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MAKING CITIZEN SCIENTISTS
By Sean Henahan, Access Excellence
"Every citizen in a democracy is capable of joining in those decisions," Schneider said, "because in the end they are value judgments based on common sense, plus an awareness of the risks and benefits of alternative strategies." However, making an informed value judgment about something as complex as global warming, requires a level of technical information, plus sophistication about scientific facts and methods, that most Americans do not have the time and energy to develop for themselves, he noted. Schneider called for establishment of a "meta-institution," an agency partly analogous to the now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment, "to do the hard work of evaluating the likelihood of scientific assertions on important topics." Schneider has devised three questions that can help any citizen, journalist or policymaker who is attempting to get the technical information from experts:
The first question "What can happen?" , will help experts to agree on a range of possible outcomes. For example, in the study of climate change, the majority of scientists predict that at the current rate that humans are discharging extra carbon dioxide into the air, the 21st century will see average global temperatures rise between 1 and 5 degrees Celsius. "However, what can happen has no policy meaning by itself. What's important is how likely is the event - that's why the second question is, 'What are the odds?'" Schneider said. "The majority of climate change experts view the odds of at least 1 degree of global warming at something like 9 out of 10. They say there's less than 10 percent chance that warming over the next century will be less than one degree. "On the other hand, the probability that the Earth will be hit by an asteroid that could wipe out most living things is estimated to be exceedingly low, something like 1 in 10 million per year. If the probability is that low, it will probably remain an un-dealt-with risk," Schneider said. The third question "How do you know?" helps evaluate the values and assumptions that underlie estimates. Science is both objective and subjective, Schneider said, based on facts established by experiments, but also on assumptions about what should be tested by the next round of experiments. The science on any complex topic is always evolving: "There are very few things an honest scientist can claim to know for sure," he said. "Except perhaps the classical laws of motion or gravity. When complex systems are involved, it's inevitable that important decisions must be based on the best available, evolving knowledge." When scientists are consulted as experts, they must hold themselves to high standards and they must be explicit about the difference between facts, assumptions and values in the information they provide, Schneider said. "These three questions are the ones I ask my doctors," he said, "because once I know their best estimates about probabilities of adverse consequences, I am the expert on how to take risks with my own health." He told the story of a 40-year-old woman whose doctors found a suspicious spot on her lung in an X-ray. By asking "What can happen?" she found that it could be a tumor, benign or malignant. By asking "What are the odds?" she found that doctors' opinions differed: Some said less than a 10 percent chance that the spot was a malignant tumor, others said the likelihood was nearer to 50 percent. "This woman was the best example I know of the citizen-scientist," Schneider said. "She asked the people who were in a better position to know about the probabilities, she asked them why, and then made a value judgment for her own life - one that weighed the risks and benefits of various treatment alternatives." The woman chose a painful surgery to have the possible tumor removed; it turned out to be malignant and so her choice stopped the spread of cancer. But either decision could have been the "right" one: "How do you know how a gamble's going to turn out? A gamble's a gamble. Risk-averse people like to buy insurance, but premiums aren't free." When enough people start asking these questions, he says, perhaps the nation will transcend the current "dueling experts" scenario, where congressional hearings or courtroom juries hear two opposing sides deliver politically selected extremes instead of the current scientific consensus on a given technological problem. Faced with claims and counter-claims from special interests that bend the facts to their own points of view, Schneider said, "many people feel they can't say anything, that they must be ignorant because they can't understand the details. So they just punt. They kick the decision over to others who supposedly 'know better.' What I call the 'one fax-one-vote' system comes into play, whereby special interests shout loud enough to confuse nearly all lay people. That is how special interests manage to gain equal credibility in the public arena for what really is not a very credible position." How can the average citizen sort out the scientific consensus on the many complicated questions that touch on his or her life? "It's a tall order for the citizen who is casual in hearing the debates," Schneider admitted. "That requires the kind of citizen who religiously watches Nova and reads the Tuesday New York Times science section or Scientific American - a good science buff with a nose for phonies." "Here's where we need a meta-institution. We need somebody in between the decision-makers, the press and the scientists to help ascertain the best-guess position of the majority of knowledgeable experts," Schneider said. Schneider proposed a quick-response agency, independent of both Congress and the president, that would assemble teams of scientists and lay people for open discussion of scientific claims made in the nation's political and economic arenas. Schneider's latest book is Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can't Afford to Lose, BasicBooks, 1997.
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Seattle, WA (2/18/97)
As the new century approaches, mankind faces a number of difficult
issues that depend on scientific expertise, such as the storage of nuclear
wastes, or fossil fuels and global warming. The best hope for these kinds
of problems is to empower people to become citizen-scientists, said Stanford
climatologist Stephen Schneider, speaking at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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