Science Under Siege and the Migration of Scientific Authority

that contemporary disputes over climate change, vaccines, and public expertise are driven by organized antiscience forces.The book is written as both a diagnosis and a warning: it identifies a coalition of economic, political, and media actors that, in the authors' view, systematically undermines scientific authority and obstructs collective action.The perspective offered is that attacks on science are neither episodic nor accidental, but politically organized.Yet the book is also symptomatic of the present conjuncture because, in defending science, it mobilizes scientific authority in a markedly partisan register.Perhaps mathematical modelling plays an unappreciated role in these controversies.It has arguably become the epistemic centre of climate science and, with it, a new axis of political polarisation around the authority of science.A similar fate befell medicine during the last pandemic, in which modelling also took centre stage.How did we get there?The answer lies in a series of shifts of epistemic authority.Climate science has come to stand, in public debate, for what science itself is about, while within climate science, the authority of knowledge increasingly rests on large modelling infrastructures.In the convulsive period at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when data were scarce, and the demand for political response was intense, modelling likewise took up a narrative-dominating role (Saltelli et al. 2020).We can perhaps accept that, after the last pandemic, a long-predicted new epoch in the relationship between science and society, one of reduced trust, has set in.There was a time when lay citizens loved and respected science as the ersatz religion of modernity (Toulmin 1992), while an assorted elite of ecologists, sociolo-