“AS WORLD leaders prepare to meet at the Group of 20 conference this week, a slew of recently released research confirms that climate change is an immediate and critical problem that must be at the top of the list of global priorities.” (Washington Post, 6 July 2017)
The above is a typical example of how journalists want to influence policy decisions based on their own presuppositions and interpretive framework of research articles Do the journalists have the expertise and can we trust them?
Academic articles are for academicians. This may sound obvious but their territory has been intruded. In the past, access to journals was limited and expensive and they only read by academicians. With the Internet, many academic journals are now published online and available at a lower cost. Some journalists follow these journals and publish news from the articles, on the hot topics like climate change, global warming, health and the environment. These articles are not subjected to scrutiny and misinformation may be common.
Journal articles are research observation and findings by the academicians. They have not been scrutinised by their colleagues and until they are endorsed, they are not suitable for public consumption. It is counter productive If politicians or other interested parties manipulate and use them for their own agenda. Once this happened, it becomes very difficult to change the public perception. The publishing cycles of the journals are much longer than the news media and public may have forgotten the content of original article by the time the questions were asked. Many people who only have common knowledge based on the news media articles, but without the formal training required, believe they understand the intricate issues involved. What they “know” is ambiguous and can differ.
Peer reviewed journal articles are not intended for the public or even for other academicians not familiar with the topics involved. They are often written in a specialized language using a vocabulary that requires formal training and background knowledge to make sense of them. The background knowledge can include the environment, historical, conceptual and contemporary information. Without the background knowledge, it is more than likely that the observations, evaluations, assertions, and findings of the papers will be understood based on their own presuppositions and rudimentary interpretative framework.
There are people who suggest that academician should write in a language easy for the public to understand. This is a mistaken idea as knowledge need to be captured and expressed in the proper language. The dictionary can define words in a few sentences but concepts may need a few pages or even a book chapter to explain. The academic language was developed to make communication among academicians more precise while keeping it concise. Reducing an academic article to the understanding of words and simplistic ideas, metaphor or analogy for the uninitiated public can be disastrous.
Technical journals are the forum to support the concept of academic freedom and freedom of expression. It allows the academics to publish and discuss their research and findings, even if they are controversial, without worrying they will be misused. Healthy discussions and deliberations can help develop, nurture and mature new ideas and concepts. Unfortunately, if these articles are promoted to the undiscerning public, the editors and peer reviewers may practice self-censorship to be politically correct. This may create an unintended problem where important but controversial papers are rejected for publication and politically correct articles dominate and distort the intellectual space.
Let me explain what I am saying with an example of the complexities involved. 197 parties met in Paris to discuss and plan the Paris Climate Agreement. “The Paris Agreement’s central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global average {sic} temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C.” But what do we understand by temperature or specifically global average temperature? What is the impact of these temperature anomalies on the weather we experience?
Let us start with the global average temperature. How is this temperature defined or determined? Is this temperature physically significant? Is this the average of the available temperature records? Are people just assuming others will know what they are unsure themselves? I find it a surprise that the Paris Agreement does not define this expression at the core of the Agreement.
Temperature measuring devices have evolved over the years, from mercury bulb thermometers to thermocouples and thermistors. More recently, the temperatures are inferred from satellite measurements. The accuracy of the measurements can vary from ±0.5°C to ±0.002°C using surface measurements. Daily temperature ranges can be more than 10°C. The surroundings of the weather stations have changed drastically with urbanization. We know the surface temperature varies with the elevation and I don’t know how this has been accounted.
Where no temperature records exist, the scientists use proxy temperatures. They determine the proxy temperatures from tree rings, ice cores and so on to go back thousands of years with no means to confirm the figures. There are no ice cores in the tropics to be included in a meaningful average.
Given the above scenarios, what do people understand when they talk of 1.5°C and 2°C global average temperature anomalies. It is more than likely that the parties involved want to stay in their state of rational ignorance and assumed that others know better. If the issue is global warming, then the discussions should be focused on the energy inventory of the earth rather than the temperature. This would be difficult to handle or even to consider as it requires existing work and long held concepts to be questioned or discarded.
The purpose of research will include and not limited to advancing our knowledge, provide the information resources for policy development and satisfying the human intellectual curiosity. Self-censorship is against the principles of academic freedom.
Policy development is hard enough without undue influence from the lobbyist. In the US, there are congressional briefings where the experts from the different schools of thoughts provide their inputs and they can be grilled by the lawmakers. This is unlike news items where the authors cannot be scrutinized. Elsewhere, think tanks may have great difficulty in making sense of the research publications with all the distractions.
I don’t have the answers how this problem can be resolved. My aim is only to create awareness of this problem.
KK Aw
July 2017
#globalwarming, #climatechange, #policydevelopment, #researcharticles
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