[Fwd: WHAT'S NEW Friday, 8 Aug 03]

[Susan L Gawarecki <loc@icx.net>]

Bob Park weighs in on the climate debate (see #2).  Have a nice weekend.



--Susan Gawarecki



-------- Original Message --------

Subject: WHAT'S NEW     Friday, 8 Aug 03

Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2003 16:21:15 -0400

From: "What's New" <opa@aps.org>

Reply-To: opa@aps.org

To: "What's New" <whatsnew@lists.apsmsgs.org>



WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 8 Aug 03   Washington, DC



(Andrew Essin contributed to this issue of What's New.)



1. POLITICAL SCIENCE: IS THE ADMINISTRATION DISTORTING SCIENCE?

The short answer is, "every administration does."  But a report

by the minority staff of the House Government Reform Committee,

released yesterday, says it's gotten worse.  To the surprise of

no one, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed the

report as political, which of course it is.  However, the NY

Times quotes McClellan in an incredibly revealing description of

administration policy: "The administration looks at the facts,

and reviews the best available science based on what's right for

the American people."  That final clause, "what's right for the

American people," is chilling.



2. POLITICAL CLIMATE: WHAT'S RIGHT FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?

One of the purported abuses cited in the minority staff report

involved the insertion into an EPA report of a reference to a

paper by Soon and Baliunas that denies globl warming (WN 1 Aug

03).  To appreciate its significance, we need to go back to March

of 1998.  We all got a petition card in the mail urging the

government to reject the Kyoto accord(WN 13 Mar 98).  The cover

letter was signed by "Frederick Seitz, Past President, National

Academy of Sciences."  Enclosed was what seemed to be a reprint

of a journal article, in the style and font of Proceedings of the

NAS. But it had not been published in PNAS, or anywhere else. The

reprint was a fake. Two of the four authors of this non-article

were Soon and Baliunas. The other authors, both named Robinson,

were from the tiny Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in

Cave Junction, OR.  The article claimed that the environmental

effects of increased CO2 are all beneficial.  There was also a

copy of Wall Street Journal op-ed by the Robinsons (father and

son) that described increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere as

"a wonderful and unexpected gift of the industrial revolution."

There was no indication of who had paid for the mailing.  It was

a dark episode in the annals of scientific discourse.



3. BASEBALL: PHYSICS COMES TO THE AID OF THE NATIONAL PASTIME.

Well, sort of.  Ivan Marusic's class in hydrodynamics at the

University of Minnesota set out to investigate whether the flight

of a baseball in the Metrodome, which has an inflatable roof, can

be influenced by manipulating the vents.  This is important: the

stadium superintendent claims that when the Twins, who play in

the Metrodome, won the World Series in '87 and '91, he was

manipulating the vents to give the Twins an advantage.  But

according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which apparently

inspired the project, the experiment was inconclusive: on one

day, it appeared that turning on the blowers behind home plate

caused fly balls, launched from a  cannon, to travel an extra 3½

feet.  But on another day it did squat.  This needs to be

resolved, but there's no urgency.  Today the Twins are a dismal

57-57.  They're not gonna be in the series this year.



THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY.

Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the

University or the American Physical Society, but they should be.

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