Junk Science Week: Science is on the verge of a nervous breakdown
Welcome to FP Comment’s 18th annual Junk Science Week, dedicated to exposing the scientists, NGOs, activists, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who manipulate science data to achieve their objectives. Our standard definition over the years has been this: junk science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, risk is exaggerated and the science adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.
Much of our content over the past 18 years has focused less on science itself and more on the NGOs, politicians and others who have found it convenient to use and abuse science as a springboard to political action. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to follow the empty-headed foibles of a media culture that mindlessly recycles reports that bacon may cause heart disease or that cell phones cause cancer. Less easy is dealing with the much bigger problem: the break down of science itself. In The Guardian last week, Jerome Ravetz, considered one of the world’s leading philosophers of science, reviewed what he and many others describe as “the crisis in science.”
Ravetz, who has been warning of the emerging internal conflicts in science for decades, sees the crisis is spreading to the general public. “Given the public awareness that science can be low-quality or corrupted, that whole fields can be misdirected for decades (see nutrition, on cholesterol and sugar), and that some basic fields must progress in the absence of any prospect of empirical testing (string theory), the naïve realism of previous generations becomes quite Medieval in its irrelevance to present realities.”
Present reality is that science is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That’s the not-so-tongue-in-cheek message in Science on the Verge, a new book by European scientist Andrea Saltelli and seven other contributors. Science on the Verge is a 200-page indictment of what to the lay reader appears to be a monumental deterioration across all fields, from climate science to health research to economics. The mere idea that “most published research results are false” should be cause for alarm. But it is worse than that. The crisis runs through just about everything we take for granted in modern science, from the use of big data to computer models of major parts of our social, economic and natural environment and on to the often absurd uses of statistical methods to fish for predetermined conclusions.
Examples from the book help prove the point. In a chapter titled “Numbers Running Wild,” one of the book’s authors, Jeroen P. van der Sluijs of the University of Bergen, asks how is it possible for a paper in Science magazine to claim that precisely 7.9 per cent (not eight per cent or seven per cent) of the world’s species would become extinct as a result of climate change — when the total number of species is unknown? Even odder, the species study concluded that the 7.9 per cent demonstrates “the importance of rapid implementation of technologies to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and strategies for carbon sequestration.” How, asks van de Sluijs, do the researchers jump from species extinction to carbon sequestration? “This sounds like an opinion for which the underlying arguments are not even given.”
Others examples come from economics, a science filled with unwarranted claims to certainty and predictability. Science on the Verge recalls Nobel economist Robert Lucas’s 2003 declaration that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved.” Also noted is the 2004 claim by former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke that the volatility of business cycles had been tamed. These and other economic blunders lead critics to suspect the discipline of economics “had reverted to (or never developed beyond) a state of immaturity.”
Few fields and practices are exempt from scrutiny in Science on the Verge. In a chapter on evidence-based science, Andrea Saltelli — also at the University of Bergen — spreads the net wide: “It is futile to expect, for example, that modelling approaches which have failed to predict a purely financial and economic crisis will be able to inform us accurately about the behaviour of a system involving institutions, societies, economies and ecologies. Yet this is what we do when we apply the technique of cost– benefit analysis (CBA) to dimensions of climate change” This kind of quantitative approach to complex systems, says Saltelli, “can only foster abuse and corruption.” (Excerpt from Science on the verge here).
It would be wrong to suspect that Science on the Verge is the work of right-wing activists, climate skeptics and hide-bound traditionalists. It is the work, rather, of scientists with a range of ideological views despairing over what appears to be a fundamental breakdown as science has become more and more enmeshed in the business of providing evidence for policy-making.
Science, in short, has already been corrupted. We explore just some of the examples in this year’s Junk Science Week, including the GDP factory myth, sugar scares, the social cost of carbon, the last pesticide Roundup, killer lipstick, and our annual Rubber Duckies awards.
Read more at: business.financialpost.com
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