Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the Battle over “good science”
If the SST highlighted existing tensions between atmospheric scientists
and their counterparts in the American environmental movement, it also
forced atmospheric scientists to face tensions over appropriate forms of
advocacy within their own ranks. These internal tensions helped shape
climate scientists' relationship to environmentalism, typically reinforc-
ing the science-first approach that has since characterized climate change
advocacy. In general, even when atmospheric scientists did share environ-
mentalists' views, they had difficulty reconciling direct political activism
with their ideals of political neutrality and scientific objectivity. They
sought to contain their professional concerns over atmospheric pollution
and anthropogenic climate change within the community-defined bound-
aries of “good science.” The “ist” in “scientist” was meant to supersede
the “isms” of political or ideological commitments. Ultimately, scientists'
commitments to the ideals of good science limited the nature and extent
of their environmental advocacy.
The debate over good science is a subtext to many of the stories in
this topic, and it is worth pausing to explore the key terms of that debate:
objectivity
and
neutrality.
To begin with, the concepts of objectivity and
neutrality are not interchangeable. As historian of science Robert Proctor
argues, the concept of “value-neutral” or “value-free” science insulates sci-
ence from political or ideological ends. “Neutrality,” he writes, “refers to
whether science takes a stand.”
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In Proctor's formulation, neutrality need
not have anything to do with objectivity, which he defines as “whether
science merits certain claims to reliability.”
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In scientific controversies,
however, scientists tend to contest opponents' political neutrality as a
way of undercutting their claims to objectivity. Antagonists in scientific
disputes play on an underlying assumption that science conducted for a
specific purpose or influenced by outside considerations cannot be as reli-
able as science conducted for its own sake. As a result, the terms— and the
concepts— are often conflated.
To complicate matters, neutrality and objectivity are hardly absolute.
Most scientists harbor commitments to both ideals, but scientists tend to
define these concepts in practice and on the fly, and rarely do they address
the terms explicitly except during controversies, if then. Atmospheric sci-
entists studying the SST, for example, rarely used the words
neutrality
or
