As I mentioned when the Climategate scandal started to break, I fear that the misdeeds of climate scientist-activists would rebound against all scientists. George Monbiot seems to be coming around to sharing that concern:
The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science. Writing recently for the Telegraph, the columnist Gerald Warner dismissed scientists as “white-coated prima donnas and narcissists . . . pointy-heads in lab coats [who] have reassumed the role of mad cranks . . . The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more.”
A small clique of activists managed to temporarily hijack the global agenda, with the potential to destroy untold trillions of dollars of economic development and reduce the freedom of billions of human beings. If the CRU data leak hadn’t taken place, we’d now be looking at massive government intervention in all areas of human existance, far beyond the dreams of power-mad dreamers.
If the threats to human existance were as bad as the CRU and IPCC declared, the actions our governments would have to take would be catastrophic for much of the world. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the level the global warming activists deemed appropriate, we’d have to pretty much give up fossil fuels altogether. We’d be condemning billions of people to starvation . . . without modern farming and modern transportation and storage facilities, we couldn’t feed the current population of the world.
To say that this is a setback to science is an understatement, for the actions of those few scientists will make all scientists that much more suspect. Given the alternative of forced curtailment or even abandonment of industrial civilization (and a death toll of unimaginable size) or scientists being given less credence by the public, the latter is by far the lesser evil.
Despite my iconoclastic, anti-corporate instincts, I now spend much of my time defending the scientific establishment from attacks by the kind of rabble-rousers with whom I usually associate. My heart rebels against this project: I would rather be pelting scientists with eggs than trying to understand their datasets. But my beliefs oblige me to try to make sense of the science and to explain its implications. This turns out to be the most divisive project I’ve ever engaged in. The more I stick to the facts, the more virulent the abuse becomes.
This doesn’t bother me — I have a hide like a glyptodon — but it reinforces the disturbing possibility that nothing works. The research discussed in the Nature paper shows that when scientists dress soberly, shave off their beards and give their papers conservative titles, they can reach across to the other side. But in doing so they will surely alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to trust them. As the MMR saga shows, people who mistrust authority are just as likely to kick against science as those who respect it.
Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life’s work.
H/T to Elizabeth who wrote “Is Monbiot on the road to Damascus? He hasn’t got there yet but he certainly is starting to question a lot of the greenery.”
But see also Alan Caruba’s blog http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2010/03/climate-wars.html
Alan has been railing against “Global Warming” and “Climate Change” for as long as I have. I mean, as have I.
I started MY campaign 11,000 years ago when Toronto, as we now know it, was covered in a two-mile (no metrics then!) thick sheet of ice that stretched to within 20 miles Of Pittsburgh (take a look at the Ohio river). But would anybody listen? No! I was a voice crying in the wilderness. We had real wilderness back then.
Today, Toronto is covered by a two-mile thick pack of lies. Look around you – the snow and ice is almost all gone.
Global Warming is real and I blame it all on rubbing those two sticks together, capturing wild beasts and genetically modifying them by deciding who could have sex and who could not (plus ca change …). I’m currently on my second draft of David Miller’s part in all of this; I suspect that it’s the warm temperatures inside TTC kiosks that cause operators to fall asleep …
Comment by Chris greaves — March 11, 2010 @ 06:39
That’d be, what, Brett Favre’s rookie season?
Mayor Miller isn’t that bad. Mile and three-quarters at most.
Comment by Nicholas — March 11, 2010 @ 11:45
“Mayor Miller isn’t that bad. Mile and three-quarters at most.”
[type alert?]”Mayor Miler”?
Comment by Chris greaves — March 13, 2010 @ 15:12