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“I DON’T want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the scientists.” That is what climate activist Greta Thunberg told the US Congress in September when she offered a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rather than her own words as testimony.

But why would anyone choose to listen to carefully dehumanised, committee-speak science over the impassioned, but not impartial, rhetoric of real human beings? Because facts outweigh opinions, say science insiders. The trouble is, as Naomi Oreskes points out in her fascinating new book, Why Trust Science?, that is because we have faith in science. In the end, none of us can actually come up with a convincing answer to the question at the heart of this discussion: why trust science?

Maybe because it works. Surely the results of social experiments like vaccination speak for themselves? Death and damage from diseases such as measles and smallpox have been radically reduced by inoculation. Or we could cite the laws of physics: if you blanket Earth in a gas that absorbs infrared radiation, trapping heat, it has to experience significant warming.

Ah, but how do outsiders know this is true? Frustrating as it seems, Oreskes argues that this is a valid question. Scientists, she says, “need to explain not just what they know, but how they know it”.

But attempts to do this can confound the problem. Take IPCC reports. They are the voice of scientific consensus on climate change: thousands of scientists contribute, and their findings, researched over decades, are distilled into a digest of objective facts by teams of scientist-writers. These reports aren’t designed to be page-turners, nor to convey scientists’ anguish at the dire situation. They are cool presentations of the scientific conclusions and how they were reached.

“In suppressing their values and insisting on science’s neutrality, scientists have gone down a wrong road”

Perhaps, Oreskes suggests, that is why they have made so little impact on global policy-makers. “The dominant style in scientific writing is not only to hide the values of the authors, but to hide their humanity altogether,” she says. “The ideal paper is written… as if there were no human author.”

Humanity matters, as we see with former doctor Andrew Wakefield’s claim that the MMR vaccine causes autism. Scientific refutations of his flawed research continue to be outgunned by media accounts of parents who declare their children have been left with autism by the vaccine. Now measles, mumps and rubella are back. People are powerful.

The issues are complicated. But as co-author with Erik Conway of Merchants of Doubt, which looked at the efforts by vested interests to obscure real science behind everything from smoking to climate change, Oreskes knows that part of the problem is that a little mistrust goes a long way.

In the pursuit of a reputation for unbiased objectivity, scientists have declined to discuss their values, she says. In fact, they have pretended to have none – a disastrous strategy. “Would you trust a person who has no values?” asks Oreskes. “In suppressing their values and insisting on the value-neutrality of science, scientists have gone down a wrong road.”

But it is hard to discern an alternative. A suggests climate change researchers offering policy suggestions aren’t viewed as any less credible by the public, unless they are advocating new nuclear power stations. Even the broader research community is now accepting of scientists who hold opinions on what should be done about their research results.

Such actions do make it easier for politicians to ignore inconvenient truths, though. If scientists had declared themselves angry at decades of inactivity or sounded an alarm to mobilise public opinion, they would have risked being grouped with lobbyists – and there are better lobbyists around, as Oreskes and Conway’s book made clear.

Oreskes offers peer review and tenure as mechanisms to establish trust. The trouble is, insiders are keeping a dirty secret: peer review is far from perfect, and tenure isn’t “the academic version of licensing” that Oreskes suggests. The vast majority of working scientists don’t have tenure. Surely most of these are as knowledgeable and trustworthy as the tenured?

Whatever paths we take, to make progress, we have to start by acknowledging that things look different outside science. If you haven’t studied science beyond what was compulsory in school, have no ongoing connections with scientists and have trusting relationships with those who doubt science’s claims, then you may be sceptical about scientists who claim to have a handle on what is true or real. Especially if those scientists suggest we take a path that looks dauntingly painful.

In fact, trust may not be the central issue anyway. Maybe, for climate change at least, it amounts to this: why do today what you can put off until tomorrow, especially if it then becomes somebody else’s problem? That “somebody else” is, of course, the next generation. Thunberg’s, to be precise.

If it is a bold move to focus a book on a question with no clear answer, it is even bolder to publish the critiques of your answer in the same book. The second half of Why Trust Science? is a back-and-forth between Oreskes and some academics. But in a field with few reasons to be cheerful, it is both enlightening and encouraging. Once we begin to understand the size of the chasm that separates science’s outsiders and insiders, as Oreskes clearly does, we can at least start to design a bridge.