How do we know who to believe?

In the era of Trump, Brexit and fake news, it seems like it is getting harder to tell fact from fiction. We need independent experts more than ever to guide us on complex, sciencerelated issues such as climate change, the state of our rivers and new medical treatments.

Despite claims that people have had enough of experts, surveys show New Zealanders’ trust in scientists is reasonably high.

But what if, in a bid to maintain that trust, we only hear from those voices deemed by higher-ups to be trusted? That’s basically what’s happened when we’ve had a crisis in New Zealand. Think of the Mycoplasma bovis outbreak, the Havelock North water contamination or the Canterbury earthquakes.

In those cases, a small band of official experts were cleared to talk. But in most cases government officials with little science background did all of the talking anyway. Some of our experts who knew the most about these issues weren’t heard from, or at least not until the crisis had abated.

We need our leaders to trust scientists to explain uncertainty when we most need them to. ‘‘Trying to avoid or eliminate [uncertainty] can bias the messages that reach the public,’’ writes Dr Nicola Gaston, associate professor in the department of physics at the University of Auckland, in an editorial in the UK publication Research Fortnight. ‘‘Controlling communication too tightly can do a bigger disservice to the truth than not controlling it at all,’’ she adds.

She should know. During her stint as the president of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, she heard from scientists who felt pressured to not talk about their science, or stayed silent for fear of risking funding or professional relationships.

Before the election, Megan Woods, Labour MP and now Minister of Research, Science and Technology, said that there was a ‘‘ready army of chief scientists who are in government departments’’.

‘‘There’s nobody, beyond a few pointy heads like ourselves, that know who they are, what they do, what departments they are appointed to.’’

A year on, I’m not sure if anything has changed. As Gaston points out, ‘‘to communicate uncertainty well, we need many, and varied, voices’’. We need to get better at doing that before the next crisis hits us.

Some of our experts who knew the most about these issues weren’t heard from.