August 2, 2013 — Who owns taxpayer-funded science? From the way many scientists behave, it's not the taxpayers.
Many scientific studies funded by federal agencies – through grants, contracts, or cooperative agreements, particularly those used to justify the most horrendous regulations – hide the guts of the science.
What the scientists keep secret is the raw data they obtain in the real world and the methods they use to interpret it, as if those were personal possessions.
Independent scientist Rob Roy Ramey told me of an extreme example: "A researcher tracked endangered desert bighorn sheep with government GPS radio collars to record precise animal locations for wildlife rangers.
"He then reset the access codes so only he could download the data remotely, and refused to surrender the codes. So California Fish and Game had to track down and net-gun the bighorns from a helicopter in order to manually download the collar data, costing a fortune and endangering both animals and people."
Agency "science" frequently isn't about data collection at all, but instead is a "literature search," with researchers in a library selecting papers and reports by others that merely summarize results and give opinions of the actual scientists.
These agency researchers never even see the underlying data, much less collect it in the field. The agency then holds up those second-hand opinions as if they had rigorously tested them against the data. Using this unscrupulous tactic, you can cherry-pick the literature to make any case you want.
With so many federal reports containing no data, only conclusions put forth by another scientist, there is no way to debate, debunk or disprove the underlying facts, even requiring court orders to track down and disclose them if Freedom of Information Act requests are denied, which they frequently are (legally or otherwise).
Read the full opinion piece at the Washington Examiner