How Scientists Talk About Science
They can handle uncertainty--it is a professional requirement, in fact--but they tend to avoid speaking about their research unless they are very certain about something. (At least the good ones do.) Increasingly so, the precision and certainty of science are being put on trial on a public scale never before experienced. And to a degree, the admirable tendency of scientists to demand certainty is in conflict with our need as the public to potentially act on less inviolable evidence.
Frustratingly, here goes the New York Times again, coughing up examples of climate change "uncertainty," including Western Washington University's Dr. Don Easterbrook, in a wandering article that half-heartedly asserts in the end that, "in terms of the big picture," Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth "got it right." The article should have ended with, "And the Big Picture is exactly what the public needs, not the infighting of inevitable scientific disagreement over the details." Along the way, the Times cruises through examples of scientists who want to argue the particulars of climate change research, or who are concerned that too much hype is now being brewed up (oh the irony). But despite a headline that suggests that scientists are telling Al Gore to shut the hell up, if you read carefully, what really lurks beneath is the honorable desire for truth.
What the Times article fails to actually explore is the increasing tension between how core science is conducted--the necessity to be statistically certain of results, and to intensely question aberrant or contradictory evidence--and the incredibly slow-moving machine that is social and human change. That is what the issue really is, not whether every scientist agrees with Al Gore or not, and vice-versa. Until the later decades of the 20th century, researchers concerned with geology or climate could hunker in their labs, asking questions about our planet that admittedly the rest of the world may not have cared much about. They could argue with colleagues about the slightest contentions of one theory against another, and obsess about getting something right for both intellectual reasons and the noble pursuit of scientific truth.
But science and public policy move on different time-scales with uniquely different priorities, and Al Gore (and Elizabeth Kolbert, who was surprisingly nowhere to be found in this apparently even-sided, objective assessment of public communication about climate change) understands this fact better than the scientists do. He isn't pushing worst-case scenarios to incite fear or hype--he simply knows that if we wait for what amounts to scientific certainty to act, we could be in a lot more than just hot water.
UPDATE: It seems that Seed Magazine has been meditating on the same topic. Go read their interview with James Hansen, one of our nation's leading climate experts (you know, the one that NASA and the government as a whole tried to silence), who said this:
There's a big gap between what is understood by the scientists at the forefront of the research, and what is known by the people who need to know. And that's partly because of this technical language, and limitations on what scientists are willing to say..Yeah, what he said.
