Scientists offer opinions about their opinions

Abstract

I would like to offer another wrinkle to the idea that scientific societies should not take positions on science issues of societal consequence, an idea raised by B. K. Ridley (PHYSICS TODAY, July 2010, page 10) and discussed by Alfred Bortz (September 2010, page 9).Because scientific societies comprise individual scientists, it may be illuminating to look at how individual scientists approach the matter. During my four years in the communications department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), I saw a small minority of scientists taking public positions on science issues of societal consequence. That low participation may have come from multiple drivers: WHOI’s soft-money culture, which emphasizes the securing of funding for the next project; fear of appearing to grandstand and therefore of being one protruding nail that needs to be hammered down; or a concern for being misinterpreted or overinterpreted. Perhaps most significantly, there was a great concern that taking public positions would ultimately compromise the ability to do impartial science. As soon as you take a position, you risk becoming an advocate for something that may turn out not to be scientific truth.The wrinkle I offer is that I discovered many scientists would be marginally comfortable offering their opinion if asked but saw it as an entirely different thing to initiate the expression of their opinion. Passive participation was OK; active was not.A case in point was the 2004 opening of the science fantasy film The Day After Tomorrow, in which the cryosphere goes global in about 90 minutes. Thermodynamic impossibilities aside, at last Hollywood was using the term “paleoclimatologist,” and we at WHOI had a chance to capture the public’s attention, riding on science-fantasy coattails as the science fact-tellers.I met with a handful of climate scientists before the film opened and discussed how we, as an institution, might take advantage of the moment. The scientists all wanted to run, not walk, from such foolishness. Yes, they would take calls from the media, but no, they wouldn’t put their names on any statement or op-ed. It would sully their reputations and risk eye-rolling, or worse, from scientist peers: “How could so-and-so take this Hollywood drivel seriously?”So we passed. The Day After Tomorrow came and went. We posted a climate change FAQ to our website and waited for the phone to ring. As I recall, it never did.To me, the moral of the story is that most scientists not only have few incentives to take positions on how society might act based on science findings, they have abundant disincentives to do so, mainly in the form of peer censure and risk to credibility. In the end, if one can’t move the individuals on an issue, it will be difficult to move the professional societies they constitute.© 2011 American Institute of Physics.