Soccer Dad

The political method

One of the criticism of the Bush administration is that the President ingonred evidence to pursue his own beliefs, not only in terms of matters of war and peace, but also in the area of science. Like the President was somewhat skeptical of claims of global warming. So the NYT happily greets President-elect Obama's new scientific advisors with an editorial, A New Respect for Science. For instance:

We are also heartened by Mr. Obama's choice of John Holdren, a Harvard physicist, as his science adviser. Mr. Holdren has served as chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as has Ms. Lubchenco. Both have argued strongly and repeatedly for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gases to avoid catastrophic climate change.

And of course Mr. Holdren's record supports this enthusiasm. John Tierney writes:

In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.

After allowing that this mistake might have been a learning experience, Tierney observes:

Consider what happened when a successor to Dr. Simon, Bjorn Lomborg, published "The Skeptical Environmentalist" in 2001. Dr. Holdren joined in an an extraordinary attack on the book in Scientific American -- an attack that I thought did far more harm to the magazine's reputation than to Dr. Lomborg's. The Economist called the critique "strong on contempt and sneering, but weak on substance"; Dr. Lomborg's defenders said the critics made more mistakes in 11 pages than they were able to find in his 540-page book. (You can read Dr. Lomborg's rebuttal here.) In an earlier post, I wrote about Dr. Holdren's critique of the chapter on energy, in which Dr. Lomborg reviewed the history of energy scares and predicted there would not be dire shortages in the future:

It sounds as if Dr. Holdren would be inclined to shape his views in order to fit "...the administration's political agenda." I thought that that's what the Times objected to.