The Bad News Bearers

This online article describes ethical and professional issues that are relevant to academics doing research and journalists reporting on their results and forecasts, particularly in the field of climate change research. The article proposes that the language of science often lacks the urgency to influence government policy and spending and people's behaviour.

The article describes author Elizabeth Pisani's examination of how research is carried out, and how its findings get translated (or fail to get translated) into public policy. According to her account, AIDS researchers with whom she worked needed to alter statistics in order to counter discrimination against "...drug injectors, sex workers and gay men" so that governments and donors would invest resources in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. She raises ethical and professional issues that are relevant to scientific studies and to journalistic reporting of them. Pisanis's example of an imbalance on the side of under-reporting is the 1950 United States Surgeon General's report on tobacco which warned against tobacco use, but was not sufficiently emphatic or reported widely enough and with enough urgency to change people's habits when it was published.

The article suggests that, in contrast, the current media have an "insatiable appetite for catastrophe. Presenting complex technical material to a non-specialist audience inevitably involves selection and simplification. Isn't there sometimes a temptation to sensationalise it as well, to make the news about global warming, for example, not just bad but apocalyptically... bad?"

Scientists interviewed have varying opinions on the language of responsible presentation of the facts, including the presence of uncertainty. According to one scientist, "science has to be transparent to be trustworthy. So accepting and reporting uncertainties is vital. That leaves a tough job for policymakers who will need to take tough decisions in the face of considerable uncertainty."

The director of the Environment Institute at University College London, United Kingdom, expresses the challenge faced by researchers who want to make a difference in public thinking and behaviour on climate change and who need to maintain credibility in their field. He argues that researchers are "walking a tightrope between doing excellent science, which is clearly defensible and has the support of peers, and communicating with the public. If you go too far towards communication (or stray out of your true specialist areas), you lose the credibility that makes you worth listening to in the first place." Another scientist calls this a "double ethical bind".

In conclusion, the article suggests that, though scientists must communicate both urgency and uncertainty, there are ways to be "both effective and honest". Though it warns of the demands on time, energy, and communication skills of scientists, the article includes the following recommendations: "One is to use 'metaphors that simultaneously convey both urgency and uncertainty'. Another is for those who engage in public debate to produce 'a hierarchy of back-up products ranging from op-ed pieces to longer popular articles, which provide more depth, to full-length books, which meticulously distinguish the aspects of an issue that are well understood from those which are more speculative.'"