UK’s chief scientist: ‘be intolerant of pseudo-science’ Was he thinking about climate?
At a speech given earlier in the month, John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientific advisor, gets annoyed about ‘pseudo-science’:
“We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality… We are not – and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this – grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method.”
“One way is to be completely intolerant of this nonsense,” he said. “That we don’t kind of shrug it off. We don’t say: ‘oh, it’s the media’ or ‘oh they would say that wouldn’t they?’ I think we really need, as a scientific community-and this is a very important scientific community-to think about how we do it.”
Beddington said that he intends to take this agenda forward with his fellow chief scientists and also with the research councils. “I really believe that. . . we need to recognise that that is a pernicious influence, it is an increasingly pernicious influence and we need to be thinking about how we can actually deal with it.”
It doesn’t seem impossible that ‘discussion’ around climate change, where well established scientific knowledge is routinely obscured, misrepresented or ignored, might have been on Beddington’s mind.
Beddington also had harsh words for journalists who treat the opinions of non-scientist commentators as being equivalent to the opinions of what he called “properly trained, properly assessed” scientists. “The media see the discussions about really important scientific events as if it’s a bloody football match. It is ridiculous.”
Could he have been thinking about the media scrum over the climategate emails?
Whatever you think of the cry to ‘be more intolerant’, it’s encouraging that he’s focused on figuring out how scientists and the research community can get to grips with this issue.
There have been some recent developments where scientists have tried to address misinformation on climate – the US-based Climate Science Rapid Response Team springs to mind, where scientists are hooked up with journalists to provide specialised support for climate science stories. But these are quite limited in scope.
Until scientists believe more generally that ‘pseudo-science’ is a real problem in relation to important issues like climate, we’re probably not going to see them stepping forward to communicate their expertise – and rebut nonsense – on a wider scale.
In closing, Beddington said: “I’d urge you-and this is a kind of strange message to go out-but go out and be much more intolerant.” He asked his audience to forgive him for what appear to have been unscripted remarks, adding: “But it is a thing that has been very much at the forefront of my mind over the last few months and I think we need to do it.”
Read the original article is at Research Professional. Link via @bengoldacre