30% of IPCC Report References Not Peer-Reviewed

I say it shouldn't matter why someone's made a claim. Motivation doesn't change the facts.

It's *lying* that changes the facts. Don't mistake a fake claim for a real one. That difference matters.

OG_slinger wrote:

I think science in general needs to hire a PR agency.

The problem here, of course, is that "science" is not a person, organization, etc. etc.

That said, there are organizations devoted to this sort of thing. The AAAS, for example. If you think they should be doing more of that sort of thing, I suggest you consider donating to the cause.

Somehow, "we invite you to learn about science" never makes as many headlines as "omgz0rz, the scientist5 are ly1ng too us!!11!!", though.

Hypatian wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

I think science in general needs to hire a PR agency.

The problem here, of course, is that "science" is not a person, organization, etc. etc.

That said, there are organizations devoted to this sort of thing. The AAAS, for example. If you think they should be doing more of that sort of thing, I suggest you consider donating to the cause.

Somehow, "we invite you to learn about science" never makes as many headlines as "omgz0rz, the scientist5 are ly1ng too us!!11!!", though.

I agree, but the vast majority of scientists--like any extremely technical group--absolutely suck at explaining what they do to a lay audience. Scientists complain about their studies being misinterpreted by media, but fail to take the extra step of having someone pre-digest their work and present media with easily understood take-away items instead of allowing their work to be interpreted by outlets who are only looking to get the most eyeballs on an article, no matter if it's accurate or not.

So all scientists should provide a "my work for dummies" abstract along with everything they publish? You do realize that crafting a layman's explanation of only a portion of what's going on deep in scientific research could be considered an amazing life's work, right? Why should the people who wrote the paper that has this abstract:

The q analogues of the Holstein-Primakoff boson realization of the su(2) and su(1,1) algebras are derived in the framework of a traditional many-body approach, Marumori-Yamamura-Tokunaga boson mapping. It is shown that the q-boson Fock space is the direct sum of the q-boson invariant subspace associated with the q-boson realizations of both algebras. The relevance of the role played by the projections on the q-boson image subspace is stressed.

have any need to explain it to people who are going to need a 100+ page primer before they can even understand the abstract, much less the actual contents of the paper? What possible use is such a document going to be to anyone?

Or should only scientists engaging in research that might have some impact on public policy be doing this? (Isn't determining how much to spend on what publicly-funded research projects part of public policy?)

I think Slinger (and others) was suggesting they hire some expressly for that purpose. That said, I don't know how I feel about research money going toward PR when situations like these - where public opinion gets in the way of science - are relatively rare. I mean sure, we can point to a half-dozen examples with huge ramifications, but in the grand scheme of things a half-dozen isn't that much. We don't have people protesting bullet trains because they think magnetism (specifically) is sinful, for instance.

Besides, if we take the matter at hand, there are a lot of good PR people arguing that climate change is real and we need to do something about it. They still haven't convinced the non-believers. And, with all due respect to those whose opinions differ from my own, there are people out there who literally choose their beliefs based on what makes them personally happiest with no regard to the reality that sometimes the truth sucks. Even if you take those people out of the equation it is not a completely irrational position to be skeptical about climate change. It won't be blatantly irrational until it's far too late to matter.

The problem of science is that it can be very complicated. The problem of humans is that we're satisfied with getting the gist of things, even when that leads us to uncertain or incorrect assumptions. The problem of democracy is that there is very often a disconnect between science and humans, and some people believe - not without merit - that this is a good thing.

Hypatian wrote:

So all scientists should provide a "my work for dummies" abstract along with everything they publish? You do realize that crafting a layman's explanation of only a portion of what's going on deep in scientific research could be considered an amazing life's work, right? Why should the people who wrote the paper that has this abstract:

The q analogues of the Holstein-Primakoff boson realization of the su(2) and su(1,1) algebras are derived in the framework of a traditional many-body approach, Marumori-Yamamura-Tokunaga boson mapping. It is shown that the q-boson Fock space is the direct sum of the q-boson invariant subspace associated with the q-boson realizations of both algebras. The relevance of the role played by the projections on the q-boson image subspace is stressed.

have any need to explain it to people who are going to need a 100+ page primer before they can even understand the abstract, much less the actual contents of the paper? What possible use is such a document going to be to anyone?

Or should only scientists engaging in research that might have some impact on public policy be doing this? (Isn't determining how much to spend on what publicly-funded research projects part of public policy?)

No, scientists shouldn't produce that document at all because as I said before the vast majority of technical people absolutely suck at communicating their work to non-technical people.

It's no different than a software company that has developers and product management focused on creating wonderful new products and technologies and a product marketing team who focuses on explaining how those products and technologies can benefit customers and make their lives easier. The customer doesn't need to know or understand all the technical details and the ins-and-outs. They just need to understand how that new technology is going to help them.

If I was the science marketing person in your example, I'd basically tell the scientist to keep up the good work and let me know when he's close to something tangible that people would actually care about, like a massively powerful quantum computer. It might sound harsh, but there's simply a lot of discoveries that don't matter at all to the public or if they do matter, there's a huge gap between the discovery and something tangible that impacts an average person's life and makes that discovery real and benefitial in their mind.

In the meantime, I'd be busy trying to get the public to understand that their idea of a theory is massively different than a scientific theory, which actually requires oddles of proof. Seriously, that's how big the gap is between scientists and an Average Joe.

I had some undergrad research published and when I go back and look at what I wrote now I'm completely astounded that I ever had a clue what all that jargon meant. It's like going back to an MMO you haven't played in a decade. You have no clue what half the buttons do anymore.

To be fair, most of these published papers aren't meant for mass consumption, they're made to spread ideas among other researchers in their field. The data have to get out there so others can pick it apart and hopefully advance their own work. It's how we progress. Saying it shouldn't be published simply because cousin Floyd, sitting on his backporch in Alabama, is going to get upset because he thinks some smarty-pants scientist is just making stuff up seems a little backwards.

While I can understand the desire for people to feel like they are capable of comprehending every possible piece of information known to man I also know that that's simply not reality. You can't expect a guy who has no scientific background, and whose height of literary consumption has been a few comic books when he was a kid, to understand a scholarly paper containing mathematical formulas that have been assembled by researches who spend their entire lives studying nothing but this one field.

Let the experts hash out the details. Once the dust settles the facts tend to trickle down in understandable form to the masses. Round earth, gravity, etc. Science is not a democracy. I shouldn't get to influence research into string theory no matter how strongly I feel about the subject because I know jack about theoretical physics.

LobsterMobster wrote:

I think Slinger (and others) was suggesting they hire some expressly for that purpose.

Who is "they"? The AAAS? The people who write papers (i.e. graduate students)? Universities? Research labs?

OG_Slinger wrote:

No, scientists shouldn't produce that document at all because as I said before the vast majority of technical people absolutely suck at communicating their work to non-technical people.

Okay. So how does the PR firm understand what the abstract I quoted means?

OG_Slinger wrote:

If I was the science marketing person in your example, I'd basically tell the scientist to keep up the good work and let me know when he's close to something tangible that people would actually care about, like a massively powerful quantum computer

That's what scientists already do. They don't go announcing crap for no reason. They publish papers to journals and conferences—where the readers *do* in fact care (hopefully). Their PR people are employed by universities, research labs, etc. Those PR people announce results in order to interest investors, get grant money, etc.--in order to continue getting to get work for the organization. They're more or less salespeople: they're selling the work to the people who do care (companies that might want to support the work, hire research to be done, etc. Investors who might want to fund a spin-off. Alumni who might want to put money back into the University. Supporters in government who'll be able to trumpet this as a success and bring in more funding for the next funding cycle, etc.)

Then a reporter comes by, quotes the stuff out of context, and a bunch of people get annoyed.

Should research organizations have more PR people who can handle this better? Perhaps—but again, those people would have to understand the real science and be able to translate it to the layman level in order to do that as well as you seem to think is necessary.

And on the flip side: Kids start learning what the scientific method is in public school before they hit sixth grade. And yet, people still can't be bothered to remember how it works when they're adults. There's no amount of money you can spend on PR people that will make up for that level of willful ignorance.

Better to spend the money on teachers to improve education and let the country go up in flames like it deserves to if this anti-intellectual streak continues.

Taking a step back for a moment, to relate this to the subject of the IPCC report:

This report was produced for the purpose of informing public policy advisors. It is already in a form tailored for non-scientists—albeit, non-scientists with a will to understand the science and the policy implications of the science. It lays out explicitly the criteria for references to the report. And yet, someone comes along and kicks the bucket over and says "nuh-uh! you didn't play by the rules!" Only... they did play by the rules.

The IPCC should certainly be out there defending what the report says, because the IPCC is a public policy body. But it's absolutely reasonable for them to say "Look, we did exactly what we said we did, and you're wrong when you claim otherwise. Read appendix A. Think about what you're saying. Come back when you have some actual well-founded criticisms, and we can talk more." At least, it ought to be.

Of course, they can't do that. Because at the point that that this "audit" was done, it became a political issue, and it's now a matter of politics, not science. Why? Because the audit is a political argument, not a scientific one, no matter what the claim. It was not done for the purpose of improving the scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change, it was done for the purpose of altering the public policy choices made by politicians—to discredit the scientific report in order to make people less willing to consider the public policy recommendations in the report.

In fact, this kind of claim isn't even directed at the policy makers themselves, it's directed at the people, in order to create public uproar directly opposing the recommendations in the report.

The science will continue right on trucking, while the politicians hash things out. And those who understand what the science says will gnash their teeth and pray that whatever tiny amount of the policy suggestions makes it through that gauntlet is enough to help, at least a little bit.

Is that sad? Yes, quite. But you can't fight a political fight on scientific grounds, because the science doesn't change just because somebody wants to whine about it. And you can't convince enraged people by showing them scientific facts if they're happy to ignore them for political reasons.

That's the catch, the part that no one seems to remember in the high-minded part of the discussion. There are many voices whose goal is simply to oppose the message, because it threatens them financially. It's fine to talk about how to deal with journalists who misinterpret something, but then what about the institutes and web sites and "experts" who are actively lying about the topic? Their voice is huge in this debate, I'd argue even more influential than the science itself on public opinion.

And the science is losing. If we want to reverse that, we have to deal not with getting the message out clearly, but also counteracting lies. And that's a much harder proposition.

Depends on how you look at it Robear. I would say crucial, over all else if getting science back into schools. The religious right has waged a successful 40 year campaign. And it has culminated on school boards in Arizona, Texas being run by young earth creationists. A president pushing false climate reports, and shouting down USGS data. To our current medical crisis surrounding vaccinations.

The saving grace of studlents getting actual science education at the college level can only do so much; and does little to change attitudes.

Problem is, I know a number of intelligent Fundamentalists and Evangelicals with college degrees in engineering, math and the like who simply have a blind spot when it comes to evolution, climate change, gender identity, or any other scientific results that disagree with their worldview. They've looked at the evidence, and looked at the lies, and they prefer the lies to the science because they are comforting and plausible. They usually explain this by offering up their own "science" or a mixed bag of conspiracy theories and outdated or unsupported hypotheses.

Heck, I know a nuclear engineer who doesn't accept that there are meaningful positive feedbacks in the climate system, much less that man could affect the climate. This is because he believes that CO2 can only warm the atmosphere in proportion to it's volume and it's ability to directly store heat. This allows him to believe that global warming is not happening. Why does he want to believe that? Because he feels that humans can't actually *change* the Earth on a global scale, no matter what we do.

He's got a doctorate in engineering. Clearly, education is no panacea. It helps, but only if people *use* it. But when you believe in a power superior to Man, that means that anything that comes from Man and contradicts what you *think* about that superior power is actually, well, wrong. It must be, because if the choice is between Man being wrong, and God, guess who wins?

There's a cultural and social dimension to the problem, as well as education.

Why is it always engineers?

I think more that better science education will create a larger preponderance of people who understand and trust in science over religion, or new age medicine, etc. And that is carried out by statistics the world over. As level of education increases, less religious belief, higher trust in science, in technology. By and large there are not many people with post secondary degrees and beyond thinking the MMR causes Autism, when they look at the science with a degree of understanding.

If you break up the ignorance echo chamber, a lot is bound to improve.

I agree with that, certainly.

Robear wrote:

Heck, I know a nuclear engineer who doesn't accept that there are meaningful positive feedbacks in the climate system, much less that man could affect the climate. This is because he believes that CO2 can only warm the atmosphere in proportion to it's volume and it's ability to directly store heat. This allows him to believe that global warming is not happening. Why does he want to believe that? Because he feels that humans can't actually *change* the Earth on a global scale, no matter what we do.

I still remember vividly the day I as a bright-eyed young lad had that argument sprung on me. It was getting a bucket of ice-cold willfull ignorance to the face. It never ceases to baffle me that people can say that with a straight face.

As a nuclear engineer, how does he respond to the global thermonuclear war argument?

Eh? His degree is in fusion power technologies, not bombs.

Robear wrote:

Eh? His degree is in fusion power technologies, not bombs.

Sorry, that was probably more than a bit opaque.

To clarify, I usually counter the "man can't affect the climate, period" argument by asking people if they think the climate would be unaffected by detonation of the world's nuclear arsenal as well. It tends to get people to backpedal from that categorical claim. I was just wondering if you'd tried that argument on him, and if he's got some wacky rationale for his response, given that as a nuclear engineer he should have a slightly deeper understanging of the forces involved than the average layperson.

It tends to get people to backpedal from that categorical claim.

The American reaction would be along the lines of "There's nothing we do in our normal life that would be of the same magnitude as global thermonuclear war - surely you're not suggesting that we're living today in a nuclear holocaust equivalent? Because if we *were* affecting the world climate, it would be a lot more obvious, and scientists would not have to fake their data to convince us." It would be taken as hyperbole.

I also expected he'd put more credit in peer review, but his main source of information is a web page written by a mining safety engineer that gets just about everything wrong and is years out of date. He regards that as "plausible math", so anything that disagrees with it is questionable. It's weird and frustrating.