When The Atlantic “Weekly Planet” asked via email “Why the media keep quoting the same climate scientist” we had an answer ready: because he tells them what they want to hear. Indeed he tells them what they want to hear in very quotable ways. He’s the guy who coined “hydro-climate whiplash” to explain why droughts and floods are both becoming more common, and hence California wildfires, even though in fact none are increasing. He cusses, which is apparently a virtue but we won’t quote it. Instead we’ll observe that it’s part of the decay in thought in the modern world that the tendency of lazy or engaged journalists to quote the same handful of people, or person, on an issue when there are literally thousands they might call is treated as something to celebrate not a warning sign about the narrowing of minds and of sensationalism.

Which brings us to Roger Pielke Jr.’s reflections on the “Republic of Science.” And particularly his observations on the loss of confidence in science on the right as the commanding heights are increasingly captured by the left. When David M. Ewalt, Editor in Chief of Scientific American, emails about “Standing up for science” and boasts of scientists meeting with politicians and their staffers, you don’t wonder what sort, either of scientists or politicians. Including moderator David M. Ewalt.

So Ewalt the journalist wrote of the event that he himself moderated, called “Science on the Hill,” is:

“a wonderful event put together in partnership with our corporate cousins at Nature, meant to put working scientists in the same room as lawmakers and policy people. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often. Too much legislation that shapes scientific research or regulates scientific issues is written without input from scientists, and as a result, we’re left with nonsensical policy.”

Now it’s hard to understand this statement on the face of it given the extraordinary panoply of government bodies, in the U.S. as elsewhere, that have exactly that mandate. What for instance are we to suppose having a “Chief Medical Advisor to the President” or a “National Institutes of Health is all about? Or a Centres for Disease Control? Or NASA? Or NOAA? Are we to believe the U.S. government’s response to COVID was driven by not having input from scientists and was nonsensical? Or its climate policy? Or its dietary recommendations? (Though anyone who takes eating advice from Big Nurse gets what they deserve in our view.)

As for RPJ, his article concerned a once-famous 1962 piece by philosopher of science Michael Polanyi envisioning a “Republic of Science” that governed itself without political oversight or the usual human frailties, bestowing endless blessings on the masses. As Pielke Jr. writes:

“Critics call this vision idealized; admirers saw it as a utopian vision to strive toward. For years ‘The Republic of Science’ was a core reading on my graduate syllabus for my seminar on science and technology policy.”

That such a professor could not continue to operate in academia is a tragedy for another day. The point here is his observation that:

“Whether the republic ever operated as Polanyi described matters far less than whether we understand how it actually works today. That understanding matters for science policy, a topic that has gotten lost in the context of the Trump administration’s wrecking ball approach to institutions of science.”

And we quote the latter part in part to underline that Pielke Jr. is no “right winger” in case you regard that phrase as both indictment and sentence in one. But after giving Trump the knucklebone shampoo he continues:

“The Biden administration caused damage as well: viewing the scientific community as a partisan constituency, weaponizing scientific authority to foreclose debate, and abandoning the broad social contract in favor of tribal alignment. Many in the scientific community willingly played along with the partisan framing of science policy – supporting Democrats while opposing Republicans.”

And it is also very much a problem that very few people appear able to see flaws on both sides any more. It’s not just science that has descended snarling into the pit. But it has done so, and in his summary of the problems RPJ noted:

“The rise of anti-expertise politics reflects a judgment that expert institutions serve themselves more reliably than the public. Expert institutions have failed to acknowledge limits, resisted scrutiny, and defended conclusions serving narrow rather than public interests. In a talk at Oslo last year, I argued that the legitimacy crisis accelerated when scientists abandoned the social contract—science serves all citizens regardless of their politics—in favor of partisan alignment. In my talk I shared data that I recently presented here at THB on how the presidential endorsement by a major science journal compromised public trust in science (shown in the figure below), and the journal endorsed even after knowing this to be the case.”

As usual, the republic cannot heal itself until it admits it has a problem. Which is also true of the media and their pet scientists who say.