Newsweek online article: August 12, 2015
It's Time for Presidential Candidates to Talk About
Science
BY NINA BURLEIGH / AUGUST 12, 2015 6:13 AM EDT
Evolution deniers often fall back on the retort, "I didn't descend from no monkey," when the topic
comes up. BRAD WILSON/GETTY
Filed Under: U.S., Climate Science, GMO, 2016 Presidential Debates, Darwin, Climate Change, Health and
Science
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When Charles Darwin set sail from Plymouth, England, on the
HMS Beagle in 1831, the British biologist fell seasick almost
immediately, and he remained nauseated for most of the next five
years on that ship. Yet the journey, however arduous for Darwin,
paid off for the rest of us in one of the greatest scientific theories
of all time. After studying the South American coast for several
years, Darwin made his way to the Galapagos Islands, where he
grew curious about the finches and their various-sized beaks.
How, he wondered, had these birds on a small archipelago
hundreds of miles from the mainland come to differ so greatly
from others of the same species? “We seem to be brought
somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the
appearance of new beings on this earth,” he wrote in his journal.
He solved the mystery of mysteries with his breakthrough theory.
Today, evolution is settled science.
Charles Darwin came up with his theory
of evolution after noticing that some finch birds on a remote island off the coast of Ecuador varied
from those found on the mainland. GETTY
Fast-forward 176 years, a British-born American author and
screenwriter named Matthew Chapman was lolling on a couch in
his Manhattan apartment, watching a presidential primary debate.
It was 2007, and while Chapman wasn’t exactly nauseated by
what he was hearing, he was noting with dismay (not for the first
time) that the candidates never discussed science—even though
any future president’s most vexing challenges, from Iran’s nukes
to global warming, Internet security and women’s reproductive
politics, are impossible to discuss without dealing with physics,
math and biology.
That’s when he had his own breakthrough.
Chapman’s scientific bona fides were mostly genetic. He happens
to be the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, and he had
recently completed a memoir about growing up Darwin—being
the literary black sheep at the end of a long line of famed
scientists. As part of his research for that book, he studied the
Scopes trial, in which politician William Jennings Bryan faced off
against lawyer Clarence Darrow on the teaching of evolution in
public school, so the politics of science in American life were
more on his mind than usual. “Everything in my family was
assessed through some form of the scientific method,” says
Chapman, who moved from London to Hollywood in the 1980s to
work as a director and screenwriter, and now lives in New York.
“It was just really peculiar to see people we were going to give
trust to not addressing either the scientific issues nor the method
by which people assess truth in the best possible way.”
Chapman’s subsequent voyage into American politics has been
not unlike his ancestor’s on the Beagle—queasy and slow to
produce results. His grand idea: Every four years, American
presidential candidates should have one debate solely about
science. He enlisted fellow author and screenwriter Shawn Otto,
author of a book on the history of science in American politics,
and together they founded Science Debate. They rounded up 28
Nobel laureates, 108 college and university presidents, the
National Academy of Sciences and a long list of artists, writers
and industry leaders, and commissioned research and polling to
examine how presidential candidates talk about science. They also
invited candidates to a debate in 2008 and got ignored, twice.
This election cycle, Chapman and his advisory board—which
includes heavyweights such as Norm Augustine, a past CEO of
Lockheed, and former Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson—
believe they have a better chance. They are working with the
National Geographic Channel and Arizona State University to
again attempt to stage and broadcast a presidential science debate.
Darwin’s descendant says he’s not discouraged by previous
failures to get the likes of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders to
explain how they’d incorporate science into White House
decision-making. “I believe that there will come a time when it
will seem as odd for a candidate not to attend a debate on science
as it would now seem odd for one not to attend a debate on foreign
or domestic policy or the economy,” he says.
But foreign policy debaters agree that a place called Iran exists,
and domestic policy opponents don’t differ on how many
Americans receive Medicare. A science debate, however, would
begin and end with a profound disagreement over facts that a vast
majority of scientists say are irrefutable.
A Snowball in Senate Hell
None of the major candidates has yet agreed to participate in
Chapman’s debate. But none can deny that science is at the core of
many of today’s most contentious battles. Take the Iran nuclear
deal. The international negotiating teams in Vienna this summer
included not only diplomats but also physicists, without whose
expertise the participants would have never gotten past chatting
about where to buy Sacher torte. Everyone in the room, from U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry on down, had to be fluent in the
arcana of uranium processing, understand the difference between
an IR-1 and an IR-2m centrifuge, decode what it means to limit a
reactor to “ not exceed 20 MWth” and understand that “bake
times” didn’t refer to Betty Crocker’s test kitchen.
Matthew Chapman, the greatgreat grandson of Charles Darwin, speaks with a television reporter about the Dover Intelligent
Design trial, in Harrisburg, Pa., September 29, 2005. JASON PLOTKIN/YORK DAILY
RECORD/AP
The anointed MVP of the American team was not Kerry, but
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an MIT physicist instantly
recognizable as a scientist by his slightly-tamer-than-AlbertEinstein’s gray hair. Moniz is credited with having bridged one of
the big divides by allowing the Iranians to keep a cherished,
fortified nuclear research bunker called Fordo after persuading
them to devote its centrifuges to medical isotopes rather than
potential bomb fuel.
When Moniz returned from Vienna, he went on a congressional
blitz, explaining the deal’s intricacies to Republican hawks who
want to kill it. The GOP has presented some valid scientific
evidence to support its objections, but the spectacle has also led to
some awkward moments. New York Times reporter Jonathan
Weisman, covering one Senate hearing, drily tweeted: “Now Sen.
Ron Johnson is lecturing MIT physicist Ernest Moniz on electromagnetic pulse weapons.”
A bitter divide rooted in biology has provoked one of the nation’s
most intractable political conflicts: legal abortion. Last month’s
release of undercover videos of Planned Parenthood leaders
discussing fetal tissue harvesting unleashed another round of
political attacks on the organization. Planned Parenthood
President Cecile Richards apologized for the doctor’s casual tone
about crushing fetal skulls, but her organization maintains that
gruesome discussions are typical medical talk. As congressional
committees gear up to hold hearings on whether to defund
Planned Parenthood’s contraception programs in retaliation for the
revelations, politicians plan to rely on scientists when considering
standard operating procedure for organ donations from cadavers
and fetuses, as well as the larger questions of fetal pain and when
human life begins. Or not.
By far, the most contentious science issue of our time is climate
change, pitting the global science establishment against the
global—but far better-financed—energy industry. Almost every
week, scientists reveal direr consequences of humanity’s carbon
emissions, including July’s announcement from former NASA
planetary scientist James Hansen and other leaders in the field that
sea levels could rise 10 feet in 50 years, far exceeding previous
estimates. Obama managed to get re-elected in 2012 without much
talk of global warming. Safely into his second term, he now
deems it of paramount concern, and in August unveiled an
ambitious Clean Power Plan to reduce emissions by 32 percent of
2005 levels by 2030. “I'm convinced no challenge provides a
greater threat to the future of the planet,” Obama said. “There is
such a thing as being too late.”
Climate change skeptics and global warming deniers wave signs
at a Tea Party Express rally in Detroit in 2010. JIM WEST/REPORT DIGITAL-REA/REDUX
•
MOST SHARED
On Capitol Hill, Republican leaders are acting now—by hauling
in NASA scientists to explain why they are wasting taxpayer
money on tracking rising Earth temperatures instead of flying to
Mars (their observations found 2014 to be the hottest year on
record). The chairman of the Senate Environment and Public
Works Committee, James Inhofe, tossed a snowball on the Senate
floor to point out that the planet probably isn’t warming. Senator
Ted Cruz, who chairs the Subcommittee on Space, Science and
Competitiveness, has pushed NASA to stop monitoring earthly
temps and prefers to talk about science fiction, most recently
assuring The New York Times that Star Trek’s Captain Kirk was a
Republican.
With few exceptions—Al Gore, Newt Gingrich—modern
American presidential candidates rarely discuss science. The
Founding Fathers, though, were devoted to the scientific method,
and science was at the heart of the national idea. On July 4, 1776,
as the Declaration of Independence was being adopted, Thomas
Jefferson was recording local temperatures as part of a research
project. Stories about Ben Franklin’s experiments with lightning
and the kite are well-known. The founder of the Smithsonian,
America’s greatest museum and first scientific institution, was a
British scientist. Like many others in his field, he believed the
new democracy across the Atlantic would produce great scientific
advances.
America did become the global leader in science and technology.
But 239 years after the founding, many Americans, and many of
our elected leaders, suspect scientists and distrust their
conclusions. We all know the Professor on Gilligan’s Island or the
grad students on CBS’s Big Bang Theory, but few can call to mind
a living American scientist. The one most Americans can name,
Einstein, feared this obliviousness so much that in 1946, less than
a year after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, he
tried to raise money to fund a national campaign to push for more
public awareness of the science behind political decision-making,
especially with respect to war and weapons. “The unleashed
power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of
thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe,”
Einstein wrote. He didn’t get his campaign.
There are many reasons Americans now distrust science, and the
most valid is that all scientific research has an element of
uncertainty and is subject to repeated confirmation. Then there are
other causes: an anti-science strain among religious
fundamentalists, as well as contrarian pseudoscience, financed by
vested interests, like those now aimed at climate change and
previously the safety of cigarettes.
Partisan sentiment toward science has shifted 180 degrees since
the Cold War, when Republicans were the pro-science party and
liberal Democrats distrusted its relationship to the military.
Democrats used to be the party of astrology and the New Age.
Certain that science’s mushroom cloud doomed humanity,
novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Only in superstition is there
hope.” Now the pendulum has swung, and Republicans are more
often distrustful of science. Of Democrats and Democratic-leaning
independents, 83 percent think government investment in basic
scientific research pays off in the long run, Pew researchers found.
A smaller majority—62 percent—of Republicans agree, while 33
percent say such investments are pointless.
The party shift dates to the early ’90s, as more and more severe
climate change predictions threatened the energy sector—a major
GOP funding base. Today, 87 percent of scientists believe human
activity is causing global warming, according to Pew, and 71
percent of Democrats say the Earth is warming because of human
activity, while only 27 percent of Republicans agree with that
statement. And just 43 percent of Republicans accept the theory of
evolution, compared with 67 percent of Democrats.
To be fair, Democrats are not uniformly pro-science on many
issues, including global warming. They can be found protecting
coal interests and tend to be against nuclear power, even though
it’s a source of carbon-free energy that scientists tend to support.
And like Republicans, their ranks include anti-vaxxers and a large
cohort who think genetically modified organisms (GMOs) foods
are unsafe—opinions at odds with most peer-reviewed science.
Modern science is based on a mode of inquiry developed by 17th
century European thinkers that’s sometimes called the scientific
method, which Darwin’s descendant refers to reverentially above.
It entails observing the natural world, questioning what one sees
and then conducting experiments to gather measurable, empirical
evidence to answer those queries.
For laypeople, understanding any scientific issue—climate
change, vaccinations, GMOs, cyberhacking and digital
surveillance, to name a few—requires a rudimentary
understanding of the scientific method and a level of trust that its
results, when confirmed, are right.
The Pew survey found that on many issues, Americans don’t have
that trust. Americans respect but don’t necessarily believe
scientists, and that is true across the political spectrum. That
distrust is at the heart of the call for a science debate. “Leading the
national discussion requires some basic knowledge of what the
important issues are, what is known and not known, and what new
efforts need to be commenced,” says physicist Lawrence Krauss.
“Scientific data is not Democratic or Republican.”
We Need to Talk About Sandy
In recent presidential elections, both parties have avoided
speaking about climate change, and so have journalists on the
campaign trail. The League of Conservation Voters ran the
numbers and found that by January 25, 2008, journalists had
conducted 171 interviews with the presidential candidates, and of
the 2,975 questions asked, only six mentioned the words global
warming or climate change, while three mentioned UFOs. In
2012, after a year of record-breaking heat, drought and Arctic ice
melt, none of the moderators in the three general-election
presidential debates asked about climate change, nor did the
candidates broach the topic. The closest the candidates came to a
debate on science arrived during their nominating conventions.
Standing before fellow Republicans in Tampa, Florida, Mitt
Romney joked about a Moses-like Obama promising to “slow the
rise of the oceans” and “heal the planet.” At the Democratic
National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Obama stated,
“Climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and
wildfires are not a joke. They are a threat to our children's future,
and in this election you can do something about it.”
And that was it, until Superstorm Sandy’s inundation of lower
Manhattan and New Jersey during the final hours of the campaign
forced candidates to cancel scheduled activities and journalists to
discuss extreme weather.
MORE FROM IBT MEDIA
The current presidential cycle promises to be different. Whether or
not candidates can be herded into a public science debate, they’re
already staking out positions. “There's clearly been an uptick in
discussion [of climate change] in both of the primary fights over
what we saw in 2012,” says Brad Johnson, with the climate
science campaign Forecast the Facts.
Most leading Republican candidates are on record refuting
mainstream climate science. Cruz said in the last 15 years “there
has been no recorded warming,” Mike Huckabee has called global
warming a hoax, and Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum have said the
planet’s getting hotter but doubt that human-produced greenhouse
gases are contributing mightily toward it. Rand Paul said he
believes the Earth goes through cycles of warming and cooling
and he doesn’t know why. Scott Walker has been a keynote
speaker at the Heartland Institute, one of the chief anti–climate
change organizations. After Sandy swamped his state in 2012,
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie declined to blame Sandy on
global warming, but he has recently said “global warming is real.”
Senator Lindsey Graham accepts climate scientists’ conclusions as
fact and has said he wants to combat the issue in a businessfriendly way. (This after Graham, John McCain and Hillary
Clinton traveled to Alaska to see the effects of climate change.)
Johnny Adinolfi is comforted
by neighbor John Vento, right, as he stands in what was once the living room of his home, in the
aftermath of superstorm Sandy, October 30, 2012, in Massapequa, N.Y. The storm caused multiple
fatalities, halted mass transit and cut power to more than 6 million homes and businesses. JASON
DECROW/AP
On the Democratic side, Clinton released a YouTube video last
month talking about her responsibility for the planet as a
grandmother and humorously depicting her potential Republican
opponents as “mad scientists,” complete with old-time
Frankenstein movie effects. But the issue is almost as tricky for
her as it is for the GOP. In July, she faced demands in New
Hampshire for a "yes or no" answer about banning the extraction
of fossil fuels from public grounds. "The answer is no until we get
alternatives into place," Clinton hedged. Hecklers, scenting a
waffle, started chanting, “Act on climate!”
‘Doubt Is Our Product’
How would a science debate work? The way Chapman and his
friends envision it, candidates would not be called upon to don lab
coats and perform experiments before an audience of millions, as
diverting as that spectacle might be. They want a debate like the
domestic and foreign policy debates, in which candidates are not
expected to explain the complex economics behind Social
Security financing predictions or know the exact population of
Tehran, the Iranian capital, but to demonstrate that they have
consulted with experts and formulated ideas and opinions about
policies.
“We don't expect the next president to know the seventh digit of
power or even be a scientist,” says Krauss. “But they need to have
some fluency with what the issues are, who to turn to for
expertise, and most important, demonstrate a willingness to base
public policy, where possible, on empirical evidence rather than
ideological prejudice.”
Chapman believes it is possible to organize a debate that reveals a
candidate’s attitude toward science without requiring him or her to
dive into eye-glazing technical details. For example, he says, some
of the questions would be: “Here is a family that will lose the land
they’ve farmed for generations if the sea rises. Why is this
happening, and what will you do about it? Here is a family that
lost their child to mental illness and suicide. What can science do
to alleviate this problem, and what would you do to help?”
It’s simpler to organize any presidential debate before the
conventions, after which the bipartisan Presidential Debate
Commission takes charge of the three 90-minute, commercial-free
presidential mega-matchups that draw as many as 70 million
viewers.
In 2008, Science Debate organized two pre-convention debates in
Philadelphia and Corvallis, Oregon, to be recorded and provided
to PBS affiliates. Both parties ignored calls and emails from the
debate organizers, opting instead to attend debates organized at
religious venues instead.
Obama agreed to answer online science questions in writing, and
other candidates followed suit. Their answers to “The 14 Top
Science Questions Facing America” received 850 million media
impressions, according to Chapman.
None of the campaigns queried by Newsweek responded to a
question about whether they would participate in a science debate,
but former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich offered
qualified support. “Republicans should participate in a science
debate if they have some assurance that it will be about science
rather than political science,” he tells Newsweek. “If the purpose
of the debate is to implement the anti-science views of the current
editor of Science magazine—who has announced that the debate
over climate change is over—no one should participate. That is
anti-science propaganda on behalf of an ideology.”
Gingrich was referring to Science Editor-in-Chief Marcia McNutt,
incoming president of the National Academy of Sciences, and a
vocal supporter of a presidential science debate. “We need to
understand whether the candidates are using science to inform
their opinions on issues, or whether they are selectively culling
scientific information to support their already formed opinions on
issues. This is a big difference, and one which should be quite
apparent in a debate format,” she tells Newsweek.
If candidates debate science, McNutt says, the public could assess
whether they trust mainstream science or industry-funded research
that looks like science, but is actually just public relations.
Journalists Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in their book
Merchants of Doubt, describe how industries and vested
individuals have spent billions to fund fake or skewed research
that conflicts with mainstream science on certain subjects. The
most famous example was the tobacco industry’s effort to keep
cigarettes from being linked to illness and death. “Doubt is our
product,” stated an executive of tobacco company Brown &
Williamson in a famous 1969 memo, as the industry began to
churn out hundreds of pages of lab-style propaganda aimed at
countering the now widely accepted fact that cigarettes cause
cancer.
Vested interests have funded parallel science to support many
public policy positions, from the safety of secondhand smoke, the
harmlessness of acid rain, the effectiveness of a “Star Wars”
defense shield (Strategic Defense Initiative), the permeability of
the ozone layer and DDT revisionism.
The effect of these campaigns on government policies is insidious,
and during lean times, when the government has fewer dollars to
invest in nonaligned technical advice, they are even more
effective. In the early 1990s, House Speaker Gingrich touted
himself as an apostle—if not an architect—of best-selling futurist
author Alvin Toffler’s high-tech “Third Wave” society, a postindustrial Utopia. But during his budget-slashing crusade, he
defunded the House Office of Technology Assessment, an act
former New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt, a Democrat and
physicist and now CEO of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, compared to a “lobotomy” for
Congress, because it left House members ever more reliant on
political staff and industry lobbyists for scientific data relevant to
policy.
The mother of all dubious science projects, though, is the one now
aimed at the climate. It began just after the Clinton administration
signed the (relatively toothless) Kyoto climate agreement. The
American Petroleum Institute funded a Global Climate Science
Communications Action Plan, with the stated chief goal of
highlighting “uncertainties” in climate science.
Since then, hundreds of projects have been launched, conferences
hosted, papers published and fishy expert analyses churned out by
free-market, fossil-fuel supporters such as the Heartland Institute,
all to mount a campaign against the 87 percent of scientists who
believe global warming is caused by human activity.
The point of these well-funded missions is not to change the
minds of scientists, but to influence voters. Mainstream scientists
whose views are at odds with industry—for example, NASA’s
Hansen, who first alerted Congress to global warming, or Penn
State climate scientist Michael Mann, who created the “hockey
stick” graph showing that the rise of human carbon emissions
tracked almost exactly with a global temperature spike—find
themselves in the middle of a game of hardball politics, fielding
personal hate mail, lawsuits, death threats and curtailed careers. A
Climate Science Legal Defense Fund was created in the last few
years to aid climate scientists caught in the political crossfire.
People listen in as Senators held a rally
to call on the Senate to take action on global warming, in Washington DC, June 2, 2008. BRENDAN
SMIALOWSKI/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
The doubt sown by so-called parallel science affects how people
view climate change, but arguably also diminishes science
generally, so that educated progressives now suspect GMOs are
harmful and vaccines must be bad for kids—dismissing
mainstream scientific opinion. Ultimately, faux science PR
campaigns embolden candidates to deny settled science and
engage in ideological decision-making that has, as Republican
adviser Karl Rove once put it (approvingly), moved beyond the
“reality-based world.”
Arrogance Kills
"Look, first of all, the climate is changing,” Bush said this spring
at a New Hampshire campaign house party. “I don't think the
science is clear what percentage is man-made and what percentage
is natural. And for the people to say the science is decided on, this
is just really arrogant, to be honest with you. It's this intellectual
arrogance that now you can't even have a conversation about it.”
One reason for the impossibility of conversation is the
intransigence of both sides, and Darwin’s heir, Matthew
Chapman, insists that the public should be able to hear from
candidates who accept settled science and those who reject it. “It
is not necessary that candidates agree with current scientific
orthodoxy, or even with the scientific method,” he says. “What
you can’t argue is that the issues are trivial and not worth
debating.” Chapman insists it’s possible for a debate to occur
between politicians who believe scientists and those who doubt
them. “I am absolutely 100 percent sure this will happen,” he says.
Dan Fagin, who won a Pulitzer Prize last year for his book Toms
River: A Story of Science and Salvation, tracks the public
discourse as a professor of science journalism at New York
University. He begs to differ. "There will never be a science
debate, at least not anytime soon, but that's not because of the
issues are complicated. It's because the triumph of the hard right is
that they convinced too many Republicans that science is just
anoth er partisan issue, another opinion. The solution is going to
have to come from within the GOP.”
As the GOP shows no signs of grappling with that issue, the
endless—nonpresidential—debate grows ever more bitter. Climate
scientists say Bush is flat wrong, that the issue is settled: Man is
mostly responsible. They scoff at Inhofe and Cruz, labeling them
“deniers.” They also admit they have a communications problem.
Few have been taught to sell the public on their work, and they
survive only by persuading colleagues or government agencies to
give them funding. Traditionally, scientists have had no incentive
to talk about their work to inform, let alone inspire, the public.
Now, when they do step up, many take the dismissive tone of an
educated elite shepherding unschooled civilians who should trust
the experts if they know what’s good for them. The Pew survey
found that education levels do not always correlate with trust in
science, a fact scientists and their supporters might consider
before assuming their adversaries are duped. “Science is not the
sole source of wisdom, an oracle,” Fagin says. “It's the most
powerful tool we have for understanding the world, but individual
scientists are only human and subject to error. A little more
humility would do us all a lot of good.”
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