Smithsonian 'Toned Down the Science' In Climate Change Exhibit

An anonymous reader writes "According to an International Herald Tribune article, the Smithsonian pre-emptively toned down the scientific content of a climate change exhibit put into place last year. The changes, including removal of scientist conclusions and muddying of displayed data, were made to ensure that the exhibit would not offend the Congress or the White House. Pressure brought to bear by Institute officials resulted in the resignation of Robert Sullivan, a sixteen year veteran of the organization. 'This is not the first time the Smithsonian has been accused of taking politics into consideration. The congressionally chartered institution scaled down a 1995 exhibit of the restored Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, after veterans complained it focused too much on the damage and deaths. Amid the oil-drilling debate in 2003, a photo exhibit of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was moved to a less prominent space.'"

Comments

Overheard at the Smithsonian

[grub]

Overheard at the Smithsonian:

Worker: Sir, I have this old display of Noah's Ark you asked for. Where did you want it?
Curator: Put some dinosaur models on it then set it up in the Geology Wing.
Worker: Will do, sir. Oh I also changed all the signage in that wing from "millions of years" to "thousands of years".
Curator: That's what I like: proactive thinking! What about the Adam & Eve diorama?
Worker: It's where the Galapagos Islands exhibit was, just as you requested.
Curator: My boy, you have a bright future in science!

They are following the "Golden Rule".

[AltGrendel]

Who ever has the gold, makes the rules.

Self-policing

[PIPBoy3000]

The most troublesome part is that it was Smithsonian's administration that wanted the changes, not people from the US administration.

There's two kinds of people: those that change their beliefs to fit the facts and those that change the facts to fit their beliefs.

When you're changing the facts to fit other people's beliefs, well, I guess you get the budget dollars but lose all self-respect.

Re:Self-policing

[flyingsquid]

Until recently, the Smithsonian was headed by Lawrence Small. Small is not a scientist, never has been, and has no scientific background. He was president of Fanny Mae, an organization that itself has a history of distorting the facts to get the answers they like.

By most accounts, and I've talked with curators at the Smithosonian about this, Small was a terrible leader of the organization. He apparently did bring a lot of money into the organization, but you didn't see any evidence of this behind the scenes at the museum. Instead, he had almost $50,000 spent on furniture for his office, $15,000 spent on the doors at his house, spent $160,000 spent on renovating his office at the Smithsonian castle building, and by using his house to host a few Smithsonian functions, was given $1.15 million dollars in housing allowances. All your tax dollars. Not to mention, his total salary for 2007 was supposed to be $915,000- nearly a million dollars, more than the president and vice president combined. Meanwhile, science seems to have taken a back seat at the Smithsonian, and I suspect the scientists threw a party when he finally resigned. See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2007/03/18/AR2007031801369.html

But Small is just one symptom of a much larger problem, which is appointing incompetent hacks to important government positions, and pushing politics over facts. This is what happened at FEMA with Heckuvajob Brownie. This is what happened in Iraq, when the White House sent over people who had the proper Republican Party credentials, but not the credentials to do the job; it's one of the major reasons the occupation there has been such a disaster. The problem has been summed up pretty well by the phrase, "the triumph of the hacks over the wonks". See, the wonks are the policy guys, the analytical guys who can analyze the facts and tell you what you need to do in order to achieve a desired outcome. They are the political equivalent of a computer geek, except they write policy instead of code. The hacks are the political guys, the guys who don't give a shit what the facts are, they are only there to push their party agenda. And this administration has favored the hacks over the wonks, so the result is that facts get shoved aside by politics, whether it's climate change, or the debatable effectiveness of "abstinence-only" education, or the infamous case of General Shinseki getting sacked by Rumsfeld after he said we would need several hundred thousand troops to effectively occupy Iraq.

The good news is ...

[Palmyst]

In a hundred years, the Smithsonian will be under water.

Re:Money ALWAYS comes with strings attached

[malsdavis]

It's like your typical parent company shareholder override situation:

The Smithsonian institute are funded by the government of the United States.
Most of the current Congressmen / Senators / President which make up the government of the United States are funded by the big Oil companies.

The big Oil companies obviously don't want to see pictures of Climate Change or pictures of the national parks they are in the process of trashing and so get what they see as their subsidiary company to "make the changes".

Courtesy of United States Inc.

Re:Government funding

[grub]

I guess these guys have to be as politically neutral as possible.

That's crap. Politics has no place in science. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it" comes to mind when politics and science meet.

Re:Well waddaya know....

[jamie]

Are you guys still spreading misinformation about the hockey stick?!

It's 2007...

Re:Lines from the article, with commentary

[Ambitwistor]

"...the script...was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans..." Imagine that! Uncertainty in science. If you want certainty, get a shaman/priest/rabbi.

Yes, science has uncertainty. The problem is in injecting more uncertainty than the scientific studies originally concluded.

"...officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data..." Why would they do that? Don't they know the great unwashed can't be trusted to draw trhe "proper" inferences?!?!!?!!

Hell, even other scientists have trouble looking at a graph and drawing conclusions from it, unless they're experts in that specific field. That's why scientific papers and scientific talks have words to go along with all those pretty graphs.

Look at all of the abuses of science that go on in Slashdot global warming threads when you take away the interpretation.

Raw data: graph showing CO2 increases following temperature increases, instead of leading them
Implied conclusion: CO2 doesn't cause temperature increases
Missing scientific interpretation: temperatures cause CO2 increases, which in turn amplify and prolong the original temperature increase
Actual scientific conclusion: CO2 does cause temperature increases (and vice versa!)

Raw data: graph showing CO2 increasing smoothly in the 20th century, but temperatures falling mid-century
Implied conclusion: CO2 doesn't cause temperature increases
Missing scientific interpretation: there were non-CO2 cooling effects in the mid-20th century, including heavy air pollution and a brief spike in volcanism
Actual scientific conclusion: CO2 does cause temperature increases (and other manmade and natural factors also influence the climate)

Raw data: graph showing temperatures and solar intensity increasing
Implied conclusion: solar brightening causes global warming
Missing scientific interpretation: the increase in solar intensity is real but too small to produce the observed warming, and did not increase at a rate similar to the increased rate of late 20th century warming
Actual scientific conclusion: solar brightening can only account for a small minority of the global warming

Raw data: graph showing Earth and Pluto temperatures increasing
Implied conclusion: solar brightening causes global warming everywhere in the solar system
Missing scientific interpretation: see above, and the fact that Pluto has recently been unusually close to the Sun
Actual scientific conclusion: solar brightening isn't responsible for global warming on Earth or Pluto

There is nothing wrong with explaining how scientists interpret data. The data themselves only give part of the picture, especially to non-scientists who don't know as much about the issues.