ivory tower

A Tribute to Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, But When Will India Have Its Own RBGs?

Not until our lawyers and judges rise and prosper on account of merit alone and not the accident of birth, connections and gender, and until we have a system which produces judges wedded to their oath to protect and defend the constitution and not to solely secure their progeny and retirement.

“What is the difference between a bookkeeper in Brooklyn, New York, and a Supreme Court justice”? asked the deceptively diminutive lady, the daughter of an Austrian immigrant, addressing a group of new American citizens assembled for their “naturalization” ceremony, all ready to sing the ‘Star and Spangled Banner’.

Bill Clinton’s nominee to the United States Supreme Court answered it herself:

“The difference between the opportunity that was offered to my mother and that which was offered to me”.

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg, indefatigable at 87, threw in the towel in her latest and fifth battle against cancer, a pall of gloom fell over Marble Palace, constructed by John P. Frank in three years between 1932 and 1935. It houses ‘the Nine’ – as the United States Supreme Court justices are called, three of whom were women. Last night the Supremes were left one short. Scores of people braved the pandemic to spontaneously gather in front of the building that had been her workplace since August 10, 1993.

President Clinton lifts a photo away during comments by Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg after announcing June 14, 1993, that he is nominating her to the Supreme Court. Photo: Reuters

The justice of a constitutional court is no popular actor of tinsel town or a politician of fame and reach. Public interface is minimal and she is sentenced to that fabled “Ivory Tower” of judicial rectitude and social distancing, for life if she wants. She labours mostly away from the public gaze, in chambers and conference rooms, plodding through memorials and summaries made by her law clerks, writing opinions and hearing lawyers wax eloquent in court.

Then why has RBG, as she was known, captured the peoples’ imagination like no other judge before? Why has she spawned a fan following that can be the envy of a rockstar or screen diva, with people going crazy, including this author, hoarding RBG merchandise like cell covers, coffee mugs, T-shirts and posters? Why is RBG a cult?

The answer is simple. She spoke for the people and was the voice of the voiceless. RBG, by her courage and conviction, fought the adversities of life and law with equal passion. She became us.

A mother of two, the opera-loving, fitness crazy gym enthusiast Ruth had already litigated six crucial cases in the Supreme Court which set the architecture of the women’s rights jurisprudence of the court. She had lost only one.

So Clinton was not exaggerating when, on her appointment, he said, “Ruth Bader Ginsberg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books. She has already done that.”

Also read: US Democracy Survives Even When POTUS Attacks SCOTUS But India Can’t Handle Prashant Bhushan

Yet the beginning was not that smooth. In Ginsburg’s own words, she had three strikes against her – woman, mother and Jewish. Even her Harvard professor was convinced that she had wasted a seat which could have gone to a deserving male. Dedicated to her husband Martin, her faithful companion until he died in 2010, Ruth transferred to New York to follow her husband and transferred to Columbia.

The topper of Columbia Law’s Class of 1959 could find no law firm in New York willing to hire a woman attorney. Ruth was not one to give up. Taking to academia, she became a professor of law at Rutgers Law School, teaching some of the first women law students there. Then finally luck smiled her way when in 1971 she appeared before the Nine with her lead brief in Reed v Reed, where the court was considering whether men would be preferred over women as executors. Ruth won the first gender discrimination case of the court. In 1972, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and under this banner took numerous causes to the court on which she would one day go on to sit as a justice herself.

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter. This is considered the waiting room for justices on fast track to the top court. Sadly, Carter was a single term president and Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush followed him. Judge Ginsberg bided her time while taking a centrist view in most cases she decided.

It is this struggle which made RBG, in later years, respond to the stock question inevitably put to her – when would there be enough women justices in the Supreme Court. She would answer with her mischievous smile – when there would be nine. Almost prepared for a shocked response, she would not hesitate to point out that for long, all nine were men and no one was shocked by that.

As the conservative lot in the court became stronger with every Bush and Trump nominee, so did RBG’s voice of dissent; so much so that there came a point when RBG became synonymous with “I Dissent”.

And dissent Ruth did with judicial élan. In a 2013 court decision to attack a vital part of the Federal Law (Voting Rights Act 1965) that ensured voting rights to Blacks, Hispanics and minorities, RBG’s dissent read as follows: “(it is) like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Justice Ginsburg’s battle with the law was as inspiring as her battle against cancer. In 1999, she had surgery for colon cancer and received radiation and chemotherapy. A decade later, cancer struck again in the pancreas. RBG battled on. In December 2018, cancer appeared in her left lung. In August 2019, the tumour reappeared in her pancreas and three weeks of radiation made RBG whole again. In July 2019, RBG announced that her pancreatic cancer had returned though she assured all that she was “fully able”. Through her long battle with illness, RBG was a regular at the gym and her weight training videos propelled her further to her ultimate status of a pop-culture icon. In fact, Ruth herself was amused at the morbid obsession and fascination with her “notoriety”. She confessed “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me”.

Also read: The Only Institution Capable of Stopping the Death of Democracy Is Aiding it

RBG had her share of controversies as well. Her comment on Trump being a “faker”, made just as America was readying herself to vote, raised quite a few eyebrows as it breached the convention of judges not commenting on politicians. She made quick amends and apologized. She also drew liberal ire by refusing to step down while Barrack Obama had the power to appoint a successor who could fill her large liberal shoes and help with the court’s ‘balance’. Perhaps Ruth was not done. Perhaps she was not so confident that Obama could get a liberal successor through. We will never know.

US Chief Justice John Roberts (seated, C) leads Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (front row, L-R), Justice Anthony Kennedy, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Elena Kagan (back row, L-R), Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch in taking a new family photo including Gorsuch, their most recent addition, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., US, June 1, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

RBG never let her experience on the bench affect her life. Her fans could never understand why, despite constantly sparring on the bench with her conservative colleague Scalia, outside court both were opera buddies.

Once on an India trip, the besties were on elephant back with Scalia sitting up front. What about feminism, she was reminded. Ginsburg with a deadpan expression and that glint in her eyes answered, “It had to do with the distribution of weight”.

As RBG joins the pantheon of legendary justices in a tech-savvy world which has made her a popular icon – that perhaps lack of technology may have denied others before her – the question we should ask is: Why can’t India have an RBG?

Waiting for an Indian RBG

With two women judges out of the 30 in the Supreme Court and 78 in the high courts amongst hundreds of male justices, India has a long road to cover. Until our judicial appointment system remains opaque shielding and nurturing the transactional approach shared by the executive and the court, until our lawyers and judges rise and prosper on account of merit alone and not on account of accident of birth, connections – and gender – and until we have a system which produces judges wedded to their oath to protect and defend the constitution and not to solely secure their progeny and retirement, we can be confident that no RBG will come our way.

There is no reason to imagine a single judge cannot sustain fame like RBG did or that she was a flash in the pan. Nearer home we have recently witnessed how someone in the Indian Supreme Court nearly rivalled Ruth in eyeballs and impact of a kind, but not in admiration. This underscores the hitherto underestimated impact that the justice system can have on a people.

Also read: Because of ‘Sex’: The US and India on Workplace Discrimination Against LGBTQI Persons

As an optimist, I shall wait for that day when India too can boast of its homegrown Ruth. Increasingly, young women are joining the bar and are slowly and silently chipping away at the glass ceiling that patriarchy and privilege have placed to impede their rise in a profession that has been ruthlessly oligarchic and non-meritocratic. The Bar is the Mother of the Bench and someday our sisters at the Bar will have the opportunity to try their hand at Ruth-level awesomeness.

I have a pile of pending books that are yet to be read by me. Till then, I shall put Linda Hirshman’s Sisters In Law on the top of the pile and get myself distracted by the story of how Sandra Day O Connor and Ruth Ginsburg, the first two women in America’s Top Court went about changing the world.

Sanjoy Ghose is a labour lawyer in Delhi.

Five Reflections on National Science Day

C.V. Raman won a Nobel Prize for discovering the light-scattering effect named for him on February 28. But by designating this date as National Science Day, India has come to celebrate the Nobel Prize itself more than anything else.

Science Day isn’t a very meaningful occasion in and of itself. It is the day C.V. Raman discovered the light-scattering effect named for him. Raman won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and – by commemorating February 28 as ‘Science Day’ – India has come to celebrate the Nobel Prize itself more than anything else. Indeed, if we had to save one day each for all the significant contributions to our knowledge of the natural universe that Indian scientists have made, a year would have to be thousands of days long. And every day would be Science Day (as it should). However, February 28 has been Science Day for over three decades, so even if not for Raman, it has become embellished in our history as a tradition. It ought to be dismantled, of course, but if it is not, it ought to be accorded an identity and purpose more suited to India’s aspirations in the 21st century. It appears the theme for Science Day 2019 is ‘Science for the people, people for the science’. So let’s repurpose the opportunity to reflect on some things the people are doing vis-à-vis science in India. 1. Since 2014, the Narendra Modi government has ridden on multiple waves of fake news, superstitions and pseudoscientific beliefs. An unexpected number of writers and journalists have countered it – with varying degrees of success – and, in the process, have engaged more with science and research themselves. There are certainly more science writers in 2019 than there were in 2014, as well as more publishers aware of the importance of science journalism. 2. Scientists were slow to rise to the mic and express their protest as a community against the government’s bigotry, majoritarianism and alchemies – but rise they did. There is still a long way to go in terms of their collectivisation but now there is precedent. There is also a conversation among scientists, science writers and journalists and some government officials about the responsibilities of science academies and the importance of communication: either speaking truth to power or having a conversation with the people. (AWSAR is a good, if awkward, step in this direction.) 3. The rule of the BJP-RSS combine, together with various satellite organisations, has helped disrupt the idea of authority in India. Consider: some bhakt somewhere forwards a dubious claim; another finds an obscure paper and an obscure expert to back their beliefs up; a third staves off scrutiny by taking jabs at commentators’ lack of expertise. But if we’re to beat back this deleterious tide of make-believe, we must all ask questions of everything. Authority longs for exclusivity and secrecy but it must not be allowed to get there, even if it means the ivory towers of the ‘well-meaning’ are torn down. 4. Many, if not most, scientists still cling to the modernist view of their enterprise: that it is the pursuit of objective truths, and that only science can uncover these truths. But in the last five years, it is the social scientists and humanities scholars who have helped us really understand the times we live in, forging connections between biology, psychology, class, caste, gender, politics, economics and cultures. Reality isn’t science’s sole preserve, so thanks to the non-scientist-experts for helping us situate science in these fraught times as well. 5. Scientific illiteracy can be less ignored now than it ever has been because of the way the BJP, and members of the upper-castes to which it panders, have sought to exploit it. From gau mutra to “braid cutting”, from attempting to rewrite textbooks to formalising Vedic education, from failing to condemn the murders of rationalists to spending Rs 3,000 crore on a statue instead of improving higher education, the government has run roughshod over too many aspirations. So kudos to the teachers in classrooms, and the parents who place a premium on education.

Why You Shouldn’t Measure Scientific Progress With Award-Winning Discoveries

The notion that science is invested in by the state to secure awards for its scientists is laughable – but the idea that science should be pursued for its own sake is just pernicious.

In an article in The Atlantic, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen express their concerns about the perceived slowdown of scientific progress. They note that there are “more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before.”

They ask whether this steadily rising investment of manpower and time in scientific research is yielding proportionately rising dividends, or whether we are “investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?”

As they concede, it’s unclear how to measure the rate of scientific progress. One problem is unambiguously assigning value or importance to scientific breakthroughs. Do the most important discoveries yield the most technological applications? Or are those scientific advances that compel us to radically alter our perceptions of nature more valuable than those that are ‘normal’ in the sense of Thomas Kuhn? And what about the variation of perceived significance through time?

Collison and Nielsen surveyed scientists, asking them to pit Nobel Prize-winning discoveries against each other in a “round-robin tournament, competitively matching discoveries against each other, with expert scientists judging which is better.”

This is where the problems begin.

Also read: Should We Rethink the Way We Evaluate Research?

Much ink has been spilled on the misplaced reification of the Nobel Prizes. The Wire: It presents “a lopsided view of how scientific research has been undertaken in the world”. A journal article: It epitomises “the winner-takes-all economics of credit allocation and distorts the history of science by personalising discoveries that are truly made by groups of individuals”. The Atlantic: “the discoverer is forever billed as an intellectual force in their own right – creating an equivalence between one historical contribution and their entire portfolio of ideas forevermore.” Then, there are the shocking omissions: Rosalind Franklin, Vera Rubin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and E.C.G. Sudarshan, to name just a few.

These important criticisms are sociological in nature. However, the importance of the scientific work itself is rarely in question. The results of the Collison-Nielsen survey (across the sciences) are not hard to guess. They seem to show that science is becoming “less efficient” and suggest “strong diminishing returns to our scientific efforts.”

A new reason of state

Beneath the idea that scientific understanding has not grown with investment in scientific research lies what seems like a truism – that research’s only purpose is to produce discoveries and inventions. In isolation, this is an innocuous statement. PhDs are in fact awarded for original research, aren’t they?

But science as a state-funded activity does not exist in isolation. Ashis Nandy has written that since the Cold War, science has served as a reason of state, along with national security and development. In particular, states “sought to out-rival another … not in the political or military arena, nor in sports, but in science redefined as dramatic technology.” It is no wonder that governments rejoice like research institutions when a Nobel Prize is awarded to one of their own.

The scientist’s role must be understood in relation to society, not in isolation. First, she has to conduct research in her field of study. In addition, she is also typically required to teach at universities, research institutions and workshops, and that she mentor graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. A recent addition to this list is that she engage in scientific outreach as well.

Framing science as a reason of state, and as a source of legitimacy of the state itself, is important. Now, we can ask: what does this publicly funded venture intend to achieve?

The notion that science is invested in by the state to secure awards for its scientists is laughable. Most scientists would balk at the thought of working solely for monetary gain or recognition. Similarly, the idea that state-funded scientific research exists only to create more scientists (than are needed to keep universities functioning) is self-serving and absurd.

However, a popular but pernicious view is that science is pursued for its own sake. This is troubling because it refuses to admit any context. This way, the scope for activity and interests of the working scientist are circumscribed by the physical walls of the institution.

Also read: Is There an Indian Way of Doing Science?

In Nandy’s words, scientific activity in this worldview “keep[s] the practice of science outside politics” but maintains the “direct, privileged access to the state” that scientific institutions enjoy. Thus, the scientific establishment and the state legitimise each other and, in the process, the former abdicates its responsibility to the people.

A more democratic view of scientific research is as a vehicle exposing the citizenry to a method of analysis that is systematic and comprehensive. Its essential method can be used to study more complicated questions in city planning, economic policy, public health, etc.

For this to happen, the structure of higher-education programmes needs to be modified so they produce graduates of use to society’s wider needs. For example, higher-education programmes in the sciences could also train would-be graduates to teach middle- and high-school students, qualifying them for government jobs in the education sector. A graduate student studying epidemiology could, through changes in the academic pipeline, acquire additional qualifications in public health administration.

Academia has always seen scientists who fail to secure a permanent position in academia as failed academics. This is unfortunate. We need to structure higher education in the sciences to allow for lateral moves, from science to public administration, to economic planning, to education, etc.

Whether science is “getting less bang for its buck” is not terribly important. Science is harder today because the questions we are asking are more nuanced, the experimental techniques are more sophisticated and the systems of study are more complex. It will take time, but we will get there. In the words of the mathematician David Hilbert, “We must know – we will know!”

The need of the hour is for institutional responses to avoid falling into the trap of optimising for more Nobel Prizes and other laurels. They should focus on organising postgraduate training to ensure young scientists useful not only to the science they practice but also the society they live in.

Madhusudhan Raman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. The views expressed here are personal.

What Made Lakhs of Scientists March for Science Across the Globe?

The artificially created public antagonism against science exists all over the world and is more pronounced in countries that are tilting towards right-wing authoritarianism.

The ‘March for Science’ underway at Portland, Oregon. Credit: Joe Frazier Photo/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

College Park, Maryland: “I have a deadline tonight. Sorry.”

I learnt from experience that this, and variants thereof, is the response you get when you urge STEM PhD researchers to come out and join some protest or public cause, at least before April 22, 2017. A PhD scholar at the bottom of the academic totem pole combines the qualities of an unhealthy workload, an allergy to the Sun and a fear of offending the wrong people. Despite there being an obvious connection between politics and how science is done, what science is done, or the baffling sentiment of should science be done, scientists themselves have always been staunchly apolitical, especially those in the West.

This is even more so if they are foreign nationals like me. Those brave ones whose work gets visible in “wedge issues” like climate change have had corporations, politicians and bigots of various shades act against them. This has been complemented by an ivory tower mentality: many of my peers do not want to, or lack the skills needed to, engage with those outside their research.

Regardless of the disconnect to ‘dirty’ politics many scientists would prefer, the act of engaging in a disciplined enquiry of truth is inherently political. Science affects the world just as strongly as the world affects scientists and our funding. Right now, climate change research is vital, with the planet’s atmosphere having a carbon dioxide concentration that will irreversibly damage the planet. This doesn’t just mean sea-level-rise but biodiversity and food security will be problems as well. In health, superbugs have started appearing due to the global misuse of antibiotics and urgent research is required to deal with this to prevent pandemics.

In the field of artificial intelligence (where I work), rapid advancements make an automated future possible, and it is imperative that public policy becomes cognisant of it. Changes to the global economic structures will be expected not just to prevent under-employment and wealth imbalance on an unprecedented scale but to also realise a future where this accelerated productivity can benefit the masses. The importance of the marriage of science to policymaking thus cannot be overstated.

So what changed that made the ‘March for Science’ possible, that made hundreds of thousands of reticent academics all over the world take to the streets? Conversations with my peers has highlighted two factors. First: the growing consciousness that we as scientists, who work to uphold empirical research, exist as a class and negotiate as a class. Second was the realisation that we are losing the battle between fact and ideology, and that seems to be a global phenomenon not localised on contemporary American politics.

Over the years there has been simmering discontent in scientific circles that we who are in the business of discovering what objective reality is are being soundly ignored by our political masters. But objective reality does not stop existing if enough powerful people refuse to engage with it. The frustration has built up that trying to save the planet should not be a political stance at all – but has been rendered into one. And while a lot of scientists in the march, including me, wanted to keep this a bipartisan apolitical march in support of the scientific method, the reality of our troubles makes it all but impossible.

After all, in the US, it is the current administration that has initiated massive cuts in research and appointed cabinet members who are openly hostile to the sciences. There exists a singular kind of politics that built the public sentiment needed to reverse stances on climate change. An overwhelming majority of the scientific community is united in tackling climate change and treats it as an existential threat to the species.

As researchers with friends in the Indian research community, I and others are deeply aware that the anti-intellectual malaise is not US-specific. The current and past Indian administrations have had a peculiar relationship with India’s premier research institutions, students and rationalists. Instead of building and funding more places of higher learning, seats are being cut, pseudoscience and superstition are being allowed to propagate and the money for research is dwindling. There is hardly any public impetus towards post-bachelor education. The artificially created public antagonism against science exists all over the world, and is more pronounced in countries that are tilting towards right-wing authoritarian.

When these ideas were floating around, the trigger event for the science march was a series of posts on Reddit in January 2017 about the Trump administration’s actions related to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and later the National Institutes of Health. Someone suggested a scientists’ march, many agreed. A postdoctoral fellow from the University of Texas Health Science Centre, Jonathan Berman, created a Facebook page that grew from 200 people to 300,000 people in less than a week, indicating popular support for the cause. Within a month, leaders had been decided, public faces like Bill Nye, and Mona-Hanna Attisha, the whistleblower in the Flint water crisis, had been invited to broadcast the event. I and many others waited with bated breath for Earth Day, April 22.

When the march finally happened, it exceeded any realistic expectations of attendance. Considering the academic cause, I didn’t expect the public to stand in solidarity with us scientists in such numbers. But in the final estimates, the marches in both Washington DC and Los Angeles attracted 40,000-50,000 each. The one in New York stretched for ten blocks along Central Park. Even outside the US, in Berlin, London, Paris, Melbourne and other major cities, there were marches with thousands of protestors.

In DC, where I marched, it rained all day and that did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm. A nonprofit called Earth Day Network was in charge for organisation (as the event happened on Earth Day). It had invited public faces and science heroes like Nye, Christiana Figueres (one of the architects of the Paris climate agreement), Lydia Villa-Komaroff, etc., to deliver speeches. Musicians and bands had been invited to play for the crowd. Twenty-something teach-ins had been organised to give a chance for researchers to communicate with the public – all before the march proper started towards the Capitol building.

While I and many others attempted sobriety on our signs and placards, there were many inventive and witty slogans as well. Signs excoriating the administration’s attitude and policies towards science were seen, too. In all, the inscrutable scientist came out with her peers, was cheered on by the people and, for a little while out of the laboratory, did something improbable and had fun.

Now that the march has ended, the question that the scientific community will have to grapple with is this: Seriously, what next? Shows of force and popularity are good but the popular sentiment generated needs to be translated into something concrete, a culture of continuous dialogue and outreach with the public at large. I certainly hope the March for Science leads to a Movement for Science.

Anupam Guha is a final year PhD candidate at the computer science department of the University of Maryland.

Why is There Little Trust Across the Aisle on Issues of Climate Change?

Making people anxious to ask honest questions, and robbing them of the opportunity to respectfully disagree, isn’t going to do much good for the climate.

Making people anxious even to ask honest questions, by robbing them of the opportunity to respectfully disagree, isn’t going to do much good for the climate.

An art exhibit by sculptor Isaac Cordal in Nantes, France, in 2013 shows businessment with floats going about business after global sea levels have risen due to climate change. Credit: objectifnantes/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

An art exhibit by sculptor Isaac Cordal in Nantes, France, in 2013 shows businessmen with floats going about business after global sea levels have risen due to climate change. Credit: objectifnantes/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Other than the extreme position that humans are not influencing Earth’s climate in any measure, a retarding force to global climate deliberations also arises from a less radical, and more potent, camp that believes:

That there is scientific consensus on the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and
There is no consensus about how much humans are contributing to rising temperatures (or, how much natural variations could/couldn’t account for)

AGW is valid. If we don’t do something about the way we’re using Earth’s natural resources, AGW will be extremely damaging to the environment as soon as a century from now. To put it another way: that AGW will force nature to adapt in ways that will no longer preserve characteristics that we have been able to attribute to it for thousands of years. This said: there is a crisis of trust between the pro-AGW and AGW-skeptic camps, a self-fulfilling cycle of distrust that prevents anyone from questioning or criticising pro-AGW efforts without coming off scalded. Two exemplary, and non-exclusive, sources of information highlight the problem well.

A place for doubt

Until the start of 2017, Judith Curry was the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. She quit on January 1. Curry shot into the limelight in 2005 after coauthoring a paper that linked a rising incidence of hurricanes with AGW. However, it wasn’t the conclusion of the paper itself but what it led to that put Curry on the climatological map: she began to engage actively with climate skeptics on blogs and other fora in an effort to defend the methods of her paper. And this, for some reason, infuriated her peers. A profile of Curry in Nature in 2010 said:

Climate skeptics have seized on Curry’s statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change. So it is important to emphasize that nothing she encountered led her to question the science; she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic. She does not believe that the Climategate e-mails are evidence of fraud or that the IPCC is some kind of grand international conspiracy. What she does believe is that the mainstream climate science community has moved beyond the ivory tower into a type of fortress mentality, in which insiders can do no wrong and outsiders are forbidden entry.

But Curry’s position has diverged further since: On April 15, 2015, she testified before the US House of Representatives Committee on Space, Science and Technology that she didn’t think scientists knew how much humans influenced the climate, especially since the 1950s. This was a discomfiting discovery because the testimony now cast doubt over what qualms Curry had with climate science itself instead of only with the ‘attitudes’ subsection of it. Ken Rice, a computational astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh, commented at the time that Curry was simply missing the point – it wasn’t the precision of our knowledge that mattered anymore, simply that we knew enough to realise the magnitude of what was coming.

Again with all the we don’t knows. Yes, we might not know but we have a pretty good idea of what caused the Little Ice Age (reduced solar insolation and increased volcanic activity) and it was obviously not attributed to humans. Why is that even worth mentioning? Again, we might not know what will happen in the 21st century, but we have a fairly good idea of what will happen if we continue to increase our emissions.

So, if we’re going to move forward by acknowledging that what we’ve been trying so far has failed and that others should have a stronger voice, why would we do so if some of those others don’t appear to know anything? Given this, I’ll expand a little on my thoughts with regards to [Steven] Mosher’s point that with regards to policy, science doesn’t much matter. Yes, in some sense I agree with this; let’s stop arguing about science and just get on with deciding on the optimal policies. However, science does inform policy and I fail to see how we can develop sensible policy if we start with the view that we don’t know anything.

In the same vein: what reason is there to get out of the ivory tower at all if, from within, climate scientists have been able to accomplish so much? The simplest answer would be that Donald Trump is set become the 45th president of the US ten days from now, and the millions who voted him to power don’t care that he’s a climate skeptic. Even if outgoing president Barack Obama asserts that the American adoption of clean energy has acquired an “irreversible momentum”, what Trump still could do is delegitimise American leadership of international climate negotiations. AGW-endorsers sitting within their comfort zones of Numbers Don’t Lie could find this a particularly difficult battle to win because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its brand of questionable integrity is doing no one any favours either. Even if the body has been on the “right” side of things, its attitude has been damaging to say the least.

Keith Kloor, former editor of Audubon, recently wrote in the magazine Issues of Science and Technology,

Donald Trump’s improbable march to the White House shocked many, but the tactics that made it possible undoubtedly looked familiar to those of us who have navigated the topsy-turvy landscape of contested science. For Trump’s success was predicated on techniques that are used by advocates across the ideological spectrum to dispute or at least muddy established truths in science. … With the ascension of Trump in 2016, have we graduated from truthiness to what some political observers are now calling the post-truth era? Post-truth is defined by Oxford Dictionary as a state in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion.” But this doesn’t do justice to the bending of reality by Trump en route to the White House. You can’t do that simply with appeals to emotion; you need, as his triumph suggests, a made-for-media narrative, with villains, accomplices, and heroes. You need to do what has already been proven to work in warping public perceptions and discussion of certain fields of science.

Those who believe Curry shouldn’t engage with skeptics because her decision could be interpreted as a prominent academic exiting the pro-AGW camp is difficult to buy into – even if Curry did switch camps. It is hard to arbitrate because there are two variables: the uncertainties inherent in climate modelling (even if the bigger picture still endorses AGW) and how that changed the mind of someone of the calibre of Judith Curry. Surely the (former) head of a reputed department at Georgia Tech is not the same as any other skeptic?

The ivory tower

Such graduated understanding of doubt, and subsequent engagement, is missing, in one case because it was simply deemed unnecessary. In May 2013, John Cook et al published a paper titled ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’. It was a literature review of 11,944 papers published in 1,980 journals, all papers dealing with climate change. Using a large team of volunteers, the authors then classified each paper into one of five groups depending on what its abstract said about the paper’s position on climate change. These were the results:

At the time of publication, the paper received a lot of play in the media – largely because of the numbers in the first row, columns two and four. According to it, 97.1% of all papers that have a position on AGW endorse AGW and 98.% of all authors that have a position on AGW endorse AGW. However, both the giant numbers don’t correspond to the 11,944 abstracts surveyed but the 3,893 (32.6%) that the authors qualified as having a position on AGW.

Clearly, the way to interpret John Cook et al would’ve been to say it like Der Spiegel did: “Of nearly 4,000 studies dealing with the causes of climate warming, 97 percent support the assumption of human-driven climate change” (translated). However, skeptics, in the course of their arguments, often linger on the 66.7% (7,966) of all papers that were uncertain about or refused to take a position on AGW. Specifically, the exclusion of these papers from the calculation that arrived at a number like “97.1%” is taken to be misguided. After all, they reason, about 8,000 papers out of about 12,000 had seen it fit to not explicitly endorse AGW (even while ignoring that fewer than 2% explicitly rejected AGW).

Dana Nuccitelli and John Cook, two of the paper’s authors, tried to explain these numbers thus on the Skeptical Science blog:

We found that about two-thirds of papers didn’t express a position on the subject in the abstract, which confirms that we were conservative in our initial abstract ratings. This result isn’t surprising for two reasons: 1) most journals have strict word limits for their abstracts, and 2) frankly, every scientist doing climate research knows humans are causing global warming. There’s no longer a need to state something so obvious. For example, would you expect every geological paper to note in its abstract that the Earth is a spherical body that orbits the sun?

Isn’t it obvious that there is an attitude problem here? The first sentence – “We found that about two-thirds of papers didn’t express a position on the subject in the abstract, which confirms that we were conservative in our initial abstract ratings” – is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than anything else. The first part of the second sentence requires even more analysis to verify, considering the 11,944 papers they parsed appeared in 1,980 journals, and the fraction of journals that set a word-limit for the abstract might just be non-trivial. The second part is the display of off-putting arrogance. Doesn’t saying “frankly, every scientist doing climate research knows humans are causing global warming” imply the authors are being dismissive of their own conclusions? And finally, that Earth orbits the Sun is far more obvious than a thesis the defence of which rests on the presumption that the thesis is right – a circularity that renders all facts moot.

While none of this makes us question the validity of AGW, which finds endorsement for reasons other than just scientific consensus, Nuccitelli-Cook’s pseudo-defence doesn’t help us trust them in particular. In fact, their position ought to make us more suspicious of why they arrived at a number like 32.6% when they were assuming at the outset that it would really be 100%.

And as it happens, Nuccitelli and Cook don’t appear to be in the minority. To assume that all climate researchers know AGW is valid is also to presume that those who dispute its existence or extent are not really climate researchers (if they’re in the same field). This also appears to be the case with Curry’s detractors.

It ought to be rewarding to engage with people from across the aisle instead of letting them persist with information they think is credible but which you think is incredible – to the point that, over time, we become habituated to disregarding them irrespective of the legitimacy of their demands. Moreover, giving room for people to disagree, to engage with them by making your methods and data available, and working with them to conduct replication studies that test the robustness of your own methods are all features of research and publishing that are being increasingly adopted to everyone’s benefit, most of all science’s.

It’s not hard from here and now to see that moving the other way – by making people anxious even to ask honest questions, by robbing them of the opportunity to respectfully disagree – isn’t going to do much good. Being nice also helps maintain a non-fragmented community that doesn’t further legitimise the impression that “science doesn’t matter when it comes to policy”.

This article is an edited version of a blog post first published on Gaplogs.