March for better science

It’s been two months since the March for Science campaign. “We love science” and “Science has no agenda,” said the placards as millions in 600 cities around the world gathered in protest, mostly against the perceived threat of Donald Trump as an anti-science ignoramus. “We marched,” says the official march website, “because science is critical to our health, economies, food security, and safety. We marched to defend the role of science in policy and society.”

The campaign was mostly a rally in favour of climatechange science and to support the United Nations’ Paris Agreement and the need for political action on carbon. But it became more than that as demonstrators turned the march into a general love-in for science in all its manifestations.

Science is indeed critical to human development, but the marchers also demonstrated a lack of awareness of what scores of scientists and outsiders see as a crisis. Rather than a March for Science we need a March on Science.

It’s been a theme of our annual Junk Science Week through 19 editions — actually 20 if we count my inaugural Junk Science Week columns at The Globe and Mail in June 1997. The purpose of Junk Science Week, outlined in 1997, was to “raise awareness of the severe economic, social and political dislocations caused by the flood of scientific flapdoodle now washing over the world. We all know what they are, the little research studies and large theories delivered to us daily by the media: the Canadian Cancer Society’s admonition to eat more cabbage and broccoli to reduce cancer risk, the breast