Pat Thomas Here in the UK the news has an increasingly monotonous quality to it… MPs’ expenses, Tony Blair’s illegal war, obscene bonuses for bankers, Tiger Woods, John Terry and Climategate. The characters change, but the story remains the same.
These are stories of arrogance and ignorance, selfishness and greed, laziness and lack of foresight, and when we read about it we are outraged, we demand resignations that (usually) never materialise and life and the media lurches on in search of the next outrage.
Most recently Climategate has morphed into Glaciergate with the revelation that the last IPCC report included bogus information about the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers were melting. For me the most outrageous aspect of the ongoing story is the naivety of those who believe that all scientists are rational, infallible, incorruptible and above using clever ‘tricks’ to make their point.Â
Climate sceptics and holier-than-thou environmentalists alike are now railing against the use of ‘grey literature’ as if this was an ‘offence’ on a par with genocide and paedophilia. Everyone seems to have forgotten that many significant discoveries begin life in the ‘grey’, as intuition, anecdote and hypothesis. Endless pages are being devoted to the call for more and better peer review, the resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri and new leadership of the IPCC.
I have my doubts, particularly when it comes to peer review. So many atrocities which have blighted our world and our lives – nuclear radiation, dioxins and PCBs, GM, thalidomide, the green revolution, to name but a few – have been ‘proved’ to be effective, progressive and safe through peer review. Conversely, some truly great scientific innovations – for instance those by Albert Einstein and Watson and Crick – were never peer reviewed. Most recently a group of 14 stem-cell researchers published an open letter charging that the process delayed or denied the publication of truly original scientific discoveries.
In truth, for more than 200 years, peer review has been an old boys’ network where some reviewers are more equal than others and which broadly functions as a way of keeping dissent and views that challenge the status quo out of the public arena. On such foundations is the belief that science will save us built.
The overaching narrative reveals a battle not about who is right but about who is less wrong. And the struggle of the average man is not so much about who you can believe, but whose lies or errors of judgement you feel most comfortable living with. It’s a precarious place to be.
What becomes clear is that our view of science suffers from the same distortions and hero worship as our view of sportsmen and celebrities. The Tigers, Terrys but also the Pachauris, groups like the United Nations and professions like bankers and scientists are so often blank canvases onto which we dump all our hopes and aspirations, our desires to be ‘right’ and ‘best’, all our unused potential, but also our darkest, most unconscious stuff, and our deep frustration with life. And perhaps what frustrates and angers us most is that these figureheads are failing to be the type of people we are not willing to be ourselves.
It’s not peer review but personal review that is most needed.
I’m not saying that we need to deny ourselves heroes – heaven knows so much of environmentalism is already framed the language of denial. But would it kill us to raise our awareness of how much these figureheads carry that really belongs to us, and reclaim it for ourselves? Maybe then, we could start doing something more constructive with our time and energy than looking for the next disappointment.
Read the original post here. Read more from Pat Thomas here or visit her website, Howl at the Moon, here.
