“Do your pupils have an energy gap?”

The Big Bang Fair, a big science and engineering event for schoolkids was held in Birmingham last month. Led by Engineering UK and supported by various government departments, charities, learned societies and businesses, it’s an annual event that’s been going for a while. They seem to have taken down the list of 2012 sponsors, but you can see a list of the 2011 ones in this leaflet (pdf), which included BAE Systems, Shell, EDF Energy and Sellafield Ltd.

Seeing as some of these firms are perhaps only too expert in making extremely big bangs, it’s upset a few people. Check out the BAE wikipedia entry, ‘products’ subheading if you don’t get why.

Anne Schulthess from CND happened to be at another education show in Birmingham that week and spotting the Big Bang, dropped in. She shared some photos, noting “basically it’s the arms fair for children. With a bit of environmental destruction thrown in for good measure”. Back in 2009, Scientists for Global Responsibility and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade condemned BAE’s role in the event (SGR/CAAT press release, reproduced on my old blog). I’d be tempted to suggest one of these groups try to set up a stall at the fair next year but even if Engineering UK let them, the £20,000 to £100,000 pricetag might well be out of the budget of a small NGO.

Industrial involvement in science education is nothing new. Take, for example, these adverts I found in some old copies of the National Association for Environmental Education’s magazine (c. 1978):

The Science Museum have a fair bit of history here: from the BNFL sponsored atomic gallery in the 1980s to Shell sponsorship of their climate gallery in 2010 (see also this 2008 freedom of information request on Shell and BP funding). I used to work on their Energy gallery, and it’d be depressing to watch visitors clock the BP logo, laugh and walk away.

I worry when I see reports that the Smithsonian were so pleased to have secured a sponsor that was ok with the idea of evolution that they let a bit of not very scientific attitude to climate change in (e.g. see ThinkProgress, 2010). I also worry when I hear about teaching resources designed to stress the uncertainty of climate change (e.g. see Guardian, 2012). I can see why groups like Liberate Tate focus on the corporate sponsorship of art and Greenpeace scale the National Gallery, but I worry slightly more about the involvement of the oil industry in exhibitions where their work is an actual topic in the content.

We should be careful of simply assuming corporate sponsorship means they have influence on content. Science Museum staff claim editorial independence from any of their sponsors. Just as, I noticed, the Guardian stresses Greenpeace had no say over editorial content of John Vidal’s report on industrial fishing in West Africa, even though the NGO paid his travel costs to Senegal. We should also recognise that there is a lot of scientific expertise in industry, just as Greenpeace give Vidal access to places he wouldn’t otherwise see. Science isn’t just a matter of what goes on in ivory towers, so perhaps it’s only right that such groups involved. Plus, seeing as people don’t seem to want to pay fees or taxes for publicly funded science communication, maybe it’s only sensible the Science Museum et al ask groups who’ve made a lot of money out of science and technology give something back. We can’t just rely on moneybags of the Wellcome Trust (which has its own complex economic history anyway).

As I’ve argued before, if businesses are going to have involvement in science education, I want to see what they think, warts and all. If groups like the Science Museum really have editorial control, they should take industrial sponsorship only if the company involved will also (a) give them their expertise, and (b) be happy for said expertise to be put under some scrutiny. Rather than retreat behind claims to scientific objectivity, science communication should wear it’s political fights on its sleeve, show science’s various institutional connections for what they really are. These sorts of debates are part of science in society and should be offered up and opened up for broader public discussion, appreciation and scrutiny.

I’ve worked with a load of instituions in science communication, from Girl Guiding UK to the Royal Society, with a fair bit of industrial sponsorship thrown in at times too. This included stints at CND, Mind and the Science Museum while I was still in my teens. For that reason, I don’t think we should be scared about opening up debate on the politics of science at educational events aimed at schoolkids like the Big Bang Fair. I coped with these issues and think others can too. We should show them BAE, but make sure they get a group like SGR along to help offer other sides too. We should trust young people more when it comes to the messiness of science in society.

Is science media just about selling us stuff?

Last month, I chaired a debate at the Royal Institution exploring the different expectations scientists and journalists have for science media. I was asked to write up my notes for the Guardian science blog, and picked out three questions from the many we discussed on the night.

1. Is climate change a qualitatively different issue from more general questions about science in the media? Any area of science is different from another: we should be careful of talking about science as if it were a cohesive whole, just as we should be careful of lumping together the whole of ‘the media’ too. Still, I think there is a lot to be said for taking time to consider what it is precisely about climate science that distinguishes it. As Joe Smith argued recently, the topic is rather a hard sell for the media: “Climate change science is looking at the long term, slow moving, run through with uncertainty and is […] at least for the foreseeable future, unfinishable. It represents one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of our time. It is our moonshot.” I’d add that it’s also a young science in many ways, it doesn’t have the same sort of political and cultural infrastructure of quantum physics or human genetics. You’d probably have to be in your early 30s or younger to have done much climate science at school. In a more cynical mode, I’d also posit the suggestion that climate change, unlike other science media issues like GMOs, nanotech or BSE, isn’t about selling us products – quite the opposite, arguably – and that might explain a certain lack of political will when it comes to supporting public communications work.

2. How do we ensure science news is reported in the public interest? I was pleased to hear the topic of the public interest raised, and it’s a topical one in the UK as we consider a possible replacement for our Press Complaints Commission (e.g. see the Wellcome/CRUK submission to Leveson, pdf). Still, I worried that the discussion of the public seemed to end here. I wanted to hear more about opening up science media to involve audiences, a sense of the public as a resource not simply an audience to be protected and looked after. Such work doesn’t have to be a matter of ignoring scientific or journalistic professional expertise and skills, just doing things in public to open the conversation a bit (Leo Hickman’s EcoAudit is a lovely example of this).

3. Should journalists read the scientific papers they write about? This question had caused a fair bit of fuss on the night, and was later explored in detail in a great post from James Randerson. I couldn’t help but think it was a bit of a distraction though: it’s the notion of a scientific paper that’s the problem, not journalists. A paper really isn’t the most efficient way of sharing scholarship, is it? I’m slightly cynical change here is possible, I suspect the publishing industry is too powerful for meaningful change.

(I admit I was in a rather cynical mood that night)

Overall, I left the event at the RI, not for the first time, worried that if we leave science media to commercial intersets that surround science rather than paying for a newspaper, museum exhibition or public funding via taxes, then too much of the public debate on these issues end up bankrolled by those with an interest in selling us stuff. Advertisers. Sponsors. Tobacco. Oil. Supermarkets. The arms trade. Science that doesn’t sell us stuff – or tells us not to buy – gets quietened. I don’t want to suggest that if commercial interests are involved in science communication the work becomes somehow invalid (I’ve worked on sponsored science communication myself) but it is something to keep our eyes on. I recently re-read a paper by Charles Thorpe and Jane Gregory which takes a critical look at increased moves to public participation in science alongside commercial exploitation of scientific knowledge. That paper’s open access, but not the easiest read if you’re not of a sociological persuasion. If pragmatic examples are more your thing, it’s worth reading up on Brian Wynne’s resignation from a Food Standards Agency steering group or perhaps Gaia Vince’s story of when SEED magazine spiked one of her articles because it was critical of a potential advertiser on advertisers.

For me, a lot of this boils down to a lack of public debate over political and commercial of science itself, not just who pays for science museum exhibitions or advertises in science magazines. I think there should be more public discussion of science policy. We shouldn’t just be having debates about whether scientists and journalists have different views over what counts as “good” science media – or if this frame mises out the role of press officers or the public – but how we might involve policy makers and political activists more productively in the conversation too.

I can see why people worry if and how science media can clearly communicate scientific knowledge, but it should also open up questions about how science is made and what we want to do with it too. Here’s my final question: how can science media more effectively discuss commercial interests of science, rather than just being constrained by them?

Finding new stories for climate science

Stained Glass Window at Royal Society.

Joe Smith has written a blogpost about climate science in the media based on his contribution to a debate at Imperial I ran last month. Smith suggests climate science is a bad fit for the mass media: too slow moving, too complex, too uncertain. Journalists try to spice things up and so reach for shouty, two-sided debates. To Smith, this is understandable though. Rather than complaining that the media gets things wrong, he says climate science needs to offer new, better stories.

Smith’s post comes in the wake of the interesting possibility of a new climate story: last week’s reports of leaked documents purporting to shine a light on the funding and public communication policies of the Heartland Institute. As Bob Ward notes, writing for the New Scientist, labels like “deniergate” and “scepticgate” are being passed around, as in many ways it seems to echo “climategate”. As Republicans for Environmental Protection put it in their press release at the weekend, it does feel like “the shoe is on the other foot”.

I suspect Smith would say the scepticgate line is too much of a riff on the same old tune. It hasn’t really sparked much as a news story, perhaps for similar reasons that the so-called “Climategate2” release didn’t make a huge dent in the news last year: a bit geeky, a bit obscure, a bit more of the bloody same. As Richard Black puts it, his BBC report on the topic is “for anyone who doesn’t spend every week up to their waists in the ordure of climate politics”, the implication being most of his readers wouldn’t have been keeping track. It feels ever so slightly like a really bad sequel. Climategate, glaciergate, climategate2, now scepticgate, deniergate and, according to the latest Heartland press release, fakegate. It’s all a bit like a parody of the sequel to a sequel of a horror movie which in itself was a parody in the first place. Which isn’t to deny the importance of any of the politics or science behind any of these -gates. It’s just that I can understand why the mainstream media haven’t covered the latest episode much.

I also think it’s interesting that, according to Spiegel, the author of a new German book arguing that an impending climate catastrophe is misleading justifies his work as an attempt to “revitalize the deadlocked debate.” Lots of people want to reframe climate communications, they just want to do it on their own terms. And some people find it easier to frame such debates than others. Simply, some voices are louder than others. This, for me, is why the Heartland story is so important. The truth of the allegations (or even truth of climate change) is almost irrelevant here: the key question is whether money and political connections gets your personal view on environmental politics more attention than it necessarily should.

When it comes to offering new stories, I sometimes wonder if climate science is especially badly served in terms of public relations compared to other areas of science. Smith talks about a time he sat next to someone from the IPCC press office at a conference and realised “to my horror that I was sitting next to almost all of the IPCC press office…”. Maybe climate science need to take a leaf out of high energy physics, poach some of the CERN communications team perhaps? Or maybe it’s unfair to compare climate science with high energy physics. Maybe more PR in climate science would just add to criticisms of spin. Maybe we need something else.

Personally, I think that if we’re looking to break any deadlock in climate communications we need to diversify. Instead of focusing on what scientists, politicians and television executives have to say to the public, I prefer a model of inviting people to be part of the ongoing process of learning about our changing climate and thinking about what we might do about it. As Matt Nisbet puts it, “scientists are better off as community-based diplomats than cable news and blogosphere culture warriors”. Go, count hedgehogs or spot contrails. Share and debate science as you do it. Let’s see what new stories we might unearth together.

Identifying arguments in climate science

George Bush used to say, in his generous way, that the science [of climate change] is uncertain. But it’s an almost content free statement because science is about uncertainty.

Lord Oxburgh FRS, Imperial College, 30th January 2012.

That quote comes from a debate on climate science in the mass media we held at Imperial last week, part of the pilot science in context course I’m working on. You can find a podcast of the debate at the college media site.

Oxburgh chaired the event, with a panel comprising of Louise Gray (Environment Correspondent, Telegraph), James Randerson (Environment and Science News Editor, Guardian), James Painter (Reuters Institute, University of Oxford) and Joe Smith (Open University), along with questions from our undergraduates.

A couple of students and tutors later told me they felt the panelists were too similar, that there wasn’t enough ‘debate’ and they’d have liked to see a climate sceptic. I take that point, but also disagree with it. There was, if you listen carefully, a fair bit of diversity within the discussion. It wasn’t one side vs. the other, and just because the panellists tended to be polite and smile and nod at each other didn’t mean they were all coming from the same position.

It’s worth reflecting on how we identify a ‘debate’ here. Debates do not always have to be a battle of two opposing views. Personally, I’d say that’s often the least productive sort of debate you can have. They can also just be a group of people playing with a particular issue; a matter of chatting to gradually identify problems and reflect on possible answers. Indeed, this question of how we structure and spot the debate within climate science was a key topic of this particular event, as it was in our previous class, with Brian Hoskins.

James Painter started things off by stressing there are many types of uncertainty involved in the public discussion of climate change, including many types of scepticism: ‘there are many ways you can question and be uncertain about climate science’. Drawing on his Poles Apart report, he suggested four types: people who are sceptical that global warming is happening, those who a sceptical that it is due to human action, those who are sceptical about aspects of climate change’s impact and people who are sceptical about specific policies.

James Randerson followed with a different track, noting the stretch of the issue with reference to an extraordinary letter to the Guardian from the medical community, calling for more transparently on climate lobbyists. Louise Gray offered another topical case study: the diversity of coverage of a recent UK government report on the impacts of climate change to the UK: the Guardian focused on the burden to poor where as the Telegraph noted possible opportunities for the tourist industry (you can google for yourself to see what the Mail said). As Gray argued, newspapers will have different frames for how they read climate news based on the editors’ ideas of their customers, a point underlined by Joe Smith later when he stressed the way we all bring our own cultural ‘baggage’ to climate change debates, and plugging Mike Hulme’s book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change. 

For his presentation, Joe Smith argued that in many ways climate science makes for a rubbish story in the mass media. There is simply too much of a consensus: too many of the experts agree, what really is there to report? He said he used to think the consensus on climate change was a good thing, but it does make it unreportably dull, which is why the contrarian views get pulled in, to liven it up. There isn’t enough of an edge, maybe we need more of an edge? Gray echoed this in discussion, saying we should pay attention to more of the ‘dodgy things’ going on around climate change – subsidies, inefficiencies of NGOs – that the real stories are less about sceptic vs non-sceptic and more about who is doing the right thing, how and when. Randerson and Oxburgh seemed slightly more cautious of Smith’s call for more arguments, laughing ‘careful what you wish for’ and noting the ways a stronger sense of disagreement plays in the US and Australia. I wonder if that misses Smith and Gray’s point though, which to me was more of a call to open up the political edginess of climate change policy. It was about the disagreements at the end of Painter’s typology of sceptics: debate over what to do about climate change, not whether it is happening or why.

For me, this was summed up in a comment from Gray near the end of the evening: ‘there’s a lot of heat and fire around a few sceptical people, but maybe that is the wrong focus’.

Maybe you disagree though.

Debating climate science

I’m currently working on the pilot for an exciting new undergrad course at Imperial which uses science policy issues to challenge students to think about a range of areas of scientific research (not just their degree stream) and put this in some social, political, ethical, epistemological and cultural context. The topic we’ve picked for the pilot is climate change, so we kicked things off this week with a keynote lecture from Brian Hoskins (EDIT 31/1: listen to a podcast of the lecture) Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, and one of the most striking things he said was that he tries to avoid agreeing to take part in debates.

I don’t think he was necessarily against either scientific discussion or democratic engagement. It was more than he didn’t feel climate science could be communicated well via a structure which pits one extreme view up against another. He happened to use the example of the Today Programme putting Nigel Lawson up against a climate scientist and coincidentally, Lawson popped up on Today the following morning. This was a debate on shale gas and he was debating Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth, not a Professor of Meteorology, but in many respects it’s a good example of the problem Sir Brian was flagging up. You can have a listen to the interview yourself on the BBC’s website. The interviewer didn’t challenge Lawson’s views as much as many would have wanted, but perhaps you agree that this is appropriate (the Daily Express seem to). Perhaps more straightforwardly, Today could have challenged Lawson on the motivations of his Global Warming Policy Foundation (see this report of a recent campaign on this, and an older post by Bob Ward). Which they did not. My personal position is that providing that sort of context, if not an outright challenge to Lawson, would be basic active journalism. I also think it makes him a slightly suspect choice, though I’m sure some people might say the same about Juniper.

The issue of “false balance” – where a marginal view is put up against scientific consensus as if they were equivalent – is something the BBC has been accused of before (recent BMJ editorial on this). Although it is also worth stressing that empirical research undertaken at Imperial College last year found that, if anything, the problem was lack of context, number and diversity of voices in science reports. Too often there simply weren’t enough people interviewed for balance to be an issue (old post from me when the report was published outlining this). With this in mind, I thought it was odd that although Today did also produce a longer package which gave more context and several other voices, this was broadcast over an hour before. Why not put this with the Lawson/ Juniper interview?

This isn’t just a UK issue (although it might be an English Language one). Earlier this week the Knight Science Journalism Tracker summed up US and Australian coverage of a similar story which they dubbed “the fracking duel“, noting the appeal of an apparent fight for the news business.

On the topic of how and if we can debate climate science, it’s probably worth reading Naomi Oreskes’ recent oped for the LA Times – “The verdict is in on climate change” – where she argues for leadership not debate when it comes to climate change, suggesting it’s unfair to expect the public to make up their own minds. You might also be interested in a recent interview with climate scientist Micheal Mann where he warns that “Scientists have to recognise that they are in a street fight”. I don’t think what Mann suggests is the same as the issue of being set up in a polarised debate, but his view is something to think about along side the others.

A version of this is cross-posted to the Imperial Horizon’s blog. Something I left off there, but worth flagging up is that I noticed Brian Hoskins’ name in the list of attendees at the ‘Chemistry Club’ exclusive networking events for corporate lobbyists (see Guardian datablog). At least when the Today Programme invite Nigel Lawson to debate a Fellow of the Royal Society, we can all listen in.