Relevance, impact and academic spin

Abstract

Ideally, collective judgements about the development of cleaner technologies should be based on a complete and objective assessment of all the relevant and well-founded evidence. In reality, of course, this will not be possible as the evidence will be partial and incomplete and any assessment of it will be skewed by the interests, motivations and perspectives of those doing the assessing. Increasingly important to governmental, institutional and business decision-making in the transition to more sustainable ways of living are the attitudes of the wider public and their expression through the political process, informed, influenced or determined (take your pick) by the press, radio, television and the internet. While these influences are not wholly negative, the methods of the media increasingly affect the way science is published, promoted and presented. I am not primarily concerned with the more obvious and egregious instances, such as the use of the media to make early disclosure of (non-peer-reviewed) experimental results that point to some major scientific breakthrough or matter of great social importance. The use of a press conference to present data from Pons (University of Utah) and Fleischmann (University of Southampton) believed to provide evidence of the phenomenon called ‘cold-fusion’ was followed by a major scientific debate that centred not just on the observations and their interpretation, but on the appropriateness of pre-empting the standard procedures of manuscript submission and peer-review. This was science in its proper self-correcting mode. Nor am I primarily concerned with ‘Climategate’ (nor even its sequel, ‘Glaciergate’). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2007) has compiled and presented various summaries of the current (imperfect) state of knowledge that have been broadly accepted by fellow scientists (not, of course, without well-founded criticism and open-minded scepticism). This success is all the more remarkable because of the powerful intellects (I will not say inflated egos!) and heavy-weight disputation that characterise scientific discourse even in a single discipline, let alone across and between so many disciplines concerned with highly complex questions. Attempts to undermine these efforts prior to the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009 led to ‘Climategate’, the media furore resulting from the theft and publication of e-mails and other material from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. Increased scepticism of the lay public towards evidence for man-made impact on the world’s climate appears to have resulted. My own view is that such scepticism is likely to be temporary (and unlikely to turn to scepticism’s more virulent and destructive cousin, denialism), if a balanced view of the scientific evidence continues to be provided. There may, indeed, be some positive benefits from this affair: it may serve to underline, first that scientists are human after all, and second that important uncertainties in aspects of climate change science and its possible consequences (highlighted by sceptics) do remain to be resolved (Schiermeier 2010). Much of the criticism of the scientists concerned exploited the use of the word ‘trick’ to characterise a means of presenting data. In a scientific context, ‘trick’ is often used to describe a clever means of resolving a technical problem and does not have the pejorative meaning, used more widely, that of an underhand and deceitful action. That much of the Climategate controversy revolved around something as seemingly N. Winterton (&) Department of Chemistry, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZD, UK e-mail: N.Winterton@liverpool.ac.uk