Exasperated Experts

OK, one more bit from Taibbi's "The Great Derangement", this one showing that we aren't alone in having to manage our exasperation in dealing with bizarre conspiracy theories. Regarding the "9/11 was an inside job" ideas:

The enthusiastic belief in the pure, almost mathematical precision of the conspiracy, with its unshakable faith in the unthinking, automatic participation of these long lists of faceless members of the cultural establishment, all coldly eager to get in on the killing of innocent Americans - it freaked me out. ...

Was I losing my mind? To make absolutely sure, I spent much of November 2006 calling structural engineers and architects and pestering them with questions about 9/11. Most of the ones I reached seemed ready to reach through the phone and snap my neck in half for even bothering them with the dreaded "controlled demolition" theory. ...

"Let me ask you a question," hissed Mir Ali, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Architecture. "If you get sick and you need an operation, where do you go? Do you go to a restaurant? A bicycle store?" ... "It's the same with this. How many of these people are structural engineers? How many? You people, always you are calling me!"

"But I'm not one of..."

From there he veered into a long tangent ... [concluding] "The air outside the building wants to rush in, do you understand?"

"No" I said, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Well, then, how can you say you know what caused the building to collapse?"

"I didn't," I said. "I'm calling about somebody else's theory about..."

But he was off on another tangent by then, ranting angrily into the phone. I got similar responses from more than a dozen other engineers and architects, all of whom said that no one in the field took the controlled demolition seriously...

Our critics seem convinced that we are "rude and arrogant" and are "hiding something", but there comes a point where trying to be reasonable is just a waste of time. Sometimes innocent bystanders are caught in the crossfire, but after all, you still have to get some real work done. This story indicates that this pattern is common across fields that get caught in conspiracy theories.

What Story Is He Going To Tell?

Yes, there is absurd polarization on both sides. Yes, there is paranoia on both sides. Yes, there is "epistemic closure" on both sides. Maybe one side is "worse" than the other, but nobody has a monopoly on confusion or rudeness. (Blaming actual scientists is crazy, though.)

But you cannot understand any of the disastrous situation we are in (with America leading the way and the rest of the world following passively behind, as ever) without taking account of the failure of the press.

I devoured most of a book by Matt Taibbi (another mt!) last night called The Great Derangement, which I highly recommend. I will quote from what I consider to be the central point of the whole brilliantly sorry story, on pages 187-189 in the paperback edition, the closing section of the chapter "9/11 and the Derangement of Truth":

"They hate our freedoms" was only one of a number of preposterous lies mainstream society was expected to embrace after 9/11. The Iraq invasion and the reasons for it were only the most obvious. By 2003 or 2004 any American with even half a brain could only assess the performance of his government via a careful weighing of various lies and contradictions. An educated person understood that the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) business was a canard and that there had to be some other reason for the invasion of Iraq...

It's not a good sign when even your supporters don't even bother to take your cover story seriously...

When the administration submitted its "Clear Skies" plan to Congress, who among us didn't automatically know that it was a giveaway to polluters? Or that "Healthy Forests" was somehow going to result in more trees being cut down? America by the early years of this century was a confusing kaleidoscope of transparent, invidious bullshit, a place where politicians hired consultants to teach them to "straight talk", where debates were decided by inadvertent coughs and smiles, and elections were resolved via competing smear campaigns...

The message of all this was that Americans were now supposed to make their own sense of the world. There was no dependable authority left to turn to, no life raft in the increasingly perilous information sea. This coincided with an age when Americans now needed to understand more of the world than ever before...

Now broke, or under severe financial pressure, with no community leaders, no community, no news he can trust, Joe American has to turn on the internet and tell himself a story that makes sense to him.

What story is he going to tell?

Emphasis added.

Maybe the idea of "saving" journalism is wrong-headed.

Many of the information streams we need have never existed, and many others are moribund.

Journalism must be reinvented.

It may be too late, but if there's any hope for sustained democracy, that is for both dignity and freedom into the future, it requires a population that is informed, skeptical and responsible. We need to be slow to claim rights and quick to grant them, slow to cast blame and quick to accept responsibility.

Reading the other mt's book doesn't leave one feeling optimistic about these matters. It's very sad; in my childhood in the 1960's, for all the not-entirely-baseless fear of Stalinist Russia, it seemed a given that civilization would continue to progress.

mt

How Deep is this Result?

There are deep results in the climate sciences. By "deep result" I mean something that would take some years of study to understand or place into context. This is an intrinsically interesting branch of physical science. (Indeed, if there were no policy issue it would probably be better funded and attract a larger number of highly talented people than it does now. But let's avoid that topic for now.)

William Stein is an accomplished mathematician and a the leader of a large open source project (that scientific programmers in the audience would do well to look into, SAGE, a replacement for Maple, Mathematica, Matlab and "Magma", the last being more of a niche product that especially interests Bill.) I had the pleasure of having dinner in his company along with various other very smart people last Monday, several of us among the climate-obsessed. Bill, however, being a very focussed person, knew very little about it. Accordingly he asked a couple of remarkably insightful newbie questions. The one I remember clearly was "how deep of a result is it?"

The response we came up with first was a bunch of caveats. Of course we cannot "prove" anything in the sense a mathematician might. Once we got that across, I pondered the question.

It emerged that Bill's question could be quantified as follows. Suppose you have a non-ideological person with a bachelor's degree in a serious mathematical science. How long would it take to complete the argument?

I quickly came to the point where I asserted that, if "it" means "greenhouse gas accumulation presents us with serious consequences over the next century" it was difficult to think of any intelligent, open-minded graduate student in the climate sciences who didn't find the proposition obvious after they had attained to a master's degree level. "So, two years then?" Bill asked? I said that was excessive: these people are studying particular phenomenologies, not the "is global warming scary" question.

So I've reached an upper bound of a few months. And I think that's roughly right. I'd think a single course (full-time equivalent of a month, possibly represented by David Archer's book "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast") should suffice. A Ph.D. level person ought to be able to read a book like that as if it were a novel, say a few evening's concentrated work. Would that be convincing? A couple of online lectures, say Alley's and Hansen's, to ice the cake, and yes, I'd say the picture could be conveyed to a scientifically educated person in a couple of weeks of serious concentration, perhaps just a few days if that person were familiar with some of the underlying physics.

Steve pointed out that the deniers could monkey-wrench any individual argument, since we are doing earth science and not mathematics. That said, their are a number of convergent arguments, and little evidence to the contrary. And of course, denying the science is insufficient to derail the policy. It is necessary for the zero-policy position to prove a low sensitivity, but not enough to question the consensus sensitivity. So a week isn't really enough to manage the minefields of debate. In fact, time constrained "debate" as construed by many people is never really a good way to examine a broad scientific context, though one could defend an individual result that way.

But "global warming is scary" isn't a scientific result in the ordinary sense.

From a strictly philosophical point of view, "scary" isn't an objective standard. Some real-world metric for "scariness" is needed, and therein we get to difficult territory. But it's hard to compare the scope of the changes we expect with the scope we are used to and be sanguine about it.

A more serious issue is that "scariness" isn't a result in that it isn't a straightforward conclusion from laws and data to a consequence. It's a "balance of evidence" argument that leads to an estimate of how big a deal this all is.

Usually the number we use is "sensitivity", i.e., the amount of warming associated with a doubling of CO2 (or equivalent radiative forcing). That number appears to be in the neighborhood of 3 C, and that in turn leads us to expect 1) detectable changes by 1990 2) noticeable changes by 2010 and under business-as-usual 3) disruptive changes by 2050 and 4) catastrophic changes by 2100. Also, failing a scheme for removing CO2, likely a more expensive prospect than not emitting it in the first place, these disruptions will be very long-lived.

So this article is my long answer to Bill's question. I also came up with a short answer, as Steve said, "the outlines of the argument" that could be understood in a few minutes and was intended to be maximally persuasive in a few minutes. That will be another article.

This article, I think, would give any fair-minded scientist enough material to at least understand the perspective of mainstream climatologists in the absence of deliberate obfuscation (*).

* - The obfuscation, alas, is there. That is a problem we have to deal with, and how we deal with it in addressing an energetic and intelligent person who is also fully occupied with their own projects and interests is another matter. It's an important one, though, and we can't rely on PR people or politicians to do it for us.

Nashville Flood: Dubious Analysis by Nielsen-Gammon

I'm wiped out. Had a wonderful weekend as co-organizer of a somewhat scaled back Scientific Software Days, conferring with Steve about the imminent future of science communication, hanging around with him and other friends arguing the future of climate science, and even having the privilege of interacting with Bill Stein over dinner, which was a treat. Plus I'm seriously starting an exercise program which for a man of my sphericity is no small task, and trying to spin up some new projects, and, yeah, attend to the tedious details of the day job.

Today I was worthless; you can always tell those days because there are eighteen items on my Reader feed. That means I was in "I'll just poke around a bit and see if I wake up enough to work" mode all day. Sigh.

Consequently not much time/energy for blogging this week. Read my feed if you're bored!.

I'd like to draw your attention to this article by John Nielsen-Gammon. It makes me uncomfortable and I think it's wrong, but it's not obviously wrong.

My first response was "um, that can't be right".

My second response was "perhaps the question is ill-posed" but I think it isn't. There's a serious actuarial question here. To be sure, given that there is only one Earth rather than thousands, it's not one that is easy to answer.

The question is essentially "How much more likely is an event on the scale of the recent Nashville flooding as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change?" John says not much, but his answer changes when you drop the "anthropogenic" term. In other words, he's saying that changes in severe flood events to date have been real climate changes but not anthropogenic climate changes.

So I'm back to "um, that can't be right." I'm pretty sure there's something more or less non-obviously wrong there, but what is it?

Harry, Read Me

HARRY READ ME - INSPIRED BY A TRUE STORY

by Michael Tobis

COLLEAGUE: Harry, I've had a look at your alpha version of the new suite, and so far it all looks right except...

HARRY: I'm still testing, you know... Don't use this stuff for publication yet!

COLLEAGUE: Calm down, Harry. I know what you mean by "alpha". Look, everything except the twelfth script looks good to me...

HARRY: But the twelfth?

COLLEAGUE: I'm not absolutely sure. These aren't numbers I could dismiss out of hand, but it looks a bit dodgy...

HARRY: Dodgy? How?

COLLEAGUE: You sure you haven't got a mercator bug? This all looks like it overweighs the polar values.

HARRY: It'll take me ten seconds to find out. I'll just run it again, like that, but here, after I've got the zonal averages, I'll put thirties in all the way except at the poles. Then the hemispheric average will have to be near enough thirty.

COLLEAGUE: Alrightee then, try it. I'll sort out what we should get. (Punching on pocket calculator.)

HARRY: (tap tappity tap tap, tap tap!) Voila! Oh hang on a second... (tappity tappity)

COLLEAGUE: You're documenting a piece of code you're deliberately breaking?

HARRY: Just a little bit, so I won't mistake it for production code. I er, I haven't set up the CVS on this thing yet.

COLLEAGUE: (bemused) The C V wot? Harry, we don't want you wasting your time on computer science nonsense until you get your work done! Still, I suppose the test model might get copied somewhere and cause some confusion. So comment away!

HARRY: (pausing, mildly exasperated) For the ninetieth time, please don't call this a model. You never know when a visitor from Hadley will be around to take offense! It's just analysis code.

(Tappity tap.)

I'm just commenting it for myself. It's not as if somebody's going to publish it on the iternet, after all!

COLLEAGUE: Ho ho ho! Imagine what those denier b****s would do with this if it were. Maybe you ought to write ten thousand words justifying this little test in case some bloke hacks into the server.

HARRY: (alarmed) Surely you're not serious??

COLLEAGUE: (bemused) Just joking. Carry on.

HARRY: Let's have a look then... Hang on a mo... (click. click. tappity tap.) It's twenty-eight point seven and sommat. Wot's that tell oos?

months later...

SOMEBODY WRONG ON THE INTERNET: Computer models were run with mid-run intervention!!! In England! By somebody who knows somebody in Virginia! Attorney General, Hell! Call out the damn cavalry!

---

Update: Apparently the word "alpha" appears in the real Harry Read Me as a reference to the late lamented DEC's relatively unlamented Alpha platform, not to alpha version software (see comments). This is a coincidence. I looked at this stuff just long enough to convince myself it was most likely completely innocent. I didn't study it in detail and to my recollection just made up the reference to "alpha" version software. The above is fiction and is only intended to offer the flavor of Harry's hack and the many similar hacks that any decent scientific programmer often does. The details are completely an invention of mine and are certainly wrong.

I don't have any reason for suggesting a mercator bug, for instance, had anything to do with the case in point. That's just an easy one to understand, where area average calculations on the globe are incorrectly done as if the latitude-longitude grid were regular. Putting artificial values in a postprocessing script would be a natural way to help track something like that down and identify the cleanest way to fix it.

Energy Collective

For some bizarre reason or other, The Energy Collective has put my picture, instead of Peter Gleick's, at the top of the NAS letter. I think they should put Gleick's on. Hasnt he had articles on there?

In any case it's absurd for them to attribute it to me.

That said I have been handling a flame war there, and I feel happy with my contribution to it so far. Go have a look see.

No, no, no, no, no

Television is a drug. from Beth Fulton on Vimeo.

three hat tips... thanks y'all!

TIME on CRU for Keith Kloor

Keith seems to have an odd position on the CRU-water episode (more like Whitewater than like Watergate, some minor embarrassments irresponsibly spun into a criminal conspiracy by political opponents). He says the press has no choice but to cover it, but that we participants in the field shouldn't get worked up about it because it doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things. At least, that's if I understand correctly, though of course I probably don't. (Generally people whose positions you find baffling don't much care for the summaries you provide, I've noticed. But really, that's the best I can do.)

Well, here's what TIME has to say about it today:

Has any field suffered a faster drop in public confidence than climate science? Two and a half years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was finishing up its widely acclaimed fourth assessment on global warming, which made an unequivocal case for the threat of man-made climate change. For its work, the IPCC was rewarded with the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — shared with Al Gore for his green advocacy — and polls showed strong concern over global warming, even in the U.S. By the time of President Barack Obama's election in 2008, the stage seemed set for climate science to go from the professional journals to the stuff of legislation.

But that was then. Thanks in part to the events of Climategate last November — when someone hacked into and released thousands of e-mails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's East Anglia University — climate scientists now find themselves under fire. The Climategate e-mails revealed that scientists used terms like trick while discussing climate modeling techniques, which was enough to set off skeptics, who considered it proof that scientists were bending data to reach their conclusions, and making climate change seem worse than it really was. In the aftermath of Climategate, critics also uncovered factual errors — small and few, but real — in the IPCC's fourth assessment. (See how alternative energy sources were discussed at the World Energy Technologies Summit.)

It energized global-warming skeptics. Most recently, on April 23, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli launched a civil investigative demand (CID) with the University of Virginia (UVA), searching for information on the climate scientist Michael Mann, who once worked at UVA. Mann, who now runs the Earth Systems Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, authored many of the controversial e-mails at the center of Climategate.

The cost of these assaults is real. Despite the fact that a parliamentary inquiry in Britain looked into Climategate and in March exonerated Phil Jones, the head of CRU, of any wrongdoing, the damage had been done. A British survey in February found a 30% drop over just one year in the percentage of adults who said climate change was "definitely" real, and polls in the U.S. have found a similar decline.

Of course it's something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And of course TIME ends up waffling in its report. "Climate change is too global a problem to be left to the academy, and if scientists are to be trusted, they need to be held accountable." That is the opposite of analysis, a deliberate conflation and confusion of many issues. Thanks for that exsight (opposite of insight) TIME. But there's no waffling about whether "Climategate" has been important in weakening public sentiment to cope with the greenhouse gas issue. That's the sort of thing where you'd still expect TIME's opinion to carry some weight, and they say yes, this thing really did take a bite.

They aren't, of course, acknowledging the fact that they were, in effect, active participants in the process. As far as I'm concerned that's the main problem.

Abdication of Human Control

Something about Thursday's Wall Street fiasco seems to me to have some wider implications about our predicament. We are running the whole world on autopilot. Everything is fine, at least until a pilot is needed. But then, there isn't one, or if there is one, she doesn't have the right authentication to take control.

Look, we set these things up. Anything they do to us is our fault. A little foresight is needed for the cases where something does go just a tiny bit out of kilter.

Bruce Stirling tweets: Hey Adam Smith, your "invisible hand of the market" has become a crazed robot crushing everything it can grip

and: A ten percent market dip on a typo makes bank-torching Greek rioters look like conservatives

Yep.

The Whole Thing

The Google may hold this against me, but it seems to me I might as well quote the whole thing since Science seems to have it behind a paywall and everything.

Many thanks to Peter Gleick for his efforts on this.

Science 7 May 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5979, pp. 689 - 690 DOI: 10.1126/science.328.5979.689

Letters

Climate Change and the Integrity of Science

We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular. All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet.

Scientific conclusions derive from an understanding of basic laws supported by laboratory experiments, observations of nature, and mathematical and computer modeling. Like all human beings, scientists make mistakes, but the scientific process is designed to find and correct them. This process is inherently adversarial—scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, and Einstein did. But when some conclusions have been thoroughly and deeply tested, questioned, and examined, they gain the status of "well-established theories" and are often spoken of as "facts."

For instance, there is compelling scientific evidence that our planet is about 4.5 billion years old (the theory of the origin of Earth), that our universe was born from a single event about 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang theory), and that today's organisms evolved from ones living in the past (the theory of evolution). Even as these are overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, fame still awaits anyone who could show these theories to be wrong. Climate change now falls into this category: There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.

Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:

(i) The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.

(ii) Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

(iii) Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth's climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.

(iv) Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.

(v) The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.

Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business-as-usual practices. We urge our policy-makers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the un restrained burning of fossil fuels.

We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option.

P. H. Gleick,^* R. M. Adams, R. M. Amasino, E. Anders, D. J. Anderson, W. W. Anderson, L. E. Anselin, M. K. Arroyo, B. Asfaw, F. J. Ayala, A. Bax, A. J. Bebbington, G. Bell, M. V. L. Bennett, J. L. Bennetzen, M. R. Berenbaum, O. B. Berlin, P. J. Bjorkman, E. Blackburn, J. E. Blamont, M. R. Botchan, J. S. Boyer, E. A. Boyle, D. Branton, S. P. Briggs, W. R. Briggs, W. J. Brill, R. J. Britten, W. S. Broecker, J. H. Brown, P. O. Brown, A. T. Brunger, J. Cairns, Jr., D. E. Canfield, S. R. Carpenter, J. C. Carrington, A. R. Cashmore, J. C. Castilla, A. Cazenave, F. S. Chapin, III, A. J. Ciechanover, D. E. Clapham, W. C. Clark, R. N. Clayton, M. D. Coe, E. M. Conwell, E. B. Cowling, R. M Cowling, C. S. Cox, R. B. Croteau, D. M. Crothers, P. J. Crutzen, G. C. Daily, G. B. Dalrymple, J. L. Dangl, S. A. Darst, D. R. Davies, M. B. Davis, P. V. de Camilli, C. Dean, R. S. Defries, J. Deisenhofer, D. P. Delmer, E. F. Delong, D. J. Derosier, T. O. Diener, R. Dirzo, J. E. Dixon, M. J. Donoghue, R. F. Doolittle, T. Dunne, P. R. Ehrlich, S. N. Eisenstadt, T. Eisner, K. A. Emanuel, S. W. Englander, W. G. Ernst, P. G. Falkowski, G. Feher, J. A. Ferejohn, A. Fersht, E. H. Fischer, R. Fischer, K. V. Flannery, J. Frank, P. A. Frey, I. Fridovich, C. Frieden, D. J. Futuyma, W. R. Gardner, C. J. R. Garrett, W. Gilbert, R. B. Goldberg, W. H. Goodenough, C. S. Goodman, M. Goodman, P. Greengard, S. Hake, G. Hammel, S. Hanson, S. C. Harrison, S. R. Hart, D. L. Hartl, R. Haselkorn, K. Hawkes, J. M. Hayes, B. Hille, T. Hökfelt, J. S. House, M. Hout, D. M. Hunten, I. A. Izquierdo, A. T. Jagendorf, D. H. Janzen, R. Jeanloz, C. S. Jencks, W. A. Jury, H. R. Kaback, T. Kailath, P. Kay, S. A. Kay, D. Kennedy, A. Kerr, R. C. Kessler, G. S. Khush, S. W. Kieffer, P. V. Kirch, K. Kirk, M. G. Kivelson, J. P. Klinman, A. Klug, L. Knopoff, H. Kornberg, J. E. Kutzbach, J. C. Lagarias, K. Lambeck, A. Landy, C. H. Langmuir, B. A. Larkins, X. T. Le Pichon, R. E. Lenski, E. B. Leopold, S. A. Levin, M. Levitt, G. E. Likens, J. Lippincott-Schwartz, L. Lorand, C. O. Lovejoy, M. Lynch, A. L. Mabogunje, T. F. Malone, S. Manabe, J. Marcus, D. S. Massey, J. C. McWilliams, E. Medina, H. J. Melosh, D. J. Meltzer, C. D. Michener, E. L. Miles, H. A. Mooney, P. B. Moore, F. M. M. Morel, E. S. Mosley-Thompson, B. Moss, W. H. Munk, N. Myers, G. B. Nair, J. Nathans, E. W. Nester, R. A. Nicoll, R. P. Novick, J. F. O'Connell, P. E. Olsen, N. D. Opdyke, G. F. Oster, E. Ostrom, N. R. Pace, R. T. Paine, R. D. Palmiter, J. Pedlosky, G. A. Petsko, G. H. Pettengill, S. G. Philander, D. R. Piperno, T. D. Pollard, P. B. Price, Jr., P. A. Reichard, B. F. Reskin, R. E. Ricklefs, R. L. Rivest, J. D. Roberts, A. K. Romney, M. G. Rossmann, D. W. Russell, W. J. Rutter, J. A. Sabloff, R. Z. Sagdeev, M. D. Sahlins, A. Salmond, J. R. Sanes, R. Schekman, J. Schellnhuber, D. W. Schindler, J. Schmitt, S. H. Schneider, V. L. Schramm, R. R. Sederoff, C. J. Shatz, F. Sherman, R. L. Sidman, K. Sieh, E. L. Simons, B. H. Singer, M. F. Singer, B. Skyrms, N. H. Sleep, B. D. Smith, S. H. Snyder, R. R. Sokal, C. S. Spencer, T. A. Steitz, K. B. Strier, T. C. Südhof, S. S. Taylor, J. Terborgh, D. H. Thomas, L. G. Thompson, R. T. TJian, M. G. Turner, S. Uyeda, J. W. Valentine, J. S. Valentine, J. L. van Etten, K. E. van Holde, M. Vaughan, S. Verba, P. H. von Hippel, D. B. Wake, A. Walker, J. E. Walker, E. B. Watson, P. J. Watson, D. Weigel, S. R. Wessler, M. J. West-Eberhard, T. D. White, W. J. Wilson, R. V. Wolfenden, J. A. Wood, G. M. Woodwell, H. E. Wright, Jr., C. Wu, C. Wunsch, M. L. Zoback