Michael Grubb, sobre ciencia, comunicación y fake news

Michael Grubb reflexiona sobre el papel de la ciencia en la sociedad, a resultas de una mala interpretación de su trabajo. Y es que, efectivamente, la ciencia bien hecha, con honestidad intelectual y por tanto reflejando bien todas las limitaciones de la misma, tiene difícil encaje en este mundo en el que lo que prima es el titular y los mensajes sencillotes y demagógicos. Esto no es necesariamente nuevo, sólo hay que recordar lo de Truman pidiendo un economista con una sola mano... pero sí es cierto que en estos tiempos se magnifica el problema.

Aquí va su conclusión: parte de nuestro trabajo es educar a la sociedad sobre la incertidumbre y cómo gestionarla.

So how should science respond? The climate policy implications are easy: nothing significant has changed. We have but one planet, and both the physical and economic processes that are driving climate change have enormous inertia. If a big ocean liner were steaming into dense fog in polar seas, only a fool would maintain full speed on the basis that the technicians were still discussing the distance to the first big iceberg.
One underlying challenge is indeed around the communication of uncertainty. This is a well-worn track, but it bears repeating. The job of science is not just to narrow uncertainties, but to educate about the risks that flow logically from it. Like a medical prognosis from smoking, the fact that things might turn out better or worse than the average is not a good reason to keep puffing. You won’t know until it is too late whether the damage has been slight, or terminal.
But science also needs to embrace and embed another obvious feature of medical practice: a doctor would never look at just your temperature to diagnose your condition. So part of the problem stems from using a single indicator for complex processes. Too much debate treats temperature (and especially the most recent global average) as the sole indicator, whereas many other factors are at play including sea levels, ocean acidity, ice sheets, ecosystem trends, and many more.
These other trends need to be reported in context, just as economics news reports not only GDP but debt, employment, inflation, productivity and a host of other indicators. And scientists themselves need to improve the art of communication in a world where research can be spun, within hours, into a story of past failure, rather than the reality of continuous improvement.