Nerlich 2013

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Moderation impossible? On hype, honesty

and trust in the context of modern
academic life
Brigitte Nerlich
Abstract: This article deals with issues of hype in science and science journalism. It
examines two cases of ‘hype’, one surrounding the discovery that neutrinos travel
faster than light, or not; the other surrounding the discovery that the earth is warming,
or not. These two cases are compared and contrasted, especially with a focus on
discovering some of the pitfalls of ‘making science public’ in an era of hype. The
analysis is carried out against the backdrop of an emerging ‘post-normal science’, the
increasing pressure to make science public at an ever-faster pace, as well as the impact
agenda in the UK. The paper shows that with relation to hype in science and science
journalism, it might be useful to distinguish between honest hype and what one might
call politicized hype. Using honest hype to make science public may be an option in
fields of science that are relatively a-political, such as particle physics, an option that
is probably unavailable in a highly politicized science, such as climate science. In this
context, moderation seems as impossible as modesty on the part of the scientists
involved.
Keywords: hype, honesty, trust, modesty, science, politics
My biggest editing hate is the bigging up you have to do on grant applications [. . .]

asserting my outstandingness
Tweet, 2 August 2012
This book scrutinizes the meaning of ‘moderation’ from a variety of perspec-

tives. My contribution deals with the seeming impossibility of practising mod-
eration in an age of hype in the context of academic life. I argue that under
conditions of severe competition for funding and students, as well as in the race
to gain ‘impact’,1 hyping research in various ways – in funding proposals, in
press releases, on websites, in interviews with journalists, for example – has
almost become the norm (Bubela, 2006; Young et al., 2008) and that modesty
and moderation have become seemingly impossible.
In this paper I examine two cases of ‘hype’, one surrounding the discovery
that neutrinos travel faster than light, or not; the other surrounding the discov-
ery that the earth is warming, or not. These two cases, one taken from a
The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

© 2013 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2013 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review. Published by
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,
USA
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Brigitte Nerlich
relatively a-political field of inquiry and the other taken from a highly politicized
one, will be compared and contrasted, especially with a focus on discovering
some of the pitfalls of ‘making science public’ in an era of hype.
Some years ago Sheila Jasanoff (2009 [first published 2003]) made a distinc-
tion between technologies2 of humility and technologies of hubris. She argued
that conventional science is based predominantly on hubris, but should instead
embrace humility (and with it uncertainty and ambiguity), as well as various
ways of bringing the public sphere into science. I will try to show how difficult
it may be to bring about such a change in habits of thought and action, first by
providing some background on research dealing with issues of hype and
honesty, medialization and politicization, open peer review and post-normal
science, and second by investigating two small case studies using some of the
concepts employed in this body of literature.
Hype and hyperbole; trust and honesty
Issues around hype are directly linked to issues around trust, as well as honesty
and modesty. The general fear is that scientific and/or media hype may lead to
a loss of public trust in science and a loss of credibility for scientists (Master
and Resnik, 2013). However, it is not entirely clear what the link is between hype
and public trust, as everything depends on how you define ‘hype’, ‘public’ and
‘trust’. This makes empirical studies of this putative link extremely challenging.
There are, however, proposals for such investigations. Zubin Master and David
Resnik (2013) have recently put forward such a proposal in their article on
‘Hype and public trust in science’. As they point out, The Oxford American
Dictionary of Current English (1999) defines hype as ‘promo[ting] (a product)
with extravagant publicity’ (Master and Resnik, 2013: 2). But when does
extravagant publicity become fraud or deception? And when do we recognize
something as one or the other? Hindsight is, unfortunately, not an option.
Scientists, science writers and journalists, in the widest sense, always have to
say something about the future when reporting on present-day scientific, espe-
cially biotechnological, discoveries. What promises for the future does a drug or
other technology hold? When will it become available? What social or bodily
ailments will it cure and when? What social impact will it have? How will the
general public perceive its risks or benefits? Or, relating more to warning rather
than promises: How bad will the future be under conditions of global warming?
Is global warming dangerous, catastrophic or, indeed, inevitable? What social
impact will it have? According to Master and Resnik, there is a spectrum of
possibilities along which such future talk can occur, ‘with one end having
publicity that is fully fact based with little prediction of scientific futures outside
the known facts, to the opposite end where there are inaccurate predictions or
complete exaggerations without any insight or factual support’ (Master and
Resnik, 2013: 4). As scientific and/or media discourses moves along that scale,
they tend to become more hyped, with intermediate stages being ‘strong
44 The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

© 2013 The Author. Editorial organisation © 2013 The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review
Moderation impossible? On hype, honesty and trust in the context of modern academic life
evidenced-based predictions’, ‘accurate/sensible portrayal’ and ‘inaccurate pre-

diction’. One should add that scientific predictions of boom or bust are usually
also amplified in the media, adding a second layer to the issue of hype and trust.
I claim that there is another scale that cuts across the hype scale proposed
by Master and Resnik, and that is a scale related to story-telling or narrative
rather than to facts and futures. Stories about science are stories. They are
told by scientists, journalists and PR personnel, amongst others, in order to be
read. They are therefore not like academic articles which seem, increasingly, to
be written in order to be published rather than read. In newspapers, science
stories are told to attract, engage and, not to forget, entertain readers. In
funding proposals they are told to attract money and beat the competition. In
press releases, they are told in order to attract public attention to the research
carried out and the institution where it is being carried out. Sometimes they
are told in order to do all those things. However, there seems to be an increas-
ing ‘conspiracy of incentives to enhance the story’ (Scolding, 2009), and this
can lead to hype in the sense of extravagant publicity or, indeed, ‘spin’
(Drescher, 2012).
On the other hand, Tim Radford, freelance journalist and science writer, has
made it clear that it is almost impossible for a science writer to tell a science story
without engaging in some sort of ‘hype’. Even the first step, that is to say,
choosing a story amongst all those that land on a writer’s desk, is already hype
in some sense: ‘I select, therefore I hype’ (Radford, 2009: 147). This type of
‘hype’ is unavoidable and I call it ‘honest hype’, a sort of hype in which both
scientists and science writers routinely and inevitably engage.
Once they have ‘hyped’ in the sense of selecting an issue or a story, they can
then go on to tell the story by using rhetorical tools that range on a scale from
apt metaphors to rampant hyperbole. But how and when do we recognize
something as one or the other, as hype or honesty, as illuminating metaphor or
as metaphorical obfuscation? To give an example, Julian Savulescu, a bioethicist
at the University of Oxford, recently exhorted Times Higher Education readers
to ‘Master the new loom before life’s tapestry unravels at our hands’3 and that
synthetic biology offers the ‘prospect of annihilating life as we know it’
(Savulescu, 2012). Is this honest hype or exaggerated publicity? It seems to be
the latter. By contrast, when Radford talks about stem cells as the ‘magic table
cloth’ (Radford, 2009: 149), readers are probably well aware that he is adding
some spice to the story. Overall though, modesty and moderation do not seem
to get stories published in newspapers.
The question then is: Are scientists increasingly forced to creep up on, and
sometimes cross over, what one might call the hype/fraud threshold (on the
Master and Resnik scientific hype scale) and the rampant hype/hyperbole
threshold (on the Radford narrative hype scale)? Master and Resnik call for
more empirical work on all issues surrounding hype and trust. This will be
difficult, but it is certainly necessary in order to keep track of where science and
society are going in a world where moderation no longer seems to be an option
and modesty is no longer seen as a virtue.
The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099 45

Brigitte Nerlich
I will now go on to discuss the emergence of the medialization and

politicization of science, that is, developments that undermine honesty and
trust.
The medialization and politicization of science
Since around 1998, Peter Weingart and his colleagues from the University of
Bielefeld (Institute of Science and Technology Studies) have studied two pro-
cesses, the medialization and the politicization of science. Weingart first wrote
about medialization, focusing on catastrophe discourses by some climate scien-
tists with regard to climate change (Weingart, 1998). Most recently, he has come
back to this early publication in the context of a newspaper article about the
politicization of science, focusing especially on scientific advice in the context of
climate change (Weingart, 2012).
Weingart’s team, led by Simone Rödder, also edited an entire book on the
issue of medialization (Rödder et al., 2012). According to Rödder et al. (2012:
2), medialization refers ‘to the mutual relation between science and the mass
media. It is based on the assumption that – due to the importance of the mass
media in framing public opinion – there is an increasingly tighter coupling of
science and the mass media.’ The authors claim that successfully exploiting the
link between science and the media is increasingly important for science in order
to achieve public legitimacy, but also in order to attract public and financial
support (Rödder et al., 2012).
This is especially true in a world where research excellence is measured not
only in itself and for itself (whether something is ‘good science’), but by quan-
tifying its societal and economic impact (what the science is ‘good for’). So,
telling a convincing story and selling a convincing story are mutually linked and
linked to selling a good product or a good policy. This increasing medialization
– and marketization – of science is bound up with its growing politicization
on the one hand and its mounting involvement with PR on the other, an
issue explored by Martin Bauer in particular (see below). A research conference
organized by Weingart a few years ago claimed that: ‘To the extent that science
enters the social arena and becomes part of political power play, the scientific
claims to objectivity and trustworthiness tend to be sapped’ (Carrier and
Weingart, 2009). This was written in 2009, just before ‘climategate’, which can
be said to be a parable in the politicization and polarization of science (Nerlich,
2010; Painter, 2011).
In truth, science does not seem to have much choice in the matter, as gov-
erning a world that increasingly depends on technology also means gaining
advice from scientists, engineers and other experts involved in the creation of
such technologies. However, as scientific activity is ever more closely linked to
generating economic, social and political benefits, so the pressure on scientists to
‘perform’, both in terms of generating income and in generating the ‘right’
advice, increases and with it the dangers inherent in politicization.

In this situation there is also pressure on academics to produce outputs

deemed socially and economically ‘beneficial’ at ever-higher speeds of delivery.
The innovation pipeline has to be fed. This leads to a ‘reward structure in which,
all things being equal, alarmist studies are more likely to be covered in the
media’ (Saguy and Almeling, 2008: 83), and to what Weingart (1998: 869) called
‘discursive overbidding which may become the norm in an age when moderation
has become impossible’. In 1998 Weingart had observed this type of exaggera-
tion in the context of climate change where scientists tried to outbid each other
in a race to gain public funding for research. In this case the discursive overbid-
ding was related to first painting a picture of an alarming catastrophe and then
proposing solutions to avert it. The media are co-opted in this process.
Since 1998, many cases of what Weingart calls ‘science-media-coupling’
(Weingart, 1998: 869) and discursive overbidding have been discussed by social
scientists, either in terms of disaster rhetoric or in terms of breakthrough rheto-
ric (see Nerlich, 2009). The most prominent example of discursive overbidding
related to scientific breakthroughs was, perhaps, the case of Woo-Suk Hwang, a
South Korean stem cell scientist who over-claimed breakthroughs in the field of
embryonic stem cell research, inflated hopes in biotechnological achievements,
engaged in fraud and violated bioethics conventions (Kitzinger, 2008). The case
seemed extraordinary at the time (around 2005) but can be seen as a cautionary
tale of modern science deployed in the race to be the first nation/university/lab/
scientist to unlock the (hyped up) promise of X, Y or Z.
By contrast, disaster, catastrophe or Cassandra discourses have pervaded
climate change communication. They are, by some, regarded as hype and alarm-
ism, by others as truths upon which we have to act before it is too late (Cook,
2012; von Storch and Krauss, 2013). In this process of discursive overbidding,
trust in science and in scientists may be eroded. What is worse, trust in science
may be difficult to restore in the context of an academic system focused not
on credibility but on (monetary or marketable) credit (Fuller, 2006). Have we
therefore reached the limits of science and the limits of trust in science and
scientific advice, as claimed by Weingart (2012)? This may well be the case, but
as the blog discussion that followed the publication of Weingart’s 2012 article
shows, there is only scant advice from science and technology scholars on how
to improve this situation.4
Another driver behind increases in hype, hyperbole and outright fraud,
already alluded to above, may be societal expectations about the pace or speed
of discovery and the publication of potential (hyped-up, ephemeral) break-
throughs, linked to the above-mentioned race-to-be-first or to be leader-in-the-
field. As one blogger expressed it after the revelation that the now-former editor
of the New Yorker and author of the popular science book, ironically called
Imagine: How Creativity Works (Lehrer, 2012), Jonah Lehrer, fabricated quotes
for his book: ‘[W]e now live in a world where counter-intuitive bullshitting is
valorized, where the pose of argument is more important than the actual pursuit
of truth [. . .]. We want oracles. And we want them right now’ (Dobbs, 2012).
This is an issue that some researchers engaged in the so-called ‘slow science

Brigitte Nerlich
movement’ are grappling with and try to counteract (http://slow-science.org/).

Expectations of instant gratification are partially fulfilled by publishing results
before peer-review and by surrounding the publication of results with PR
exercises.
‘PR’: public relations and/or press releases in an era of

post-normal science
In the two case studies I will discuss, scientific findings were published before or
during peer review. Pre-publication of findings in science is increasing in a
culture where PR and press releases seem to take over from science publishing
and its critical evaluation by science writers and journalists (Tuteur, 2010).
Martin Bauer has dealt with this topic extensively, focusing on the increase in
corporate communication in the context of science communication. In their
introduction to an edited volume entitled Journalism, Science and Society:
Science Communication between News and Public Relations (2008), Bauer and
Bucchi highlight two dangers that threaten the status of what one may call
honest and moderate science communication, namely the increasingly private
funding of research and the adoption of corporate communication strategies
which turn (honest) science communication into (hyped) corporate promotion.
Medialization, politicization, hype and haste and what one may call PR creep
in science communication can all be said to be aspects of what some Science and
Technology Studies (STS) scholars call ‘post-normal science’, although their
focus is generally on shifting aspects of risk and uncertainty. However, I believe
the issues discussed here should also be considered aspects of the emergence of
‘post-normal science’, even more than changes in how we deal with uncertainty
and risk. As Mike Hulme said in 2007, ‘disputes in post-normal science focus as
often on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who
has the ear of policy – as on the facts of science’. And who has the ear of policy
is perhaps, in our times, the one who shouts the loudest.
One of the ways to deal with issues raised by post-normal science in this sense
is, according to those who first created this concept (namely, Funtowicz and
Ravetz, 1990), to open science up to scrutiny by a wider variety of ‘stakehold-
ers’. They call this ‘extended peer review’. This is a form of peer review that
differs from traditional peer review, on the one hand, and open peer review, on
the other. Extended peer review consists in inviting non-scientific peers to
engage in reviewing scientific research but can also involve the use of ‘citizen
juries’, ‘focus groups’, and ‘consensus conferences’ in an effort to widen public
participation and oversight in scientific research (see OECD, 2011). This is
different from Internet-based open peer review, which has been implemented by
various journals in the natural sciences in particular and involves ‘rapid pre-
screening on the Internet, in order to allow members of the scientific community
to participate in the assessment of scientific manuscripts through interactive
comments, in addition to designated reviewers’ reports’ (OECD, 2011).

In the following I will discuss two recent cases where issues of hype were at
stake, one relating to fundamental physics, the other to climate science. I will try
to show that in one case we are probably dealing with what one may call ‘honest’
hype, and that in the other case we are dealing with more dubious uses of hype.
There are various links between these two cases. What happened in fundamental
physics was seen as a precedent for the hype that surrounded the publication
of two climate science papers. Furthermore, both the physics and the climate
science publication by-passed traditional peer review. However, one type of
hype occurred in a context of a depoliticized or relatively apolitical type of
science and the other in a highly politicized one. This means that discussing these
two examples may provide insights into the way hype works in the context of the
medialization and politicization of science.
Neutrinos and climate change: on hype and extended peer review
On 23 September 2012, a team of researchers in Italy claimed that they had

observed superluminal neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light from
the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva to the Gran Sasso underground lab
in central Italy. As this finding would have overthrown Einstein’s special theory
of relativity, a fundamental cornerstone of theoretical physics, they decided to
open up the paper based on this observation to ‘open-source review’ rather than
formal peer review. They released the paper on the arXiv (an online archive for
electronic preprints of mainly natural science papers), accompanied by seminars
and a press release, ‘without further tests of possible systematic errors being
carried out’. They called on the scientific community to help them find such
errors (Cartlidge, 2011).
This announcement of neutrinos travelling faster than light stimulated a lot
of debate and press coverage, both in traditional and in online media. Hype was
inevitable. The findings were subsequently shown to be wrong and based on
faulty equipment. The initial findings were abandoned, the paper was with-
drawn and the leaders of the project resigned. Many scientists and journalists
hailed this reversal as a demonstration of the scientific method in action, as an
example in openness, transparency and honesty (Ozawa, 2012; Nature, 2012).
It is interesting to look more closely at the way the researchers arrived at the
decision to pre-publish their results and generate a bit of a media frenzy, which
one can also call hype. As reported in an article published in Physics World, the
decision to publish this way was put to a vote – that is, was achieved demo-
cratically – an aspect of so-called post-normal science that many STS scholars
would surely applaud. The strategy to first publish the research on arXiv and
only later to a peer-reviewed journal got an almost unanimous vote. Some felt
that extra checks should have been carried out by scientists before ‘going
public’. As one person said, ‘There are so many things that people outside can’t
check. It is these things that we have to do before publishing’ (Cartlidge, 2011).
Others, however, were anxious to go public because, as one scientist expressed

Brigitte Nerlich
it: ‘It is not that people think there is a mistake that is being hidden,’ she says,
‘But since something going faster than light would kill modern physics as we
know it, some researchers would feel more at ease with these independent
checks’ (Cartlidge, 2011, italics added). One of the important words here is
‘hidden’. This word has become loaded in science since 2009 and the so-called
‘climategate’ affair.
At the end of 2009, private e-mails between climate scientists had been hacked
and illegally released on the Internet in what came to be known as climategate
(Nerlich, 2010; Grundmann, 2012). These emails seemed to show that climate
scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and else-
where were engaged in scientific deceit (manipulating data and hiding data),
using peer review to side-line critical voices and so on. They seemed to be
engaged in activities that were more political than scientific – a prime example
for the politicization of science. They also seemed to engage in secrecy rather
than openness, as they struggled to deal with Freedom of Information requests.
Many inquiries have exonerated the climate scientists targeted by the hackers.
Some have asked for scientists to be better prepared for dealing with freedom
of information requests (Corner and Bell, 2010). Overall, climategate has led to
general calls for science to be more open and transparent, especially in terms of
giving access to raw data. At the time, some scholars – notably Jerry Ravetz, the
father of the term ‘post-normal science’ – called for climate scientists to ‘show
us your working’ (Hulme and Ravetz, 2009), that is, to not hide but reveal to
everybody how they collect data, analyse them, peer review them, publish them
and so on. A tall order! As some have argued, just accessing reams of scientific
information is not enough to gain insights into the process of science; ‘to get at
the heart of a scientific dispute requires scientific expertise’ (Corner and Bell,
2010).
Since 2009, the open access, open data, open science agenda has moved a long
way, partly driven by the climategate impetus (Courier, 2011). This agenda has
sometimes been called, using what I regard as an inappropriate metaphor, an
‘academic spring’ (referencing the so-called Arab spring, a wave of protests and
upheavals in Tunisia and so on) (Jha, 2012). Others have, by contrast, likened it
to ‘media hype’ (Sociological Imagination, 2012). This was the socio-political
context in which the neutrino pre-publication occurred.
There is no direct evidence that the neutrino researchers were influenced by
climategate and allegations that climate scientists tried to ‘hide the decline’ in
global temperature.5 However, there is evidence of a link between the neutrino
affair and another climate change affair in the media, that is, in the context of
the medialization and corporatization of research (Plummer, 2012). In October
2011, Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative
economic think tank in New York, wrote about climate change:
The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the
prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might –
repeat, might – travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question
Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings

and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere. (Bryce, 2012; see also Moscovitz, 2011,
Plait, 2011)
Subsequently, many scientists pointed out the many differences that exist
between uncertainties in theoretical physics and uncertainties in climate science
(Moscovitz, 2011). However, the neutrinos made a return to the climate change
agenda in July 2012.
At the end of July 2012, two groups of researchers interested in climate change
published their findings. Both groups belong to the wider community of what has
been called ‘climate sceptics’, that is, those contesting dominant views on human
induced climate change. One group formerly belonged to this community; the
other still does now. Both groups published their papers before or during peer
review. One study was the work of a team of climate researchers headed by the
physicist (and ‘former climate sceptic’) Richard Muller at the Berkeley Earth
Surface Temperature Study (BEST).6 This study corroborated views about
climate change held, for example, by members of the United Nation’s Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as members of the Climate Research
Unit at the University of East Anglia from which the private climategate e-mails
had been stolen in November 2009. Muller wrote a New York Times op-ed to
showcase his findings on 28 July 2012, entitled ‘The conversion of a climate
change sceptic’ (Muller, 2012). The second group is headed by Anthony Watts
who maintains the website Watts up with that, which reports on anthropogenic
global warming-related issues from a sceptical standpoint. He published a paper
almost simultaneously with Muller. This group issued a press release on 29 July
2012 entitled ‘U.S. temperature trends show a spurious doubling due to NOAA
station siting problems and post measurement adjustments’ (Watts, 2012).
The story of the two papers has a longer history. Richard Muller had already
published some findings in the autumn of 2011, which had prompted Anthony
Watts to write in his blog on 20 October 2011: ‘THERE’S only one problem: not
one of the BEST papers have completed peer review . . . yet BEST is making a
“pre-peer review” media blitz’ (The Australian, 2 November 2011). Ironically,
Watts himself then engaged in a similar pre-peer review blogging campaign in
the summer of 2012. What is interesting in the quote from The Australian is the
word ‘media-blitz’, which has connotations of war between scientists rather than
a reasoned debate. Another telling word, ‘battle’, is used in an article on this
whole affair entitled ‘How climate science became politicised’ (Pappas, 2012):
‘The latest volley in the public-relations battle over climate change was launched
by University of California, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller.’ Climate
science, whether pre-peer reviewed, peer reviewed or non-peer reviewed, has
become embroiled in both medialization and politicization, two trends that seem
to contribute not to a lively public debate of, and public engagement with, the
issue of climate change, but rather the contrary; it has become polarized between
two rather vocal ideological ‘camps’. Does this mean that open access and
extended peer review are not the panacea to science-society issues of which STS
scholars have dreamed?

Brigitte Nerlich
Two of the most high-profile social scientists working on the issue of climate
change in the United States, Anthony Leiserowitz and Ed Maibach, are quoted
in the article on the politicization of climate science mentioned above. They
point out that the fight over Muller’s findings which played out on the Internet
may pass the American public completely by and therefore not influence public
opinion on climate change or change people’s minds. By contrast this public
turnaround conveys a general message about science, namely that, if the evi-
dence is clear, scientists change their minds (Pappas, 2012).
In both the neutrino and the Richard Muller cases, scientists changed their
minds. However, there are differences in the way they did so and in the way they
made this ‘changing of mind’ public, mostly with regard to how scientific results
were made public and with regard to the type of hype involved in the process.
Shortly after the publication of the two climate science papers, on 30 July
2012, a blog post appeared in the Washington Post entitled ‘Two climate papers
get hyped first, reviewed later. Is that a bad idea?’ Surprisingly, the post opened
with a reference to the neutrino affair and contended that
[The] CERN researchers also set an odd precedent, in which scientific results are
announced to the world before they’ve gone through traditional peer review. To some
scientists, this was a controversial practice. And now the practice seems to be creeping
to other areas, including the always-charged field of climate science.
Physicists opened up their findings to peer review by fellow physicists using

‘open peer review’. Climate scientists opened up their findings to an extended
community of climate scientists and fact-checking enthusiasts from a variety of
disciplines, using what one may call ‘extended peer review’. In both cases one
can detect the use of hype; in the first example by claiming a rather earth-
shattering scientific breakthrough, in the second by using the media and the
Internet to, on the one hand, popularize findings that support an emerging
scientific consensus and, on the other, to contest it.
However, there are important differences between the neutrino affair and the
climate papers affair. The hype in the first instance was linked to the fact that
neutrinos travelling faster than light would have challenged fundamental aspects
of our understanding of the universe. This is what I call ‘honest hype’. There was
no extra dramatization or sensationalism involved in making that claim which
was in itself dramatic, but there was, of course, excitement. There was no
‘extravagant publicity’, and getting the results out there to be scrutinized shows
a degree of modesty and openness to moderation in all its senses. The way the
findings were published led to a swift reassessment of the results and the issue is
now closed.
By contrast, the hype surrounding the climate papers was to some extent
intended by those who published the papers, despite the fact that the findings
were, as far as other scientists were concerned hardly earth-shattering
(RealClimate, 2011). In terms of science, they may contribute incrementally to
climate science or not, but they would not overturn the whole of established
climate science. The importance of these papers lies in the politics of science

rather than science itself, as they pit what some call a former and a current
‘climate sceptic’ (Richard Muller and Anthony Watts) against each other.
Initially, the BEST study was hailed and hyped as finally closing the debate
about climate change and perhaps persuading those still doubtful of the
anthropogenic or human-induced nature of climate change that the theory of
global warming put forward by climate scientists was true after all. If that had
happened the politics of climate change (not the science) would have indeed
shifted dramatically. The publication of the second paper opened up the debate
again. In doing so, it perpetuated the stalemate that had been reached between
those who want to base their policies on findings showing that the earth is
warming due to human activities and those who want to base their policies on
findings showing the opposite. The hype generated around the two climate
papers, unlike the hype generated around the neutrino paper, therefore links
directly to the increasing politicization of science, for which climate science is the
prime example.
Interestingly, the way a so-called former climate sceptic and a current climate
sceptic made their papers public was not unique to the climate sceptic scene.
Shortly after the BEST affair, James Hansen, who is generally reviled by climate
sceptics and has been trying to push politicians to recognize the dangers of
anthropogenic climate change since 1988 (Jaspal and Nerlich, in press), also
published a paper which appeared in PNAS (Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America). Surprisingly, he broke
his own embargo on the paper by publishing an opinion piece in the Washington
Post shortly before its publication, forcing PNAS to publish the paper early
(Hansen, 2012; http://embargowatch.wordpress.com/). This was immediately
criticized by opponents as ‘science by press release’ (Smith, 2012). As Weingart
diagnosed as early as 1998, climate science still seems to be trapped in a process
of ‘discursive overbidding’.
Hype and openness – a dilemma for ‘making science public’
In both cases discussed above, ‘open access’ was provided to important research
and ‘extended peer review’ has been made possible. But does extended peer
review work in the context of a highly politicized science?
The type of peer review that was employed in the neutrino case was open peer
review. The type of peer review to which those who published their climate
papers aspired was the more radical form of extended peer review. It corre-
sponds to some extent to the way scientists should interact with society as
advocated by Hulme and Ravetz (2009) after climategate. They claim that
scientific knowledge, especially knowledge that has policy relevance, should
undergo not only ‘extended peer review’ in terms of the democratization of
science they advocate, but that scientists should also ‘show their working’,
should be as open as possible about what they do. They claim that it ‘is no longer
tenable to believe that warranted and trusted scientific knowledge can come

Brigitte Nerlich
into existence inside laboratories that are hermetically sealed from such
demands’.
Here, the opening up of knowledge claims to public scrutiny is linked to the
issue of trust. The implicit claim is that the more scientific processes and prod-
ucts undergo public and open scrutiny, the more trust people will have in
science. In relation to such claims, the comparison between the neutrino case
and the climate science case may provide some insights. In the case of the
neutrino story, scientists worked openly and democratically and science cor-
rected itself swiftly after public scrutiny, in the sense of scrutiny by other
scientists. Physics went back to ‘normal’ and media attention (and with it
probably a small proportion of public attention) turned to other issues. Politi-
cally, there was nothing really at stake, apart from the fact of scientists
‘showing their workings’ in a political climate that increasingly demands this
transparency.
In the case of the climate science story, climate science is still in the same state
it was before the publication of the papers, but more importantly and disap-
pointingly, climate politics is too. Open debate of two important papers (and
including Hansen’s, three) on climate science in the summer of 2012 has not
significantly transformed the political scene. Climate policy is still unable to
advance, gripped in the pincer movement of polarized public engagement with
the issue of climate change. Extended peer review will continue but there is no
closure in sight – if closure is the right word in a context of open debate about
science and politics. Various waves of hype and anti-hype will continue to crash
against an ever-higher wall of public indifference. Is this what post-normal
science looks like?
In this paper, I have tried to explore various dimensions of ‘hype’ in relation
to impact, acceleration and the speed of producing research outputs, PR creep
and funding issues. I have linked this discussion to some topics discussed in the
context of post-normal science and extended peer-review, especially in relation
to the hotly debated issue of climate change. The analysis of two case studies has
shown that one can perhaps distinguish between honest hype and what one
might call politicized hype. I have argued that honest hype is an option in a
science that is not politicized but probably remains unavailable in a highly
politicized science, such as climate science. In this context, moderation seems as
much impossible as modesty on the part of the scientists involved.
Aristotle (1955) claimed that virtues are a point of moderation between two
opposite vices, where modesty is situated between bashfulness and vanity. It
seems that modern academia, under pressure from the market, may be on the
way to becoming an enterprise in vanity, where bashfulness, humility and reti-
cence are virtues that are being driven out by market forces.
Notes
1 I use impact here in the broadest sense, as academic and societal, cultural, etc., impact. For an
overview of the concept see Bornmann (2012).

2 In the context of science and technology studies, ‘technologies’ means the ‘social and policy-based
mechanisms of how science is done’ (Maynard, 2007).
3 This was the headline to an article on synthetic biology, which was possibly written by the
copy-editor.
4 See the discussion on the blog entitled Klimazwiebel: http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/
peter-weingart-grenzen.html#more.
5 This issue is still hotly debated with some defending the climate scientists and showing that they
did not engage in hiding ‘the decline’, while others still accuse them of doing so (Montford, 2012).
6 Although it was not altogether clear whether this ‘conversion’ itself was hype, that is, a PR stunt
(Ward, 2012).
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1467954x, 2013, S2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-954X.12099 by Nanjing University, Wiley Online Library on [16/03/2023].

Moderation impossible? On hype, honesty

Keywords: hype, honesty, trust, modesty, science, politics

My biggest editing hate is the bigging up you have to do on grant applications [. . .]

This book scrutinizes the meaning of ‘moderation’ from a variety of perspec-

The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

Hype and hyperbole; trust and honesty

44 The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

evidenced-based predictions’, ‘accurate/sensible portrayal’ and ‘inaccurate pre-

The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099 45

I will now go on to discuss the emergence of the medialization and

The medialization and politicization of science

46 The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

In this situation there is also pressure on academics to produce outputs

The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099 47

movement’ are grappling with and try to counteract (http://slow-science.org/).

‘PR’: public relations and/or press releases in an era of

48 The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

Neutrinos and climate change: on hype and extended peer review

On 23 September 2012, a team of researchers in Italy claimed that they had

The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099 49

50 The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099 51

Physicists opened up their findings to peer review by fellow physicists using

52 The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

Hype and openness – a dilemma for ‘making science public’

The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099 53

54 The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

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Jasanoff, S., (2009), ‘Technologies of humility: citizen participation in governing science’, in B.

56 The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099

The Sociological Review, 61:S2, pp. 43–57 (2013), DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12099 57

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