Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The Associated Press has published a piece attacking the Trump administration’s move to challenge the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” the ruling that declared greenhouse gases a threat to public health and gave bureaucrats license to regulate nearly every aspect of energy and industry. The administration is relying on a Department of Energy report that highlights overlooked and underreported aspects of climate data, but the AP frames the effort as “flawed” and filled with “bias.”
The Associated Press has published a piece attacking the Trump administration’s move to challenge the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” the ruling that declared greenhouse gases a threat to public health and gave bureaucrats license to regulate nearly every aspect of energy and industry. The administration is relying on a Department of Energy report that highlights overlooked and underreported aspects of climate data, but the AP frames the effort as “flawed” and filled with “bias.”
The AP surveyed 64 scientists, with most accusing the DOE of “cherry-picking” and “twisting” evidence to downplay climate risks. One oft-repeated complaint was a mistaken figure: the DOE report said Arctic Sea ice had declined 5% since 1980, which is actually the Antarctic figure. The Arctic, they argue, has lost more than 40%. Another example cited by AP was wildfire data that extended back before 1960, despite warnings that such early records are unreliable. Critics claim these inclusions create a misleading impression that fires were worse in the past.
Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather accused the report of misusing his work, calling the process a “farce,” while Yale’s Jennifer Marlon claimed wildfire data was mishandled. French economist François Bareille said his findings on agricultural resilience were misapplied to broader contexts.
In other words…. WAAAAH! How dare you challenge us! (cue Greta Thunberg)
But the AP quietly admits that some scientists supported the DOE report. James Davidson, an economics professor at the University of Exeter, praised it for breaking away from “unnecessarily alarmist findings” and for voicing views long excluded from official reports. The DOE authors themselves emphasized that their work was not intended to be a full climate assessment, but rather a focused review of neglected evidence and alternative interpretations.
Not surprisingly, the National Academy of Sciences is rushing to produce a “fast-tracked special report” to reinforce the orthodoxy, while activists are already mobilizing online. Public comments on the DOE’s report are open until September 2, with EPA hearings set to close September 22.
The AP ends with its now-standard disclosure: its climate coverage is funded by private foundations with an obvious stake in perpetuating the climate crisis narrative.
In short, the article is less reporting and more sermonizing. The AP wants readers to believe that scientific disagreement is illegitimate and that only the “consensus” counts. Yet the very need to discredit and suppress alternative analyses suggests the opposite: the endangerment finding rests on shakier ground than its defenders want to admit.
NOTE: You are welcome to comment on this article, but WUWT is still in the middle of an upgrade. When that completes in a few days the comments will be lost. This post may or may not survive.
The Committee’s Charge to Review Evidence Whether Anthropogenic Emissions of Greenhouse Gases to the Atmosphere Are Reasonably Anticipated to Endanger Public Health and Welfare in the United States.
Richard Lindzen Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology
William Happer Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Princeton University
August 25, 2025
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases and US Climate: Evidence and Impacts 500 Fifth Street, NW Washington, DC 20001
Re: The Committee’s Charge to Review Evidence Whether Anthropogenic Emissions of Greenhouse Gases to the Atmosphere Are Reasonably Anticipated to Endanger Public Health and Welfare in the United States.
We appreciate the opportunity to submit science related to the Committee’s charge, including its “focus on evidence gathered by the scientific community since 2009.”
We are career physicists with a special expertise in radiation physics, which describes how carbon dioxide and other GHGs affect heat flow in Earth’s atmosphere, and in the dynamics of atmospheric transport of energy and momentum on our rotating planet Earth. We are both members of the National Academy of Sciences, and our CVs are attached. In our scientific opinion, the Endangerment Finding (“EF”),1 is not based on science for four separate reasons:
1. It is based on unscientific evidence.
2. It failed to consider the physics that demonstrates that increasing carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases (“GHGs”) and fossil fuel use will have a trivial effect on temperature and cannot and will not cause catastrophic warming and extreme weather.
3. It failed to consider the essential benefits of carbon dioxide to life on Earth, including that doubling carbon dioxide from today’s 420 parts per million to 840 ppm will increase the world’s food supply by 40%.
4. It failed to consider the science that eliminating carbon dioxide and fossil fuels will have disastrous effects for Americans, America, the poor and people worldwide.
Therefore, for these four reasons separately and together, science demonstrates that human emissions of carbon dioxide and other GHGs and the use of fossil fuels cannot endanger public health and welfare in the U.S. and instead provide benefits to public health and welfare. Thus the Endangerment Finding should be repealed ASAP. Scientific details follow and in our attached June 7, 2025 paper, “Physics Demonstrates that Increasing Greenhouse Gases Cannot Cause Dangerous Warming, Extreme Weather or Any Harm.”
The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine were congressionally chartered in 1863 to do just that. However, as with so many of our venerated institutions in recent years, it has dived head-first into many progressive policy priorities and fallen prey to other destructive influences.
The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine were congressionally chartered in 1863 to do just that. However, as with so many of our venerated institutions in recent years, it has dived head-first into many progressive policy priorities and fallen prey to other destructive influences.
Science is suffering from a reproducibility crisis, where identifying bogus, manipulated, and politicized research has become a cottage industry. This is due in no small part to torch-wielding activists burning down institutions that produce research that fails to support the “right” conclusions. Rather than fighting it, the National Academies have too often given fuel to the torch-wielders. NASEM’s tepid, caveated 2020 report on school reopening was a de facto invitation for teachers’ unions to throw their weight around, prolonging the damaging closures. As if that weren’t bad enough, the report included an epilogue on “the epidemic of systemic racism.” Predictably, the students NASEM professed to be most concerned about were most harmed by the closures the report helped prolong.
Last month Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency announced it was beginning the process to reverse the 2009 Clean Air Act Endangerment Finding, which granted the feds authority to regulate CO2. Since its inception, skeptics have worried that this policy was driven by progressive special interests. A recent dump of public records suggested the Obama-era officials’ finding was pre-determined — a no-no under the Administrative Procedures Act. This kicked off a very profitable period for researchers, consultants, and environmental NGOs who rushed to gorge at the trough of what they termed the climate crisis. NASEM, technically a non-profit foundation which has not only received significant government money to promote climate alarmism but has actively solicited private donations for that cause, decided it ain’t gonna take the EPA’s recent move lying down.
Marcia McNutt, president of NASEM’s National Academy of Sciences, declared the organization will be conducting a “fast-track review” studying “the latest scientific evidence on whether greenhouse gas emissions are reasonably anticipated to endanger public health and welfare in the U.S.” In other words, NASEM, tasked with providing advice to the federal government “whenever called upon,” is taking the extraordinary step of proactively second-guessing the EPA’s decision and advising the government, whether the government asked for it or not. Historically, it has been a responsive organization, weighing in to provide expertise to support the government’s needs. Thus, it is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for NASEM to insert itself into a federal agency process absent a request to do so — and certainly to wade into a politically fraught subject at the center of a pending high-profile regulatory effort, such as rescinding the Endangerment Finding.
Ideology aside, NASEM appears to be heavily dependent on government support — receiving approximately $200 million from government coffers in 2023. That is, until the Department of Government Efficiency began auditing federal research dollars suspected of being used improperly or to promote progressive policy priorities such as DEI, gender ideology, and climate alarmism.
The audit has hit NASEM hard. Contract cancelations and stop work orders have undoubtedly left the organization scrambling, with Ms. McNutt announcing in May that 250 of its 1100 staffers could lose their positions over substantial funding cuts. Staff reactions to scrubbing “wokeness” haven’t mollified critics. One report revealed NASEM “members [] expressed outrage when staff were ordered to purge words such as ‘health equity’ and ‘marginalized populations’ from complete or near-complete reports this winter,” and Ms. McNutt and NASEM chief operating officer Greg Symmes dissolved the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, “citing executive orders from Trump and NASEM’s obligations as a federal government contractor.”
Ms. McNutt and NASEM’s decision to insert themselves further into the political fray is likely to attract more scrutiny. It is not far-fetched to think that fungible taxpayer funds that have yet to be fully DOGE’d might be deployed for this self-initiated activist effort to stop the EPA from derailing what many see as a climate alarmism gravy train. As a long-time VIP rider on the train, opposing the EPA may make sense to NASEM climateers. To outside observers, it looks like sour grapes soaked in evident financial conflicts.
Michael Chamberlain is the director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
Morano Excerpt: In the case of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, it has morphed into a warmist climate advocacy group. NAS, under Ralph Cicerone, is dedicated to producing science that fits the man-made global warming narrative.
NAS/NRC Climate Panel Fails The Laugh Test: ‘5 of 23 panelists are or were staffers for env. activist orgs’ — ‘Prior to publishing the NAS/NRC report, 19 of 23 made statements claiming global warming is a human induced problem and/or we need to take action to reduce CO2. That means 83% of panel was clearly and obviously biased before being selected. To claim that a report from such a small panel, comprised primarily of non-climate scientists and environmental activists, is objective and scientifically authoritative is a joke’
Climate’s POLITICAL SCIENCE Exposed: Warmist activist Chris Mooney appointed to American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) board –Pielke Jr. Reacts: ‘Appointing an English major who has written divisively about the ‘Republican War on Science’ to help AGU oversee ‘science communication’ is more than a little ironic…To the extent that AAAS and AGU endorse the Democratic policy agenda, or just appear to do so, it reflects their role not as arbiters of knowledge claims, but rather as political actors’
Other developments have cast doubt the “consensus” expressed by science organizations.
In 2009, the world’s largest science group, the American Chemical Society (ACS) was “startled” by an outpouring of scientists rejecting man-made climate fears, with many calling for the removal of the ACS’s climate activist editor.
More than 100 international scientists challenged President Obama’s climate claims, calling them “simply incorrect.” In December 8 2009, 166 scientists from around the world wrote an Open Letter to the UN Secretary-General rebuking the UN and declaring that “the science is NOT settled.”
Vermont’s WCAX 3 news station posted an article from the Associated Press (AP) titled “People often make wrong climate choices, a study says. One surprise is owning a dog,” in which the writers claim that owning a dog is bad for the climate because they are meat eaters. This is completely misguided. Meat eating does not have an inordinate impact on the global climate and studies show that dog ownership can be beneficial to peoples’ mental health – an important consideration in a period where the media coverage of climate change is stoking climate-fear-related anxiety and mental health issues.
Vermont’s WCAX 3 news station posted an article from the Associated Press (AP) titled “People often make wrong climate choices, a study says. One surprise is owning a dog,” in which the writers claim that owning a dog is bad for the climate because they are meat eaters. This is completely misguided. Meat eating does not have an inordinate impact on the global climate and studies show that dog ownership can be beneficial to peoples’ mental health – an important consideration in a period where the media coverage of climate change is stoking climate-fear-related anxiety and mental health issues.
The post summarizes points from a recent study from the National Academy of Sciences, which looked at survey participants’ beliefs when it came to the impact of their individual efforts to “fight” climate change. Participants apparently ““weren’t very accurate when assessing how much those actions contributed to climate change, which is caused mostly by the release of greenhouse gases that happen when fuels like gasoline, oil and coal are burned.”
Aside from the point that it is very much not an established fact that most climate change is caused by human use of fossil fuels or is dangerous, it is interesting that the study ranks some very intrusive climate efforts as low-impact. Those included things like using energy efficient appliances and lightbulbs, and recycling. Those individual efforts are things that the U.S. government has pushed for decades, imposing burdensome regulations on consumers and appliance manufacturers alike, as well as hijacking public school classes to promote the merits of recycling.
Associated Press’ writers claim that that the three actions that “help the climate” most are avoiding flying, using renewable electricity, and “choosing not to get a dog.”
These three items were consistently underestimated by study participants as effective mitigating climate change, at least according to the authors. The most offensive is probably the claim that dog ownership is particularly harmful to the planet.
The article claims that because dogs are carnivores, they are a significant contributor to climate change since “farm animals, which will become food, release methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.” They claim that beef is a particular problem on that front.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) it is simply false to claim cattle raising is a significant contributor to emissions, let alone global climate change.
The EPA reports that livestock as a whole contribute 3.9 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, and cattle by themselves contribute just 2 percent.
Figure 1. Greenhouse gas emissions by sector in the United States. Note that beef production is less than half of the entire livestock sector, at just 2 percent. Source: Data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Graphic by Anthony Watts. Artwork icons in graphic licensed from 123rf.com.
Figuring out what proportion of that beef is then turned into pet food in general and dog food specifically is almost impossible, but it would seem safe to assume it’s very minimal, especially since most commercial dog foods outside of specialty brands are made with animal byproducts that might otherwise go unused. Check the ingredients listed on the label of most dry and canned dog food and you’ll find that even when beef is an ingredient and listed first, it makes up a small portion of the overall content of the food.
Climate Realism has covered discussed methane a lot, but it is worth re-iterating, especially as the media and climate alarm machine target man’s best friend. Methane itself is yet another trace gas, and while it does play a role in the atmosphere’s energy balance, it does not stay in the atmosphere for nearly as long as other gases like carbon dioxide, and much of its ability to trap heat is already covered by water vapor, which plays a much stronger role.
A paper written by physicists William Happer, Ph.D., of Princeton University and W. A. van Wijngaarden, Ph.D., of Toronto’s York University, says that “the contribution of methane to the annual increase in forcing is one tenth (30/300) that of carbon dioxide.”
So whatever percentage of cattle emissions result from your dog eating beef-based food, or even all the dogs in the country, they still have such a miniscule impact on any warming, it can hardly be taken seriously as an “underestimated” contributor to climate change.
Besides all of that, climate alarmists probably should think about getting a dog (if they are responsible enough) because having a dog in particular is known to reduce anxiety, which, as Climate Realism has covered, climate alarmists seem to suffer inordinately from. Repeated studies show that pet ownership in general, and dog ownership in particular can reduce stress and anxiety. Thus, a canine companion can help fight the mental illnesses and anxiety that the daily torrent of false stories claiming that human-caused climate change is destroying the planet is generating in some people. Owning a dog can be doubly effective in shoring up mental health, if those alarmed about climate change come to recognize the fact that dog ownership is not hurting the planet.
The AP, WCAX 3, and the study authors are not accurately portraying the true state of the planet. They certainly have no place talking anyone who wants to own dog out of doing so, at least not as a means of preventing climate change.
Here’s an article you might find interesting from Science magazine on June 2. The headline is “National Academies, staggering from Trump cuts, on brink of dramatic downsizing.”
Science magazine is one of those formerly-prestigious “peer-reviewed” journals where for many decades you just had to get your research published in order to become someone in a scientific field. Somewhere along the way, Science turned from scientific inquiry to orthodoxy enforcement. The National Academy of Sciences (“NAS,” and along with two fellow Academies of Engineering and Medicine sometimes called “NASEM”), meanwhile, is a federally-chartered but supposedly private entity set up to give “independent” scientific advice to the government. The Academies raise meaningful amounts of private funds, but in the most recent reported year (2023) got the substantial majority of their funding (over $200 million) via contracts from the feds. (See Treasurer’s Statement here.). As far as I can determine, the main business of the National Academies, and particularly of the NAS, is also orthodoxy enforcement.
The latest, from the June 2 Science article, is that the National Academy of Sciences “is navigating a tense situation as the organization faces unprecedented contract losses and layoffs.” The President of the NAS is named Marcia McNutt. The Science piece describes a May 21 email sent by McNutt to colleagues outlining how the Academies (and their umbrella organization the National Research Council) plan to respond to funding cuts. Excerpt:
“While it is too early to share specific outcomes, we anticipate that the NRC will emerge as a smaller organization with fewer units,” McNutt wrote in a 21 May email.
How big are the funding cuts?
From Trump’s inauguration to 6 May, NRC lost 41 U.S. government contracts and received another eight stop-work orders. . . . The DOGE website lists 36 of the canceled NASEM contracts, and Science calculated the total cost of these losses to be more than $25 million.
Well, so far by my calculation that’s $25 million down and $175 million to go.
Is there anything about the NAS that’s worth preserving at all? To answer that question, you need to consider its long-time President, Marcia McNutt. Ms. McNutt transitioned from editor-in-chief of Science magazine over to President of the NAS way back in late 2015/early 2016. At that time, I wrote two posts on that subject, here on December 18, 2015, and here on February 8, 2016. The focus of those two posts was what I called the “epidemic” of orthodoxy enforcement in the U.S. scientific establishment. And I identified the leader of that epidemic as Ms. McNutt.
In the December 2015 post I featured an extraordinary email submitted by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars opposing Ms. McNutt’s candidacy for President of NAS (although there was no other serious contender for the position at the time). Mr. Wood identified three major areas of scientific inquiry, all with huge money at stake, where Ms. McNutt as editor of Science had led the forces seeking to suppress all dissenting evidence and data. The three areas were (1) the so-called “linear no threshold” hypothesis as to the effects of pollutants and carcinogens (including radiation); (2) the health effects of very small particulate matter (2.5 microns or smaller) in the air (known as “PM 2.5”); and (3) the so-called “consensus model” of climate change driven by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. I will repeat here a long excerpt from Mr. Wood’s email that I included in that 2015 post:
Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a substantial scientific challenge. The challenge in each case could itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing. Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by shutting the door on the challenge. . . . Dr. McNutt’s dismissive treatment of scientific criticisms is disturbing. . . .
1. The status of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response model for the biological effects of nuclear radiation. The prominence of the model stems from the June 29, 1956 Science paper, “Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation,” authored by the NAS Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation. This paper is now widely questioned and has been seriously critiqued in many peer-reviewed publications, including two detailed 2015 papers. These criticisms are being taken seriously around the world, as summarized in a December 2, 2015 Wall Street Journal commentary. In August 2015 four distinguished critics of LNT made a formal request to Dr. McNutt to examine the evidence of fundamental flaws in the 1956 paper and retract it. However, on August 11, 2015 Dr. McNutt rejected this request without even reviewing the detailed evidence. Furthermore, Dr. McNutt did not even consider recusing herself and having independent reviewers examine evidence that challenges the validity of both a Science paper and an NAS Committee Report.
This is a consequential matter that bears on a great deal of national public policy, as the LNT model has served as the basis for risk assessment and risk management of radiation and chemical carcinogens for decades, but now needs to be seriously reassessed. This reassessment could profoundly alter many regulations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and other government agencies. The relevant documents regarding the 1956 Science paper and Dr. McNutt can be examined at www.nas.org/images/documents/LNT.pdf.
2. Extensive evidence of scientific misconduct in the epidemiology of fine particulate air pollution(PM2.5) and its relationship to mortality. Since 1997 EPA has claimed that lifetime inhalation of about a teaspoon of particles with diameter less than 2.5 microns causes premature death in the United States and it established a national regulation based on this claim. Science has provided extensive news coverage of this issue and its regulatory significance, but has never published any scientific criticism of this questionable claim, which is largely based on nontransparent research.
Earlier this year, nine accomplished scientists and academics submitted to Science well-documented evidence of misconduct by several of the PM2.5 researchers relied upon by EPA. The evidence of misconduct was first submitted to Dr. McNutt in a detailed June 4, 2015 email letter, then in a detailed July 20, 2015 Policy Forum manuscript “Transparent Science is Necessary for EPA Regulations,” and finally in an August 17, 2015 Perspective manuscript “Particulate Matter Does Not Cause Premature Deaths.” Dr. McNutt and two Science editors immediately rejected the letter and the manuscripts and never conducted any internal or external review of the evidence. This a consequential matter because many multi-billion dollar EPA air pollution regulations, such as, the Clean Power Plan, are primarily justified by the claim that PM2.5 is killing Americans. The relevant documents regarding this controversy can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/PM2.5.pdf.
3. Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views. This issue has become so polarized and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical record. Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June 26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015 McNutt editorial, “The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015 McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November 25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate Science Inquiry.”
Further to the subject of climate orthodoxy enforcement, my February 2016 post quoted from a July 2015 editorial in Science authored by Ms. McNutt. Excerpt:
The time for debate has ended. Action is urgently needed. The Paris-based International Energy Agency recently announced that current commitments to cut CO2 emissions [known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs)] from the world’s nations are insufficient to avoid warming the entire planet by an average of more than 2°C above the preindustrial level. To set more aggressive targets, developed nations need to reduce their per-capita fossil fuel emissions even further, and by doing so, create roadmaps for developing nations to leapfrog technologies by installing low-CO2–emitting energy infrastructure rather than coal-fired power plants as they expand their energy capacity.
In the time since 2016, Ms. McNutt and the NAS have been central actors in suppressing dissenting voices in the climate debate.
And here’s something else from the June 2 Science piece:
The presidents of those three honorific societies that together with NRC comprise NASEM—McNutt, John Anderson, and Victor Dzau—each earned more than $1 million in 2023. . . . At a time when hundreds of jobs are at risk, “It is galling that the leadership of the institution makes that kind of money,” says one senior program officer with a decade of experience at the institution.
I can’t think of any reason why any organization headed by Ms. McNutt should get a dime of taxpayer money. Can you?
Global yields of wheat are around 10% lower now than they would have been without the influence of climate change, according to a new study.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks at data on climate change and growing conditions for wheat and other major crops around the world over the past 50 years.
It comes as heat and drought have this year been putting wheat supplies at risk in key grain-producing regions, including parts of Europe, China and Russia.
The study finds that increasingly hot and dry conditions negatively impacted yields of three of the five key crops examined.
Perhaps the con merchants who wrote this study might care to explain exactly at what point in the last 65 years this “climate change effect” began to click in. And why the actual trends show no sign of this so-called effect becoming progressively worse – something which the authors say is already happening:
Maybe they might also like to explain how much lower wheat yields might now be without the benefits provided by fossil fuels, including increased mechanisation, transportation and refrigeration.
Carbon Brief attempt to play the climate scare card, saying:
It comes as heat and drought have this year been putting wheat supplies at risk in key grain-producing regions, including parts of Europe, China and Russia
There are always bad harvests somewhere in the world. But according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, global wheat production will be the second highest on record, even better than last year’s near record total:
We must always bear in mind that Carbon Brief receives more than a million pounds in funding a year from the notorious ECF, the organisation set up to channel billions from far-left US foundations to European bodies like Carbon Brief in order to spread climate misinformation.
In a new paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we, alongside colleagues from a diverse range of fields, investigate the prevalence and extent of censorship and self-censorship in science.
In a new paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we, alongside colleagues from a diverse range of fields, investigate the prevalence and extent of censorship and self-censorship in science.
Measuring censorship in science is difficult. It’s fundamentally about capturing studies that were never published, statements that were never made, possibilities that went unexplored and debates that never ended up happening. However, social scientists have come up with some ways to quantify the extent of censorship in science and research.
For instance, statistical tests can evaluate “publication bias” – whether or not papers with findings tilting a specific way were systematically excluded from publication. Sometimes editors or reviewers may reject findings that don’t cut the preferred direction with the preferred magnitude. Other times, scholars “file drawer” their own papers that don’t deliver statistically significant results pointing in the “correct” direction because they assume (often rightly) that their study would be unable to find a home in a respectable journal or because the publication of these findings would come at a high reputational cost. Either way, the scientific literature ends up being distorted because evidence that cuts in the “wrong” direction is systematically suppressed.
Audit studies can provide further insight. Scholars submit identical papers but change things that should not matter (like the author’s name or institutional affiliation) or reverse the direction of the findings (leaving all else the same) to test for systematic variance in whether the papers are accepted or rejected and what kinds of comments the reviewers offer based on who the author is or what they find. Other studies collect data on all papers submitted to particular journals in specific fields to test for patterns in whose work gets accepted or rejected and why. This can uncover whether editors or reviewers are applying standards inconsistently that shut out perspectives in a biased way.
Additionally, databases from organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression or PEN America track attempts to silence or punish scholars, alongside state policies or institutional rules that undermine academic freedom. These data can be analyzed to understand the prevalence of censorious behaviors, who partakes in them, who is targeted, how these behaviors vary across contexts, and what the trendlines look like over time.
Supplementing these behavioral measures, many polls and surveys ask academic stakeholders how they understand academic freedom, their experiences with being censored or observing censorship, the extent to which they self-censor (and about what), or their appetite for censoring others. These self-reports can provide additional context to the trends observed by other means – including and especially with respect to the question of why people engage in censorious behaviors.
One thing that muddies the waters, however, is that many scholars understand and declare themselves as victims of censorship when they have not, in fact, been censored.
For instance, rejection from a journal for legitimate reasons, such as poor scientific quality, is not censorship – although there could be censorship at play if the standards reviewers and editors hold papers to varies systematically depending on what authors find and which narratives the paper helps advance.
Likewise, it’s not censorship if your work, upon publication, is widely trashed or ignored. No one is entitled to a positive reception.
Granted, peer responses to a paper may be unfair or a product of unfortunate biases. A hostile response to particular findings may dissuade other scholars from publishing similar results. And the reception of published work can have career implications for scholars: well-received works can be career enhancing, while poorly-received works have the opposite effect. Nonetheless, there is no censorship at play unless one’s scholarship is prevented from publication, or there are campaigns post-publication to punish the author for their study (through formal or informal channels) or have the work retracted or suppressed.
Work ignored upon publication has not been censored either. The overwhelming majority of published research receives few reads, even fewer citations (especially if we exclude self-citations), and makes no meaningful impact on the world. This is the outcome people should generally expect for their scholarship, for better or for worse. If someone experiences the modal result for their published work (it gets ignored), this should not be assumed to be a product of unjust bias. And even where there is “dissemination bias” at play (systematic variance in whether papers are read, shared, cited or receive media coverage based on whether they advance or undermine a particular narrative), this is an importantly different problem from censorship.
Likewise, it’s not censorship if scholars engage others in mocking, disrespectful or uncharitable ways and are generally greeted with hostility in turn. There are many “crybullies” in the culture war space who characterize reasonable pushback to their own aggressive behaviors as political persecution.
Nor is it censorship if scholars advocate for a particular position while violating academic rules and norms and these violations result in censure. Such punishments could approach censorship if standards are enforced inconsistently. It would likewise be censorious for people to try to dig up dirt on the author of a publication they disliked to have them punished for ostensibly unrelated offenses, or to have spurious investigations launched to make their lives miserable.
It is also necessary to distinguish between self-censorship that arises from real and highly costly threats versus self-censorship driven by cowardice or inaccurate information. Often there is plenty of room for people to dissent from prevailing views without significant adverse consequences, but scholars refuse to speak out regardless because they because they misperceive the magnitude or likelihood of sanction, or because they are unwilling to incur even mild risks to speak their minds (although we often compare ourselves to the likes of Galileo, in fact, higher ed may have unusually high concentrations of cowards, conformists and careerists). These aren’t instances of censorship where other people are the problem. The problem in these cases is largely in the mind of the self-censor.
By carefully working through the best available data on censorship in science, sifting genuine cases of suppression from culture war chaff, some general patterns emerge.
One of the most striking patterns is how often censorship is driven by scientists themselves.
Typically, when people think or talk about censorship we imagine external authorities (like governments or corporations), or perhaps campus administrators or overzealous students. We often understand censors to be driven by ignorance, ideological authoritarianism, or a desire to suppress findings that are inconvenient for someone’s political project or bottom line.
In fact, censorship and self-censorship seem to be most typically driven by prosocial motives. Sometimes scholars self-censor or suppress findings because they worry that claims will be easily misunderstood or misused. Sometimes they self-censor and instruct their advisees to do the same out of a desire to avoid creating difficulties for their colleagues and students. Sometimes findings seem dangerous or unflattering to populations that are already stigmatized, vulnerable or otherwise disadvantaged, and scientists suppress findings out of a desire to avoid making their situation worse (although, in practice, censorship often ends up having the most dramatic and pernicious effects on these very populations).
Critically, it isn’t just censorship that works this way. Many other academic problems tend to be driven by prosocial motives as well.
As psychologist Stuart Ritchie demonstrates in Science Fictions (Metropolitan Books, 2020), academics who commit fraud often seem genuinely convinced that the narratives advanced by their papers are, in fact, true. Fraud is often motivated, in part, by a desire to amplify what scientists believe to be the truth when their experiments fail to provide the expected confirmatory data. In other cases, scholars are convinced that a new treatment or intervention can help people, but they feel like they need eye-popping results to draw attention or secure funding for it – leading them to either massage the data or overhype their findings.
And as Lawrence Lessing shows in America, Compromised (University of Chicago Press, 2018), it is often scholars who are sincerely committed to honesty and rigor who end up being corrupted – and it is precisely their high sense of integrity that often blinds people to the ways they end up compromising their work.
This is precisely what makes many problems with the state of science difficult to address. They often aren’t caused by bad scientists driven by evil motives but by researchers trying to do the right thing in ways that ultimately undermine the scientific enterprise.
To reduce censorship and self-censorship, it’s not enough to create robust protections for academic freedom. We must also convince scientists to use those freedoms to follow the truth wherever it leads and to tell the truth even when doing so seems to conflict with other priorities.
This article was originally published by RealClearScience and made available via RealClearWire.
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