From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Fri Aug 08 2003 - 15:13:13 PDT
----- Original Message -----
From: What's New
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 6:04 PM
To: What's New
Subject: WHAT'S NEW Friday, 8 Aug 03
WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 8 Aug 03 Washington, DC
(Andrew Essin contributed to this issue of What's New.)
1. POLITICAL SCIENCE: IS THE ADMINISTRATION DISTORTING SCIENCE?
The short answer is, "every administration does." But a report
by the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee,
released yesterday, says it's gotten worse. To the surprise of
no one, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed the
report as political, which of course it is. However, the NY
Times quotes McClellan in an incredibly revealing description of
administration policy: "The administration looks at the facts,
and reviews the best available science based on what's right for
the American people." That final clause, "what's right for the
American people," is chilling.
2. POLITICAL CLIMATE: WHAT'S RIGHT FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?
One of the purported abuses cited in the minority staff report
involved the insertion into an EPA report of a reference to a
paper by Soon and Baliunas that denies globl warming (WN 1 Aug
03). To appreciate its significance, we need to go back to March
of 1998. We all got a petition card in the mail urging the
government to reject the Kyoto accord(WN 13 Mar 98). The cover
letter was signed by "Frederick Seitz, Past President, National
Academy of Sciences." Enclosed was what seemed to be a reprint
of a journal article, in the style and font of Proceedings of the
NAS. But it had not been published in PNAS, or anywhere else. The
reprint was a fake. Two of the four authors of this non-article
were Soon and Baliunas. The other authors, both named Robinson,
were from the tiny Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in
Cave Junction, OR. The article claimed that the environmental
effects of increased CO2 are all beneficial. There was also a
copy of Wall Street Journal op-ed by the Robinsons (father and
son) that described increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere as
"a wonderful and unexpected gift of the industrial revolution."
There was no indication of who had paid for the mailing. It was
a dark episode in the annals of scientific discourse.
3. BASEBALL: PHYSICS COMES TO THE AID OF THE NATIONAL PASTIME.
Well, sort of. Ivan Marusic's class in hydrodynamics at the
University of Minnesota set out to investigate whether the flight
of a baseball in the Metrodome, which has an inflatable roof, can
be influenced by manipulating the vents. This is important: the
stadium superintendent claims that when the Twins, who play in
the Metrodome, won the World Series in '87 and '91, he was
manipulating the vents to give the Twins an advantage. But
according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which apparently
inspired the project, the experiment was inconclusive: on one
day, it appeared that turning on the blowers behind home plate
caused fly balls, launched from a cannon, to travel an extra 3½
feet. But on another day it did squat. This needs to be
resolved, but there's no urgency. Today the Twins are a dismal
57-57. They're not gonna be in the series this year.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY.
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the
University or the American Physical Society, but they should be.
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