Has public scepticism trumped scientific consensus at the Science Museum?
The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months.
The decision by the 100-year-old London museum reveals how deeply scientific institutions have been shaken by the public’s reaction to revelations of malpractice by climate scientists.
The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.
Even the title of the £4 million gallery has been changed to reflect the museum’s more circumspect approach. The museum had intended to call it the Climate Change Gallery, but has decided to change this to Climate Science Gallery to avoid being accused of presuming that emissions would change the temperature.
Last October the museum launched a temporary exhibition called “Prove It! All the evidence you need to believe in climate change”. The museum said at the time that the exhibition had been designed to demonstrate “through scientific evidence that climate change is real and requires an urgent solution”.
Chris Rapley, the museum’s director, told The Times that it was taking a different approach after observing how the climate debate had been affected by leaked e-mails and overstatements of the dangers of global warming. He said: “We have come to realise, given the way this subject has become so polarised over the past three to four months, that we need to be respectful and welcoming of all views on it.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7073272.ece
The Science Museum should not be ‘respectful and welcoming of all views’, it should be respectful and welcoming of all scientific views – and promote the scientific consensus view. Otherwise it has lost its mission to educate and should instead be called ‘The Ill-Informed Public Opinion Museum’.
For crying out loud! It wouldn’t do to give the impression that the skeptics are plain wrong, would it? That might hurt their feelings.
It is unbelievable, and very worrying, that the Science Museum should aim to be ‘respectful and welcoming’ of all views on climate change, including climate change denial in the teeth of the evidence. It is parallel to ‘welcoming all views’ on evolution vs. creation. It reflects, I think, a misguided concept of tolerance, an excessive relativism, a sense that somehow ‘all views are equal’ regardless of the evidential differences between them.
Who at the Science museum is behind this, I wonder?
Scepticism is an important aspect of humanism and rationalism. I can see nothing wrong in the Science Museum changing the name of its exhibition to the “Climate Science Gallery”. The important point is whether it presents the evidence in an unbiased manner, so that we can all come to a sound conclusion. The conclusion should come after examining the evidence, not before.
Of course there are people who have their own agenda, and decide these issues on the basis of their preconceived prejudices, but these are not truly described as sceptics. Unless “skeptics” with a “k” is coming to have some new meaning, such as “denialist”.
I don’t have a problem with the name change. This article clearly states ” acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.”. And that’s true. There ARE legitimate doubts. They may be right and they may be wrong, but they certainly are legitimate.
That in no way suggests that there is a case for “balancing” evolution against creationism. Evolution has thousands of examples of proof, garnered over a long period of time, and available to anybody who wants to examine it. (unlike some of the the data on which climate change reports are based)
As I understand the climate change debate, we have proof that some scientists deliberately falsified their reports. As I also understand it, more scientists signed a letter to the president of the US denying the conclusions of the IPCC report than there were actual scientists signing it (that is, ‘scientists’, not civil servants).
For myself, I am a sceptic. Not about climate change, because that’s clearly been going on for millions (sorry, billions) of years. To start saying that we can stop it sounds a bit like the King Canute story I was taught as a child.
It just seems to me that whatever we do, the results will be engulfed by increases in population. And so until that issue is tackled, I’ll remain exceptionally sceptical about the motives of politicians and those who want to trade in Carbon Certificates.
And I was around during the last “another ice age is coming” scientific campaign.