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Their Own Worst Enemies
Why scientists are losing the PR wars.
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
Published Mar 18, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Mar 29, 2010
It's a safe bet that the millions of Americans who have recently changed their minds
about global warming—deciding it isn't happening, or isn't due to human activities such
as burning coal and oil, or isn't a serious threat—didn't just spend an intense few days
poring over climate-change studies and decide, holy cow, the discretization of continuous
equations in general circulation models is completely wrong! Instead, the backlash (an
18-point rise since 2006 in the percentage who say the risk of climate change is
exaggerated, Gallup found this month) has been stoked by scientists' abysmal
communication skills, plus some peculiarly American attitudes, both brought into play
now by how critics have spun the "Climategate" e-mails to make it seem as if scientists
have pulled a fast one.
Scientists are lousy communicators. They appeal to people's heads, not their hearts or
guts, argues Randy Olson, who left a professorship in marine biology to make science
films. "Scientists think of themselves as guardians of truth," he says. "Once they have
spewed it out, they feel the burden is on the audience to understand it" and agree.
That may work if the topic is something with no emotional content, such as how black
holes form, but since climate change and how to address it make people feel threatened,
that arrogance is a disaster. Yet just as smarter-than-thou condescension happens time
after time in debates between evolutionary biologists and proponents of intelligent design
(the latter almost always win), now it's happening with climate change. In his 2009 book,
Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style, Olson recounts a 2007
debate where a scientist contending that global warming is a crisis said his opponents
failed to argue in a way "that the people here will understand." His sophisticated,
educated Manhattan audience groaned and, thoroughly insulted, voted that the "not a
crisis" side won.
Like evolutionary biologists before them, climate scientists also have failed to master
"truthiness" (thank you, Stephen Colbert), which their opponents—climate deniers and
creationists—wield like a shiv. They say the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
is a political, not a scientific, organization; a climate mafia (like evolutionary biologists)
keeps contrarian papers out of the top journals; Washington got two feet of snow, and
you say the world is warming?
There is less backlash against climate science in Europe and Japan, and the U.S. is 33rd
out of 34 developed countries in the percentage of adults who agree that species,
including humans, evolved. That suggests there is something peculiarly American about
the rejection of science. Charles Harper, a devout Christian who for years ran the
program bridging science and faith at the Templeton Foundation and who has had more
than his share of arguments with people who view science as the Devil's spawn, has some
hypotheses about why that is. "In America, people do not bow to authority the way they
do in England," he says. "When the lumpenproletariat are told they have to think in a
certain way, there is a backlash," as with climate science now and, never-endingly, with
evolution. (Harper, who studied planetary atmospheres before leaving science, calls
climate scientists "a smug community of true believers.")
Another factor is that the ideas of the Reformation—no intermediaries between people
and God; anyone can read the Bible and know the truth as well as a theologian—inform
the American character more strongly than they do that of many other nations. "It's the
idea that everyone has equal access to the divine," says Harper. That has been extended to
the belief that anyone with an Internet connection can know as much about climate or
evolution as an expert. Finally, Americans carry in their bones the country's history of
being populated by emigrants fed up with hierarchy. It is the American way to distrust
those who set themselves up—even justifiably—as authorities. Presto: climate backlash.
One new factor is also at work: the growing belief in the wisdom of crowds (Wikis,
polling the audience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire). If tweeting for advice on the
best route somewhere yields the right answer, Americans seem to have decided, it doesn't
take any special expertise to pick apart evolutionary biology or climate science. My final
hypothesis: the Great Recession was caused by the smartest guys in the room saying,
trust us, we understand how credit default swaps work, and they're great. No wonder so
many Americans have decided that experts are idiots.
Sharon Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor and author of Train Your Mind, Change
Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform
Ourselves.
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/235084
© 2010