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Impacts of the Science Blogosphere
by Readers of Correlations have already heard about the blog-led effort (with special kudos to our own Sheril Kirshenbaum) to sponsor a candidate's debate about science policy. And of course, especially the Dean and Obama campaigns in the previous and current US presidential elections have elevated the importance of blogs in politics.
What about science? Well, we are hoping here to nucleate a science learning blog tradition, and I am still hopeful of our eventual success. And it's certainly true that RealClimate has had a lot of effect on the way climate science is perceived. At the very least it should suffice to look there to understand that we are talking about science.
I've only been splashing in this pool for about a year now, though I was active on usenet (the once very interesting and now sadly worthless sci.environment) in the 1990s, so I'm not entirely inexperienced about how mass conversation works. So it's interesting to see myself mentioned in various rather high-profile places around the edges of science, and it's interesting to see other influential events emerging from blogging.
A case in point is a recent informal survey of climate scientists regarding their support of otherwise of the IPCC first working group position on climate change. The first interesting thing to the hard core climate bloggers is the surprising collaboration of three prominent climate bloggers with very different styles and attitudes on the matter: Fergus Brown, Roger Pielke Sr. (not to be confused with the also-prominent RP Jr.) and James Annan. I thiunk it should give people who love political feuds pause to understand that all it takes is sufficient respect for truth for such different people to collaborate on a result. The second interesting thing is the relatively high amount of attention going to this effort at the Nature Blog for one and at Salon for another. Who knows, maybe the traditional press will sneak a peek at it.
I for one don't agree with Pielke's gloss on this paper (see the link to the survey above). I don't find the extent of disagreement extraordinary at all. As one who works on the boundary between disciplines, I also don't find the difficulty in finding a venue for traditional scientific publication all that odd.
In the end their method failed to find a single person who echoes the much-promoted but poorly supported position that IPCC is peddling a fraud. Unfortunate, really. I'd rather have wasted my career than to see the world in such trouble as I perceive it. Since that won't turn out to be true, hopefully the time has passed for emotional responses to real problems, and we can start thinking our way out of our common predicament.
By the way, if anyone happens across this who misses the old sci.environment, you might want to check out the global change Google group.
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