Who's the Boss of Science?

[This is a cross-post from SoapBox over at Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO).]

Thanks to the theft and publication of years worth of email from the Climate Research Unit (CRU), a major scientific center devoted to climate science, we now have an interesting picture of the at-times-questionable conduct of a number of top researchers in the field.The media and blogosphere are abuzz with commentary, analysis, and introspection from all corners. Initiatially there were two major narratives:

Emissions Policy Dogma

Here is one reason that international agreements on climate change face such huge problems. A story in the Australian today makes the following observation:

Despite the willingness of the US and China to put figures for emissions cuts on the table over the past few days, most leaders have given up the idea of reaching a treaty-level agreement because of glaring differences in the plans proposed and widespread disagreement.
Both the US and Chinese plans are tailored to their own economic circumstances and fall short of tougher remedial action sought by the European Union.

And the fact that two countries would have differing policies that respond to local economic conditions... this is a problem?

How Decision Making Influences Decision Making

My wife and I recently were offered the use of a car while we are here in Australia. This is very tempting. We hope to get out of the city as often as we can to explore our surroundings, go on camping trips, and just see as much of this country as we can during our year-long stay. And our apartment comes with a parking spot, so all signs point to yes.

But at least for now, I think we'll pass. The reason? We want to establish a pattern of walking, biking and using public transportation while living in Melbourne. It's good for us, good for the environment, and is in keeping with the kind of community we want to live in. In theory, we could take the car, only use it when we're leaving the city, and stick to our original plan getting around locally without it. But having come from sprawling Phoenix, we know how easy it is to develop bad habits when there is an easier option.

So now we can still rent a car and get out, but it's not just sitting there waiting for us. Now we can't just hop in and drive to Victoria Market when we're feeling too lazy to take the tram. In making this first order decision, we have deliberately set up our circumstances to influence the likely outcome of our daily (second order) decisions about transportation.

In thinking this through, I realized that this kind of first order choice underlies all sorts of second order decisions that we make about our personal lives. We are constantly trying to live up to our own expectations of ourselves, and our surroundings are part of what determines our ability to do so. I know that eating less meat is a good way to reduce my overall environmental impact, but I have varying degrees of motivation and success in achieving that. A lot of it has to do with what happens to be in my fridge. My food-buying decisions influence my eating decisions.

Ok, put that way it seems kind of obvious, but I think there is an important point buried here:

Cancer Screening: Doubts and Difficulties

It hasn't gotten too much coverage here that I've seen (aside from here and here), but cancer screening is big news in the US these days. I first encountered this very tricky issue in a presentation I attended at a conference on science and technology policy more than three years ago, in which a Dartmouth professor made the controversial assertion that we are over-screening for certain types of cancer, and that this is having detrimental effects on public health. Well, it's safe to say that the issue has grown. The New York Times reported in July:

An upshot of the decades-long war on cancer is the popular belief that healthy people should regularly examine their bodies or undergo screening because early detection saves lives. But in fact, except for a few types of cancer, routine screening has not been proven to reduce the death toll from cancer for people without specific symptoms or risk factors — like a breast lump or a family history of cancer — and could even lead to harm, many experts on health say.

There are a few reasons for this.

Density, Sustainability, and Urban Transport

Continuing on the theme of yesterday's post about Melbourne/Australia's growth debate:

Paul Mees, of RMIT has an interesting column in today's paper, in which he calls into question some common assumptions about the relationship between density and public transport, and its implications for sustainability. Mees has applied a more informative density calculation to compare cities, taking into account only "urbanized" land, rather than total land. The result is that a city like Los Angeles turns out to have much higher density than many believe, while New York, which includes the normally forgotten outer Boroughs, has a much lower density than expected. Melbourne comes out somewhere near the middle.

I like Mees' conclusions, which point out that these discussions should maintain a clear focus on what we can actually do to change things in a metropolitan area:

To Grow Or Not To Grow? That is the (wrong) question.

Last week there was a lot of coverage of issues related to immigration, population growth, and urban growth after the state planning minister said that Melbourne's urban-growth boundary urban-growth boundary will not be moved again in his lifetime. This prompted a variety of soul searching coverage from various Australian news outlets, typically bringing up a lot of worries:

The Climate Headline Wall

I've signed up for home delivery of The Age, in an effort to get myself better informed about the political landscape here. I just do better with a hard copy, sad to say.

I've noticed right off the bat that climate change--usually emissions policy--is on the front page quite frequently, so for fun I've decided to embark on a little installation project. Starting yesterday, I'm going to try to put every front page climate story, and every headline related to climate up on The Climate News Wall. Maybe this will provide an interesting way of looking at how coverage changes over the next year. Of course, this will be biased to coverage by The Age, but hopefully that won't mar the effort too much. Photo above is The Wall after two days. Not too much to go on so far, but we have one big front page piece on adaptation, surrounded by a ton of political coverage of the ETS scheme.

No doubt this ratio will continue...