"Science Under Attack" is a show recently offered by the BBC. The new President of the UK's Royal Society--their prestigious scientific organization--is Paul Nurse, who explores the dynamics of the ongoing battles between science and various types of deniers.
A nice piece about the show can be found here: Paul Nurse: science under attack
The official BBC page for the Horizon show is here, but unless you are in the BBC's area you won't be able to watch it there. It has been pieced and uploaded to youtube , though. The first part will be embedded below. It's chunked into 6 parts that you'd have to load and view sequentially if you would like to view it.
Nurse is doing something very interesting in this show. He's also trying to advocate for a couple of things: relying on quality sources and the weight of evidence from these multiple sources. He's also advocating for scientists to get out and become part of the conversation--because of the type and volume of misinformation out there.
Using several examples--from climate science, to HIV deniers, and to GMO crop destroyers--he illustrates some of the heated topics and tries to understand the public misconceptions.
He acknowledges how difficult it is for the public to understand what's really going on. He provides numerous examples of the media coverage of the climate science and debate that flat-out contradict each other--using the identical source of the story.
He also speaks to the situation in the blogosphere--where it's very easy to find something written that supports one's point of view. He speaks to the fact that it seems deniers have come to a conclusion--and use the blogs to find support for that conclusion. This is something I tried to cover recently when we were discussing the Wakefield vaccination conflama ( Running with conclusions. A bad strategy.).
We saw an example of this just last night. Someone came in with a crappy source (whale.to), an appealing idea--that some new diet was the route to all health and happiness, and refusal to acknowledge the actual weight of the scientific evidence, which was offered by a credentialed scientist who has worked in that field for decades.
But that incident should be informative for you. You need to consider the preponderance of evidence, as provided by legitimate sources. You need to be more careful about confirmation bias--so that you don't fall into the traps that deniers find themselves in. You also need to be somewhat wary of people selling books, and sometimes activist gray literature, as Joe Romm and the IPCC discovered :
To me, the peer-reviewed science contains more than enough to write reports on — see my summary of the literature in 2009, "The year climate science caught up with what top scientists have been saying privately for years." I think the IPCC needs to stop this practice of using gray literature, especially for quantitative matters.
This does not mean you won't have questions about the issues. And it does not mean that there won't be conflicts among scientists about the details of new data. As Bryan Walker transcribes from the video:
"As a working scientist I’ve learnt that peer review is very important to make science credible. The authority science can claim comes from evidence and experiment and an attitude of mind that seeks to test its theories to destruction...Scepticism is very important...be the worst enemy of your own idea, always challenge it, always test it I think things are a little different when you have a denialist or an extreme sceptic. They are convinced that they know what’s going on and they only look for data which supports that position and they’re not really engaging in the scientific process. There is a fine line between healthy scepticism which is a fundamental part of the scientific process and denial which can stop the science moving on. But the difference is crucial."
It was refreshing to see a scientist take this on. I applaud Nurse's effort here. I wish it would appear in the US. And I hope that in DK4 the Science Matters group that is being proposed will help us to quickly bring science where it's needed. Let's not become HuffPo.
edit: added link to information about gray literature, as suggested by flitedocnm.