What I was telling the Discover interviewer, of course, was my disdain for a soundbite communications process that imposes the double ethical bind on all who venture into the popular media. To twist my openly stated and serious objections to the soundbite process into some kind of advocacy of exaggeration is a clear distortion. Moreover, not only do I disapprove of the “ends justify the means” philosophy of which I am accused, but, in fact have actively campaigned against it in myriad speeches and writings. Instead, I repeatedly advocate that scientists explicitly warn their audiences that “what to do” is a value choice as opposed to “what can happen” and “what are the odds,” which are scientific issues (e.g. p. 213 of Ref. 3). I also urge that scientists, when they offer probabilities, work hard to distinguish which are objective and which are subjective, as well as what is the scientific basis for any probability offered.
For such reasons I was honored to receive, in 1991, the AAAS/Westinghouse Award for the Public Understanding of Science. If the readers of APS News are confused by all this rancor and want a fair and balanced treatment of environmental scientific and policy debates, they can turn to the several National Research Council or IPCC assessments, in which words like “any,” “all,” “every,” and “entirely” are scarce, and citations are quoted or paraphrased in their proper context.
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