A conference in California next week says it aims to make scientific studies more reliable, but critics fear the event is a new tactic used by those who question the reality of climate change.
The event, called , is being run by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a non-profit organisation based in New York.
The conference’s programme focuses on the reproducibility crisis – the claim that science has an increasing problem with poorly performed or even fraudulent studies – with a portion dedicated to how that applies to both economics and climate change.
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In recent years, psychology and medicine have suffered a series of embarrassing incidents, where well-established results collapsed under scrutiny. Many scientists believe we must reform how science is organised to avoid such errors.
So it is no surprise that the upcoming conference has attracted a number of high-profile experts on reproducibility.
On the surface, identifying flawed studies “looks like a very good mission”, says Philipp Schmid at the University of Erfurt in Germany, who studies science denial. He isn’t attending the conference.
Sustainability critics
But he says there may be more to the NAS’s conference than that. “They use the findings from these areas to downplay climate change, which kind of shows that they have a specific agenda when writing their reports,” says Schmid.
The NAS has published reports attacking sustainability initiatives, including campaigns seeking to persuade universities to divest their fossil fuel investments. A 2018 NAS report on reproducibility said that climate scientists seek to “demonize carbon dioxide”.
NAS president Peter Wood says the world is warming, but “whether that is caused by human activity is a matter of significant dispute”. In fact, .
Responding to the accusations about the conference, Wood said: “We have been critics of the sustainability movement, which is not the same thing as climate science by a long stretch. The science and politics can and should be distinguished.”
The NAS’s focus on reproducibility is significant, says Sven Ove Hansson at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. “It seems to me to be a new tactic. The idea is to say, ‘Look here, the behavioural sciences have sometimes been wrong, therefore the climate scientists are wrong just now in what they are saying’,” he says.
Climate change hasn’t been implicated in the reproducibility crisis, says Schmid.
Furthermore, the central findings of climate science have been replicated over and over, and data and models have been subjected to high levels of scrutiny.
This leaves scientists with a question of whether to attend the conference and push back on these ideas.
Daniele Fanelli at the London School of Economics plans to go. He argues that the reproducibility crisis is overblown because most fields of science are highly reproducible. Fanelli says he has “sought reassurance that my participation will not be taken as an endorsement of any political position or agenda”.
Computational biologist Lenny Teytelman is CEO of protocols.io, a company that aims to make experiments more reproducible by standardising how data and methods are shared. Aware of the NAS’s history, “I tweeted a general warning against the conference and then emailed the individual speakers to alert them about the group’s background,” he says.
In response, Wood published an in The Wall Street Journal accusing Teytelman of trying to stifle debate. Others have since weighed in on Teytelman’s side.
“My view is that many of the speakers at this meeting are being played,” Dorothy Bishop at the University of Oxford argued on her blog. By attending, they are lending credibility to fringe views and to an essentially political group, she said.
“If the purpose of a conference is not bona fide scientific, people whose names would add to the status of the conference shouldn’t go there,” says Hansson.
