The backlash against scientific advice during the coronavirus pandemic follows the same dynamics as the debate over climate change and shows that ¡°scientifically formed political decisions will always be fraught¡±, according to a Nasa scientist.

Gavin Schmidt, senior climate adviser to the US space agency, said that he previously believed that the debate around climate change was unique, but that Covid-19 ¡°has shown that people come up with the same nonsense and bullshit¡± to support their own agendas.

¡°That we should reduce our carbon dioxide emissions and our methane emissions as fast as we can, that doesn¡¯t really depend on any strong uncertainty in the data,¡± Dr Schmidt told Times Higher Education¡¯s World Academic Summit.

Covid had shown that people ¡°ride the same contrarian train to gain influence and get social media attention¡­the same kind of nonsense preprints get elevated because they¡¯re newsworthy, [and we see] the exact same failures of the media to properly contextualise scientific information¡±.

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¡°It is not because Covid and climate change are the same; it is because people are the same,¡± he said.

Dr Schmidt, former director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that the denial of evidence and the anti-science movements that have sprung up in the wake of the pandemic should be ¡°a wake-up call to folks who are trying to get evidence-based policies in place¡± that ¡°scientifically formed political decisions will always be fraught¡±.

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The idea that ¡°the politician sees the science on the shelf, takes it down, brushes it off, and then applies it, it¡¯s never going to be like that¡±, he said.

He added that the similarities between the two global crises demonstrated that making scientists better communicators or creating ¡°flashy websites¡± would not offer a solution.

¡°The reason why climate change is still a problem, and one in which we don¡¯t seem to be making a lot of progress with, is because there are enormous amounts of vested interests in the status quo,¡± he said, not just fossil fuel and oil companies, but all of society. ¡°Nobody wants to change anything that they don¡¯t have to, particularly behaviours that have developed over decades,¡± he said.

The idea that that ¡°a climate scientist pairing up with an expert in communications to slightly change the framing in an op-ed in a newspaper or on TV, for example¡± will not solve the problem, he said.

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Dr Schmidt added that if ¡°climate scientists spend a little bit more time with social scientists, that¡¯s not a bad thing¡± but that the ¡°scale of the problem and clash of the values¡± were too huge to be solved by better communication.

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com