Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specializations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science. When it comes to this academic discipline, it seems that if you are a specialist in public sector food-poisoning supervision or possess a zoology PhD on sexual selection in birds, editors will seek your contrarian views more eagerly than if you have qualifications in climate science and lifetime's professional expertise. The press is further littered with climate "heretics" almost all of whom have academic backgrounds in history and literature with a diploma in media studies. One plant expert trying to argue that glaciers were advancing took his data(described as simply false by the World Glacier Monitoring Service) from a former architect.

Contrary to the fields of some contrarians, academia welcomes the Galileos and encourages skepticism. It wants its hypotheses robustly tested precisely because it wants to pass those tests. Its stem systems of peer review is sensible and conscientious. One more thing is required of academia: to play its role right at the heart of democracy. Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy. Society needs the expertise of academics in the most important issues: climate science above all.

A democracy then needs the press to disperse academia's knowledge and to do so with integrity. But the media's ambition to be entertaining and provocative too often overrules its respect for intellectual rigour. Journalists cannot hold degrees in every subject they report on, but their job is not to claim they know the science better than experts, or to practise that skilled deception of pretending there is controversy when the consensus is overwhelming. But a controversy is more fun, and media—fleeing towards infotainment—is losing sight of the core purpose of its activity: to be a truthful messenger, in this case between the world of academia and the public.

I would propose a system of certification for media articles in which there is a clear issue of social responsibility—kitemark of quality assurance. It would be awarded by teams of academics, and be given to the article, not the journalist, recognizing the facts, not the sometimes deceptive credibility of being a "personality". It would be awarded when the article is accurate, using reliable sources and peer reviewed studies.

The certification should be voluntary. I'm not against entertainment: if someone wants to read nonsense, let them, but I resent the appearance of parity between two articles on an issue as serious as climate change when one article is actually gibberish masked in pseudoscience and the other is well informed and accurate. Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.