“When to shoot down… bad work and when to ignore it.”

Andrew Gelman recounts a call he got from a journalist about a pretty shoddy looking study, examines the dilemma that journalists face in deciding what to write about, and then nicely ties this to the dilemma that editors face in deciding what studies to publish:

“The problem, as I see it, is when a claim presented with (essentially) no evidence is taken as truth and then treated as a stylized fact. And the norms of scientific publication, as well as the norms of science journalism, push toward this. If you act too uncertain in your scientific report, I think it becomes harder to get it published in a top journal (after all, they want to present ‘discoveries,’ not ‘speculations’). And science journalism often seems to follow the researcher-as-Galileo mold.”

How many journalists call up a respected skeptical scientist to get a take on a potential story before writing the story?  How many ignore the skeptic because it takes the fun or the fear out of the story?

“We can’t pretend that things are more certain than they are.”

In a speech at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, David Victor delivers a thoughtful critique of how climate science is discussed in the public sphere:

“First, we in the scientific community need to acknowledge that the science is softer than we like to portray. The science is not ‘in’ on climate change because we are dealing with a complex system whose full properties are, with current methods, unknowable. The science is ‘in’ on the first steps in the analysis—historical emissions, concentrations, and brute force radiative balance—but not for the steps that actually matter for policy. Those include impacts, ease of adaptation, mitigation of emissions and such—are surrounded by error and uncertainty. I can understand why a politician says the science is settled—as Barack Obama did…in the State of the Union Address, where he said the ‘debate is over’—because if your mission is to create a political momentum then it helps to brand the other side as a ‘Flat Earth Society’ (as he did last June). But in the scientific community we can’t pretend that things are more certain than they are.

Second, under pressure from denialists we in the scientific community have spent too much time talking about consensus. That approach leads us down a path that, at the end, is fundamentally unscientific and might even make us more vulnerable to attack, including attack from our own. The most interesting advances in climate science concern areas where there is no consensus but the consequences for humanity are grave, such as the possibility of extreme catastrophic impacts. We should talk less about consensus and more about the consequences of being wrong—about the lower probability (or low consensus) but high consequence outcomes. Across a large number of climate impacts the tails on the distributions seem to be getting longer, and for policy makers that should be a call for more action, not less. But people don’t really understand that, and we in the scientific community haven’t helped much because we are focused on the consensus-prone medians rather than the tails.”

HT Judith Curry and Dot Earth.