Yves here. KLG finds inconsistencies between the abstract and the actual paper in an article on trust in scientists. Per KLG’s cover note: “A good lesson in reading the paper and studying the data rather than accepting the Introduction/Abstract/Conclusion.”
By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health.
Perhaps a better question is why is it that Americans don’t trust each other. That is probably an unanswerable question, especially in this format. Unanswerable questions are often the most important, but we must start somewhere. A paper in PLOS Climate published in September 2023 by researchers at Cambridge and Caltech asks the question: Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change. As such papers go, this one lays out the problem well, beginning with a standard summary of climate science leading to the consensus that anthropogenic climate change/global warming is real. The question is whether this kind of analysis brings us any closer to scientific, political, and cultural consensus on anthropogenic climate change and what we can do about it.
That humans are causing global warming by burning fossil fuels has been widely recognized in the scientific community since the 1980s. Perhaps the first mainstream treatment was The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, which I read shortly after it was published during a stretch of hot weather in North Georgia that felt unprecedented. It wasn’t, of course, but looking back this was when the average temperature had doubled the pre-industrial revolution norm. Following Wendell Berry and a few others such as Herman Daly, McKibben called for a way of more “humble” way of life that will allow us to live better, if not “richer” in a full world. Growth in a full world is not the answer to our problems. Nor are electric cars, which mean more growth, more mining, more pollution, and more dislocation (see this link from October 5th). One pathway forward allows us to live better with less. In the other we will live meanly with less. Our choice.
Current scientists were not the first to raise the question of greenhouse gases and climate change. This is taken from a previous post on how scientists and engineers working for Big Oil knew exactly what fossil fuel use would lead to: From On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), by Charles Babbage, the polymath who, along with Ada Lovelace, invented the first computer: “The chemical changes which thus take place are constantly increasing the atmosphere by large quantities of carbonic acid (i.e., carbon dioxide) and other gases noxious to animal life. The means by which nature decomposes these elements, or reconverts them into a solid form, are not sufficiently known.” This is now “sufficiently known.”
Svante Arrhenius, a founder of the discipline of physical chemistry who was awarded the third Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903, published “On the influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground(1896, pdf; that title is wonderfully descriptive). His temporal predictions were wrong because he underestimated the extent of fossil fuel use in the 20th century. His logical predictions were correct. Carl Sagan as a leading planetary astronomer who proposed the greenhouse effect was responsible for the most inhospitable climate on Venus before he became an indispensable scientific communicator (worth the 16:53). The science of climate change really is simple: “We are releasing carbon that was sequestered over a few hundred million years in a few hundred years. Thus, the effects of this are likely to be serious.” These include global warming, ocean acidification, disruption of the water cycle leading to severe weather as a symptom of a climate out of balance. I have never gotten very far using this argument with the true disbelievers. Nevertheless, the science in this case is undoubtedly true, and both the mechanisms and consequences are widely understood [1].
Upton Sinclair described why scientists from Big Oil would deny the validity of their own very good research [2]. The current paper confirms that “segments of the American electorate do not “believe” climate change is a problem for the United States and that climate change is not a consequence of human activities. But we also show that part of the problem regarding climate denialism is a lack of trust in university research.” I confess, as someone who has been “in” university research for his entire professional life, this bothers me. Where did we go wrong?
The beginnings of a conventional academic answer from this paper are summarized as follows: “Climate change is a global challenge and needs an interdisciplinary collaborative approach to understand and address this ‘wicked problem’. Climate science provides a crucial intersectional example for examining public trust in science (and research). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasizes that public confidence in climate science is needed to ensure that the public and governments that receive their mandates from the public implement consensual mitigation and adaptation policies to prevent the predicted devastation from further global warming.” Intersectional? Wicked? Words.
As are these “from a recent meta-narrative literature review” of the meaning of trust in climate science: attitudinal, cognitive, affective, contextual, communicated, and contingent. Attitudes, where do they come from? Not directly from science, but from science-adjacent advocates have been at work saving the “Market” scientistically from scientific results for a long time. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have analyzed this very well since they published Merchants of Doubt. This has been covered at Naked Capitalism here and here. The other words are for another time, perhaps in a series of posts on Ian McGilchrist’s work in The Master and His Emissary, originally published in 2009 and updated in 2019, and his two-volume magnum opus The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021).
The present paper concentrates on attitudes, what they are and who has them regarding trust in university research centers. In general, Americans’ trust in scientists has historically been high, mostly for good reasons [3]. What happened? The short answer is that scientific research ran up against the Market, and science-adjacent market advocates struck back very effectively. Scientists, in their proud obliviousness to anything that was “just politics” paid no attention until it was too late. Which it has been for a while.
As expected, the authors of the present paper repeat the PMC trope, which is nevertheless true, that “conservatives” are less likely to trust university research on climate science than their more liberal fellow citizens. One of the more interesting notions of these critics of climate science is that the scientists “pushing” anthropogenic global warming tend to do this because they will “get rich” from the grant money that comes their way. Not exactly. It just does not work that way, especially in universities and nonprofit organizations. Yes, having a grant with which to run a laboratory is necessary to even have that research program. But the personal “return on investment” in writing grants is generally negative for all but a very few in each discipline, and I am not speaking only from personal experience. My success rate, which comes in below the Mendoza Line is actually not so bad. But that is no way to live, for very long.
So, what did the authors of Why don’t Americans trust university researchers and why it matters for climate change find in their survey of 2,096 American citizens? Figure 2 (rather than insert the figures into the text, I will use links which are legible, even on a phone) shows the results of the question “How much of a problem is climate change?” Note that the authors had to use logistic regression to show differences among groups. This is certainly standard procedure, but the nature of such statistics often conflates “statistically significant” with “meaningfully different.” [4]. As expected, Democrats, Moderates, and Liberals are “significantly” in the affirmative, while older people are on the other side. That is about it, though, except for those with “low trust.” Figure 3 shows the result of “Is climate change caused by humans or nature?” The answers are the same, with few exceptions (an answer of +1 is “humans”; –1 is “nature”). Black respondents and those who attend church regularly were more on the “nature” side of the divide.
Figure 4 addresses “Who trusts university research centers?” Democrats, Moderates, Liberals; those who get their news from TV and print, but not online (as I smile while typing this); Catholics, Jews, Others; often/sometimes but not frequent churchgoers; postgraduates. I will not attempt to interpret these results. But they could be interesting at this point in a “just so” manner. Instead, I want to return to Figure 1 (Distribution of Dependent Measures, in %, n = 2,096), the top half of which is inserted here.
My simple (perhaps simple minded) interpretation of these data is that 68% of the participants in this survey view climate change as at least a “somewhat important problem,” 18% view climate change as a “not very important problem” but a problem nevertheless, while 14% view climate change as “not a problem at all.” Moreover, 59% of the participants view climate change as “caused by human activities.” In addition, although 24% are on the “Don’t Trust” (0 – 4) side of the “Trust in University Research Centers,” 60% (6 – 10) are on the “Trust Completely” side of the spectrum. 16% are in the middle at “5” on the 0 – 10 scale. See the complete Figure 1 at the link for the latter data. Note that the numbers are different and presumably correct, in that that they add up to 100% in Table A of the Supplementary Information (click on Supporting Information at the left of the text in the landing page of the link if you are so inclined, but I did it, so you don’t necessarily have to).
I will also add here that while “conservative” and “Republican” appear in the text of the article, they are nowhere to be found in the primary results presented. Democrat, Independent, Moderate, Liberal – yes. Republican, Conservative, Libertarian – no. Odd, that, but I could have missed something.
This all leads me back to the title of this post: Why don’t Americans trust scientists? Or do they? And why this matters. It would seem, based on the results presented here that most Americans do view climate change as a problem and that more than half tend to trust university research centers. So, what is a take-home message from this paper? According to the authors (formatted slightly differently here):
Our results confirm that segments of the American electorate do not believe climate change is a problem for the United States and that climate change is not a consequence of human activities. But we also show that part of the problem regarding climate denialism is a lack of trust in university research. We argue for a comprehensive four-stage research strategy based on the empirical results.
- First, more research must be done to understand who trusts or distrusts university research on climate change and who is persuadable.
- Second, more research is needed on climate communication framing and messaging.
- Third, additional research on appropriate messaging is necessary.
- Finally, we need to develop a culture of trust in climate research and how it is communicated across society.
In response to these bullet points, I can only reply that distrust in institutions has never been total nor will it ever be. Institutions and bureaucracies develop imperatives that prevent them from “doing their duty.” The solution to this problem is to remove the imperatives. Removing maladaptive imperatives from universities and research institutions has been a common theme here, but Neoliberal Market Fundamentalism gets in the way. Until it doesn’t.
The only way to persuade the skeptical segment, hostile or not, is to be transparent, which means scientific, at all times. Academic ivory towers can be comfortable, but we scientists cannot afford this luxury in the Anthropocene. It is entirely too late for that. Nor do we need more research on “climate communication framing and messaging.” We do need scientists to engage the public seriously, however. Since the deaths of Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, the communication of science has languished, despite the prominence of so many TED Talk mavens. More’s the pity.
Appropriate messaging is simply the provisional truth as clearly as one can present it, with all the relevant assumptions and caveats attached. These are always present. The data in this paper show that trust in climate research is already present, but that political and cultural factors make this less than obvious. Still, the people have reason to distrust scientists. An everchanging scientific “food pyramid” has since the late-1960s done nothing except change the American diet for the worse, with epidemic obesity accompanied with metabolic syndrome and Type 2 diabetes as the result. Statins are supposed to be the “cure” for much of our burden of heart disease, but cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States. Polypharmacy has become the American Way of Medicine: “Yes, we have a pill for that.” Confined Animal Feeding Operations (i.e., industrial livestock production) require the misuse of antibiotics, which contributes to the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria. All science. The list goes on.
Such is the way of our world, and it will be the death of us. Unless we do something about it. And that something is not meta-analysis of any problem. We need more genuine understanding from every direction, with scientists asking and answering questions appropriate to their discipline. The people, all of us, scientist and layperson alike, will listen. Particularly when scientists abandon the PMC – Professional Managerial Class – for their original vocation. It could happen.
Notes
I thank LS for sending me this paper, which became something much different on a second, more considered reading.
[1] Michael Mann has recently published Our Fragile Moment, which I have not read but promises to be a good summary of the many arguments on global warming. Professor Mann was the first to popularize the “hockey stick graph” (Wikipedia but a good description of the controversy) that illustrated the recent acceleration in global temperature. As has been noted before, change is often manageable. But exponential change in any living system leads to collapse. The hockey stick graph was used initially as a cudgel by critics of anthropogenic global warming, but the validity of the observation has been confirmed in multiple complementary analyses.
[2] “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” But this could be too harsh. The eminently qualified scientists and engineers in Big Oil undoubtedly knew what their results were likely to show. For one thing, most of them had mastered the relevant chemistry and physics, which was not at all esoteric. But how those results were reported, or not, was up to “management.” Heroes are rare when their livelihoods are threatened by something that has been insensible, until now, 40-50 years after the original research.
[3] Not that the research establishment has been blameless by any stretch of the imagination. The entire “science” of eugenics, which was in full flower 100 years ago, comes to mind. It has been largely forgotten that conventional statistics was largely developed to “make eugenics true.” And the Tuskegee Experiment, which still baffles every sentient human being. Feel free to add your own examples.
[4] In a recent analysis of a significant question in medical education, I have found that something widely, essentially universally, accepted as “statistically significant” has no legitimate predictive utility. More on this later.
