Activist scientists on the Federal payroll in the United States are reeling from President Trump’s recent executive order designed to promote openness and integrity in an often corrupted and politicised scientific process. The order mandates transparency, objectivity and it provides a protection for dissenting views and safeguards against political interference. Scientific results must be falsifiable, computer models must be explainable and negative results available. Needless to say, not everyone is happy with this return to the “gold standard” with a group of scientists including Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann writing in the Guardian – seemingly without irony – that it will “destroy American science as we know it”. A group called Stand Up for Science, whose executive director also helped write the Guardian article, is collecting signatures noting that “state sponsored” scientific programmes in Nazi Germany led to the deaths of millions of Jews, people with disabilities and people identifying as LGBTQ+.
Of course, the Hitler trope is often deployed when political activists are circling the wagons to defend a way of doing business “as we know it”. In fact, the Trump executive order does no more than provide guidance as to how science should be conducted. It is patently necessary because much of the science produced during the recent Covid panic and in the current fake climate emergency is biased towards promoting the political agenda of an influential, moneyed elite. Even the Guardian finds it hard to quarrel with the new requirement that science produced by Federal employees should be informed by “the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available”. Quite how the newspaper’s writers believe “science is under siege” with an order enshrining such basic scientific principles is not immediately clear.
Over the last five years in the US, public confidence in science has fallen, according to the executive order. In several cases the Federal Government has contributed to this loss of trust. During the pandemic, schools remained closed despite the “best available scientific evidence” showing that children were unlikely to transmit or suffer serious illness or death from the virus. On climate change, agencies have regularly used the RCP 8.5 scenario to produce ‘worst case’ computer model projections. In fact, RCP 8.5 is the basis for most climate and weather fear-mongering. The order notes it is based on highly unlikely assumptions like end-of-century coal use exceeding estimates of recoverable coal reserves. The science writer Roger Pielke Jr has long been a critic of this widespread ‘pathway’, calling its continued misuse, “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the 21st Century so far”.
For the avoidance of any doubt, the order lays out in simple terms what is meant by “restoring gold standard science”. It means it must be reproducible; transparent; open about error and uncertainty; collaborative and interdisciplinary; sceptical of its findings and assumptions; falsifiable; subject to unbiased peer-review; accepting of negative results as positive outcomes and without conflicts of interest. Highly unlikely and overly precautionary assumptions and scenarios should only be relied upon in agency decision-making where required by law or otherwise relevant to an agency’s action. Any outside ‘contractor’ working for a federal agency will also be obliged to follow the new rules as though they were directly employed.
There is nothing out of the ordinary in the order to those immersed in the traditional scientific process and without an ideological axe to grind. But in the climate sphere it is likely to spike the guns of a number of activists and their alarmist claims. After years of producing junk science to promote the Net Zero fantasy, great care will now need to be taken in promoting ‘worse case’ scenarios. Meanwhile, the pseudoscience of attributing individual weather events to humans burning hydrocarbons will need to be confined to gullible journalists and lawfare operations, two purposes for which it was originally designed.
As the Guardian article shows, opposition to the gold standard requirement is a little tricky given that it lays down perfectly reasonable rules and procedures for employees paid by the taxpayer. “It all sounds very non-objectional, but it’s extremely dangerous in its details and subtext,” observed Gretchen Goldman, president of the Green Blob part-funded Union of Concerned Scientists. The only objection left is to criticise the ‘political’ appointment of administrators to examine the workings out. But these will be made by the heads of agencies such as the weather service NOAA and space operation NASA who are themselves appointed by the Government. The oversight will not set the scope of any work or require certain conclusions to be produced. It is highly unlikely that any LGBTQ+ people will be marched to the gulag any time soon. Federal employees are simply being required to follow best scientific practice.
Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, which coordinates science policy across the government, told Nature that the order created a path to rebuilding trust between the scientific community and the public “through common sense scientific principles”. According to Nature, she also accused the recent Biden Administration of incorporating radical woke ideology into the scientific enterprise by introducing diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. “If that’s not politicised science, I don’t know what is,” she added.
Meanwhile, the Guardian concludes its thoughts on the Trump order by stating that “science depends on free speech – free and continuous discussion of data and ideas”. This is the same newspaper that has spent decades attempting to close down any debate that does not accept the central role of carbon dioxide and humans in its imaginary climate crisis. No alternative ‘denier’ view from however distinguished a scientist or observer is allowed. Climate science is always described as ‘settled’. It is also the same newspaper that in August 2018 published a letter from 60 writers, politicians and academics under an editorial ‘climate crisis’ subhead stating they would “no longer lend our credibility” by debating with anyone who disputed the overriding role of humans in changing the climate. Debating all views on how the climate works was said to create a “false equivalence” – not the most scientific of approaches, it might be concluded, in spite of the Guardian’s claim to be on the side of ‘the Science’.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic Environment Editor.
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