Category: Science

The billionaire’s solution to climate change

On May 3, Bloomberg published a profile of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s 1t.org project to plant or conserve one trillion trees around the world in order to sequester 200 gigatonnes of carbon every year. The idea reportedly came to Benioff from Thomas Crowther’s infamous September 2015 paper in Nature that claimed restoring trees was the world’s best way to ‘solve’ climate change.

Following pointed criticism of the paper’s attitude and conclusions, they were revised to a significant extent in October 2019 to tamper predictions about the carbon sequestration potential of the world’s trees and to withdraw its assertion that no other solution could work better than planting and/or restoring trees.

According to Bloomberg’s profile, Benioff’s 1t.org initiative seems to be faltering as well, with unreliable accounting of the pledges companies submitted to 1t.org and, unsurprisingly, many of these companies engaging in shady carbon-credit transactions. This is also why Jane Goodall’s comment in the article is disagreeable: it isn’t better for these companies to do something vis-à-vis trees than nothing at all because the companies are only furthering an illusion of climate action — claiming to do something while doing nothing at all — and perpetuating the currency of counterproductive ideas like carbon-trading.

A smattering of Benioff’s comments to Bloomberg are presented throughout the profile, as a result of which he might come across like a sage figure — but take them together, in one go, and he sounds actually like a child.

“I think that there’s a lot of people who are attacking nature and hate nature. I’m somebody who loves nature and supports nature.”

This comment follows one by “the climate and energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists”, Rachel Cleetus, that trees “should not be seen as a substitute for the core task at hand here, which is getting off fossil fuels.” But in Bloomberg’s telling, Cleetus is a [checks notes] ‘nature hater’. Similarly, the following thoughtful comment is Benioff’s view of other scientists who criticised the Crowther et al. paper:

“I view it as nonsense.”

Moving on…

“I was in third grade. I learned about photosynthesis and I got it right away.”

This amazing quote appears as the last line of a paragraph; the rest of it goes thus: “Slashing fossil fuel consumption is critical to slowing warming, but scientists say we also need to pull carbon that’s already in the air back out of it. Trees are really good at that, drawing in CO2 and then releasing oxygen.” Then Benioff’s third-grade quote appears. It’s just comedy.

His other statements make for an important reminder of the oft-understated purpose of scientific communication. Aside from being published by a ‘prestige’ journal — Nature — the Crowther et al. paper presented an easy and straightforward solution to reducing the concentration of atmospheric carbon: to fix lots and lots of trees. Even without knowing the specific details of the study’s merits, any environmental scientist in South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, i.e. the “Global South”, would have said this is a terrible idea.

“I said, ‘What? One trillion trees will sequester more than 200 gigatons of carbon? We have to get on this right now. Who’s working on this?’”

“Everybody agreed on tree diplomacy. I was in shock.”

“The greatest, most scalable technology we have today to sequester carbon is the tree.”

The countries in these regions have become sites of aggressive afforestation that provide carbon credits for the “Global North” to encash as licenses to keep emitting carbon. But the flip sides of these exercises are: (i) only some areas are naturally amenable to hosting trees, and it’s not feasible to plant them willy-nilly through ecosystems that don’t naturally support them; (ii) unless those in charge plant native species, afforestation will only precipitate local ecosystem decline, which will further lower the sequestration potential; (iii) unafforested land runs the risk of being perceived as ‘waste land’, sidelining the ecosystem services provided by wetlands, deserts, grasslands, etc.; and (iv) many of these countries need to be able to emit more carbon before being expected to reach net-zero, in order to pull their populations out of poverty and become economically developed — the same right the “Global North” countries had in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Scientists have known all this from well before the Crowther et al. paper turned up. Yet Benioff leapt for it the moment it appeared, and was keen on seeing it to its not-so-logical end. It’s impossible to miss the fact that his being worth $10 billion didn’t encourage him to use all that wealth and his clout to tackle the more complex actions in the soup of all actions that make up humankind’s response to climate change. Instead, he used his wealth to go for an easy way out, while dismissing informed criticism of it as “nonsense”

In fact, a similar sort of ‘ease-seeking’ is visible in the Crowther et al. paper as well, as brought out in a comment published by Veldman et al. In response to this, Crowther et al. wrote in October 2019 that their first paper simply presented value-neutral knowledge and that it shouldn’t be blamed for how it’s been construed:

Veldman et al. (4) criticize our results in dryland biomes, stating that many of these areas simply should not be considered suitable for tree restoration. Generally, we must highlight that our analysis does not ever address whether any actions “should” or “should not” take place. Our analysis simply estimated the biophysical limits of global forest growth by highlighting where trees “can” exist.

In fact, the October 2019 correction to Crowther et al., in which the authors walked back on the “trees are the best way” claim, was particularly important because it has come to mirror the challenges Benioff has found himself facing through 1t.org: it isn’t just that there are other ways to improve climate mitigation and adaptation, it’s that those ways are required, and giving up on them for any reason could never be short of a moral hazard, if not an existential one.

Featured image credit: Dawid Zawiła/Unsplash.

Infinity in 15 kilograms

While space is hard, there are also different kinds of hardness. For example, on April 15, ISRO issued a press release saying it had successfully tested nozzles made of a carbon-carbon composite that would replace those made of Columbium alloy in the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage and thus increase the rocket’s payload capacity by 15 kg. Just 15 kg!

The successful testing of the C-C nozzle divergent marked a major milestone for ISRO. On March 19, 2024, a 60-second hot test was conducted at the High-Altitude Test (HAT) facility in ISRO Propulsion Complex (IPRC), Mahendragiri, confirming the system’s performance and hardware integrity. Subsequent tests, including a 200-second hot test on April 2, 2024, further validated the nozzle’s capabilities, with temperatures reaching 1216K, matching predictions.

Granted, the PSLV’s cost of launching a single kilogram to low-earth orbit is more than 8 lakh rupees (a very conservative estimate, I reckon) – meaning an additional 15 kg means at least an additional Rs 1.2 crore per launch. But finances alone are not a useful way to evaluate this addition: more payload mass could mean, say, one additional instrument onboard an indigenous spacecraft instead of waiting for a larger rocket to become available or postponing that instrument’s launch to a future mission.

But equally fascinating, and pride- and notice-worthy, to me is the fact that ISRO’s scientists and engineers were able to fine-tune the PSLV to this extent. This isn’t to say I’m surprised they were able to do it at all; on the contrary, it means the feat is as much about the benefits accruing to the rocket, and the Indian space programme by extension, as about R&D advances on the materials science front. It speaks to the oft-underestimated importance of the foundations on which a space programme is built.

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre … has leveraged advanced materials like Carbon-Carbon (C-C) Composites to create a nozzle divergent that offers exceptional properties. By utilizing processes such as carbonization of green composites, Chemical Vapor Infiltration, and High-Temperature Treatment, it has produced a nozzle with low density, high specific strength, and excellent stiffness, capable of retaining mechanical properties even at elevated temperatures.

A key feature of the C-C nozzle is its special anti-oxidation coating of Silicon Carbide, which extends its operational limits in oxidizing environments. This innovation not only reduces thermally induced stresses but also enhances corrosion resistance, allowing for extended operational temperature limits in hostile environments.

The advances here draw from insights into metallurgy, crystallography, ceramic engineering, composite materials, numerical methods, etc., which in turn stand on the shoulders of people trained well enough in these areas, the educational institutions (and their teachers) that did so, and the schooling system and socio-economic support structures that brought them there. A country needs a lot to go right for achievements like squeezing an extra 15 kg into the payload capacity of an already highly fine-tuned machine to be possible. It’s a bummer that such advances are currently largely vertically restricted, except in the case of the Indian space programme, rather than diffusing freely across sectors.

Other enterprises ought to have these particular advantages ISRO enjoys. Even should one or two rockets fail, a test not work out or a spacecraft go kaput sooner than designed, the PSLV’s new carbon-carbon-composite nozzles stand for the idea that we have everything we need to keep trying, including the opportunity to do better next time. They represent the idea of how advances in one field of research can lead to advances in another, such that each field is no longer held back by the limitations of its starting conditions.

Justice delayed but a ton of bricks await

From ‘SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’’, The Hindu, April 10, 2024:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. … Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.

… The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.

A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government’s hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.

But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali’s charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.

I think the Supreme Court’s inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that’s more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn’t new. In that May, he’d called evidence-based medicine “stupid” and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.

But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India’s response to the virus’s spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading “vaccine hesitancy” and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.

For this alone, Vardhan deserves the “ton of bricks” the Supreme Court is waiting with.

Will ‘Surya’ launch bombs or satellites?

From Times of India, March 14, 2024:

ISRO chairman S. Somanath confirmed to TOI in an exclusive interview that the NGLV project, internally named “SOORYA”, will be headed by (Project Director/PD) S. Sivakumar, currrently the programme director (space transportation systems) at VSSC…

ISRO and DRDO really need to systematise their naming scheme here. The next iteration of ‘Agni’ ballistic missiles DRDO is working on has widely been called ‘Surya’. For ISRO to follow by calling its newfangled launch vehicle ‘Soorya’ – even if internally – complicates communications on this topic (not that it’s otherwise great).

‘Soorya’ and ‘Surya’ may have different spellings but they refer to the same Sanskrit word and meaning (‘Sun’). The typical aloofness of Indians vis-a-vis transliterating words between English and Indian languages will inevitably feed confusion over the technology to which a given instance of ‘Surya’ refers.

Another source of confusion is the existing overlap between the civilian and the military applications of suborbital and orbital flight technologies in India. This has its pros and cons and I’m not judging that now, but here we have a next-generation launch vehicle being called ‘Soorya’ and a next-generation missile being called ‘Surya’. Not helping.

Others have noticed this issue with other projects ISRO is working on and have suggested the organisation stick to its original, de facto naming scheming – e.g. one where the name of a next-generation launch vehicle is Next-generation Launch Vehicle. It’s boring, yes, but there will be no confusion.

Farce and friction over an Indian astronaut

When we met Mr [Morarji] Desai, he was totally relaxed even after the long journey from Delhi. Squatting on a carpet in the Kremlin and spinning his favourite charka, he received us very gracefully and congratulated us on the impressive achievement [the launch of Bhaskara-I on June 7, 1979]. He then proceeded to express his own view against sending an Indian astronaut on a Soviet mission saying, “How will it help the country if an Indian astronaut goes up into space and comes down?” He was extremely pleased to note that our views coincided with his own and jokingly told Prof. Dhawan, “Why don’t you convince Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, our foreign minister sitting in the next room, who is keen on sending an Indian into space?” Even more interesting was that he turned to me saying, “This is in line with what Vikram believed, isn’t it?”

– UR Rao, India’s Rise as a Space Power (2014)

But then times did change after Desai’s term ended and Indira Gandhi, who was more enthusiastic about Leonid Brezhnev’s offer to fly an Indian astronaut on a Soviet mission, assumed power in 1980. Thus, Rakesh Sharma’s flight happened in 1984 – although not without the Indian bureaucracy raising its ridiculous head…

When H.J. Bhabha wrote the extraordinary one-page constitution of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was later adopted by the Department of Space, he had specifically invested the commission with appropriate powers to avoid ‘the needlessly inelastic bureaucratic rules of the Government’. About a year prior to thr actual flight of Sq Ldr Rakesh Sharma, who was finally selected as the prime candidate for the joined manned mission with Mr [Ravish] Malhotra being designated as the standby, Ministry of Defence came up with two trivial bureaucratic objections. The first was whether both of these officers who were undergoing training on ground at the Star City were eligible to receive a flying allowance of Rs 500 a month. The second was whether the announced reward of a modest amount of Rs 25,000 should be given to both the candidates or restricted only to the astronaut who finally goes to space. Mr R Venkataraman, who was the then Minister of Defence and who later became the President of India, invited Prof. Dhawan and me to discuss the above two issues. Both Prof. Dhawan and myself told the defence minister that it is regrettable that silly suggestions such as stopping the flying allowance and not extending the honorarium to both the chosen candidates were brought up for discussion at the highest level. Fortunately, Mr Venkataraman after listening to our righteous indignation not only agreed with our view but also pulled up the bureaucracy for bringing up such outrageous issues, resulting in both the chosen astronaut candidates continuing to receive the flying allowance and becoming eligible for receiving the honorarium.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of course, the tables have turned somewhat, with the enthusiastic support of his office for the ambitious Gaganyaan mission allowing work to proceed as smoothly as possible. Bhabha’s and Sarabhai’s visions for the Indian space programme fundamentally included ease access to the upper echelons of decision-making in the nascent new national government, with avid reciprocation by the prime ministers of their time (especially Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi). But as these barriers no longer exist for the space programme and the national government is using the programme as a way to project its own power and vision, it is time to insert some ‘friction’ between ISRO and the government, more so since its missions are now becoming more sophisticated and expensive, and nudge it to the levels of accountability expected of other public-sector institutions.

To the moon – or the stock market?

Now this is quite upsetting. I learn from Jatan Mehta’s Moon Monday #166 that Intuitive Machines – the maker of the Odysseus spacecraft that landed on the moon on February 22 – may have lied about the circumstances of the landing attempt in order to protect its market value, before ‘correcting’ itself later. Excerpt:

Previously, the publicly traded company prematurely stated post-landing that Odysseus is “upright”, only to correct it in a media briefing timed to the closing of the stock market an entire day later. Now it turns out even the NASA LiDAR onboard … actually did not assist Odysseus’ landing in the last 15 kilometers of descent due to a delay in processing its data.…Are we supposed to believe that descent telemetry on Mission Control screens … never made it clear to the company and NASA that the LiDAR readings weren’t coming through to the lander’s navigation system? Or that it wasn’t clear in the following few days either?…A [NASA] payload called SCLPSS was flown on Odysseus to specifically study the lander’s engine plume effects on lunar soil during the final descent phase. NASA says the payload did not do said imaging. And yet the agency states in the same release that “the bottom line is every NASA instrument has met some level of their objectives.” A subsequent report by Eric Berger [of Ars Technica] reads: “As of Wednesday [February 28], NASA had been able to download about 50MB of data. The baseline for success was a single bit of data.” Was this criteria for success made clear and public pre-launch?

NASA has rightly defined the ideal standard for communications over the years by placing what data its probes collect as soon as possible in the public domain. (This responsibility even led to some tension in the book and the film The Martian.) So it’s really disappointing, and frankly a little infuriating, to see this bad-faith effort from Intuitive Machines.

Its Odysseus mission was funded by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme and it carried six NASA instruments (including SCLPSS) to the moon. Even if Intuitive Machines isn’t implicitly required to follow NASA’s communications policies, NASA needs to ensure the companies it contracts to fly its payloads – to ease its own path to the moon in future – do. As Jatan also pointed out, the onus to communicate lies with NASA: CLPS is publicly funded and without it missions like Odysseus wouldn’t happen. We need explicit policies to streamline these companies’ communications expectations to follow NASA’s rather than their share prices.

It’s also a poor look for NASA to celebrate Odysseus’s success the way it did (was it to protect Intuitive Machines again?). CLPS is a billion-dollar programme to ferry NASA payloads to the moon. How do you call the mission a “success” if the payloads aren’t collecting data?

We don’t want tax money to disappear into black holes like this that release no or, worse, misleading information.

Why not increase ISRO’s budget?

This post is in response to a question on Reddit about why the Indian government won’t increase ISRO’s space budget.

There’s a good analogy in India’s research budget. As a share of the GDP, the national expenditure on R&D has fallen significantly since 1996, to the current value of around 0.65%. The world’s other ‘science superpowers’ – including the US, China, Germany, and South Korea – spend at least 2% of their GDP on R&D. Many experts have also said publicly that earmarking this fraction of the GDP for R&D may be a prerequisite for India’s desire to become an economically developed national by 2047. But this is one half of the story. The other half is that the Ministry of Science & Technology has consistently underspent the amount the Ministry of Finance has been allocating it.

One established reason for underspending is that there are too few avenues for uptake, meaning the ministry needs to setup those opportunities as well. In 2018, the then principal scientific advisor to the government, K. VijayRaghavan, had articulated something similar in an interview – two days ahead of India’s ‘March for Science’, an event that philosopher Sundar Sarukkai had criticised earlier for pushing the notion that more funding for science (participants wanted the government to spend 3% of the GDP on R&D) could halt the spread of pseudoscientific ideas in society.

It’s the same with ISRO. While there’s a reasonable case to be made to increase spending on space-related activities, we also need the right industries and research opportunities to exist and which demand that money. It’s possible to contend that this is really a chicken-and-egg problem and that by increasing spending, institutions and activities can, say, become more efficient and allow members of the extant workforce to ‘look’ for new opportunities to begin with. But the cycle needs to be broken somewhere, and as things stand, it’s not unreasonable for funds to be released as and when the right opportunities arise.

ISRO’s lack of effective PR or media outreach offers a good illustration: many observers and commentators have pointed at NASA’s higher budget (in absolute numbers) and then at its admirable outreach policies and programme as if to say the two are related. However, throwing more money at ISRO and asking it to set up an outreach unit will still only produce a less-than-mediocre effort because we’ll be attempting to improve outreach without enhancing the culture in which the need for such outreach is rooted.

A similar argument goes for claims about ISRO employees being ‘underpaid’: who decides their salaries and why are they what they are? I doubt the salaries haven’t been increased for want of funds – speaking to a recurring motif in India’s research administration. Setting aside the concerns about underspending and utilisation efficiency, India’s spending on R&D is low not because the government doesn’t have the money. It certainly does, and in the last decade alone has repeatedly allocated very large sums for certain technologically intensive enterprises (and puff projects to inflate the ruling party’s reputation) when they present the right, even if short-sighted, appeal.

As publicly funded R&D institutions go, ISRO is among the most efficiently organised and run in India, even if it isn’t perfect. This backdrop merits examining the cases to increase its capital expenses (for missions, etc.) and revenue expenses (for salaries, etc.) separately. In this post I’m skipping the latter.

The practice of funding mission proposals on a case-by-case basis rather than hiking overall allocation makes more sense because such a thing would force ISRO, and the Department of Space (DoS) ecosystem more broadly, into a culture of pitching ideas to the government and awaiting deliberation and approval. In fact, currently, the DoS is overseen by the prime minister and missions have to be approved by the Union Cabinet, which is also an iffy setup. If this individual and/or their party puts politics before country, we are liable to have politically advantageous missions funded even when they lack proportionate scientific and/or societal value.

Instead, there needs to be an expert committee in between ISRO and the Cabinet whose members vote on proposals before forwarding the winning ones to the Cabinet. This committee needs to be beyond the DoS’s remit as well as be empowered to resist political capture. Such a setup is the way to go now that ISRO is starting on very expensive and sophisticated missions like human spaceflight, space stations, reusable launch vehicles, and lunar sample-return.

(* In a previous version of this post, I also suspected the Indian and the US governments have allocated comparable fractions of their GDP for their respective space departments. I subsequently stood corrected.)

Poonam Pandey and peer-review

One dubious but vigorous narrative that has emerged around Poonam Pandey’s “death” and subsequent return to life is that the mainstream media will publish “anything”.

To be sure, there were broadly two kinds of news reports after the post appeared on her Instagram handle claiming Pandey had died of cervical cancer: one said she’d died and quoted the Instagram post; the other said her management team had said she’d died. That is, the first kind stated her death as a truth and the other stated her team’s statement as a truth. News reports of the latter variety obviously ‘look’ better now that Pandey and her team said she lied (to raise awareness of cervical cancer). But judging the former news reports harshly isn’t fair.

This incident has been evocative of the role of peer-review in scientific publishing. After scientists write up a manuscript describing an experiment and submit it to a journal to consider for publishing, the journal editors farm it out to a group of independent experts on the same topic and ask them if they think the paper is worth publishing. (Pre-publishing) Peer-review has many flaws, including the fact that peer-reviewers are expected to volunteer their time and expertise and that the process is often slow, inconsistent, biased, and opaque.

But for all these concerns, peer-review isn’t designed to reveal deliberately – and increasingly cleverly – concealed fraud. Granted, the journal could be held responsible for missing plagiarism and the journal and peer-reviewers both for clearly duplicated images and entirely bullshit papers. However, pinning the blame for, say, failing to double-check findings because the infrastructure to do so is hard to come by on peer-review would be ridiculous.

Peer-review’s primary function, as far as I understand it, is to check whether the data presented in the study support the conclusions drawn from the study. It works best with some level of trust. Expecting it to respond perfectly to an activity that deliberately and precisely undermines that trust is ridiculous. A better response (to more advanced tools with which to attempt fraud but also to democratise access to scientific knowledge) would be to overhaul the ‘conventional’ publishing process, such as with transparent peer-review and/or paying for the requisite expertise and labour.

(I’m an admirer of the radical strategy eLife adopted in October 2022: to review preprint papers and publicise its reviewers’ findings along with the reviewers’ identities and the paper, share recommendations with the authors to improve it, but not accept or reject the paper per se.)

Equally importantly, we shouldn’t consider a published research paper to be the last word but in fact a work in progress with room for revision, correction or even retraction. Doing otherwise – as much as stigmatising retractions for reasons not related to misconduct or fraud, for that matter – on the other hand, may render peer-review suspect when people find mistakes in a published paper even when the fault lies elsewhere.

Analogously, journalism is required to be sceptical, adversarial even – but of what? Not every claim is worthy of investigative and/or adversarial journalism. In particular, when a claim is publicised that someone has died and a group of people that manages that individual’s public profile “confirms” the claim is true, that’s the end of that. This an important reason why these groups exist, so when they compromise that purpose, blaming journalists is misguided.

And unlike peer-review, the journalistic processes in place (in many but not all newsrooms) to check potentially problematic claims – for example, that “a high-powered committee” is required “for an extensive consideration of the challenges arising from fast population growth” – are perfectly functional, in part because their false-positive rate is lower without having to investigate “confirmed” claims of a person’s death than with.

Violence shuts science? Err…

Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news.

I’m reminded of this adage of the news industry – and Nambi Narayanan’s comment in August 2022 – when I read reports like ‘Explosion of violence in Ecuador shuts down science’ (Science, January 13, 2024). An “explosion of violence” in a country should reasonably be expected to affect all walks of life, so what’s the value in focusing a news report only on science and those who practice it? It’s not like we have news reports headlined “explosion of violence in Ecuador shuts down fruit shops”.

There are little tidbits in the article that might be useful to other researchers in Ecuador, but it’s unlikely they’re looking for it in Science, which is a foreign publishing reporting on Ecuador for an audience that’s mostly outside the country.

The only bit I found really worth dwelling on was this one paragraph:

The Consortium for the Sustainable Development of the Andean Ecoregion (CONDESAN) … went further. It canceled all fieldwork this week and next, says Manual Peralvo, a geographer and project coordinator. He adds that CONDESAN plans to design a stricter security protocol for future projects that involve fieldwork. “We’re going to have to plan our schedules much more specifically to know who is where and at what time,” and to avoid dangerous areas, he says.

… yet it’s just one paragraph, before the narrative moves on to how the country’s new security protocols will “deter non-Ecuadorian funding and scientists”. I’d have liked the report to drop everything else and focus on how research centres organise and administer fieldwork when field-workers are at risk of physical violence.

If anything, there may be no opportunity cost associated with such stories – except for the authors and publishers of such reports (i.e. in its current form) suggesting they believe science is somehow more special than other human endeavours.

Ram temple at science ‘festival’

The Surya Tilak project had courted controversy in the past with Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra flagging it on social media in November 2021. The CSIR officials, however, defended the project arguing the scientific calculations that went into making the system.

‘Surya Tilak at Ram temple at the India International Science Festival backed by the Union Science Ministry’, Deccan Herald, January 18, 2024

This is a succinct demonstration of science’s need for a guiding hand. The Indian Science Congress isn’t happening this year, which is both for the better and otherwise, but given the vague allegations that have cast its status in limbo, I remain suspicious that its star declining (further) at the same time that of the India International Science Festival (IISF) is rising isn’t a coincidence. The latter has a budget of Rs 20-25 crore, according to the Deccan Herald article quoted above, “contributed by various scientific departments”.

The absolute value of India’s expense on scientific research is increasing – a horn the national government has often tooted – but as a percentage of the GDP as well as of the total annual budget, it is dropping. In this milieu, it’s amusing for the government to suddenly be able to provide Rs 20-25 crore for the IISF, when in fact the Department of Science and Technology has been giving the Science Congress a relatively lower Rs 5 crore and which last year alleged unspecified “financial irregularities” on the part of its organisers.

But as with the Science Congress, it wouldn’t be fair to dismiss the IISF altogether for some problematic exhibits and events. This said, CSIR officials contending the “Surya Tilak” of the upcoming Ram temple in Ayodhya deserves to be exhibited at the IISF because “scientific calculations” went into designing it is telling of the relationship between science, religion, and the Indian state today.

Considering there are government regulations stipulating the minimum structural characteristics of every building in the country, any non-small structure in the country could have been included in the IISF exhibit. Don’t be absurd, I hear you say, and that’s just as absurd as the officials’ reasoning.

Natural philosophy in many ancient civilisations, including those in India, was concerned with the motions of stars and planets across the sky and seasonal changes in these patterns. So as such, using the principles of modern science to design the “Surya Tilak” isn’t objectionable, or even remarkable.

But the fact that IISF is being organised by Vijnana Bharati, an RSS-affiliated body, and that Vijnana Bharati’s stated goal is “to champion the cause of Bharatiya heritage with a harmonious synthesis of physical and spiritual sciences” makes the relationship suspect – in much the same way the Vedas and other parts of India’s cultural heritage have become tainted by association with the government’s Hindutva programme. And these suspicions are heightened now thanks to the passions surrounding the impending consecration of the Ram temple idol.

A practice of science that constantly denies its political character is liable to be, and has been, appropriated in the service of a larger political or ideological agenda – but this isn’t to say science, more specifically the national community of science exponents, should assume a monolithic political position. Instead, it’s to say this is precisely the cost of misunderstanding that science and politics, as human endeavours go, are immiscible. It’s to say that scientists’ widespread and collective aspiration to be apolitical implicitly admits political influence and that we should all understand that it’s not desirable for science to be appropriated in this way. And when it is, we must bear in mind how these unions have become deleterious and how the two of them can be, or ought to be, separated so that we understand what science is (and isn’t) and what sort of legitimacy it should (and shouldn’t) be allowed to grant the state.

Defying awareness of the value of separating science and (a compromised) state strikes to me as being fundamentally antisocial because such awareness is the first step to asking how and in what circumstances they ought to be separated. It undermines the possibility of this awareness taking root. This isn’t new but in the increasing fervour surrounding the Ram temple, and India’s temple-state dis-separation the event will consummate, the importance of its loss seems heightened as well.