking from creativity.  Critical thinking really means applying creativity and a broader perspective to everything -- seeing that there are many paths to understanding, and for most things in life, there is no single right answer.  This is why I believe that cutting arts education, which is happening in many schools, will have negative impacts on every subject.  By eliminating the arts, we are taking away one of the fundamentally unique things about being human -- the ability to create something entirely new.  How can we find creative solutions to problems if we've been taught that the most creative endeavors have no value?

Well, first, her perceptivity absolutely took my breath away.  Her observations are not only spot-on, they are even more pertinent than she may have realized, because just yesterday an announcement was made that the Trump administration is considering balancing the federal budget by (amongst other things) eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts.

It brings to mind a similar move that was proposed in England during World War II -- to eliminate funding for the arts in favor of diverting the money to the military.  Winston Churchill famously responded, "Then what are we fighting for?"

Which is it exactly.  Our lives are made immeasurably richer because of the arts -- not only art per se, but writing, music, theater, film, and dance.  The NEA has supported arts and artists of all genres, not to mention programs to encourage the next generation of creative young people.  So you might be asking yourself, why would the new administration target such an organization?

Make no mistake about it; this is an ideologically-based salvo.  It's not about saving money.  The NEA's contribution to the federal budget last year was $148 million out of a $3.9 trillion total, a portion that Philip Bump explains thusly:

If you were at Thanksgiving and demanded a slice of pecan pie proportionate to 2016 NEA spending relative to the federal budget, you'd end up with a piece of pie that would need to be sliced off with a finely-tuned laser.  Put another way, if you make $50,000 a year, spending the equivalent of what the government spends on these three programs would be like spending less than $10.

The conservative powers-that-be have targeted the arts for one reason and one reason only; artists are not controllable.  If you give people the power to create, they will do so -- but won't necessarily create something that makes your political party, religion, or gender comfortable.  One of the most widely-publicized examples of this is the NEA-supported work of American photographer Andres Serrano, who made headlines (and received death threats) for his piece Piss Christ, which was a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine.

Sometimes the role of art is to shock, to jolt us out of our complacency.  I know as a writer, I am conscious of the fact that I'm writing to entertain -- but at the same time, if my readers' brains are the same when they're done with my book as they were when they started, I've failed.  All of the arts are about expanding our awareness -- twisting our minds around so we see things in a different way.

That twisting process isn't necessarily comfortable.  And for those of us who value conformity -- those who would like to see everyone follow the rules and march in tempo and draw inside the lines -- it can be profoundly frightening.  But that's exactly why we need the arts.  The capacity for turning your brain around and altering your perspective is not learned by rote.

And we'll need that sort of creativity, considering some of the issues we're currently facing.  As Albert Einstein put it, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

So this ideological shot-across-the-bow needs to be fought, and fought hard, even if you haven't always agreed with every project the NEA has supported.  We need our artists, and more importantly, we need our government and business leaders, our doctors, scientists, educators, and engineers to have the skills that the arts teach.  As my student put it -- if we devalue the arts, we devalue the creative approach to all aspects of life.

And to the artists, writers, musicians, actors, dancers, and all other creative people out there: keep creating.  Keep exploring, keep pushing the boundaries, keep making us see the universe in a different way.  Don't let your unique voice be silenced.  Even though things seem dark right now, recall what one of my favorite visionaries -- J. R. R. Tolkien -- put in the mouth of his iconic character Frodo Baggins, as he faced the overwhelming might of Mordor:  "They cannot win forever."

Sweet deals

Vested interests are a huge problem in science.

Scientists, like all humans, have biases.  Our perceptual and cognitive apparatus isn't foolproof, and our prior understanding can sometimes blind us to what is actually going on.  A darker tendency, however, is the fact that scientists (once again, like all of us) are subject to the temptations of power, notoriety, and money -- and this can sometimes lead to the publication of research that is seriously flawed.

Science journals all require the declaration by researchers of any conflicts of interest that might bias the research -- if, for example, the study was funded by a group that had motivation to make certain that the scientists reached a particular conclusion.  Conflict of interest doesn't mean that the research is flawed, of course; assuming that is called the motive fallacy.  Having a motive to lie doesn't mean that you actually did.  But a known conflict of interest would certainly make me read the research a lot more carefully -- which is the intent of the policy.

It's pretty suspect, therefore, when research is done where there was a conflict of interest -- and it wasn't declared.  And this appears to be the case with research done all the way back in the 1950s and 1960s casting doubt on the health effects of sugar apropos of heart disease -- and which a study published just last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association has showed was funded by the Sugar Research Foundation.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The study, entitled "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents," by Cristin E. Kearns, Laura A. Schmidt, and Stanton A. Glantz, casts a skew glance at the influence that industry has had on scientific (in particular, medical) research.  Studies funded by the SRF -- the research arm of the sugar industry -- not only successfully raised doubts on the role of sucrose in inflammatory diseases such as heart disease, but turned the public's eye toward dietary fat as the culprit.

In fact, sugar industry spokespeople not only suppressed information connecting carbohydrate consumption to cardiovascular disease, they suggested that increased sugar consumption would improve health.  The SRF's president, Henry Hass, said in a public speech in 1954:

Leading nutritionists are pointing out the chemical connection between [Americans'] high-fat diet and the formation of cholesterol which partly plugs our arteries and capillaries, restricts the flow of blood, and causes high blood pressure and heart trouble… if you put [the middle-aged man] on a low-fat diet, it takes just five days for the blood cholesterol to get down to where it should be…  If the carbohydrate industries were to recapture this 20 percent of the calories in the US diet (the difference between the 40 percent which fat has and the 20 percent which it ought to have) and if sugar maintained its present share of the carbohydrate market, this change would mean an increase in the per capita consumption of sugar more than a third with a tremendous improvement in general health.

Dietary scientist John Yudkin and others had published research identifying sugar as a factor in increasing the risk of heart disease, but Hass and others with ties to the sugar industry began pumping money into research which had as its goal demonstrating the opposite.

Which is, of course, antithetical to the way research should be done.  Of course scientists have their preconceived notions, their guesses as to which way the data will swing.  But the idea that you'd go into a study with the intent to support whatever your well-heeled funding agency says you should support is frightening.

And the worst part was that the scientists themselves did not openly declare their conflict of interest.  The result is that their research was not given the scrutiny it should have received -- and the industry's role in skewing the public's understanding of the role of nutrition in health has only recently been uncovered.

"This historical account of industry efforts demonstrates the importance of having reviews written by people without conflicts of interest and the need for financial disclosure," the authors write.  "Scientific reviews shape policy debates, subsequent investigations, and the funding priorities of federal agencies... Whether current conflict of interest policies are adequate to withstand the economic interests of industry remains unclear."

While discouraging, such findings are no particular surprise, given the tobacco industry's role in suppressing information about the link between smoking and cancer.  However, it should alert us to the potential for funding to bias research that is going on today -- making it even more imperative that our policymakers give careful scrutiny to "studies" of climate change by groups like the Heartland Institute, whose ties (financial and otherwise) to the fossil fuel industry run deep.