Why doesn’t the public accept the science? This is the so-called Hard Question in the science-communication sciences.

The paradigm is straightforward enough:

A scientist and a non-scientist meet. This is a teaching moment: the non-scientist is ‘exposed’ to science. We logically expect this to translate (or ‘convert’) to an increase in his or her acceptance of the science.

But it doesn’t always happen.

We’ve studied hundreds of unsuccessful exposures—’failures to convert’ [FTC]—and asked participants what went wrong with the rapport between scientist and citizen.

The single biggest rapport-breaker?

Arrogance.

Time and time again, scientists find the public arrogant.

Unless and until ordinary people show some humility and deference, the scientists will have little interest in helping them.

Nowhere is arrogance more of a turn-off than in the climate debate. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone complained, “Just because they’re climate scientists, it doesn’t mean they’re smarter than us.”

Yes it does. And until the general public gets over its self-importance, the scientists are just going to keep switching off.

“Skeptics” believe the darnedest things. One of their favorite mythconceptions is that scientists are under pressure to agree.

Far from it. Science is all about overturning the consensus; there’s no glory in conformity. If the prevailing view never changed then all you’d have is “settled science,” and scientists have a word for that kind of thing: “religion.”

That’s why everyone who works in (say) climate science is driven by one goal: to be the next Michael Mann, the researcher who changed everything we thought we knew about the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the rest of the last 1000 years of climatic change. By proving the then-consensus view wrong, Mann won instant respect and credibility throughout the scientific world.

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An article by Wall Street Journal employee Pete du Pont, in which he argues that the public “could use an honest debate” on climate change, has just come out in the WSJ (where else?).

We cannot risk taking du Pont’s advice. What he forgets, or deliberately fails to tell his readers, is that debates take at least an hour. They can easily break the two-hour mark, depending on the format.

But we need to act on climate now.

Not in a couple of hours. Not next month. Not in an hour. Now.

Du Pont’s motivation, then, is clearly to stall for time. Seen in this light, the call for “debate” is almost understandable (if not forgivable). Hey: if you can’t deny it, delay it!

Look for such tactics to become increasingly central to the denialist MO this year as the science itself becomes less and less controversial. Remember, people who oppose science are, at bottom, neophobes with an irrational addiction to the status quo. And when change terrifies you you’ll do anything to slow it down—no matter how foolish you make yourself sound in the process. (This is why my New Year’s resolution was to say “science refusard” less and “climate retardard” more.) If the climate-change wars have proven anything it’s the visceral conservativeness, the blind fear of change, of the left half of the human bell curve.

Of course, my critique of du Pont’s desperate call for a debate doesn’t even take into account the considerable time it would take to find a venue and arrange security (hardly a trivial task when the topic is as “heated” as this one). But as if these flaws weren’t fatal enough, du Pont also ignores the problem of recruiting participants. Real climate scientists are notoriously reluctant to debate. Even if they agreed to do so—and as any scientist on earth will tell you, getting scientists to agree on anything is like herding cats—they would then need to select their opponents. It could easily take weeks of negotiations just to nominate three or four skeptics whose presence on the same stage wouldn’t offend the sensibilities, or tarnish the good name, of anyone on the Affirmative team.

And as climate scientists have been telling us since the late 80s, that’s time we simply don’t have.

When will we finally believe them?

Denialism equals delayalism equals debatalism, folks.

Jonathan Jones, Professor of Physics at Oxford, has been meta-shunned; snubbed by the ostrarchy; excluded from the excluditi.

The Internet can be such an Amish place.

Do you remember what life was like 25 years ago?

Probably not—at least not if you work in medicine or have spent any time in hospital (in virtually any rôle) since 1989. The world of health care is an unrecognizably different place than it was a mere quarter-century ago.

In a good way.

Since then, medical science has given us the completed Human Genome Project, the first cancer-preventative vaccine (for HPV), HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors [‘statins’], an awareness of the therapeutic and prognostic significance of omega-3 fatty acid levels, stem-cell therapies for adrenoleukodystrophy and other conditions, functional MRI, self-expanding stents made of nitinol and next-generation materials, minimally-invasive robotic surgery, the bio-informatics revolution, lifesaving genetically-engineered drugs like tissue plasminogen activator, gene-targeted therapies like Herceptin and Gleevec (for breast cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia and GIST), the multi-lumen tubing which is now a mainstay on high-dependency wards, highly active anti-retroviral therapy [HAART] and the once-a-day HIV pill that can slow down and even arrest progression to AIDS, entire families of antidepressants and noötropics…

The list goes on. And remember, that’s just medical advances.

But it got me thinking about an even bigger question:

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