Science & the Public

One particularly interesting aspect of the Nature feature on the avian bird flu is that it has a fictionalized account of the onset of a global flu pandemic here.  I find this interesting because there seems to be a growing interest, particularly among scientists, in alternative channels and forms of communication.  I think that scientists themselves have begun to realize that the traditional models of scientific communication are not working, because of politics, commercialization, and fractured public discourse.

For example, in the last part of her series on climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert contrasts the state of discourse in the political sphere about global warming:

“Senator [James Inhofe], who has called global warming 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,' went on to argue that this important new evidence was being suppressed by 'alarmists' who view anthropogenic warming as 'an article of religious faith.' One of the authorities that Inhofe repeatedly cited in support of his claims was the fiction writer Michael Crichton”,

to the unanimous opinion within the scientific community,

“In legitimate scientific circles, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming.... out of a study of the more than nine hundred articles on climate change published in refereed journals between 1993 and 2003 and subsequently made available on a leading research database.... not a single article disputed the premise that anthropogenic warming is under way.”

There is a building level of frustration about how issues such as evolution and climate change are discussed in public, as evidenced by the formation of groups like Scientists and Engineers for Change, or the increasing willingness of Nobel Prize winners to speak out about economics, stem cells, or science policy, or Scientific American's hilarious new editorial policy.

Nature's willingness to run a fictionalized, though rigorously researched, account of a possible pandemic is another step towards a growing openness to thinking about how we communicate about science, whether through scenario planning and challenges that focuses on policy outcomes, such as the U.N. Millenium Goals; or countless academic re-arrangements towards interdisciplinary outcomes, like the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University, or Center for Science and Technology Policy in Colorado ; or in collective blogs, meant to bring these issues directly to the public, such as RealClimate.org, Prometheus or Resilience Science, or the Becker-Posner blog, all written by distinguished academic authors.

[Update 6/8/05:  The New York Times reports that a senior Bush administration official, who previously led the oil industry against limits on greenhouse gas emissions, was allowed to edit administration reports to downplay links between emissions and climate change.  The article states,

.... critics said that while all administrations routinely vetted government reports, scientific content in such reports should be reviewed by scientists. Climate experts and representatives of environmental groups, when shown examples of the revisions, said they illustrated the significant if largely invisible influence of Mr. Cooney and other White House officials with ties to energy industries that have long fought greenhouse-gas restrictions.]

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