Note to Washington: Unleash the Geeks

There is good climate change and bad climate change. One of the very best types is the radical warming of the atmosphere for scientific inquiry we’re already feeling from the incoming Obama administration.

Watchdog reports from the Union of Concerned Scientists and other groups have detailed the suffocation of science in the Bush administration–the censorship of findings, delays in producing required reports, reduced funding for earth sciences. President Bush is not known as the inquisitive type. As I have reported in the past, some members of the federal government’s science corps believe the president stifled climate science because he doesn’t want to know the answers. He most likely doesn’t want the rest of us to know them, either.

What a difference an election can make. President-elect Obama, often the smartest guy in the room, obviously is open to new knowledge, information and ideas. He’s named Nobel Laureate physicist Stephen Chu, director of Lawrence Livermore Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next secretary of Energy; physicist and energy/environment expert John Holdren of Harvard as his science advisor; Marine biologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University to head NOAA; and Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Eric Lander of MIT as co-chairmen of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

As Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science notes in the Economist, “we’ve never had a president surrounded in close proximity with so many well-known, top scientific minds.”

Another signal that it’s springtime for science is the economic stimulus plan the Obama team is circulating in Congress and in cyberspace. According to the plan:

Obama and Biden support doubling federal funding for basic research and changing the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.

Here are some additional suggestions as the administration prepares to take office.

End political censorship: During his first week in office, President Obama should issue an executive order that forbids political interference in the work of federal climate scientists. The order should also remove barriers to contact between federal scientists and the media and order agencies to release draft scientific reports that become buried in the “black hole” of agency review. 

Restore earth sciences: Obama should direct NASA to put the study of the Earth back into its mission statement. More substantively, the administration should ask Congress to increase the agency’s funding for climate-observing satellites, its capability to analyze climate data, and its studies of the likely local and regional impacts of climate change in the United States. Climate scientists lament that with the erosion of NASA’s satellites budget, the institutions trying to better understand global warming are going blind.

“The observations we have at this point just aren’t good enough,” said Robert Charlson of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The biggest single problem we have now is a lack of adequate satellite measurements, and the platforms that could be moving us toward answers are either pending or being killed.”

If necessary, funding for NASA’s Mission to Mars should be transferred to Earth sciences. We need to understand Earth’s life-support systems now; we can worry about Mars later.