The Wall Street Journal's on a roll on "climategate," and we recently pointed to the disturbing parallel of the parasitic relationship of government advocates and special interest groups on the global warming and salt reduction issues. Today's WSJ carries an opinion column by Daniel Henniger, "Climategate: Science Is Dying ," making another observation relevant to the salt and health debate: the use of junk science to prop up government policy goals -- whether by the Bush or Obama Administrations -- is creating, in Henniger's words, a "credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with with it."
Henniger points out the corrosive effect on science of the environmentalists'-touted "precautionary principle" whereby objective standards of evidence are replaced by subjective judgments -- "this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences."
Henniger quotes an Obama Administration spokesperson on the "precautionary principle:"
The Obama administration's new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled "Law and Economics for a Warming World," Ms. Heinzerling wrote, "Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . ."
If the new ethos is that "close-enough" science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails.
The tie to salt, we hope, is obvious. In the absence of evidence from even a single controlled trial of whether salt reduction would improve health and in the absence of any evidence that physiological salt appetite can be modified as a "behavior" by either education of policy diktat, the government errs on the side of precaution. I use "err" purposefully since the current policy is erroneous both on the science and even on the question of precaution. Low-salt diets are risky for some people and may be risky for the entire population. So even advocates of the "precautionary principle" should favor our longstanding advocacy of a controlled trial to get the evidence right. Close isn't "close enough for government work."
Add comment