‘Democratising science’ through the mobilisation of an extended peer community carries risks as well as benefits. - Mike Hulme
Climate change has mutated from being a physical phenomenon to be studied to an idea to be contested. The sites of adjudication between competing truth claims have therefore moved from the secluded academy and scientific peer review to the vociferous agora and the extended peer community.
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Removing science from its ‘black-box’ status by subjecting its truth-claims to different forms of public scrutiny and accountability .. adds new social value to scientific knowledge. It also opens up possibilities for adjusting public expectations about the different levels of confidence with which science can speak. But this can cut both ways...
The case of Callendar, Gore and Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glaciers also illustrates the ambiguous – or at least the conditional - benefits of moving truth adjudications from the republic to the agora. Democratisation of science, in this case discursive checking of scientific claims by Beck’s ‘open upper chamber’, may destabilise knowledge as much as it may legitimise it. The interplay between these two consequences of the democratic move in science depends crucially on notions of trust: trust in the transparency with which experts are selected and trust in the new processes of adjudication thereby established – in this case the judiciary. If the reality of climate change on the basis of evidence is to be ‘owned’ by the people, the people must be confident that adequate provisions are made for quality assurance of that evidence by an extended peer community. As the case of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers shows, such confidence has to be earned not assumed.
An prescient paper he wrote last year, very interesting.