Post-Partisan

The headline caught my eye: Obama signals new approach to science Popperian epistemology is out? Huh, what?

It turns out that President-elect Obama is -- well, let the AP tell you:

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama today named a Harvard physicist and a marine biologist to science posts, signaling a change from Bush administration policies on global warming that were criticized for putting politics over science.

Both John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco are leading experts on climate change who have advocated forceful government response.

The Bush science people were political, but Holdren is a scientist!

Colleagues say the post is well-suited for Holdren, who at Harvard went from battling the spread of nuclear weapons to tackling the threat of global warming. He's an award-laden scientist comfortable in many different fields.

The hopelessly-pro-Bush partisans at the New York Times, however, may not be so keen on the pick. John Tierney asks "Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not..." Tierney mentions -- and the AP and Denver Post omit -- Holdren's experience in scare-mongering and junk science:

Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.

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.

This is great because I love to bring up Paul Ehrlich to fervent DAWG believers and you know I love a good segue. Ehrlich's catastrophic and catastrophically wrong predictions seem comical today. It's not about the strike price of Tungsten. Ehrlich thought we'd all starve to death in the 1990s.

It seems fitting and proper that an Ehrlich associate would be promoted to science advisor in an Obama Administration (where's that in the Constitution again?) but absurd that we have to read about his appointment as a triumph of science over politics.

Read the whole Tierney piece just as much as you can stand of Hope Yen's AP story.

Media and Blogging Posted by John Kranz at December 20, 2008 5:47 PM