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Next month's meeting between the United States and the Soviet Union is welcome. But the meeting will best succeed if its goals are modest, a standing commission on strategic arms in the first place.
Despite the appearance of analytical rigour, IIASA's widely acclaimed global energy projections are highly unstable and based on informal guesswork. This results from inadequate peer review and quality control, raising questions about political bias in scientific analysis.
The US academy's predictable plea for more research should be granted if people are that worried. But the real need is for steady nerves — and atmospheric physics.
