http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/c ... ate-change

That article, and particularly this paragraph:
"[Climate scientists] assume that belief will be built on their data and that public trust is merited by their authority. With the exception of a few outstanding communicators, they often make no attempt to speak to deeper values or make an emotional connection with the public – indeed they see that as contrary to thei...r professional independence. Climate change deniers have always understood this. They use language that is designed to appeal to deeper values (such as freedom, independence, progress). The narrative they tell of being determined (and even persecuted) free-thinkers, standing against the tide of oppressive and self-interested conformity is designed to create an aura of integrity and trustworthiness."

make me think about what if any "duties" scientists have as far as advocating and communicating to the general public their results and implications of their studies. Here is my opinion:
The public should trust scientists over politicians and if the public were what I consider to be ideal, then scientists wouldn't need to rally the public to act around the conclusions that they come to... however our public is ignorant and far from ideal and thus scientists really need to start speaking out, because as this article illustrates, politicians will play dirty and design this whole spiel and because the public does not hear the scientists' side of things (and heaven forbid the public actually try to look up information on studies themselves...) they only hear and thus only trust the politicians' side of things, and quite frankly even a lot of liberal politicians are cowards when it comes to climate change in that they don't take nearly as drastic steps as need to be taken. So even though there are scientists who do scream to the world that something needs to be done about global warming (NASA's climate scientist James Hansen comes to mind), I don't think nearly enough do. So to sum up - politicians are either not doing enough or are trying to hinder our combating of climate change, and scientists who KNOW we need to act now and we need to act radically need to speak up about it or else nothing will get done because the public will just believe those politicians (who are accepting cash from oil companies, etc) because the politicians DO try to communicate to the public.

Anyway, any thoughts? Alex, I'd like to hear yours since you suggested I put this here :-p

and actually, here's a more blunt article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/c ... l-strategy

I'll do this in small sections as they filter out of my head. The main one that comes to mind throughout any discussion of scientists as communicators is the nature of advocacy or being politically neutral. A lot of scientists (I think) view their role in the world as collecting information, analyzing data, running experiments, and publishing it in a completely objective manner. What is becoming more and more apparent is that the task for the scientific profession doesn't stop there - particularly in the areas of environmental research, but also in areas like biology or medicine, the results of the publications need to be put up not as 'here are the facts', but as 'here are the facts and they clearly suggest this path of action or viewpoint, which we strongly support'. There is a concept that advocating a position eliminates one's objectivity or (stranger) the objectivity of one's data. Regardless of the fact that I can point to many science bloggers who are very good at both presenting data and advocating, I don't know where this notion comes from. I hope it is not because scientists are afraid to support what their data supports in policy circles. There is a huge difference between supporting a candidate and supporting a set of information from an experiment which is relevant to state or national or international policy (namely... most data, hopefully).

Scientists and 'the public' don't do a good job communicating. The public is, by and large, uninformed on a lot of science. The realization that you know more than 90% of people on a subject will rock your world at some point if it hasn't already, Becky. However, I don't expect the public to necessarily go look things up - mainly because the papers written on climate change require a lot of background in terminology and statistics and geohistory and etc. What I expect is for the public to value being informed, and translate that into demanding that news outlets have science sections with good scientific communicators - people that will not give both sides equal weight when one is wrong, and people that have a technical background but can explain things to everyone. (It's the job I'd love to have). I blame scientists for not being willing to advocate, and for not promoting communication with non-scientists as part of the undergraduate training (think of all the writing you do as a physics major - how much of it is for a lay audience and how much is training to write journal papers?). I blame the public for not being interested or, in many ways worse, for participating in a system without being informed of what it's talking about. Both sides have some things to fix. Communication from scientists is perfectly possible - see ScienceBlogs or any number of other digital media outlets. The trick is getting that onto the main media outlets - the dying newspapers, the terrible local news, and the partisan/'balanced' news shows. That's 'balanced' as in 'gives both sides equal weight', which is exactly what you *don't* want in scientific areas - the whole point here is that there is a right and wrong side.

There has been a large amount of writing on science and communication in the last few months - and there are a few books which are quite good.

I'm curious as to other people's thoughts - do you think the scientists should communicate more, the public should listen more, or something different all together? (I'll take as a premise that the MSM is flawed in many ways and would rather avoid rants on such subjects if possible).

As a side note, http://e360.yale.edu/content/digest.msp?id=2159 is a perfect example of what we need to avoid in science journalism - giving both sides equal weight when one side is [illegal, illegitimate, incorrect].