Trying to hold civilised discourse
Brian Clegg writes on the Science writers' forum at Nature Network: "I’ve recently had an exchange of emails with a respected scientist who has doubts about the validity of some of the science behind the current thinking on climate change. He has been villified as a ‘climate change denier’ " . Regular readers of Climate Feedback, the blog of Nature Reports Climate Change, will certainly have seen examples of imbalanced, passionately expressed, readers' comments directed at climate scientsts.
Brian asks whether this is really the right way for professional scientists to go about things. He points out as one example that Fred Hoyle's espousal of the steady-state theory long after most astrophysicists were convinced by the Big Bang did not result in him being vilified as a ‘Big Bang denier’. Are there some topics within science in which objectivity is always sacrificed for emotion? Nature Reports Climate Change and Nature Reports Stem Cells are providing light, rather than unnecessary heat, on these particular "flashpoint" areas of science -- and Brian welcomes your views in the Nature Network forum. Are there other disciplines that would benefit from the Nature Reports approach?