Wildlife Deputy Changed Science For Lobbyists 174
fistfullast33l writes "In another case of a government official creating a 'unique' interpretation of science, TPM Muckraker reports on Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for fish and wildlife and parks in the Department of the Interior in Washington. The Department's Inspector General issued a report today documenting evidence that MacDonald not only overrode opinions of department scientists to benefit lobbyists, and political interests, but also that she shared internal documents with said lobbyists and a friend in an unnamed online roleplaying game. My favorite episode: 'At one point, according to Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a nesting range of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a running battle with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.'"
Recommended Reading (Score:5, Informative)
All too common (Score:1, Informative)
In South-West Utah, whenever some road work was going to be done, they would find a dead tortoise on the road, and the environmentalists would cry foul. After they did an autopsy on one, they found frozen lettuce in its stomach. The environmentalists had caught them live, fed them for a while, then froze them until "needed".
Ya, really good stuff there.
Re:MMOG? (Score:4, Informative)
Science at the Dept. of the Interior? (Score:1, Informative)
Here's an example of their "science":
Gov't researchers caught planting false ESA evidence [heartland.org]
Liberal Arts majors BS detectors are broken. (Score:2, Informative)
How many times have we seen perpetual motion reported as straight news?
For a journalist to be able to think critically about scientific subjects they should be reasonably well grounded in the subject (which is asking a lot for a journalist).
Otherwise all they do is pick a side in the argument, dumb it down till they think they understand it, then report it as undisputed fact.
So while you do have a point about presenting information to non-scientists the journalist should be somewhere in the middle. What we've gotten is regurgitated press releases being passed off as news by idiot reporters who can't ask the any intelligent questions.
I went to a University with a very well respected J-school. They took the same amount of math and science as the education majors (basically they were required to re-take the material they should have learned in middle school).
2002 called... (Score:5, Informative)
If it weren't for lavishly funded free-market think tanks [exxonsecrets.org] the truth might have never come out and anti-endangered species activists [google.com] in the 109th Congress such as Richard Pombo [hcn.org] would have been put in the awkward position of having to make up politically convenient but dubious anecdotes [washingtonpost.com] on their own. It's a relief they didn't have to do that.
Clearly this all fits into the larger pattern of career EPA employees purging all political operatives from sensitive policy positions and having them replaced with more nonpolitical people.
Re:Liberal Arts majors BS detectors are broken. (Score:2, Informative)
I've never met a journalist (or read or listened to...) who was ever able to perform investigative journalism worth a damn. It seems a dying art. Journalists these days just pick a side then never deviate from the line.
That aside your science degree should equip you to ask tough questions. Just understanding conservation of energy would put you at the 99th percentile of working journalists. Conservation of energy is a basic part of any working BS detector.
For example one of the questions that should be asked about any numeric model is how well it 'back casts' (reproduces historical results given only input data equivalent to that being used for forcasts). To put that in concrete terms I'd like climate models to be able to show north Africa becoming progressively more arid when back casting the last 2000 years (something we know is historically true). As a professional computer modeler (power grid) I know that you can get any result you want by manipulating the model. Energy boards spend much effort validating models and datasets before excepting the results. They do this because they know everyone involved has an ax to grind. Experience has taught them they need to sweat the details or be manipulated by those smarter/sneakier then them.
You wouldn't report perpetual motion as straight news would you? (not without a damn lot of evidence anyhow, not on the word of a 'self trained physicist/inventor'!) I see that story about once a year on national news. If they were mocking the moron that would be great, but they're not.
Re:Modded "Informative"? (Score:4, Informative)
Please, bad science is bi-partisan. All you have to do is hear Gore (as a recent, glaring example) state the "debate is over" on global warming. Any time you hear an absolute from a politician of any ilk you can be assured it is no longer science, but retoric.
Heck, the story right after this one, http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/
Re:Global Warming is the Left's ID... (Score:4, Informative)
The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today. And for good reason: the tools scientists have at their disposal now--vastly more data, incomparably faster computers and infinitely more sophisticated mathematical models--render any forecasts from 1975 as inoperative as the predictions being made around the same time about the inevitable triumph of communism.
Re:Recommended Reading (Score:2, Informative)
Certainly saying "nukes are bad, umkay?" is anti-science.
Taking a long good look at the safety (no, pebble-bed reactors are not all that safe [wikipedia.org]), security (Iran's in the news again), waste disposal (still don't have a place to put it), and limited fuel availablity issues involved with fission and concluding that it is a poor choice for our long-term energy needs, is not. (Note that there are other nuclear power technologies, like thorium spallation "energy amplifiers" [wikipedia.org], and of course fusion, that hold more promise, and we ought to be directing resources toward researching and developing these rather than on fission.)
Indeed, much of the support for fission seems to be based more on techno-fetishism, on a desire to relize a myth of Man as Master, holding the Power of the Mighty Atom, than on sound scientific analysis.
Re:Global Warming is Irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
Think of it like this: How good will your economy be when people take days off from work for bronchial infections, asthme, and are dropping like flies from cancer? Have a look at the heavy industrial cities of Russia and China, where life expectancy is falling by the year, and the economies are tanking because no one wants to live or invest there?
Worst polluted cites [blacksmithinstitute.org]
DZERZINSK, RUSSIA
In Dzerzhinsk, a significant center of the Russian chemical manufacturing, the average life expectancy is 42 years for men and 47 for women. Despite the heavy toll on the populations health, a quarter of the city's 300,000 residents are still employed in factories that turn out toxic chemicals. According to a 2003 BBC report it is the young who are most vulnerable. In the local cemetery, there are a shocking number of graves of people below the age of 40. In 2003 it was reported that the death rate exceeded the birth rate by 2.6 times and it is easy to see why. The dioxins that get into the water as a by-product of chlorine production are reported to cause cancer even in minute doses.
LINFEN, SHANXI PROVINCE, CHINA
Shanxi Province is considered to be the heart of Chinas enormous and expanding coal industry, providing about two thirds of the nations energy. Within it, Linfen has been identified as one of Shanxis most polluted cities with residents claiming that they literally choke on coal dust in the evenings, according to a BBC report. Local clinics are seeing growing cases of bronchitis, pneumonia, and lung cancer. Lead poisoning was also seen at very high rates in Chinese children in the Shanxi Province.
LA OROYA, PERU
Since 1922, adults and children in La Oroya, Peru - a mining town in the Peruvian Andes and the site of a poly-metallic smelter - have been exposed to the toxic emissions from the plant. Currently owned by the Missouri-based Doe Run Corporation, the plant is largely responsible for the dangerously high blood lead levels found in the children of this community. Ninety-nine percent of children living in and around La Oroya have blood lead levels that exceed acceptable amounts. Sulfur dioxide concentrations also exceed the World Health Organization emissions standards by ten fold. The vegetation in the surrounding area has been destroyed by acid rain due to high sulfur dioxide emissions.