Scientists are constantly worried about how they can interface with policy makers, presumably because many of them (I know I do) have an inherent desire for ‘truth’, and get upset when people are unable to recognise it. I personally think there’s something quite comical about some scientists’ responses to the idea that policy makers aren’t engaging enough with the literature: they write highly-cited papers calling for scientists and policy makers to work together (some feature some lovely metaphors about co-evolution), and argue over the particulars of how this could best be achieved. Yet at no point do they actually seem to do anything!

Sadly, the reason for all these problems are blindingly simple – which is probably why the issue hasn’t been attacked that strongly by scientists, who as a rule are bored by things they already know the answers to. Policy makers listen at first, because they are reasonable people, but there comes a point when they need to take action, and after that it doesn’t help to have scientists arguing that actually they should change tack – particularly since scientists must exaggerate differences between theories to help move their fields forward.

A good example would be the ‘hotspots’ prioritisation debate that has raced its way across the pages of Nature (and this very blog) over the last decade or so. Conservation International got very excited at the idea of being able to save most of the world’s biota by concentrating on just a few parts of the world. While scientists were right to clamour (a decade later) that it might not be quite as simple as this, and we needed to change what we were doing right now if we were to save the optimal number of species, they missed that CI were already in the process of saving quite a lot with the millions of dollars they’d raised and didn’t really need anyone telling their funders they were wrong, thank you very much.

Which brings us back to those ‘reserve managers’. In my experience, people working ‘on the ground’ tend to have low opinions of scientists who postulate from their ivory towers, and so even if they had time to follow the intricacies of debate flowing in the pages of PNAS they wouldn’t bother, partly as a matter of principle. So if the authors of these articles in PNAS actually want to see any return from their hard work, they’re going to have to get out there and start getting their hands dirty.

Yet chemical contaminants are still a threat to this day, despite the actions of governments in the past. In India and Pakistan, vultures are facing certain extinction because a common anti-inflammatory drug given to domestic cattle (diclofenac) poisons the vultures when they scavenge on their carcasses. Meanwhile at home, we are told that pesticides used to destroy weeds have infected the supply of manure in our gardens, leaving some unable to plant anything for at least a year, if not more. Perhaps the ultimate irony here is that in both cases the problem has been worsened by our want to care for nature; farmers were using the diclofenac to ease the suffering of dying animals, ignorant of the effect it might be having on vultures, while gardeners in the UK are simply trying to enjoy their own garden.

Beyond the realm of chemicals, climate change, over-fishing and habitat loss leave us facing a biodiversity crisis that we seem unable to fight. While the IPCC and Al Gore may have received the Nobel Peace Prize, there persists a proportion of the public who almost seem to take a perverse pleasure in disputing climate change. Modern approaches to conservation do not engender the kind of unilateral support that we need, and so maybe it’s time to learn a few lessons from history and think about what made Carson’s work so influential. ‘Silent Spring’ has two fundamental, underlying assumptions: that human beings enjoy nature to the extent that they will defend it where it does not interfere with their own wellbeing, and that those same human beings operate rationally – that in the face of evidence they will change their actions if they are shown to be flawed.

Few would argue that, as a species, we have lost our love of nature, and so the lack of support for some conservation measures cannot stem from this. Instead, the public see nature as window dressing, and are ignorant of how we are needlessly, and in most cases against our own interests, damaging nature. I believe that my views on conservation are entirely rational, and that by showing the facts and arguments upon which they are founded, given Carson’s assumptions, I should be able to convince anyone to conserve wild nature. Where she succeeded and we have failed is that she made her arguments plain for all to see and distilled scientific work into a form that was intelligible to the interested layman.

I wrote everything up there (along with a couple of paragraphs after) over two years ago to launch the first incarnation of Conservation Today, back when it was a news and editorials site. I was reminded of it when listening to the recordings from the ‘Open Ground’ event we held back in June last year (check out Ruth Padel she was fantastic), where we aimed to bring academics from the sciences and humanities into the same room with the general public and ask everyone what they thought we should be conserving.

Since then, nothing really seems to have changed, indeed if anything the prognosis for the environment has got worse, and I believe (rather arrogantly) that’s because no one’s been listening to us. The closest to the Rachel Carson-esque outreach that we have is the IPCC reports, and as for the other recommendations I make in my introduction to ‘The Open Ground’ – they haven’t even been touched on.

So if, by any chance, there’s a scientist out there reading this – register for a blog with us today. Start telling the world why we do what we do and maybe, just maybe, the world will decide to support you. If it worked for Rachel Carson, it just might work for you.

Around a decade ago, these two scientists demonstrated exactly what Bertrand Russell has always known – “the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt“. In whatever way they tested undergraduate psychology students, those who performed worse at a task always rated themselves as better than the average, while those with additional training rated themselves in the opposite way.

This is the reason smart scientists in the public eye wake up in a cold sweat every night – the very people they’re trying to educate are the ones most likely to get the wrong end of the stick, decide they’re an expert, and then act on their opinions because they don’t know the limits of their own understanding. Sadly, it also means the people most likely to appear on television with the word ‘expert’ flashing across the screen beneath them are the least deserving people of the title (trust me on this – I’m an expert). I’m not blaming someone who’s watched ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ for thinking climate change isn’t happening, but deciding an hour-long documentary is equivalent to years of dedicated study is pretty damn arrogant, not to say wrong.

Scientists cannot expect to make their decisions behind closed doors and expect the public to simply agree with them - anyone can just buy lab coats and a bunch of letters after your name means nothing. However, the public cannot expect to understand every facet of what’s being presented to them, and shouldn’t feel bad for it – if science were that simple there would be little point devoting one’s life to the study of it. A good scientist can explain their field and expose the limits of their knowledge in a sentence, and leave the listener excited by that gap rather than appalled at science’s ignorance – and I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of guy we’d all rather see on television.

Some favour ‘biodiversity hotspots‘ (e.g. Conservation International), where they believe there are a disproportionate number of species, others want support for areas of ‘latent risk‘ where extinction-prone species are about to come into close combat with humans for the first time, while yet more say we should focus on ‘phylodiversity’ and try to maximise the amount of evolutionary history we save (e.g. the EDGE List). A fair number think we should all shut the hell up and get stuck in where things are in danger (e.g. The Alliance for Zero Extinction), as opposed to just drawing pretty maps of the globe saying where we think the optimal solution to conservation strategies lie. To be fair to them, ~80% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface has been defended as a global priority area for conservation at some point or another, so they’ve got a point.

Yet there are a few who think everyone else is missing a more fundamental mistake, and theirs is a story that doesn’t get enough attention. Kevin Gaston has recently argued that we are ignoring common species, whose numbers are dramatically declining while few are prepared to do anything to save them. Many of the commonly-cited environmental problems like habitat loss and climate change hit common species hardest, and while species that are naturally rare may have evolved to cope with restricted ranges and population sizes the same isn’t likely to be true for common species.

A reduction in common species isn’t quite as trivial as it first sounds; common species are often strongly associated with ‘ecosystem services’, things the environment does for us like provide bushmeat or protect us from flooding. Modern environmentalism, as typified in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, is based on the idea that if we can show that conserving is an economically rational choice (i.e. it makes/saves us money) we can get people to act in the interests of wildlife. If, by valuing rare species above common species and thus decimating ecosystem services we no longer achieve this, our own economic arguments will destroy us.

One of the most spectacular sights in the world – flocks of millions of passenger pigeons flying through the sky in perfect synchrony – was destroyed in under a century by hunting. Just because something’s common doesn’t mean it’s just another bit of muck under a conservationist’s boot.

The passenger pigeon

Don’t get me wrong, I think most of the people on that list are despicable, but I think time could be better spent than by patting ourselves on the back for being better than these people. I love groups like ‘climate rush‘, which use peaceful protesting to not only draw attention to the cause but also to demonstrate how mature (and fun!) we greens are, but when they dumped manure outside Jeremy Clarkson’s house I can’t help but wonder what they’re hoping to achieve. Indeed, it is “very selfish of him not to take responsibility for climate emissions”, and maybe he is a loud-mouthed tit, but what is the message I should take from this? That I shouldn’t drive to the Arctic for fear of having manure dumped on my drive by seven slightly-eccentric climate change protesters dressed as suffragettes? Objective achieved, I’m not going to do that.

Instead, wouldn’t it be better to move away from this idea of ‘carbon sin’ where we must atone for our past mistakes, wander round screaming to the hills that we got on a plane last year and there’s nothing we can do to bring our footprint down, and instead encourage people to do something positive now? As much as I have issues with ‘The Age of Stupid’, it focused on a man who worked for an oil company and who was re-evaluating his lifestyle in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Franny Armstrong didn’t invite the other protagonists to come over and beat him to death with a shovel for his past ‘mistakes’, instead he was congratulated for doing the right thing now, and shown to be a much happier person for it.

It’s one hell of a lot easier to blame someone else for not being a ‘good’ a person you are than to actually change something about the way you live so that you’re happier with it. Heck, it’s probably even better for your mental health. So let he without carbon sin cast the first stone.

Sadly, that’s not what Giles Coren did before writing his latest editorial for The Times. He’s quite right, dealing with comedians’ jokes of “global warming? what about this snow” is about as much fun as watching ‘The Invention of Lying’ with a directors’ commentary of Ricky Gervais explaining how immensely clever he is, but sadly his science isn’t quite up to scratch.

Can you get it into your thick skulls? If global warming turns out to be true, Britain [sic] weather will go bonkers. It will snow all the time. Weather might be like this more often, not less. Those unseasonably sunny early springs are exactly what there will be fewer of, not more. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
Giles Coren, The Times

Around the late 90s, plenty of people (including the BBC’s Blue Planet if my memory serves) were concerned that a shut-down of the Gulf Stream would leave Britain the same temperature as other countries in its latitude, like Canada. However, the IPCC has always been quite reticent on the issue, and have never really gone beyond saying there is incconclusive evidence that it may happen in over a century’s time. Indeed, a quick skim through the IPCC’s 2007 synthesis report tells us that temperatures are actually predicted to increase in Britain over the next century. A better explanation would have involved explaining the difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’, whereby long-term trends (over thirty years) can change without necessarily being obvious in every single weather event.

Why am I drivelling on about this? Not just because I think it’s important to refer to sound science when talking about a scientific issue, but because I found myself actually agreeing with a right-wing anti-climate change idiot whose article was linked to at the side of Giles’ article.

Steve Dorling, of the University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences — yes, the UEA of “climategate” email fame — warns that it is “wrong to focus on single events, which are the product of natural variability”.

Quite so; but it would be easier to accept the point that a particular episode of extreme and unexpected cold was entirely due to “natural variations” if the UEA’s chaps had not been so adept at publicising every recent drought or heatwave as possible evidence of “man’s impact”, and if David Viner (then a senior climate scientist at UEA) had not made a headline in The Independent a decade ago by warning that in a few years “British children just aren’t going to know what snow is”.
Dominic Lawon, The Times

And he’s quite right. Climate change is a scientific theory, and as such it doesn’t need anyone making things up to make it sound more valid. Doing this weakens the case for climate change, and makes it that much harder for the rest of us, who know what we’re talking about, to get the message across.