Speaking Science to the Public

The topic for this year's American Association for the Advancement for Science Annual Conference was "Science and Society," but it just as well could have been "Science Getting the Crap Beaten Out of It by Society and Not Understanding Why."

For those who do not know the AAAS, it's like an American version of the Royal Society - where Newton and Darwin once discussed ideas among learned colleagues. But instead of smoke-filled rooms and brandy they have Power Point and stale danishes.

Every year, the AAAS meets to share the important science being done around the country. It's a chance to catch up on astronomy, medicine, and geology while hobnobbing with the press. This year, however, the meeting was dominated by climate scientists scratching their heads and trying to figure out what is going wrong.

Maxwell Boykoff summed it up best when he presented this graph demonstrating that the number of stories on climate change spiked when the angle took a skeptical turn as a result of so-called Climategate. He called it "a different kind of hockey stick." Both in public and in private, scientists are fretting over the perceived scandal around the leaked e-mails. More than that, though, they are panicked that the American public simply isn't listening to them.

The dozen or so meetings on climate change denial illustrated two things. One, most of America's top scientists have no idea how to communicate to the public. Many of the presentations dragged out the same data. Scientists approach the world through data, and they can't understand why the public won't finally reach a data-induced tipping point and collectively say "Ooooh, now we get it."

Here's a small example of how scientists fail to quash ill-informed, even loony, theories: In a meeting titled "Can Geoengineering Save Us from Global Warming?" a panel of scientists laid out the newest results in human-moderated climate solutions. Unbeknownst to them, it was crashed by activists from a conspiracy theory group that thinks the government is already secretly releasing experimental chemicals from behind jetliners. Afterward, the group peppered the panel with bizarre questions about sulfur cover-ups.

One baffled panelist just repeated the group's website, suggesting people go there for answers. Another patiently tried to explain that what these people are seeing are vapor trails - tiny ice crystals that form outside a plane and, under the right conditions, can hang around all day.

This did not work. The group immediately podcasted about the government's continued cover-up while scientists went to the next meeting to discuss how best to communicate to the public.

This has to stop. Scientists are not designed for policy, yet increasingly are being dragged into political fistfights and getting their glasses stolen and their noses bloodied. This has led to a common theme at the meeting with scientists insisting they need to become more like Rush Limbaugh and less like Bill Nye the Science Guy.

But this is not the direction that most benefits the public. We pay these people to be dispassionate and pursue the truth. No one — except those who want to discredit science altogether — is served by scientists who cherry-pick data to serve an end. Conservatives may not like evolution, but they need to come up with countervailing research. Liberals might be pleased that science justifies their fears about air pollution, yet quickly abandon science when it refuses to back up fears over nuclear power.

At the end of the conference last week, the scientists went home to their labs, the press went back to write our sensationalist stories, and the protesters went home to write their congressmen. Something needs to get better before it gets worse.

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons