Trust in public institutions has eroded over many years. One of the last bastions of trust was science, but the confidence has been waning even here. Is this mistrust misplaced, or is there a problem with science? During the first leg of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2021, 77% trusted the CDC, according to a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation poll. Less than a year later, public trust had plummeted to 44% in an NBC News poll. What’s behind this precipitous drop?
Climate Change
Despite more than 30 years of media campaigns to convince the world of the threat of manmade global warming, governments and elites have only succeeded with their messaging in certain countries. According to the data, it seems the more educated a nation is, the more skeptical of catastrophic climate change its people tend to be.
The World Economic Forum regularly orders world surveys on confidence in global institutions, and in 2020, SAP and Qualtrics provided results from 30 different countries that reaffirmed previous findings. South Asian nations had the greatest confidence in climate science, while North American and European countries had the lowest. The same survey showed that more educated nations consumed less news.
Dr. Steven Koonin gives a good explanation for this widespread rejection of climate science in his bestseller Unsettled. He systematically shows how scientific information is distorted at every transmission point from the journals via the IPCC report to the Summary for Policy Makers and eventually through the media. He shows that every time the data is distorted, it is always in the direction of gloom and doom, never in the opposite direction. Koonin goes so far as to say that parts of the Summary for Policy Makers are a “swindle,” stating the opposite of what the underlying science says.
Koonin is not a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He is one of the most well-respected scientists in America and served as Under Secretary for Science under President Barack Obama. Like many others, Koonin had swallowed the media story until he was asked to lead an assessment of the science. He then discovered the extent of the distortion, which many well-educated lay people have been aware of for a long time.
The matter is made even worse by the so-called replication crisis in science. A disturbingly high percentage of findings cannot be replicated in new studies. Today, many people regard the phrase “a new scientific study shows” as synonymous with snake oil pushed by interest groups.
Trust the Science?
The trust in scientific institutions has been waning across the board, and the reason appears to be corruption and abuse for ideological purposes. People sense that science is being used as a tool for social manipulation. There is only one sustainable way to reinvigorate confidence: return to honesty and ideology-free science.
~ Read more from Caroline Adana.
