Let’s face it, some subjects just aren’t the sort of thing to be spoken of in polite company. Many of these taboos involve bodily fluids and what can sometimes happen to them. Others are more to do with the type of mental frailties and foibles that we’d all rather not admit to. And on very rare occasions the world of fluid somehow melds with the world of mentality, and what we are left with is perhaps the most difficult and taboo of all the subjects; one which we nevertheless need to confront: Seepage.

Yes, that’s right, you heard me. The problem we never talk about but which has such far-ranging implications goes by the name “seepage”. And it is every bit as yucky as it sounds. Whatever we do, we must never let distinctly different mental worlds seep into one another. Yet, according to our old friend Stephan Lewandowsky, that is exactly what we have let happen. We have let the sordid, smelly thinking of the climate sceptic seep into the clean and wholesome world of scientific research. Science has been soiled by sceptic seepage, and it’s about time someone cleaned up the mess. Stephan says he is your man, and I for one don’t doubt it for a minute.

Well, I say he is your man, but it would be more accurate to say that he and some fellow avengers have assembled for your salvation. It is yet another of those constellations of stellar luminaries; on this occasion we have: Lewandowsky, Oreskes, Risbey, Newall and Smithson. Together they have produced the seminal tome on “seepage”, explaining what it is, how it happens and what we can do to prevent it. And the first thing they advise is that it is nothing to be ashamed of. Even the best of us can succumb to “seepage”. Furthermore, it is understandable that no one would wish to admit to it. It’s a bit like getting head lice. No one likes to admit that they have let a parasitic insect get the better of them. And, of course, with the climate sceptic it is even worse, because the little blighter hasn’t just got into your hair, it has got inside your head! What self-respecting scientist is going to admit to that? But as Lewandowsky et al explain, it is a perfectly natural result of years of having been exposed to pathogenic open-mindedness:

We suggest that in response to constant, and sometimes toxic, public challenges, scientists have over-emphasized scientific uncertainty, and have inadvertently allowed contrarian claims to affect how they themselves speak, and perhaps even think, about their own research…Given that science operates in a societal context, there are strong a priori grounds to assume that relentless denial may find some degree of reflection in the scientific community. We refer to this potential phenomenon as “seepage”—defined as the infiltration and influence of what are essentially non-scientific claims into scientific work and discourse.

Now, you might think that a reluctance to be too categoric comes with the territory as far as science is concerned, but you would be wrong. Apparently, climate scientists are desperate to raise the alarm in the most categoric of ways possible, but they have been cowed into silence by years of gas-lighting from a toxic community of climate sceptics. And Lewandowsky et al say they have plenty of evidence that this is the case:

Appeals to uncertainty are so pervasive in political and lobbying circles that they have attracted scholarly attention under the name “Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods”, or “SCAM” for short (Freudenburg et al., 2008). SCAMs are widespread and arguably have postponed regulatory action on many environmental problems, including climate change (Freudenburg et al., 2008).

You just know that when something has “attracted scholarly attention” you must be dealing with a well-established phenomenon. And it gets worse:

We show that even when scientists are rebutting contrarian talking points, they often do so within a framing and within a linguistic landscape created by denial, and often in a manner that reinforces the contrarian claim. This “seepage” has arguably contributed to a widespread tendency to understate the severity of the climate problem (e.g., Brysse et al., 2013, Freudenburg and Muselli, 2010).

So even as sceptics are being rebutted, like zombies in the mall, they somehow still manage to achieve their avowed, evil intent – to eat the scientists’ brains and thereby get the world to understate the severity of the climate problem. If I might say so, this isn’t just “seepage”, it is “seepage” with supernatural powers.

Okay, so how have scientists – the most level-headed and logical amongst us – allowed themselves to succumb to such a dastardly influence? Lewandowsky et al have an answer:

Although the expertise of climatologists provides an ample reservoir for the refutation of overt falsehoods—such as the long-debunked “zombie arguments” that are levelled at climate science (Weart, 2011)—the complex and nuanced nature of climate science, the prominent role of uncertainty, and its inter-disciplinary aspects, offer the door to more subtle routes of influence.

Well, that’s what you get when you leave the door open; it’s an open invitation to subtle influencers such as yours truly. And there is plenty of evidence of such intellectual trespass. According to Lewandowsky et al, a survey of nearly 500 climate experts has shown that:

“… perceived pressure to alter one’s views had an independent effect on assessments of global warming. Scientists who said they had been pressured to downplay the results of global warming in public rated the likely effects of global warming as slightly less severe than did other scientists” (pp. 98–99). Although this result was confined to a small (5%) subset of their sample, in the present context it serves to highlight the possibility that climate scientists are not immune to external pressures.

Yes, in the “present context”, 5% saying “slightly less severe” really must seem hugely important! What more evidence do you want? We are talking about nearly 25 scientists here! Beside which, there are cognitive processes to consider. Apparently:

There are a number of well-understood cognitive processes that can give rise to seepage.

The paper goes on to emphasise three in particular. Firstly, there is “the large literature” on stereotype threat. Secondly, there is the literature on pluralistic ignorance within the scientific community. Finally, there is “ample evidence” of the third-person effect.

Just very briefly, the stereotype threat refers to the consequences of there being a “virtual public inquisition to which climate science has been subjected (Powell, 2011), and which frequently stigmatizes scientists as ‘money grabbing’, self-interested, or as being mere ‘pseudo-scientists’.” Pluralistic ignorance refers to that well-known phenomenon in which each climate scientist thinks they are in a minority in believing that a particular aspect of climate change is serious, when the reality is that they are always in the majority (who knew?). And the third-person effect refers to the phenomenon in which people “generally believe that social manipulations and persuasive communications exert a stronger effect on others than on themselves”. But you don’t really need to understand what these effects are or appreciate their relevance, you just need to know that the literature is large and the evidence is ample. So there!

Finally, there is the vexed question of how uncertainty should be viewed:

The tacit logic underlying SCAMs is that scientific uncertainty about climate science implies uncertainty about whether something should be done in response to it.

The paper then proudly cites Lewandowsky’s attempt to demonstrate that actually the greater the uncertainty then the greater is the risk and so the greater is the imperative to act. Okay, admittedly he got that all wrong because he doesn’t seem to appreciate what Knightian Uncertainty can do to ordinal arguments, but that’s not the point. The point is this:

Certainty may not be attainable, but uncertainty provides a certain impetus for action, and that recognition may be an important element in imbuing the scientific community with resilience to SCAMs and, by implication, seepage.

Yes, uncertainty may provide a certain impetus for action. But by the same logic one could equally say that uncertainty provides a certain impetus for inaction when that uncertainty relates to action-related risks. However, we are not going to say that here because that would be a SCAM.

By now, you should have detected a hint of irony in my delivery that implies I am not totally on board with the seepage idea. In fact, perhaps it would be fairer to say that I find it wholly unconvincing. There are just too many flaws in the argument for me to be convinced. Firstly, as we have just seen, the central idea of SCAMs has little merit. The Lewandowsky argument for there being an impetus for action does not hold true under Knightian Uncertainty and, besides which, it is a tendentiously applied argument when the solution-domain uncertainties are being ignored. These academics may think they are being very clever by having invented a suitably insulting acronym to describe the sceptics’ strategy, but what they are actually doing is betraying an ignorance of the thinking behind robust risk management. Furthermore, there is a horrible and glaring contradiction in their ideas regarding the role of uncertainty in providing impetus for action. Allow me to explain.

Early in the paper they introduce the idea of ambiguity aversion and how it manifests as a preference for known risks over unknown risks. They then argue that this is the reason why people exhibit a status quo bias, preferring the known situation associated with doing nothing against the unknown risks associated with acting. As they put it:

The “business as usual” (BAU) option gives the appearance of being associated with a known outcome (“won’t things just stay the same?”)

Where exactly they get the idea that such thinking exists amongst sceptics is quite beyond me. It just looks like something they made up to bolster their case. But worse than that – much, much worse, in fact – is that having said that there is a perception of relative certainty associated with taking no action to prevent climate change, they then argue later in the paper that the uncertainties associated with allowing the climate to change are incorrectly used as a reason not to take action. They can’t have it both ways. They can’t start by saying there is a status quo bias because people think inaction offers a certain future (won’t things just stay the same?) and then say there is a status quo bias because people play upon the uncertainties (the SCAM).

Add to the above there is the off-the-scale cherry-picking when they focus upon all the ways in which prosocial censorship can cause scientists to underplay climate change (a seepage) and then totally ignore the ways in which it has encouraged exaggeration of the problem (a tsunami). What was it that the climatologist Lennart Bengtsson said after his peers had forced him to resign from the GWPF? Oh, I remember:

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue, I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety.

Just saying.

So, to conclude, I am happy to accept that there will be a degree to which scientists will be reluctant to overstate problems (to err on the ‘side of least drama’) but I do not accept that this is primarily because they are running scared of sceptics. Furthermore, I’m not so worried about what the 5% of climate scientist have experienced, but I do wonder about the other 95% and what they have been up to. That said, at the end of the day I trust the majority of scientists to have remained broadly professional. Yes, there will be Matthew effects and monocultures to worry about but there has been no widespread hoax deliberately designed to exaggerate the risks; and there certainly hasn’t been a sceptic-inspired movement within the scientific community to play them down. Team Lewandowsky will tell you it is all very subtle and due to the “complex and nuanced nature of climate science, the prominent role of uncertainty, and its inter-disciplinary aspects”. The door, they say, was left open and the notoriously nuanced climate sceptics crept into the scientists’ minds. I suggest instead that a certain highly motivated group of academics is unhappy that the climate scientists are not providing them with all the drama they demand and so have responded by concocting a narrative in which the scientific community has been ‘captured’ by an orc army of mind-bending sceptics. Appealing though that might sound, I’m afraid that was never in God’s plan.