Assyntk's List: Communicating science

• What emerges is that leading researchers have been subjected to sometimes brutal attacks by outsiders and become bogged down in a bitter and far-reaching trench war that has also sucked in the media, environmental groups and politicians.
• It all started in 1986, when German physicists issued a dramatic public appeal, the first of its kind. They warned about what they saw as a "climatic disaster." However, their avowed goal was to promote nuclear power over carbon dioxide-belching coal-fired power stations.
• there was certainly clear scientific evidence of a dangerous increase in temperatures, prompting the United Nations to form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988
• the idea didn't take hold in the United States until the country was hit by an unusually severe drought in the summer of 1988. Politicians in Congress used the dry spell to listen to NASA scientist James Hansen, who had been publishing articles in trade journals for years warning about the threat of man-made climate change.
• Global Climate Science Team, a crude-oil lobby group, "Victory will be achieved when average citizens recognize uncertainties in climate science." In the meantime, scientists found themselves on the defensive, having to convince the public time and again that their warnings were indeed well-founded.
• A dangerous dynamic had been set in motion:
• Out of fear that their opponents could take advantage of ambiguous findings, many researchers tried to simply hide the weaknesses of their findings from the public.
• In 1991, the Information Council on the Environment (ICE) issued a strategy paper aimed at what it called "less-educated people." This proposed a campaign that would "reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)."
• the lobbyists had less success on the international stage. In 1997, the international community agreed on the first-ever climate protection treaty: the Kyoto Protocol. "Scientists had issued a warning, the media amplified it and the politicians reacted," recalls Peter Weingart, a science sociologist at Bielefeld University in Germany, who researched the climate debate.
• some scientists began getting too cozy with environmental organizations
• In August 1997, Greenpeace sent a letter to The Times newspaper in London, appealing on behalf of British researchers. All the climatologists had to do was sign on the dotted line. In October of that year, other climate researchers -- ostensibly acting on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF --

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• Climate researchers are now engaged in a debate about whether their science is being crippled by a compulsion to conform. They wonder if pressure to reach a consensus is too great. They ask if criticism is being suppressed. No less is at stake than the credibility of research evidence for climate change and the very question of whether climate research is still reliable.
• "The problem is their anti-science agenda, clearly illustrated by the fact that they refused point blank to submit their recent report criticizing the IPCC 5th Assessment Report to the same kind of open peer review that the IPCC report was itself subjected to."
• Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado and professor long critical of the politicization of the climate debate, says the group uses science to cloak its political agenda
• stealth advocacy -- hiding its politics in science -- a strategy common across the climate issue, found on all 'sides,' and is pretty common across many issues.
• Bengtsson's justifications for associating with GWPF are perfectly legitimate. That he was pressured by his peers with social and other sanctions reflects the deeply politicized nature of this issue."
• Roger Pielke Sr., a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado and Pielke Jr.'s father, says, "Unfortunately, climate science has become very politicized and views that differ at all from those in control of the climate assessment process are either ignored or ridiculed. From my experience, I agree 100 percent with the allegations made by the very distinguished Lennart Bengtsson."
• Knutti says
• "If you are on the left politically, you believe in global warming," he says. "If you are on the right, that is much less likely." He adds that the line between opinion and fact is often blurred, even among scientists.

  • Chimes with what Edison said about the public having opinions about relativity except it acknowledges that scientists are no exception!
• Werner Krauss
• He says climate research is dominated by "strongmen" who know how to exploit the media whenever they like. Krauss claims Bengtsson stage managed his move to GWPF in the media and alleges that climate research has fallen into the throes of the scientific equivalent of religious fervor.
• Miller says that scientists were politicized more than anything else by having to seek a consensus on results for the 5th IPCC repor
• who was branded a "climate skeptic" after questioning the scientific validity of computer simulations.

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• A variety of labels have been used to describe citizen science and related forms of public participation in scientific research. Among these, volunteer monitoring, participatory action research, civic science, action science, and community science have been used most often. Each label is specific to a particular set of research disciplines and emphasizes different features of public engagement in science
• Increasingly, the term citizen science is used to refer to all of these variations on scientific collaboration with the public.
• Given the common reliance on technology, citizen science could be viewed as yet another form of Internet-enabled collaboration or peer production, but that would be an oversimplification; part of the appeal of citizen science is its novelty and diversity. Much citizen science could be (and until recently was) successfully conducted in a completely “analog” environment.
• a proliferation of inherently varied collaboration strategies.
• citizen science shares a number of features with other open contribution systems
• an interesting context for studying such wide-ranging topics as participation, distributed citizenship, motivation, sociotechnical controversies, online communities, volunteerism, science learning, science identity, collective action, expertise, socialization, coordination, social and environmental justice, and many more.
• methodological development in areas such as participatory research protocols, high performance computing, dynamic task allocation, ground-referencing remote sensing data, and sophisticated statistical modeling.

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• In their recent Research Policy article, Franzoni and Sauermann refer to this type of amateur science as crowd science. The the term is extremely effective at capturing the underlying mechanics of most citizen science projects, which involve low-threshold-large-scale-participation. Today, participation of volunteers in science is scalable.
• When it comes to data collection, social participation and science communication, citizen science is promising
• Citizen scientists are great data sensors.
• You can go to the Scientific American’s citizen science webpage and search for the word ‘help’ and you will find that out of 15 featured projects, 13 are prefaced help scientists do something. The division of roles between citizens and real scientists is evident. Citizen scientists perform honey bee tasks. The analytic capacity remains with real researchers. Citizen science today is often a twofold euphemism.
• That being said, citizen science is still a win win in terms of data collection and citizen involvement.

  • evidence??
• Timothy Gower’s Polymath Project i

  • Not cs - crowdsourcing. Different!
• The participation is smaller in scale but higher in quality. It resembles Benkler’s commons-based peer production or the collective invention concept from open innovation. The core challenges for this kind of citizen science is to motivate and enable expert volunteers to make a long-term commitment to a scientific problem.

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• Sciencewise was created in 2004 as part of the Science and Society Unit (in the then Department for Trade and Industry). It was intended as a body which could respond to the call in the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s landmark Science and Society report from 2000 to make public dialogue an integral part of science policy-making, rather than merely an add on.
• ‘public dialogue’
• Public dialogues differ from public opinion polling in that they are about giving participants time to develop an understanding of an issue and an appreciation of those who hold opposing views, rather than taking a snap decision.
• a significant expansion in the scale of the Sciencewise programme with the incorporation of the non-profit organisation Involve and the British Science Association,
• The volume of projects and government departments involved has also greatly increased over the past two years, linked to the expansion of the programme and the greater emphasis put on networking across government.
• dovetailing of Sciencewise aims with recent high profile government agendas, such as the push for open policy and the crowdsourcing of policy making pushed by the Cabinet Office and the civil service reform plan, and also the new Government Chief Scientist Mark Walport’s interest in exploring policy decisions through multiple lenses.
• Recent high profile controversies around fracking and the badger cull, suggest that even if the Government is taking public participation more seriously it is not doing enough early on in policy development and it is not always prepared to listen to what citizens say.
• The increasing institutionalisation of public participation has also been met with robust critiques from many of the original academic advocates of increased public involvement
• the significance of the framing
• the power of expert mediators to shape and report
• lack of learning about publics and public engagement in key government and public bodies
• look beyond ‘public dialogue’,

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• inaugural meeting of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science (BSSRS)
• hey aimed to open up the politics of science to both scientific and public scrutiny so it might change and improve.
• By the 1970s, this developed into a series of pub-based seminars on science and politics entitled "Beneath the white coat".
• The Edinburgh branch helped run a huge teach-in on pollution in March 1970 which involved over a thousand people and was reported in both Nature and New Scientist.
• Later editions of Science for People suggest an ongoing critique of the BSA for its lack of vision, even sheep-like, over-deferent "propagandist function"
• pacifism w
• a newer interest in both the environment and women's rights.
• e was Undercurrents, a radical technology magazine,
• Radical Statistics Society, which is still going. T
• I have the feeling it is 100% 'radical chic'. There is virtually no attempt to do real agitation if it involves the slightest bit of unpleasantness."
• Gary Wersky, a participant in 1970s radical science who also wrote a history of earlier Marxist scientists, suggested in a 2007 article that we might see a third wave to the movemen
• I don't think we've seen the like of the radical science movement since the BSSRS packed up in the late 1980s. Left, right or other in political orientation, I don't think we've seen a scientist-led movement that dared that level of self-critique

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