A conference in California next聽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聽non-profit organisation based in聽New York.
The conference鈥檚 programme focuses on the reproducibility crisis 鈥� the claim that science has an increasing problem with poorly performed or even fraudulent studies 鈥� with a portion dedicated to how that applies to both economics and climate change.
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In recent years, psychology and聽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 鈥渓ooks like a very good mission鈥�, says Philipp Schmid at the University of Erfurt聽in Germany, who studies science denial. He isn鈥檛 attending the conference.
Sustainability critics
But he says there may be more to聽the NAS鈥檚 conference than that.聽鈥淭hey use the findings from these areas to downplay climate change, which kind of shows that聽they have a specific agenda when writing their reports,鈥� says聽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聽鈥渄emonize carbon dioxide鈥�.
NAS president Peter Wood says聽the world is warming, but 鈥渨hether that is caused by human activity is a matter of significant dispute鈥�. In fact, .
Responding to the accusations about the conference, Wood said: 鈥淲e have been critics of the sustainability movement, which is聽not the same thing as climate science by a long stretch. The science and politics can and should be distinguished.鈥�
The NAS鈥檚 focus on reproducibility is significant, says聽Sven Ove Hansson at the Royal Institute of Technology in聽Sweden. 鈥淚t seems to me to be聽a聽new tactic. The idea is to say,聽鈥楲ook here, the聽behavioural sciences have sometimes been wrong, therefore the climate scientists are wrong just now in what they are saying鈥�,鈥� he says.
Climate change hasn鈥檛 been implicated in the reproducibility crisis, says Schmid.
Furthermore, the central findings of climate science have been replicated over and over, and聽data and models have been subjected to high levels of scrutiny.
This leaves scientists with a question of whether to attend the聽conference and push back on聽these ideas.
Daniele Fanelli at the London School of Economics plans to go. He argues that the reproducibility crisis is overblown because most聽fields of science are highly reproducible. Fanelli says he has聽鈥渟ought reassurance that my participation will not be taken as an endorsement of any political position or agenda鈥�.
Computational biologist Lenny Teytelman is CEO of protocols.io, a聽company that aims to make experiments more reproducible by standardising how data and methods are shared. Aware of the NAS鈥檚 history, 鈥淚 tweeted a general warning against the conference and then emailed the individual speakers to alert them about the group鈥檚 background,鈥� he says.
In response, Wood published an聽 in The Wall Street Journal accusing Teytelman of trying to stifle debate. Others have聽since weighed in on Teytelman鈥檚 side.
鈥淢y view is that many of the speakers at this meeting are being played,鈥� Dorothy Bishop at the University of Oxford argued on her blog. By attending, they are lending credibility to fringe views聽and to an essentially political group, she said.
鈥淚f the purpose of a conference is not bona fide scientific, people whose names would add to the status of the conference shouldn鈥檛 go there,鈥� says Hansson.
