Quick message to scientists: the public wants you to advocate for climate policies and engage with policymakers. Just make sure to do it right (see more below) because if you do it wrong, we’re all gonna laugh at you.
Remember David Legates and Ryan Maue? You know, late-2020 appointees to the seditious Trump administration, who tried to publish their poorly written and poorly designed brochures without approval, but with the official White House Office of Science and Technology Policy seal? Well, it turns out their premature posting might actually be a real problem for them, as the Inspector General has opened an investigation.
The internet was … not particularly kind to Dr. Legates, whose “value meal,” “5th grade” bowl-cut-with-bangs hairstyle was the target of many, um… cutting remarks. (Generally, we try not to glorify appearance-based insults, like how Legates is “Ralph Wiggum as an adult,” or how he looks like “big toe dressed up in a suit,” because what’s most important is “the fact that this guy is lying about a threat to humankind.” But someone pointed out his connection to Big Oil, and his behavior as a denier certainly does fit with his appearance of “a Garbage Pail Kid” and a villain from “Captain Planet” or “a straight to DVD Disney movie.”) Of course, his being a Trumper means the lying terribleness is at this point “just kind of a given,” because “we already know that someone denying climate change is a joke.” Most importantly, though, “his bangs ARE the threat to humankind.”
Well-deserved cyberbullying constructive criticism aside, there may be something to learn from Legates and Maue. Not anything from the pamphlets, obviously, which made elementary school science fair projects look polished and intellectually sophisticated, but from the passion with which they were willing to advance their distortions of the science.
Because, since the Biden administration is all about listening to the science, its appointees are going to need to feel empowered to speak up. But what they shouldn’t do is slap an official government seal on their posts if they are not, in fact, approved. Because, it turns out, that’s illegal.
So don’t do what Ryan and David did, and sacrifice a career spent pretending to be politically unbiased, only to join the most toxic presidential-ego-before-politics-before-science administration in modern history in exchange for the opportunity to fraudulently put an official seal on a few pieces of denial propaganda and end up potentially facing five years of prison time for doing so.
But what you should do is speak up and engage with the public, advocating for climate policies and working with policymakers. And that’s not just a lesson from watching bozos fail, but from actual science!
A new study in Environmental Research Letters, led by Viktoria Cologna with Reto Knutti, Naomi Oreskes and Michael Siegrist as co-authors, surveyed scientists and the public in US and Germany to see what expectations the public had for scientists, and how they would react to scientists’ advocacy on climate change.
They found that the public is supportive of scientists working “closely with policymakers to integrate scientific results into climate-related policymaking.” Similarly, a majority of both German and US citizens think “scientists should advocate for climate-related policies, in general,” though that support decreases slightly as policy options get more specific.
Interestingly, they report that while a fictional professor’s open support for a particular policy “did not affect perceptions of Prof. Jones being trustworthy and honest,” it did “negatively affect” their “perceived objectivity, yet positively affect perceptions that she acts in the interest of society.”
People saw advocacy from a scientist as making her less objective, but actually more confident that she is acting in the public’s best interest. At this point, the public recognizes that objectivity is pretend, and being honest about policy preferences is an effective way to establish trust and build support.
And you need that trust, so you don’t end up with the internet suggesting that you look like the sort of person who “denies that Vogon poetry is the third worst in the universe” or “like your aunt who drinks wine all the time and uses ‘off brand’ racial slurs at summer parties.”
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