http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wamc/local-wamc-1003371.mp3
Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Gavin Schmidt of Columbia University explains why we shouldn't always expect scientists to agree.
Gavin Schmidt is a climate scientist at Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. His research is focused on understanding the variability of the climate, in both its internal variability and in response to external factors.
Dr. Gavin Schmidt - "Scientists Say"
Scientists say' - it's a phrase you often read in articles reporting the latest scientific news. But if you think about it, it's a very odd phrase. No one writes articles beginning with "Politicians say," or "Plumbers say." It sounds absurd as if we expected all the world's politicians or all its plumbers to have gotten together to agree on something, and announce it. Yet, when it comes to scientists, that's assumed to be normal.
Scientists are not all of one mind about the 'truth'. They are people working at the frontiers of uncertainty, trying various ways to get the world to give up some of its secrets. Science is amazingly competitive. Ground-breaking work that uncovers just a little bit of the unknown is what the Nobel Prizes are awarded for. However, most of the science news we hear about is based on papers that have just come out in a few high-profile journals that specialize in big, splashy results but if those results were already commonly accepted, they wouldn't have got into those journals to begin with. So we have a paradox: the work that the media supposes all scientists agree on is precisely the work that is on the edge of the uncertainties, most likely to be contested, and might in fact be completely wrong. By contrast, the stuff all scientists agree on is mainly to be found in textbooks or assessments by the National Academy of Science.
Listening to scientists themselves discuss the latest studies is much more revealing of the real scientific process. Get on the web and dive into the scientific blogosphere, and you'll see a continuous series of proposals, observations and challenges. It is nothing like the groupthink that some assume.
So the next time you hear that Scientists say' - look a little deeper, and you might find that there is an actual conversation.