Perhaps the greatest advantage of the AAAS is the way it brings together scientists – and journalists – from across all the disciplines. I know it sounds cheesy, but this really does bring a new and refreshing light to old topics. Talking to a particle physicist over a glass of wine about recent news events, for example, gave me a new perspective on climate change. In his line of work, “certainty” is a much firmer thing than it is in the Earth sciences. No one would claim to have found a particle if they were only “greater than 90%” sure that they had observed it. Yet that’s the IPCC level of certainty that climate change is being caused by mankind – an announcement that was heralded in the press as being really, really quite sure indeed, with headlines from “climate change pinned on mankind” to “It’s all your fault!” splashed across the newspapers. Particle physicists would rather be 99.99994% certain (that’s 5 sigma for those who know about such things) before making such firm statements. Of course there isn’t a precautionary principle when it comes to the existence of, say, the Higgs boson, nor is our children’s future riding on the ultimate energy of the particle that ‘gives things mass’. So perhaps the comparison isn’t really fair. But it gave me pause for thought.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of the AAAS is the way it brings together scientists – and journalists – from across all the disciplines. I know it sounds cheesy, but this really does bring a new and refreshing light to old topics. Talking to a particle physicist over a glass of wine about recent news events, for example, gave me a new perspective on climate change. In his line of work, “certainty” is a much firmer thing than it is in the Earth sciences. No one would claim to have found a particle if they were only “greater than 90%” sure that they had observed it. Yet that’s the IPCC level of certainty that climate change is being caused by mankind – an announcement that was heralded in the press as being really, really quite sure indeed, with headlines from “climate change pinned on mankind” to “It’s all your fault!” splashed across the newspapers. Particle physicists would rather be 99.99994% certain (that’s 5 sigma for those who know about such things) before making such firm statements. Of course there isn’t a precautionary principle when it comes to the existence of, say, the Higgs boson, nor is our children’s future riding on the ultimate energy of the particle that ‘gives things mass’. So perhaps the comparison isn’t really fair. But it gave me pause for thought.