Science in Service to…whom?

One of the things that scientific professional societies like to tout is that we do our science in service to society, or something like that. Yeah, well, sometimes, it sort of depends. Certainly if you are scientist in government that should be your goal. But what if society isn’t interested?

This is not an academic question. The Supreme Court ruled that the so-called Chevron Doctrine needed to be trimmed back, a ruling that the New York Times slugged as limiting the power of federal agencies. And this is widely interpreted to mean that decision made by, say, the FDA or EPA to implement laws will now get a lot more scrutiny. In many cases these are decisions based on science to do things like set levels of pollutants or efficacy and safety of medicines. According to news accounts, this decision means either Congress has to be a lot more specific or the courts will have to examine lots of the decisions.

Now it might make sense to reduce the power of the Executive Branch (feel free to go off and discuss), but the prospect of, say, every drug approval or update to a pollution law landing in courts is kind of unappealing. Aside from the obvious lengthy delays courts are increasingly famous for, courts do not have a great history in making scientific judgements (see, for instance, who got stuck being responsible for the Portuguese Bend landslide). In a real sense, this might be taking scientific decisions from agency scientists and handing them to lawyers and judges.

So it sounds like some agency scientists may not be serving society as much going forward. But more is possible. The Heritage Foundation, recognizing that they lost a chance to reform the executive branch in 2017, has laid out a blueprint for a GOP administration in 2025. In this Project 2025 document, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is up for dismemberment. You know, the umbrella above the Weather Service, which Project 2025 wants to privatize. And they don’t want the National Hurricane Center to say anything about, um, hotter ocean water causing more rapid intensification of hurricanes because, um, well, that might make it seem like climate change matters. So, you know, let’s not let science out of the bag to society.

We still get things like congresspeople writing letters to agencies bringing up the same stale chestnuts we’ve heard for 40 years to insinuate that government scientists are a bunch of liars (you aren’t correcting for the heat island effect! your thermometers are ineffective! you…you…you keep getting an answer we hate!). You know, letters that are ignoring a rather robust literature on the whole “measuring temperature” thing.

With all this and more going on, it would certainly be understandable for government scientists to shrug and walk away. And there is a good chance that will happen. Why bother if science is going to be ignored anyway? So as a reminder to politicians and lawyers and judges: Scientists are experts in their field. Just as you don’t want GG going in and telling you what the law really means, we don’t want you to wander in and just declare what you think scientific results should be. For the most part, scientists are telling you what is going on and why, whether it is increase in CO2 or toxicity of some pollutant or contamination of some water source. We lay it at your doorstep to legislate or litigate as you will. But just shutting the whole thing down so you don’t have to hear the consequences of your actions is not acceptable. You want to burn coal and shut down wind turbines? That may be your prerogative, but you should face the calculations of how much more CO2 that produces and how much more heat that traps in the atmosphere.

Forcing power to face truth is, probably, the greatest service to society science can provide.