"I've never seen such an orchestrated war on the environment or science," says Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the Office of the Environment under Republican President George W. Bush, Jr., quoted in a comprehensive investigative piece by the magazine, which unusually specifically called for Joe Biden to be elected.
Unusually, this week the two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, appealed to support Joe Biden in the US presidential elections.
In an article dedicated to supporting Biden, the editors of Nature wrote: "Nature did not hide its disappointment with Trump's election in real time, but its editors believed at the time that American democracy was designed with safeguards designed to protect against shocks. It is based on a system of checks and balances that makes it difficult for a president to exercise absolute power. We hoped it would help curb the damage that could result from Trump's disregard for evidence and truth, disrespect for those he disagrees with, and toxic attitudes toward women. How wrong we were."
The journal Nature recently published a comprehensive investigative report with quotes from scientists who fear that some of the damage Trump has caused to science is irreversible.
"It is difficult to quantify Trump's responsibility for the number of deaths from Corona, but scientists who were interviewed on the website of the journal Nature believe that most of the lives lost in the US could have been saved if the country had approached the challenge earlier. Many experts blame Trump for the country's failure to contain the outbreak. Olivia Troy, who was a member of the White House's coronavirus task force, said in September that the president has repeatedly derailed efforts to contain the virus and save lives, focusing instead on his political campaign.
"However, the treatment of the corona epidemic is only one example of the damage that Trump has caused to science and its institutions during the last four years. The president and the people he appointed to key positions in the various scientific organizations backed away from efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, loosening laws that limit pollution and reducing the influence of scientists at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In the many other agencies as well, the administration has undermined scientific integrity by suppressing or distorting evidence to support political decisions, policy experts say."
An orchestrated war against science
"I've never seen such an orchestrated war on the environment or science," says Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under Republican President George W. Bush.
According to Nature editors, Trump has also eroded America's standing on the world stage through isolationist policies and rhetoric. "By closing the doors to many non-European visitors and immigrants, he has made the United States less inviting to foreign students and scholars. And by demonizing international organizations like the World Health Organization, Trump weakened America's ability to respond to global crises and isolated science in the country."
All the while, the president created chaos and fear and denied the facts, for the purpose of promoting his political agenda. He also discredited the opponents including scientists. In dozens of interviews conducted by Nature, the researchers emphasized this point as particularly worrisome because it undermines the public's trust in the importance of truth and evidence, which are the basis of science and democracy."
While the president can point to some positive developments in science and technology despite none of them being his top priority (he waited 19 months before appointing a science adviser), his administration has pushed to return astronauts to the moon and prioritize development in areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In August, the White House announced more than $XNUMX billion in new funding for these and other advanced technologies.
Irreparable damage
According to Nature, much of the damage to science—including changing regulation and breaking international agreements—can be repaired if Trump loses the election. In this case, we will lose precious time to limit climate change and the spread of the virus, but the damage to scientific integrity, public trust, and the standing of the United States could remain far beyond Trump's term, say scientists and policy experts.
The government's withdrawal could increase emissions by 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2035, five times the annual emissions of the entire UK. This is due to the deliberate loosening of regulations requiring a cut in methane emissions.
The man appointed by Trump to the EPA, Scott Pruitt, took care to remove the scientists from the advisory committees and replaced them with industrialists and issued an order preventing the use of data from confidential studies, and such are the majority of medical studies that prove the link between air pollution and morbidity and mortality. His successor, Andrew Weiler, softened the regulations focusing on chemicals in water and air pollution.
The new law proposed on September 24, 2020 by the Department of Homeland Security in the USA to limit the stay of foreign students to 4 years and those coming from certain countries to even XNUMX years will harm American science. The scientists interviewed for the article fear that this will cause good students to go to other countries and not rub shoulders with American scientists, thereby harming American science.
Re-establishing scientific integrity in agencies where government scientists have been sidelined and censored by political appointees won't be easy, says Andrew Rosenberg, who heads the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Union members have documented more than 150 attacks on science during Trump's tenure from his political appointees in organizations.
If Trump wins today's (3/11/2020) election, researchers fear the worst. "Trump's people poured acid on public institutions, much stronger than anything we've seen before," defined one of the interviewees.
For the full article on the Nature website
More of the topic in Hayadan:
- Science under siege: Nature reveals how the Trump administration abused the Environmental Protection Agency
- 2017 - the year of the destruction of science in the USA
- Are your findings science or evidence based? You will not receive a budget from the US government
- An alarming finding: a significant proportion of Americans think that scientific research is harmful to society. Opinion/The Middle Ages are upon us
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Excellent article. Thanks for compiling the data.
The largest democracy in the world, perhaps like us, has fallen. Someone stopped the vote count.
Someone appointed a judge to the Supreme Court who is a member of a pseudo-Mormon sect that believes women should not be educated in a secular education.
The discourse on cooking programs will be maintained. But an achievement of the French Revolution that cost hundreds of millions of people in dozens of countries
In two world wars in danger.
It is a shame to involve politics in science. Trump destroyed entire industries in the US and took it down from its scientific greatness. This is not simple politics - in an emergency, emergency measures must be taken.
It's a shame that this article was published. It is unnecessary to mix politics
Amazing to read the comments.
Embarrassing article that harms science. Where did you go?
Nature and Science published a very embarrassing article. It turns out that these batons don't know how to distinguish between society and politics and science.
What Trump tried to do is a different prioritization of social values, not a fight against science per se and certainly not an attack on it. In terms of Trump's social and political agenda, values and political economic interests in the global and local circumstances that exist today (for example: the interest in improving positions in a firm struggle between global economic control against the Chinese dictatorial power and reducing its political power in favor of the values of Western liberalism and freedom, the transformation of the American economy, mainly financial - for more productive people, creating more jobs for the lower classes, etc.) - more important in the short and medium term than scrupulous preservation of environmental values. that's it. It is possible to disagree about this agenda and the value and normative prioritization involved, but from here to the failed and pointless attempt to present this agenda and the struggle for or against it as a war for or against "science" - the distance is enormous.
And so - in their failure, the editors of the article fail to bring even a single piece of evidence about "irreversible" "harm" and precisely in "science", despite their dense rhetoric.
They also fail to hide their very political motives, when they mix in this rhetoric also matters that are completely unscientific - such as the accusation of a "toxic attitude towards women", or the strange accusation about the United States being "at least inviting foreign students and researchers" or about "Demonization of international organizations such as the World Health Organization". Again, these are matters that amount to a social and political agenda: it is permissible for the state to decide that it invests and allocates more space for students born there, it is permissible for the state to try to admit fewer people from hostile or problematic countries, and it is absolutely permissible to condemn and operate destructive and hypocritical international organizations, including - the World Health Organization, For example, for his shocking part in worsening the spread of the Corona virus in the world and his performance as an operator of China in this terrible crisis. But what is the connection between this strange progressive rhetoric about availability to foreign students, attitude to problematic international organizations, etc., etc. - and "irreversible" "damage" - to "science"?
The move by Nature and Science in publishing the article is, in the jargon accepted in political science, a tedious, shameful and even malicious "hierostatic" of an elite and a pressure group with a very progressive political agenda, no less than that. After such an article, one can question the "integrity" of these batons, and their scientific integrity in particular.
Why does science get dirty in politics?
There are enough who have done it, we don't need another one.
Delete this embarrassing article so we can keep the balance...
In the headline it says that he harmed science, and in the body of the article it is written that he is responsible for the dead (without mentioning China, of course, which probably did not finance the article in Nature at all).
During the Trump era, science continued to grow stronger and companies like SpaceX and Tesla, for example, are flourishing under his tax breaks, and these are the companies that will bring real change, unlike the GREEN NEW DEAL which is based on huge taxation to free up solar panels that will not be able to power a tenth of California, according to real *science*.
It's a shame that you are entering the political game, you are alienating an intelligent audience.
A political, embarrassing and terribly trendsetting article.
"Irreversible damage to science"?! How far can the lack of response and exaggeration go?
A well-timed war in science?! What embarrassing nonsense!
I would go on, but I don't have the strength to continue addressing this cheap and hateful nonsense.
Be healthy.
I think it's a shame that seemingly professional bodies interfere in political issues. It's not their strong suit, and never will be.
After all, the fact that you chose a side made half of the US anti-science. And who is to blame now?
I hate seeing people dig themselves holes.
This is an irreversible damage to the prestige of Nature, instead of publishing political articles it would be better if it concentrated on science.
And I'm not trying to defend Trump just crying over the populism that some scientific magazines are taking on.
"The toxic attitude towards women" - by Trump or Biden? Is this a joke?
Yes, Trump's replacement is known in the world for his attitude that "respects" women, various videos can be seen around the internet that "support" this claim, the very fact that he does this in front of everyone on a public stage raises questions about him,
And it doesn't end with just that, there are other topics with statements that are still in front of the audience and without shame...
So this is also a sample ride on topics of simple terrible science
On the level of embarrassing to the point of shame, this can also be seen all over the internet. He could have bought his world in the fight against the corona epidemic, as a real world-class leader, he would have taken the elections on foot, but it didn't happen.
As it is said here, mixing politics with science harms science, the mixing is not only a form of cancellation from the right, especially the religious one in the USA for theological reasons towards the science that Trump rode on and strengthened it,
The damage to science also comes from the other side of the map when you use information and add unrelated things to it,
We see it many times also in articles on this site where environmental activists sin on this issue
When you become extremely emotionally involved in a certain topic, you may distort the data, adding data that is unrelated or even unproven to strengthen the main claim, we all may sin in this, we must always be careful not to fall into this slippery pit, and it is not easy because What drives us is emotions,
The difficult problem is that a worthy subject, for example the preservation of nature, raising awareness of the suffering of animals, is directly attacked by those people who want to promote these subjects, because in fact they create deniable absurdities that in the end close the proper subject that can unite people from all extremes.
Both Nature and Science are newspapers whose system is made up of politically inclined people (whose direction is clear in the light of this publication).
To treat them as if they were the oracle from Delphi is common blindness.
The amount of politics and vitamin P running there (and in any other newspaper for that matter) in publications that are proper science, has long been known.
The system for determining the factor (the importance of the newspaper) is crooked, the amount of newspapers is absurd, and every nosedive ran to publish his findings as if he were a child in kindergarten running to show his mother his latest doodle.
Science is not an ancient religion. As long as man is curious about the world, science will develop. There is no such thing as "irreversible damage to science".
This is what it looks like when leftism and science mix
What does irreversible damage to science is politicization.
This is indeed a huge damage to science, as it is seen from one political angle.
there's more.
Trump was not elected by aliens, or Russians.
He was elected by people who support his views,
Opinions such as changes in the climate are not related to emissions (unpopular in the scientific world, but sometimes the scientific establishment becomes religious and obsessive - and unreliable. Articles have already been published about the fakes on the way to the theory of global warming), or studies that support an intelligent universe, and other opinions that the people of popular science are not ready Get.
So now these people are raging with rage. They stole the government!
Well expected.
Reminds you of the classic Ion that was on the verge of a technological revolution. Then the Middle Ages. It only took a little time for the people to recover; 1600 years or so. What is it compared to the dinosaurs?
I agree with the article. If I could upload a file to the comments of the sample I made. There are approximately 200-300 IEEE journals in the American Society of Engineers. I modeled a professional niche within it - electricity and electronics. An example newspaper:
4 editors-in-chief - 3 from one country of origin that Trump threatened to boycott.
19 articles for the last quarter. 12 from the same country of origin and the rest from very high quality Arab researchers. Not a single article
American or European. This is a trend in dozens of newspapers in my opinion.
I can't say that everything is black. This week a fascinating 79-page article was published by 3 researchers from Stanford, who perform calculations of the physics behind the event horizon of a black hole. Time is a space where, according to them, it goes through a phase transition like a solid to a liquid, but it can be calculated. The theory used is quantum gravity.
The article offers a solution to Hawking's information paradox. Of course, such an atomic bomb will be tested in the coming years, either they will find an error in it or they will state that it is now possible to calculate beyond the event horizon.
Some of the researchers who contributed to the topic, although not all of them in this article are young, are Professor Netta Engelhart from MIT, Professor Tom Hartman and Amir Hosseini from California Santa Barbara, and Professor Ahmed Elmehairi from Princeton. To teach us that Arabs are just as smart as us.
This is an entrance to the Middle Ages. No less important than science is the morality that develops with it.
As soon as politics gets mixed up in science, and science loses any semblance of objectivity, the public's lack of support for scientific publications will worsen. In this publication, Nature causes a tremendous blow to the objective image of science
Nonsense, there is no such thing as causing irreparable damage to science. Science cannot be irreparably damaged.
Even if you burn scientists at the stake, you will burn sapphires and close universities.
Science is human knowledge, it doesn't matter how you pursue it, it will always be able to recover and usually much faster than it seems at first.
Only the destruction of all humanity will cause irreversible damage to science.
In a night of incitement and hatred plus cheap and false propaganda