From Sebastian Kraemer
“Science is not democratic”, writes Martin Livermore of the Scientific Alliance in defence of the organisation’s climate-change scepticism (4 November, p 24). No, it does not work by majority vote, but it does work by consensus. That is how peer review of evidence works. When he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 Thomas Kuhn upset the scientific community by showing how much of what counts as knowledge depends on what the community agrees.
From Matt Salusbury
Martin Livermore demonstrates by the structure of his letter that his goal is anything but a “return to scientific principles”. Rather, he puts a “defence case” for carbon emissions, like a public relations consultant or a lawyer with a dodgy client.
Science may not be a simple democracy. Nor does it work by the rhetorical convention, embodied in court procedure and newspaper reports, that every story has precisely two sides that must be accorded equal weight.
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The fundamental tactic of the lobbies that deny climate change – just as it was for those who denied the ill effects of tobacco – is to pretend that science can be discussed in these simplistic terms. They claim that as dissidents they deserve equal space to “balance” the “other side” of the argument – the legions of scientists who have reached consensus on climate change. Unfortunately, this tactic works well on those who are concerned with a lawyer’s concept of “fairness”, notably professional politicians. The same tactic works equally well for quacks, creationists and conspiracy theorists.
Science, however, is not fair. Nor is it prepared, for example, to acquit gravity of making apples fall on the basis that someone can argue “reasonable doubt”. Livermore develops his adversarial defence by accusing New Scientist of “rigid dogmatism”. He claims that the Alliance are “certainly not the ones doing the bullying” – so who, allegedly, is?
The necessary basis for understanding the output of lobbies such as the Alliance is not logic, but the analysis of rhetoric. Perhaps this study should be a compulsory ingredient of science courses, since we never know what scientific work will make it into the glare of publicity and face such attacks.
London, UK
London, UK
