If You Seek the Truth, Don’t Trash the Science - By John Schwartz - Washington Post.
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The mug gives the Web address, www . junkscience . com (motto: “All the junk that’s fit to debunk”), and the rest of the mug is decorated with acronyms and phrases that exemplify Milloy’s idea of debunked junk: DDT, EMFs (electromagnetic fields), Gulf War Syndrome, alar, global warming, silicone breast implants and more.
There’s a huge irony at work here, of course. It’s science, after all, that has effectively laid some of those controversies to rest (no authoritative study has found that EMFs from overhead power lines cause cancer, for example). But others, such as global warming, are still part of a serious ongoing debate. And so it should be. If there is one clear way in which science is abused, it is by reducing its deliberate, complex method of discovery to the kind of epigrams that you can display on a coffee mug. Yet, here is the self-proclaimed “Junkman” calling the ball dead on controversy after controversy.
When I called him up and asked him about it, Milloy emphasized that he was simply trying to attract people to his site, where they could read more. And while that might be true, the problem with terms such as “junk science”–which, like “political correctness,” originated in conservative circles–is that they are used not to spark debate but to cut it short. Science, on the other hand, is in large part about keeping the conversation going.
What happens if we cut short the conversation on topics such as global warming? It is pretty well established that temperatures are on the rise. But there are huge gaps in our knowledge about whether human activity has caused that rise, and what human activity might be able to do to reverse the process. Can we afford to dismiss the topic now, putting off any study of what prudent steps we might need to take to be certain that there’s nothing to worry about?
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What’s a consumer to do? How can you hope to find out whether a given product is actually safe (which is all most of us are really interested in)? Anyone hoping to make sense of the science news and the political battles surrounding it has to develop antennae for judging each new story and study. The most reliable information is likely to come from that peer-reviewed journal, though that’s no guarantee. A good story should say whether a finding is new, or confirms an existing body of research–anyone who stopped drinking coffee in 1981 out of fears of getting pancreatic cancer suffered through a lot of bleary-eyed mornings for nothing. And let’s hope people aren’t put off eating cancer-fighting fresh fruits and vegetables by the report last week about the possible health risks of pesticide residues on those foods.
But most of all, any reader’s ears should prick up when they hear phrases like “politicized science” or “junk science” being tossed about. The claim may be right–but anyone who makes it should be vetted for politics and junk as well.