07 Dec 11 | Uncategorized
Transparency in science is in the news these days, from leaked emails on climate change to unpublished drugs trials and information being kept out of the public domain for reasons of confidentiality or copyright. But calls for transparency and openness are almost always met with claims that scientific research is potentially at risk from persistent FOI requests or demands from the public to make science more easily accessible.
Should raw data be available to everyone? What is the value of transparency? Is the sharing of NHS patient data an example of good transparency? Who defines what open access means?
These questions and others were up for discussion at Index on Censorship’s “Data Debate” at Imperial College last night, marking the publication of the new issue of the magazine, “Dark matter: What’s science got to hide?” The event was chaired by the magazine’s editor, Jo Glanville.
The philosopher Baroness O’Neill opened the discussion by pointing out that the Protection of Freedoms Bill places greater pressure on academics, calling as it does for openness. But this is not a new concept for scientists — the Royal Society is based on openness, viewing science as a public enterprise. What was difficult, she said, at a time when transparency is so valued by so many, is how open data might be “reusable” in a way that is useful and productive.
Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust, agreed. “Science”, he said, “has led the way with openness”. But he warned against the dangers of raw data, which he likened to raw sewage (easily the most tweeted comment of the night, and repeated throughout the event’s discussion). Like O’Neill, Walport called for “useful” data sets to be available to the public so that serious misinterpretation of this unsorted data did not stand in the way of public knowledge.
But the journalist and campaigner George Monbiot called for full access to data, saying that it was counterproductive to allow scientists to determine who accesses information. He spoke of the public’s suspicion about science; at times communication between the scientific community and the public was simply a “tragedy of human incomprehension”. The public are told they need to know more and more about science and yet there are significant barriers to making this possible. He admitted the media were partly to blame, but stated that openness would help ease the public’s suspicion. As Fred Pearce writes in the magazine, “the fuss over climategate showed that the world is increasly unwilling to accept the message that ‘we are scientists; trust us’.”
Professor David Colquhoun called for greater openness in clinical trials. The competitive nature of the scientific community is exploited, he lamented, particularly within the drugs industry. As a result, important research is kept from the public, often because while clinical tests must be registered, the results do not have to be published. It’s a subject explored in detail by Deborah Cohen, BMJ investigations editor, in the current issue of the magazine too. Colquhoun offered that competition also meant that a huge amount of research was being carried out and not all of it to a good standard. Perhaps, he said, a reduction in the number of studies would bring about higher quality research.
01 Jul 11 | Uncategorized
As the rest of the world’s governing bodies and opinion polls have gradually come around to a consensus on climate change, the United States stands out as a particularly odd outlier: Supporters and deniers here have in fact grown further apart, with the issue more politically divisive today than it was just five years ago. Public concern about the climate has actually declined. Politicians who once acknowledged global warming have changed their minds. And in a particularly shocking vote earlier this spring, not one of the 31 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee would vote for an amendment simply acknowledging that climate change exists (which is the position of the government’s own scientific bodies).
In the midst of all this, an even stranger thing has happened — scientists themselves have become controversial figures, now routinely harassed, investigated and attacked for their research.
In a particularly high-profile case, Virginia’s elected attorney general has spent most of the past year trying to subpoena the state’s prestigious public university for the academic records of a climate scientist, Michael Mann, whom he accuses of defrauding the public for grant money to support his research. Mann has not worked at the University of Virginia since 2005.
The latest tactic, inspired by the Climategate email scandal, has been for non-governmental activist groups to file public records requests about individual researchers in the hunt for personal information to discredit them. One such group, the American Tradition Institute, last week sued NASA to obtain records on any ethics or disclosure violations by James Hansen, a top climatologist who blew the whistle on censorship of scientists during the Bush Administration.
The trend is distressing for each of the researchers who’ve become unwitting targets. But, more broadly, academic and scientific organisations increasingly worry that such tactics will have a much wider impact — intimidating the entire scientific community and deterring work on a crucial area of public inquiry.
Exasperated with this trend, one of the country’s most respected scientific organisations (and the world’s largest general scientific body), this week released a formal statement decrying all the harassment. The board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science wrote:
“We are deeply concerned by the extent and nature of personal attacks on climate scientists. Reports of harassment, death threats, and legal challenges have created a hostile environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas and makes it difficult for factual information and scientific analyses to reach policymakers and the public. This both impedes the progress of science and interferes with the application of science to the solution of global problems. AAAS vigorously opposes attacks on researchers that question their personal and professional integrity or threaten their safety based on displeasure with their scientific conclusions.”
The scientific community has spent centuries perfecting the process of policing itself — peer review is designed to ferret out research fraud, and the revision and correction of earlier findings is a central element of the very idea of scientific progress.
All of this has been lost on aggressive climate deniers, who have been remarkably successful at creating the public impression of scientists as agenda-wielding partisans in a political war. For their part, cloistered researchers not used to communicating with the public have seemed baffled by attacks that can’t be repelled on data and evidence alone.
As the AAAS points out, the stakes go beyond even the implications for chilled speech. Because all of society will lose out when scientists are intimidated into staying away from climate research that’s needed to inform what we should do about the problem.
As the board put it:
“We are concerned that establishing a practice of aggressive inquiry into the professional histories of scientists whose findings may bear on policy in ways that some find unpalatable could well have a chilling effect on the willingness of scientists to conduct research that intersects with policy-relevant scientific questions.”
27 Nov 09 | Events
The Copenhagen Summit will debate one of the most important public issues of the past thirty years. Many scientists and advocates predict climate change will kill potentially hundreds of millions of people worldwide over the coming decades. This begs the question: is there a special responsibility for the media to exercise restraint in reporting climate change? Or are we witnessing the rise of an unchallengeable orthodoxy?
3 Dec, 6.30 – 8pm, Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA
RSVP to: [email protected]
or call Free Word on +44 (0) 20 7324 2570
On our panel debating “Saying the unsayable: is climate scepticism the new Holocaust denial?”:
George Monbiot
George Monbiot is one of the UK’s leading environmental campaigners and the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent, A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed and No Man’s Land. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian. His website is: www.monbiot.com
James Delingpole
James Delingpole is a libertarian conservative journalist, broadcaster and author of Welcome To Obamaland, I’ve Seen Your Future And It Doesn’t Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is: www.jamesdelingpole.com/
Further reading
James Delingpole, “Climategate reminds us of the liberal-left’s visceral loathing of open debate”, Daily Telegraph, 24 Nov 2009
Read here
George Monbiot, “The threat is from those who accept climate change, not those who deny it”, The Guardian, 21 Sep 2006.
Read here
15 Apr 09 | Uncategorized
The arrests of 114 climate protesters, coupled with ongoing revelations about police conduct at the G20 protests in London seem to point to a trend in police attitudes to protest and direct action.
The tendency seems to be back to Miners’ Strike tactics, with constables not in place to just police protests — that is, to allow freedom of expression and assembly while assuring protesters do not become a danger to themselves and others — but rather to confront demonstrators. The pre-emptive arrests in Nottinghamshire seem to actively enforce the idea that police are actively anti-protest, at least for now.
This morning, I took part in a radio discussion concerning an anti-police Facebook group, ‘Northumbria Police — what a group ov wankers’ if you must know. 8,478 members and counting!)
The question of the morning was whether people had lost respect for the authority of the police. I’m not really sure that we have less respect for the police than before, but with responsibility comes scrutiny and criticism.
The more worrying question is whether the police are losing respect for us: while it would be naïve to imagine that the police have always held the general public in the highest regard, there has, somewhat ironically, been a more civil atmosphere at heavily-policed protests since the advent of advanced surveillance techniques: perhaps when you can get someone on video and arrest them later, you’ll be less inclined to wade in with the truncheon. Most people on protests these days are quite used to the policeman with the video camera openly filming them.
Are we looking at an age of confrontational policing? One would hope not. Twenty years ago, almost 100 people died in Sheffield because the police assumed that football supporters were hooligans. It’s worrying that today, increasingly, police seem to be assume protesters who may merely be exercising their rights, automatically pose a threat.
