I recently attended the QRA annual conference in Durham. For three days we mostly discussed sea level rise, and the large quantity of snow under foot (Durham was blanketed in six inches of snow for the whole week). One session was on science and the media. Here was a room of over a hundred scientists representing millions of pounds of public research money, what was our relationship with the public?
In a far ranging discussion here are a few points that stuck out to me:
Despite many years of training few scientists have training to understand the media. This is becoming well recognised and most universities are starting to offer training, especially for their more prominent academics but it remains the exception rather than the rule. A book that I think all scientists should find time to read is “Don’t be such a scientist” by Randy Olson. It was recently reviewed on Real Climate.
Journalists tend not to have subscriptions to scientific journals, they literally can’t see our science. Even if they could, many papers would remain illegible due to the specialist terminology and assumed knowledge. A proposal from the floor was for journals to require from paper authors a “layperson version” of the paper. It could be a short summary, written for a general audience, with a figure or two. This would be available on the journal’s website for free providing much needed public content for the journal and a way for the core message of the science to find a wider audience.
There exists a tension between knowledge and uncertainty. Too often specialists aren’t willing to give the certainty media craves. The situation may arise where an editor has a story, they phone their pet scientist, known and trusted for advice. Most likely is that the scientist won’t be the expert so will refer the editor on to someone else. Someone the editor doesn’t know and doesn’t have time to develop a relationship with. There’s a four-hour deadline after all. The point is the editor only needs to know the general stuff and the scientist probably knows enough, more than the editor anyway. If the scientist refers the editor either the true expert will baffle the editor with way more information than they need or the editor will just write up the story themselves. We should be braver, run with what we do know, with caveats if need be. The expert fine detail isn’t always required or even desirable.
NASA climate scientist James Hansen makes a very good point in a 2007 paper:
Scientific reticence and sea level rise
Reticence is fine for the IPCC. And individual scientists can choose to stay within a comfort zone, not needing to worry that they say something that proves to be slightly wrong. But perhaps we should also consider our legacy from a broader perspective. Do we not know enough to say more?
One fascinating question to the room was how many have written on the web, a blog or Wikipedia? Only a few admitted blogs, no one raised their hand to Wikipedia. Scientists tend only to publish in peer-reviewed journals, however the general public and the media don’t read them. Oops. They read the web but scientists aren’t writing on the web! In a room full of sea level rise experts none had contributed to the Wikipedia article on sea level rise. Who had written it!? There is no encouragement or recognition for scientists to communicate in the forum most people get their information from. I will keep writing this blog!
The discussion did come back to sea level rise, what image represents sea level rise? Shouts included Katrina, Tuvalu etc. however it was pointed out these examples are scientifically controversial. The problem is how do you communicated mm per year without using these emotional, controversial images? It’s a scale issue. The science works on scales that people aren’t interested in. People care about weather not climate. The useful response was to reframe mm per year into insurance premiums, 200-year flood events becoming 50-year events and so on. Same science but human language.
Predictably the media’s treatment of climate change with 50:50, “balanced” debates was raised. Journalists are trained in politics, economics and law where there are often two sides worthy of equal coverage. Journalism is all about finding the other point of view, it simply doesn’t handle science well. It was suggested that the BBC at least is improving in this area now.
Whist the debate focused on science and the media, the actual decision makers with respect to sea level rise at least, are often local government. There doesn’t seem to be much of a communication channel between the sea level scientists and local governments at all.
Finally, The Oil Drum was founded by a couple of US academics [edit: see 2nd comment]. Key to their motivations was dissatisfaction with the traditional academic publishing process. It simply took too long to go from idea to published paper and once published few people read it. Blogging reduced a process that took months, to days or even hours and increased eyes by an order of magnitude or three. Blogging also enables academics to more easily write outside their recognised specialism.
