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In Search of a Strategy

The scientific community is good at laying out the facts, but it might not be good enough to make changes on important issues like climate change.

By Kay Steiger
August 13, 2009

(CREDIT: Gail Albert Halaban)

Scientists don’t tend to be activists. Journalist and author Chris Mooney thinks this is a very big problem. In a world where prominent members of Congress (like Rep. Mike Pence) can openly deny that global warming is real despite a broad scientific consensus, scientists need to do more to promote science-based public policy. Mooney discusses this problem with his co-author and co-bloger at The Intersection, Sheril Kirshenbaum, in his new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Campus Progress sat down with him to discuss how the scientific community can better influence public policy.

How is this book different from you other two books, Storm World and The Republican War on Science?

I was inspired mainly by an attempt to provide solutions for some of the problems raised in the other ones, and particularly inspired by the Science Debate 2008 initiative that we worked on, where we came so close and yet remained so far away from having the presidential candidates really engage in science. We sort of tried to think systematically about why we couldn't get science through on the level we wanted to be getting through on.

Things were bad for science under the Bush administration, but I've also noticed that a lack of attention to science isn't necessarily partisan. There are Democrats who are bad on science too.

This is much more of a common-ground consensus book, and not an attack on one party, certainly. I stand behind everything [I wrote] in The Republican War on Science. It's become common wisdom that the Bush administration was really bad for science, and I'm glad that I've been one of the first people to really lay it all out there. And let me add that if you take an issue like climate change, it's pretty clear that party affiliation is one of the number-one things that's involved in people not accepting the science. Yes, there are some exceptions, there are some Republicans [who are pro-science], but mostly it's a Republican talking point—and even doctrine—that Al Gore's wrong. Politics is very significant. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that there are some areas where the left isn't using science, and they just happen to be different areas.

Like what?

I would broadly put the animal rights movement on the left. I would broadly put the anti-GMO [genetically modified organisms] people on the left—you know, not center-left, but left-left. And, most recently, the anti-vaccine people, I would place mostly on the left. In various ways, all these groups undermine or attack science.

I'm a fan of this podcast called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, which does promotion of science. How does the work you do connect with that sort of skeptical science-based movement? Do you have similar goals?

[There are] interesting overlaps, and I kind of grow out of that movement, personally. More than 10 years ago, I was, for a short while, an employee of Skeptical Inquiry magazine. I don't have issues with the skeptics, cause I think they're always right. Whenever they debunk something, they're almost always right, and it's very important to debunk things that are wrong.

However, there is a mindset in the scientific community that it's our job to set the facts straight and nothing more, and so that's how we fight on all these issues, whether it's evolution or global warming, or whether it's, "Are psychics accurate?" We refute them, refute them, refute them, and then we think, well, if people don't accept the reputation, that's just cause they're ill-informed or not rational.

To me, that's not enough. Debunking is only the beginning of a very important process, a very difficult process. You must set the facts straight for the audiences that will be receptive to that kind of setting the facts straight, but a lot of audiences are not going to respond on that level, and you really have to understand why they're not, and you have to figure out different strategies for reaching people who are not amenable to that approach.

Where could science really do a better job of informing the debate, rather than this anti-science mantra?

There are some perennials, like evolution. If it's not hot at the moment, I'm sure it will be again in a couple months, because it never goes away. It just keeps coming back. It's like Whack-a-Mole, with the anti-evolutionists and the evolutionists. It's really just kind of a vicious cycle. That's a great example of where the facts have been laid out again and again and again; the creationists have been debunked again and again and again; there's books doing it, there's ample websites doing it, everything you can think of. So much ink has been spilled.

The creationists are resoundingly refuted, there's nothing left for them to stand on, and they'll keep trying. But nobody's mind is being changed, and we've been fighting over this for decades—actually, there's been a strong creationist movement in the US for centuries, or more, and we're not making any inroads. Even the polling data shows that we're not making any inroads.

So the question is, should we do something differently? I think we can. I think it's incredibly hard, because people's core beliefs are at stake, and that's tough enough, but they're also walled off from the scientific community, so it's very hard to reach them, and they only hear these shouts from the scientific world that are not at all the kind of things that are going to break down the walls they've constructed. And the scientists are very angry that people wouldn't accept their knowledge on something so fundamental, so the whole thing is a huge mess.

It seems to me it almost has some parallels with the battles that the reproductive rights community goes through, in that they're constantly trying to rework messaging and things like that, but the polling numbers roughly stay the same year after year, decade after decade. Do you see those similarities?

I'm willing to buy it, [though] I don't know the [issue of reproductive rights] as well. I know that it's a long, hard-fought battle. But to me, you're saying that the reproductive rights groups are constantly working on their messaging, and I believe that they probably are. I don't think that's true of the science groups. Maybe some of them, but in science it's different, because there's this whole thing where you're not supposed to have messaging. It's seen as a lack of integrity. And there's no coordinated strategy in the science world about how to handle this.

You talked a little bit about the Science Debate 2008. Do you see the pro-science movement trying to form in future elections or future presidential debates?

I know that we plan to try again in 2012. There were certain things about the 2008 election that made it right for people who care about science to organize, and I hope they realize that every election is important to organize for, and that that one doesn't end up being unique. People in science were really tired of Bush; they were really, I think, disturbed by [Sarah] Palin. That made it the election where they were able to get fired up. But we will definitely be trying to fire them up just as much in 2012.

Kay Steiger is editor of Campus Progress.

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