Undermining science and scientists

The news this week is full of stories of science being undermined by political appointees.

• Sowing Doubt and Undermining Science
• Disbanded EPA science panel blasts lack of action on particulate matter
• A War Against Climate Science, Waged by Washington’s Rank and File

I'm cleaning up browser tabs and came across a story I meant to write about 5 years ago. In 2015, I wrote VW and the dark side of AI about how VW was cheating on diesel engine smog tests.

This global map of tropospheric NO2 was produced using data from the Envisat's SCIAMACHY sensor in 2004.

Science funding is very scarce.  If you are lucky, you will get one or two opportunities in your scientific lifetime to be involved with a new satellite sensor.  Around 2004, I met scientists who were validating and calibrating the SCIAMACHY sensor.  They couldn't figure out why they were detecting more NO2 than were supposedly being emitted.

They were working off emissions inventories which took into account all the known emitters of NO2.  They knew all the fixed sources like factories and power plants.  They could estimate the mobile sources (vehicles) based on the amount of gasoline and diesel sold and the expected emissions from those vehicles.  So what was wrong?  The emissions inventory (and associated models) or the satellite sensors?

This discrepancy troubled scientists for 10 years while VW and other diesel vehicle manufacturers brazenly lied and cheated.  Imagine how much science could have been done if scarce people time and money weren't wasted trying to reconcile pollution measurements to falsified emissions data.

Back then, I had never heard of the term, gas-lighting.  Man, I am a member of several routinely gas-lit many groups: women, people of color, scientists.  All that fury is bubbling out right now.

Go take a look at these and other figures of NO2 that wasn't supposed to be there.