IMPURITIES OF POLITICS CAN DILUTE SCIENTIFIC CREDIBILITY

March 1, 2003

Scientists have as much right to their political opinions as anybody else, but the fact that they're scientists doesn't make their political opinions any more credible than anybody else's.

The same is true of entertainers, of course, except that scientists as a rule are smart enough to understand the point, and therefore subject to the temptation to present what are essentially political views as if they were purely scientific.

The danger is that scientists may cry wolf so often, only to be revealed as political sheep -- remind me, is it nuclear winter or global warming that threatens us? -- that they destroy their credibility to speak as scientists.

That was the theme of a panel at the recent convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver. Roger A. Pielke Jr. of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder organized the session, titled "The Politicization of Science: Learning from the Lomborg Affair."

The title refers to the uproar over Bjorn Lomborg's highly successful book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Lomborg is an optimist, but he's not a cock-eyed optimist. His obsessively researched book documents significant improvements in a great many environmental indicators over the past several decades, while acknowledging how much remains to be done. And he focuses on the social and political context of the debate, especially the media preference for gloom and doom over even a modest measure of good news.

The book evoked a ferocious response from environmental groups -- and scientists -- concerned that the book would be put to political uses. For instance, Pielke quoted Lisa Sorenson, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who said, "This book is going to be misused terribly by interests opposed to a clean energy policy."

It's no surprise that advocacy groups worry about other people politicizing science; because that's what they do themselves, either because they genuinely believe in gloom and doom, or because their continued influence and fund-raising prowess depend on it.

And it's no surprise either that politicians politicize science. Pielke gave as an example the political "stacking" of science advisory panels by the administration. But if that's problematic, as he believes it is, he asks, "should it not also follow that it is problematic when scientists themselves seek to politicize science?"

That's what has happened in Lomborg's case, Pielke believes. The magazine Scientific American published several articles denouncing the book and its author as unscientific. An obscure part of the Danish Research Agency called the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty picked up the Scientific American critique, and used it to condemn the book (Lomborg has links to the entire controversy on his website, Lomborg.com, under critiques).

But the Danish agency ran into a problem, one that Pielke identifies as a Catch-22. If the book is not science but something else -- a political polemic, say -- then scientists acting as scientists have no more standing to criticize its politics than anybody else. So they have to claim that the book is science and their objections are scientific objections. But if that's the case, the possibility that it may be misused by politicians is ruled out of the discussion.

A vexing dilemma, which the agency solved with this tortured conclusion: "Subject to the proviso that the book is to be evaluated as science, there has been such perversion of the scientific message in the form of systematically biased representation that the objective criteria for upholding scientific dishonestly have been met."

That is, it is accusing Lomborg of unintentional dishonesty, and speaking objectively, that's nonsense. It's pleasing to know that the agency itself is now under investigation, as Nature reported in its Feb. 13 issue.

Pielke summed up several risks when scientists become political advocates. One is that it leads politicians to think turning science into a tool for politics is standard procedure for scientists, so there's no reason why the politicians shouldn't do the same. Another is that it leads the public to think that scientists are primarily advocates.

It damages the credibility of scientists when they speak on policy issues on which they have previously taken a political position. Potentially, it splits the scientific community into partisan factions, as seems to have happened with discussion of climate change and the extent to which human activity is a cause. The existence of factions, he thinks, tends to increase "politically-driven science focused on supporting particular positions on contentious topics."

Of course scientists have political opinions. They just shouldn't try to disguise them as science.