Climate of Denial
By the 2016 US presidential election, the trend had grown worse, with neurosurgeon Ben Carson telling audiences he didn’t believe in evolution or the big bang, and Donald Trump telling audiences that vaccines can cause autism and saying he didn’t believe in climate change. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz denied climate change, while Chris Christie said the climate has always been changing and was not a crisis. Bernie Sanders tweeted, regarding climate change, “For those of us who believe in science, you simply cannot ignore what the scientific community is saying almost unanimously”—but he kicked an even greater scientific consensus aside (that GM foods are safe to eat) in favor of requiring labels warning consumers of “what’s in the food that they eat.” (GM is, again, a process for plant breeding, not an ingredient. GM crops have the same nutritional profile as their non-GM parents.)
Meanwhile, Neil Chatterjee, a top aide to US Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, spent time visiting representatives from foreign embassies to make it clear that Republicans intended to fight any international agreement on climate change. McConnell himself worked to spread the anti-climate agenda internationally, warning foreign governments that “our international partners should proceed with caution before entering into a binding, unattainable deal.” New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait registered the disbelief and frustration of many: “The speed at which Republicans have changed from insisting other countries would never reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to warning other countries not to do so—without a peep of protest from within the party or the conservative movement—says everything you need to know about the party’s stance on climate change.”
Leading up to the 2015 climate summit in Paris, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, chair of the House Science Committee, conducted a months-long probe of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers. Beginning in July, Smith sent NOAA letters and subpoenas asking the agency to provide “all documents and communications” related to a study published in Science that refuted the so-called global-warming “hiatus”—a favored theory of climate deniers that the planet had not warmed since 1998. NOAA refused to comply with Smith’s requests for e-mails, citing the importance of confidentiality among scientists. The American Association for the Advancement of Science and several other scientific societies publicly deplored the science committee’s move. “In one fell swoop, you have accused a host of different individuals of wrongdoing,” fellow Texas representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, the ranking Democrat, wrote Smith.
You have accused NOAA’s top research scientists of scientific misconduct. By extension, you have also accused the peer-reviewers at one of our nation’s most prestigious academic journals, Science, of participating in this misconduct (or at least being too incompetent to notice what was going on). If that weren’t enough, you are intimating a grand conspiracy between NOAA and the White House to doctor climate science to advance administration policy. Presumably this accusation extends to [NOAA] Administrator [Kathryn] Sullivan herself. And all of these indictments are conjured out of thin air, without you presenting any factual basis for these sweeping accusations—exposing this so-called “investigation” for what it truly is: a witch hunt designed to smear the reputations of eminent scientists for partisan gain.
The NOAA investigation wasn’t the first ideologically motivated attack on science and individual scientists that Smith’s committee had conducted. It had previously investigated the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency over conclusions Smith didn’t agree with. In October 2015, Smith used the committee to begin investigating Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason University who led a group of scientists calling for a Department of Justice investigation into whether the fossil-fuel industry orchestrated a cover-up of dangers from climate change.
In December 2015, during the Paris climate talks, Texas Republican and presidential candidate Ted Cruz, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, held a similarly combative hearing “on the ongoing debate over climate science, the impact of federal funding on the objectivity of climate research, and the ways in which political pressure can suppress opposing viewpoints in the field of climate science.” The hearing featured prominent climate deniers repeating discredited talking points designed to cast doubt on the science.
In the end, the Paris climate accord was non-binding, as McConnell had hoped.
Through the Looking Glass, Darkly
How could we have gotten here? How could science, our greatest global source of health, wealth, and power, have somehow become a partisan political football? How did it come to be dismissed out of hand, denied, debated, even reviled by politicians, by large swaths of the voting public, and by judges—even by Supreme Court justices—with no consequences from the media, the law, the government, or the public?
And what will it mean for democracy, in an age dominated by increasingly complex science, that our political and governance structures seem to have so little regard for the role of scientific evidence in democratic decision making?
In short, are the people still sufficiently well-informed to be trusted with their own government?
To understand what is happening—and we must, if we are to have hope of winning the war—we must first understand science’s complex and fraught relationship with political power.
There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of Science and Literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of Government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the Community as in ours it is proportionably [sic] essential.
—George Washington, January 8, 1790
How to Ruffle a Scientist’s Feathers
When speaking to scientists, there is one thing that will almost always raise their indignation, and that is the suggestion that science is political. Science, they will respond, has nothing to do with politics.
But is that true?
Let’s consider the relationship between knowledge and power. “Knowledge and power go hand in hand,” said Francis Bacon, “so that the way to increase in power is to increase in knowledge.”
At its core, science is a reliable method for creating knowledge, and thus power. To the extent that I have knowledge about the world, I can affect it, and that exercise of power is political. Because science pushes the boundaries of knowledge, it pushes us to constantly refine our ethics and morality to incorporate new knowledge, and that, too, is political. In these two realms—the socioeconomic and the moral-ethical-legal—science disrupts hierarchical power structures and vested interests (including those based on previous science) in a long drive to grant knowledge, and thus power, to the individual. That process is always and inherently political.
The politics of science is nothing new. Galileo, for example, committed a political act in 1610 when he wrote about his observations through a telescope. Jupiter had moons and Venus had phases, he wrote, which proved that Copernicus had been right in 1543: the celestial bodies did not all revolve around Earth. In fact, Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, as contemporary opinion—and the Roman Catholic Church—held. These were simple observations, immediately obvious to anyone who wanted to look through Galileo’s telescope.
But the statement of an observable fact is a political act that either supports or challenges the current power structure. Every time a scientist makes a factual assertion—Earth goes around the sun, there is such