American Scientist

Scientists are highly aware that the process of conducting research is full of uncertainty. A new study can lead to unexpected data that can completely revise standard theory in a field. Indeed, some scientists I speak to are positively gleeful about the prospect of cutting-edge data proving them wrong—that’s the most fun part of science, they tell me, because it means that they’ve found something unpredictable.

But as became acutely obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic, people who aren’t scientists are not as prepared to accept fast-moving research changes. When the data come to support a different approach, it’s less clear to the general public why they should be willing to accept that these new findings are valid if they could soon change again.

Since the pandemic began, it has become a common theme in the scientific community that there is a crisis of public trust in science, attributed to these differences in understanding the changing nature of data, as well as other political and social divides. Indeed, survey data seem to bear out this trend. But in How People Decide to Trust in Science, Larry Au, Cristian Capotescu, Gil Eyal, and Sophie Sharp take a deep look at how data on this phenomenon are collected, and whether the questions really capture the intentions of the respondents.

For instance, Au and his colleagues question whether the basic terms in these surveys are themselves based on assumptions. What does it really mean for a person to trust science, and why should trust be easy and straightforward to distinguish from mistrust? In fact, they say, why should surveys assume that it is possible to distinguish science as a single entity in which public trust is placed? The authors provide a careful breakdown of the framework for examining the public view on specific types of science, and how the timing of messages can change how opinions are formed.

One area of science that can leave people feeling very uncertain is climate change. It is common to hear that the problem of climate change feels so overwhelming that it’s difficult for people to take any action at all. In Sustainability Simplified, Stephen Porder takes us back to the basic elements of life to provide a roadmap for people to take meaningful action.

Porder is clear not to imply that climate change can be solved by individuals alone but requires work at a global level. But he notes that by focusing on reducing consumption of the basic building blocks of life (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus), people can make changes that have an effect, without being paralyzed by guilt. For an individual, reducing carbon comes down to housing and transportation, and people do have choices on what technology to use that will help reduce their environmental footprint—heat pumps rather than oil furnaces, or electric cars rather than gas cars, for instance.

Porder points out that most human energy use is external, powering the rest of our lives rather than powering our bodies, at a ratio of about 500 to 1 for those energy needs. The good news is that reducing those energy needs does not come at the cost of individual biological health, unlike in previous world-changing energy shifts, such as when cyanobacteria pumped oxygen into the atmosphere two billion years ago, or when plants took hold on land 400 million years ago.

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