The value of experts, and expertise as a concept, is often derided by science deniers. This is both defensive, protecting their pseudoscience from attack, and offensive, eroding public trust in expert analysis. While it is true that many experts are guilty of elitism and gatekeeping, both individually and systemically, the fact remains that expertise is valuable. Beyond the obvious usefulness of knowing a lot of facts about a topic, to be deeply involved with a subject and study it closely allows experts to address new questions with estimates and rough models.
Experts spend years or decades researching a subject, and the result is being able to construct mental models that connect the dots of information. This way, when asked a question to which there is no recorded answer (yet), experts can still be useful with their initial guesses or hypothesis.
Deniers will often hone in on a gap in the knowledge of their target audience, and argue that the scientific consensus is wrong, or at least unconfirmed, because of whatever alternate (and unproven) hypothesis they happen to favour.
Here’s an example that recurs over and over in climate discourse: for anyone who doesn’t know how attribution can be measured (see my previous article) there’s an open space for a competing hypothesis as to what’s causing the rise of atmospheric CO2.
Quite often deniers will blame volcanoes. In the early days of climate change studies, there was a legitimate question about how much CO2 volcanoes emitted relative to humans. After all, volcanoes are these big, massive forces of the Earth, they contribute to the reshaping of the planet’s surface and can decimate human societies. That can certainly make us feel insignificant. While there’s a simple way to find out who’s emitting more CO2, and that is to just measure the CO2, there’s a detail that most people who’ve never studied geology might not be aware of: the explosiveness of an eruption is related to its gas content. More gas in the magma leads to a more explosive eruption.
The majority of emissions from volcanic sources is passive degassing, and passive degassing is continuous, while eruptions happen only from time to time. But there’s only so much one can argue that passive degassing is secretly higher than our measurements without showing up in the occasional eruption, not to mention that deniers like to use the awe-inspiring nature of eruptions to press their point in the first place.
A geologist would immediately be aware that there’s an upper limit to how much CO2 volcanoes could be emitting without being detected, but someone without that understanding might think it’s possible our measurements are simply incomplete. Especially with the deep ocean ridges that are so rarely accessible… and, of course, scientists know about the deep sea too! Does anyone really think the people who discovered mid-ocean ridges just forgot about them?
One can also look to another of my articles: the assertion that rising CO2 is good for plant growth appears simple, and straightforward. But put that argument to botanists and biochemists, and they will immediately raise an eyebrow and ask “what about changing climate? What about limiting nutrients”?
Experts can pick up on the problems in a pseudoscientific argument, even without already knowing the answer, because of this. It is not a perfect system – experts are human, institutions are steeped in history (history that is almost always racist, misogynist, classist, and on and on) –but handing over total trust to experts would be a fallacy anyway, an appeal to authority.
It’s better to be suspicious of neat narratives that challenge scientific expertise with simplistic “what-ifs”. If it seems like those challenges work, and if you or I can’t see a problem with the arguments, but the experts dismiss it, perhaps they have gotten it wrong… or perhaps there’s something you and I hadn’t considered. And that is why, even if experts are flawed, expertise matters.
