This post first appeared at TomDispatch. Reproduced here for fair use and discussion purposes. My comments in bold.
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This is a very long and often pedantic article, so I'm editing out sizable passages that I don't want to comment upon. Also, it's worth noting that Ms. Oreskes is a geologist. She's not a climate scientist.
Read on:
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...compared to many of his colleagues, [John] McCain looks like a moderate. They have dismissed climate change as a fraud and a hoax, while conducting McCarthy-esque inquiries into the research of leading climate scientists. (Hmm. And how do her and her ilk treat climate change deniers? Well, they question their veracity, uniformly accuse them of collusion with Big Oil, they're liars. They will even subpoena them to testify. We note the irony that these all meet Ms. Oreskes' definition of a witch hunt.)
Many of them attack climate science because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand the reach of government. (Ms. Oreskes leaves this to dangle without comment, I suppose because it's undeniable that government's reach has and will continue to expand as a result of climate change.)
In a hearing at which I testified last month, Republican members of the Committee on Natural Resources denounced a wide range of scientific investigations related to the enforcement of existing environmental laws as “government science.” And this, they alleged, meant it was, by definition, corrupt, politically driven and lacking in accountability. The particular science under attack involved work done by, or on behalf of, federal agencies like the National Parks Service, but climate science came in for its share of insults as well. (She sounds a bit sensitive. Climate science was insulted? Oh the humanity! Insulting a government program!
You know, climate control freaks never, ever insult their ideological opponents, do they? All the vitriol comes from deniers, doesn't it?)
On the face of it, the charges were absurd: most (Weasel word) agency science is subject to far more scrutiny, accountability and oversight, including multiple levels of peer review, than research done in academic settings. (Like alar? Too much salt? Alternative energy grants and loans? What actually is absurd is for the author to claim that government science has any oversight at all, let alone "far more."
In fact, government has thrown money at a wide array of questionable research projects and diversions of science monies. Government is quintessentially known for spending large quantities of money on every conceivable thing. Let's list a few:
In contrast, research done under the aegis of industry is often subject to no public accountability at all.
The political goal of “containing” Communism was a powerful motivation for scientists.
In preparing my testimony, however, I realized that something far larger was at stake: the issue of politically driven science itself. It’s often claimed that environmental science done in federal agencies is “politically driven” and therefore suspect. It was, I realized, time to challenge the presumption that such science is bad science. While widely held, the idea is demonstrably false. (The author makes this howler of a claim and does not document it. What will happen is the author will spend a thousand words refuting an assertion that no one has made: That ALL government science is failed and valueless.)
Moreover, the suggestion that “government science” is intrinsically problematic for Republicans who eschew big government ignores the simple fact that most of the major contributions of the 20th century, at least in the physical sciences, came from just such government science. (Which presumes that such contributions would not have happened otherwise, which is unknowable.)
History shows that much — maybe most — science is driven by political, economic, or social goals. (Hmm again. Note the author's claim has moved the goal posts to include economic and social goals. Thus she abandons her previous objection by conceding that private research with an explicitly economic agenda is good.)
Some of the best science in the history of our country was focused on goals that were explicitly political. (Which no one denies. No one has asserted that all government science is bad. No one has claimed that government science has not yielded benefits. The specific claim, which the author avoids, is that a good amount of government science is corrupted by political bias. In fact, she herself admits this very thing by her accusation that Republicans are corrupting government science!)
(Ok here comes the endless parade of government scientific achievements:) Consider the Manhattan Project. During World War II, scientists mobilized to determine the details of fission reactions, isotope separation, high-temperature and high-pressure metallurgy, and many more matters for the purpose of building an atomic bomb. The political goal of stopping Adolf Hitler and the sense that the future of the world might depend on their success provided a powerful motivation to get the science right.
Or take the space program. The United States first developed advanced rocketry to threaten the Soviet Union with nuclear destruction. The political goal of “containing” Communism was a powerful motivation for scientists. In later years, the goal of maintaining peace through the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction similarly motivated scientists to ensure that the weapons they developed would go where sent, and work as advertised when they got there.
In the Apollo program, NASA scientists knew that getting the science right would not only ensure that our astronauts made it to the moon, but that they made it home again. Knowing that lives may depend on your calculations can be a powerful form of accountability.
Some might argue that these were technological, not scientific projects, but it’s a distinction without much meaning. If such projects led to new technologies, they were also founded upon newly developed science. Moreover, politics can drive good science even in the absence of technological goals. (Which, as mentioned, is not being contested.
I'll let you read on for paragraph after paragraph as the author defends government science because some of it is good.)
Plate tectonics, for instance, is the unifying theory of modern earth science and it, too, was a political product. The key work that led to it came from oceanography that was part of US Navy programs to develop methods of detecting Soviet submarines, while safely hiding our own. It came as well from seismology as part of a military effort to differentiate earthquakes from nuclear bomb tests. Military and political goals, in other words, led to research on the fundamental understanding of planetary processes, an understanding that, not incidentally, forms the basis for oil and gas exploration, mining and mineral exploration and predicting seismic hazards.
Nearly all of this work was done by scientists working directly for the government, or by academics in universities and research institutions with government funds. The Manhattan Project was government science. The Apollo program was government science. Plate tectonics was government science.
Saved From the Ozone Hole
Is environmental science any different?
Consider the men and women who laid the scientific foundations for the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. Established in 1985, that Convention protects us from the potentially devastating effects of ozone depletion. Today, the ozone hole is on the mend and scientists expect a full recovery in the coming decades — something that would not have happened without the work of the environmental scientists who first recognized threats to stratospheric ozone in the early 1970s.
Scientists working at NASA and the University of California realized then that chemicals released into the atmosphere from supersonic transport planes and the space shuttle could react with ozone in the stratosphere and destroy it. Because of this threat, NASA began to fund studies of the chemical reactions involved. Meanwhile, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina at the University of California, Irvine, recognized that a certain class of chemicals known as chlorinated fluorocarbons, or CFCs, found in hairspray and other consumer products, had the potential to destroy ozone on a global scale. At first, their predictions were viewed skeptically even by their colleagues: Could hairspray really end life on Earth as we knew it? That seemed an adventurous, if not outrageous, claim.
In 1985, however, Joseph Farmer of the British Antarctic Survey announced the discovery of an area over Antarctica in which stratospheric ozone was dramatically diminished: the “ozone hole.” The following year, a team led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist Susan Solomon suggested that ozone was indeed being depleted by chlorine chemicals derived from CFCs in catalytic reactions on polar stratospheric clouds.
In 1987, Harvard Professor James Anderson sent an experiment aloft in a NASA U-2 plane over the Antarctic, establishing by direct measurement that the ozone layer had been massively depleted there and that those depletions correlated with CFCs. This was a striking confirmation of the earlier hypotheses. Later, his team obtained similar measurements over the Arctic. All this research was NASA-funded.
On the basis of this work, Republican President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State George Schultz and Assistant Secretary of State John Negroponte gave their support to the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention and so committed the world to reducing and later to phasing out, the use of CFCs. In 1988, with the president’s support, Congress ratified the Montreal Protocol.
Susan Solomon has since been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the French Academy of Sciences. In 2008, she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. James Anderson has won more prizes than you can count. In 1995, Rowland and Molina shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on ozone depletion.
If ozone science had been distorted, corrupted, or otherwise incorrectly done, none of them would have received such honors. More important, if the science had been wrong, we would be in dire straits right now because the ozone hole would not be recovering. Among other things, skin cancer rates in America would be about 60 percent higher than they are today. Livestock, crops and wild plants and animals would have been affected, too.
Bush, a Republican president, was not duped. He did the right thing and protected us from harm, but few people realize just how well the Montreal Protocol has worked and at what little cost. It was ratified by 197 nations — in other words, the whole world! — and production and consumption of ozone-depleting chemicals has fallen 98 percent.
Not only did this cost very little as manufacturers quickly replaced ozone-depleting chemicals with new, less harmful products, but the world profited. The Protocol stimulated competition in technological innovation that reduced manufacturing costs, improved efficiency and safety and lowered prices for consumers, while we avoided significant economic losses in agricultural and fishery yields and adverse human health impacts. The indirect health profits in terms of avoided cases of cancers and cataracts alone have been estimated at 11 times the direct costs of implementation. And there was no net loss of jobs, although there was a shift to more skilled jobs carried out by better-trained workers under safer conditions.
As the risk of disruptive climate change became widely recognized in the 1990s, the ozone success story offered a model for how we might tackle climate change, especially as it refuted the familiar conservative claims that environmental protection restrains growth, hurts the economy and leads to job loss, or that benefits accrue to polar bears but not people. But the Republican shift to the right was already underway. When it came to the subject of regulation, the GOP was on the road to rejecting any science that pointed in that direction.
In the early part of the 20th century, Republicans had been pioneers in environmental protection; in its middle years, they had worked with Democrats to pass bills like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act. By the 1980s, however, resistance to environmental measures that might limit private sector prerogatives was starting to overshadow their historic commitment to a safe and beautiful America. By the 1990s, regulation was seen as bad in principle, even when, as in the ozone case, it was clearly and demonstrably good in practice. (Answering a charge that no one has leveled, she continues to spew verbiage about the wonders of government science...)
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To ask only about public funds and not private sources is like asking for safety inspections of just half an airplane.
The organization responsible for the denialist meeting in Rome was the Heartland Institute, a group with a long history not only of rejecting climate science but science generally. They were, for instance, responsible for the infamous billboards comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. They have a documented history of working with the tobacco industry to raise questions about the scientific evidence of tobacco’s harms. As Erik Conway and I demonstrated in our book Merchants of Doubt, many of the groups that now question the reality or significance of human-made climate change previously questioned the scientific evidence of the dangers of tobacco.
Today, we know that millions of people have died from tobacco-related diseases. Do we really have to wait for people to die in similar numbers before we accept the evidence of climate change? (Skepticism used to be valued in the scientific community. But now because of the mixing of science with politics, all dissent must be ridiculed, mocked, and suppressed.
And note that because tobacco, climate change is real.)
Private Funding Creates a Hole in the Atmosphere
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The point of all this, of course, is to confuse Americans and so delay action, which brings us to the crux of the matter when it comes to “politically motivated” science. (There we finally have it. Because climate change is a problem, the solution must be accepted. However, the solution is a political issue, not a scientific one. This is the crux of the matter. For some unknown reason, the author wants her solutions implemented in the form of government action. But there is no requirement that this must be the solution.)
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Many Republicans resist accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand big government.
Perhaps most important, as is undoubtedly true with many of the funders of climate denial, the industry knew that the research it paid for was biased. By the 1950s, its executives were well aware that tobacco caused cancer; by the 1960s, they knew that it caused a host of other diseases; by the 1970s, they knew that it was addictive; and by the 1980s, they knew that secondhand smoke caused cancer in non-smokers and sudden infant death syndrome. Yet this industry-funded work was significantly less likely to find tobacco use damaging to health than research not funded by the industry. And so, of course, they funded more of it. (Again, because tobacco, climate change action is required.)
What lessons can be drawn from this experience? One is the importance of disclosing funding sources. In preparing for my Congressional testimony I was asked to disclose all sources of government funding for my own research. That was a reasonable request. But there was no comparable request for disclosure of any private funding I might have had — an unreasonable omission. To ask only about public funds and not private sources is like asking for safety inspections of just half an airplane.
Unnatural Disasters and the Nightmare of Denialism
Many Republicans resist accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand big government. Here’s what should give them pause: by delaying action on reducing global carbon emissions for more than two decades, we have already significantly increased the likelihood that disruptive global warming will lead to the kinds of government interventions they most fear and seek to avoid. Climate change is, in fact, already causing an increase in the sorts of extreme weather events — particularly floods, extreme droughts and heat waves — that almost always result in large-scale government responses. The longer we wait, the more massive the required intervention will be. (???? In other words, Republicans must accept massive interventions of government because if they don't, there will be massive interventions of government later.)
In the future, as the devastating effects of climate change unfold here in the United States, natural disasters will result in a greater reliance on government — especially the federal government. (Of course, our grandchildren will not call them “natural” disasters, because they will know all too well who caused them.) What this means is that the work climate deniers are now doing only helps ensure that we will be less ready for the full impact of climate change, which means greater government interventions to come. Put another way, climate deniers are now playing a crucial role in creating the nightmare they most fear. They are guaranteeing the very future they claim to want to avoid.
And not just at home. As climate change unfolds around the globe, climate disasters will give undemocratic forces the justification they seek to commandeer resources, declare martial law, interfere with the market economy and suspend democratic processes. (???? This is exactly what the author advocates!) This means that Americans who care about political freedom shouldn’t hold back when it comes to supporting climate scientists and acting to prevent the threats they have so clearly and fulsomely documented. (So give up your freedom now or later, your choice.)
To do otherwise can only increase the chances that authoritarian forms of governance will come out ahead in a future in which our children and grandchildren, including those of the climate deniers, will all be the losers, as will our planet and so many of the other species on it. Recognizing and emphasizing this aspect of the climate equation may offer some hope of enabling more moderate Republicans to step back from the brinkmanship of denial. (Can you imagine? Accept government oppression now, or it will be much worse later.
The thing is, government has already been heavily involved in the private sector regarding climate change. The author makes it seem like nothing is being done, but that's not true. We already have an authoritarian government telling us we must buy efficient water heaters, emission-controlled vehicles, certain levels of insulation for our homes, and all sorts of other things. Government is already enmeshed.
And despite all this government intervention, she cries wolf. It's a crisis. People will die. But why have past efforts not been effective? Why should we do even more of what's failed? Why is there only one solution for us to consider?
I'd also like to know, why does the author offer this specter of authoritarian Big Government? Is she really concerned about potential oppression? No, she wants it. Does it concern her that even more draconian measures will hurt commerce and affect peoples' lifestyles? No, she certainly believes that eeevil corporations must be reeled in, and that people live excessive lifestyles.
Like all Leftists, she loves government, the bigger the better. There has never been a problem government can't solve. She wants government to tell people what to do. She wants power wielded over people. This is a Leftist axiom.
And she hates dissent. She can't stand people having another opinion. She and her fellow luminaries are more capable to make these decisions because people aren't bright enough to do so.
People like Ms. Oreskes should not be trusted.)
Read on:
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...compared to many of his colleagues, [John] McCain looks like a moderate. They have dismissed climate change as a fraud and a hoax, while conducting McCarthy-esque inquiries into the research of leading climate scientists. (Hmm. And how do her and her ilk treat climate change deniers? Well, they question their veracity, uniformly accuse them of collusion with Big Oil, they're liars. They will even subpoena them to testify. We note the irony that these all meet Ms. Oreskes' definition of a witch hunt.)
Many of them attack climate science because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand the reach of government. (Ms. Oreskes leaves this to dangle without comment, I suppose because it's undeniable that government's reach has and will continue to expand as a result of climate change.)
In a hearing at which I testified last month, Republican members of the Committee on Natural Resources denounced a wide range of scientific investigations related to the enforcement of existing environmental laws as “government science.” And this, they alleged, meant it was, by definition, corrupt, politically driven and lacking in accountability. The particular science under attack involved work done by, or on behalf of, federal agencies like the National Parks Service, but climate science came in for its share of insults as well. (She sounds a bit sensitive. Climate science was insulted? Oh the humanity! Insulting a government program!
You know, climate control freaks never, ever insult their ideological opponents, do they? All the vitriol comes from deniers, doesn't it?)
On the face of it, the charges were absurd: most (Weasel word) agency science is subject to far more scrutiny, accountability and oversight, including multiple levels of peer review, than research done in academic settings. (Like alar? Too much salt? Alternative energy grants and loans? What actually is absurd is for the author to claim that government science has any oversight at all, let alone "far more."
In fact, government has thrown money at a wide array of questionable research projects and diversions of science monies. Government is quintessentially known for spending large quantities of money on every conceivable thing. Let's list a few:
These are just a few of thousands of government research programs that waste taxpayer money. The author's claim is preposterous on its face.)
- The National Science Foundation has given $384,949 to Yale University to do a study on “Sexual Conflict, Social Behavior and the Evolution of Waterfowl Genitalia”.
- The National Institutes of Health has given $1.5 million to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to study why three quarters of lesbians in the United States are overweight and why most gay males are not.
- The National Institutes of Health has also spent $2.7 million to study why lesbians have more “vulnerability to hazardous drinking”.
- NASA spends close to a million dollars a yeardeveloping a menu of food for a manned mission to Mars even though it is being projected that a manned mission to Mars is still decades away.
- During fiscal 2012, the National Science Foundation gave researchers at Purdue University $350,000. They used part of that money to help fund a study that discovered that if golfers imagine that a hole is bigger it will help them with their putting.
- During 2012, the National Science Foundation spent $516,000 on the creation of a video game called “Prom Week” which apparently simulates “all the social interactions of the event.”
- The U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent $300,000 to encourage Americans to eat caviar.
- The National Institutes of Health recently gave $666,905 to a group of researchers that is conducting a study on the benefits of watching reruns on television.
- The National Science Foundation has given 1.2 million dollars to a team of “scientists” that is spending part of that money on a study that is seeking to determine whether elderly Americans would benefit from playing World of Warcraft or not.
- The National Institutes of Health recently gave $548,731to a team of researchers that concluded that those that drink heavily in their thirties also tend to feel more immature.
- The National Science Foundation recently spent $30,000on a study to determine if “gaydar” actually exists.
- In 2011, the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.
- The National Science Foundation spent $198,000 on a University of California-Riverside study that explored “motivations, expectations and goal pursuit in social media.” One of the questions the study sought an answer to was the following: “Do unhappy people spend more time on Twitter or Facebook?”
- The federal government actually has spent $175,587 “to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior”.
- The National Institutes of Health has contributed $55,382toward a study of “hookah smoking habits” in the country of Jordan.
- The federal government gave $606,000 to researchers at Columbia University to study how heterosexuals use the Internet to find love.
- The federal government has given approximately $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research into video games such as World of Warcraft.
- The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers$400,000 to study why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.
- The National Institutes of Health once gave researchers$442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.
- The National Institutes of Health once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.
- The National Science Foundation recently spent $200,000 on a study that examined how voters react when politicians change their stances on climate change.
In contrast, research done under the aegis of industry is often subject to no public accountability at all.
The political goal of “containing” Communism was a powerful motivation for scientists.
In preparing my testimony, however, I realized that something far larger was at stake: the issue of politically driven science itself. It’s often claimed that environmental science done in federal agencies is “politically driven” and therefore suspect. It was, I realized, time to challenge the presumption that such science is bad science. While widely held, the idea is demonstrably false. (The author makes this howler of a claim and does not document it. What will happen is the author will spend a thousand words refuting an assertion that no one has made: That ALL government science is failed and valueless.)
Moreover, the suggestion that “government science” is intrinsically problematic for Republicans who eschew big government ignores the simple fact that most of the major contributions of the 20th century, at least in the physical sciences, came from just such government science. (Which presumes that such contributions would not have happened otherwise, which is unknowable.)
History shows that much — maybe most — science is driven by political, economic, or social goals. (Hmm again. Note the author's claim has moved the goal posts to include economic and social goals. Thus she abandons her previous objection by conceding that private research with an explicitly economic agenda is good.)
Some of the best science in the history of our country was focused on goals that were explicitly political. (Which no one denies. No one has asserted that all government science is bad. No one has claimed that government science has not yielded benefits. The specific claim, which the author avoids, is that a good amount of government science is corrupted by political bias. In fact, she herself admits this very thing by her accusation that Republicans are corrupting government science!)
(Ok here comes the endless parade of government scientific achievements:) Consider the Manhattan Project. During World War II, scientists mobilized to determine the details of fission reactions, isotope separation, high-temperature and high-pressure metallurgy, and many more matters for the purpose of building an atomic bomb. The political goal of stopping Adolf Hitler and the sense that the future of the world might depend on their success provided a powerful motivation to get the science right.
Or take the space program. The United States first developed advanced rocketry to threaten the Soviet Union with nuclear destruction. The political goal of “containing” Communism was a powerful motivation for scientists. In later years, the goal of maintaining peace through the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction similarly motivated scientists to ensure that the weapons they developed would go where sent, and work as advertised when they got there.
In the Apollo program, NASA scientists knew that getting the science right would not only ensure that our astronauts made it to the moon, but that they made it home again. Knowing that lives may depend on your calculations can be a powerful form of accountability.
Some might argue that these were technological, not scientific projects, but it’s a distinction without much meaning. If such projects led to new technologies, they were also founded upon newly developed science. Moreover, politics can drive good science even in the absence of technological goals. (Which, as mentioned, is not being contested.
I'll let you read on for paragraph after paragraph as the author defends government science because some of it is good.)
Plate tectonics, for instance, is the unifying theory of modern earth science and it, too, was a political product. The key work that led to it came from oceanography that was part of US Navy programs to develop methods of detecting Soviet submarines, while safely hiding our own. It came as well from seismology as part of a military effort to differentiate earthquakes from nuclear bomb tests. Military and political goals, in other words, led to research on the fundamental understanding of planetary processes, an understanding that, not incidentally, forms the basis for oil and gas exploration, mining and mineral exploration and predicting seismic hazards.
Nearly all of this work was done by scientists working directly for the government, or by academics in universities and research institutions with government funds. The Manhattan Project was government science. The Apollo program was government science. Plate tectonics was government science.
Saved From the Ozone Hole
Is environmental science any different?
Consider the men and women who laid the scientific foundations for the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer. Established in 1985, that Convention protects us from the potentially devastating effects of ozone depletion. Today, the ozone hole is on the mend and scientists expect a full recovery in the coming decades — something that would not have happened without the work of the environmental scientists who first recognized threats to stratospheric ozone in the early 1970s.
Scientists working at NASA and the University of California realized then that chemicals released into the atmosphere from supersonic transport planes and the space shuttle could react with ozone in the stratosphere and destroy it. Because of this threat, NASA began to fund studies of the chemical reactions involved. Meanwhile, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina at the University of California, Irvine, recognized that a certain class of chemicals known as chlorinated fluorocarbons, or CFCs, found in hairspray and other consumer products, had the potential to destroy ozone on a global scale. At first, their predictions were viewed skeptically even by their colleagues: Could hairspray really end life on Earth as we knew it? That seemed an adventurous, if not outrageous, claim.
In 1985, however, Joseph Farmer of the British Antarctic Survey announced the discovery of an area over Antarctica in which stratospheric ozone was dramatically diminished: the “ozone hole.” The following year, a team led by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist Susan Solomon suggested that ozone was indeed being depleted by chlorine chemicals derived from CFCs in catalytic reactions on polar stratospheric clouds.
In 1987, Harvard Professor James Anderson sent an experiment aloft in a NASA U-2 plane over the Antarctic, establishing by direct measurement that the ozone layer had been massively depleted there and that those depletions correlated with CFCs. This was a striking confirmation of the earlier hypotheses. Later, his team obtained similar measurements over the Arctic. All this research was NASA-funded.
On the basis of this work, Republican President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State George Schultz and Assistant Secretary of State John Negroponte gave their support to the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention and so committed the world to reducing and later to phasing out, the use of CFCs. In 1988, with the president’s support, Congress ratified the Montreal Protocol.
Susan Solomon has since been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the French Academy of Sciences. In 2008, she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. James Anderson has won more prizes than you can count. In 1995, Rowland and Molina shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on ozone depletion.
If ozone science had been distorted, corrupted, or otherwise incorrectly done, none of them would have received such honors. More important, if the science had been wrong, we would be in dire straits right now because the ozone hole would not be recovering. Among other things, skin cancer rates in America would be about 60 percent higher than they are today. Livestock, crops and wild plants and animals would have been affected, too.
Bush, a Republican president, was not duped. He did the right thing and protected us from harm, but few people realize just how well the Montreal Protocol has worked and at what little cost. It was ratified by 197 nations — in other words, the whole world! — and production and consumption of ozone-depleting chemicals has fallen 98 percent.
Not only did this cost very little as manufacturers quickly replaced ozone-depleting chemicals with new, less harmful products, but the world profited. The Protocol stimulated competition in technological innovation that reduced manufacturing costs, improved efficiency and safety and lowered prices for consumers, while we avoided significant economic losses in agricultural and fishery yields and adverse human health impacts. The indirect health profits in terms of avoided cases of cancers and cataracts alone have been estimated at 11 times the direct costs of implementation. And there was no net loss of jobs, although there was a shift to more skilled jobs carried out by better-trained workers under safer conditions.
As the risk of disruptive climate change became widely recognized in the 1990s, the ozone success story offered a model for how we might tackle climate change, especially as it refuted the familiar conservative claims that environmental protection restrains growth, hurts the economy and leads to job loss, or that benefits accrue to polar bears but not people. But the Republican shift to the right was already underway. When it came to the subject of regulation, the GOP was on the road to rejecting any science that pointed in that direction.
In the early part of the 20th century, Republicans had been pioneers in environmental protection; in its middle years, they had worked with Democrats to pass bills like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act. By the 1980s, however, resistance to environmental measures that might limit private sector prerogatives was starting to overshadow their historic commitment to a safe and beautiful America. By the 1990s, regulation was seen as bad in principle, even when, as in the ozone case, it was clearly and demonstrably good in practice. (Answering a charge that no one has leveled, she continues to spew verbiage about the wonders of government science...)
[...]
To ask only about public funds and not private sources is like asking for safety inspections of just half an airplane.
The organization responsible for the denialist meeting in Rome was the Heartland Institute, a group with a long history not only of rejecting climate science but science generally. They were, for instance, responsible for the infamous billboards comparing climate scientists to the Unabomber. They have a documented history of working with the tobacco industry to raise questions about the scientific evidence of tobacco’s harms. As Erik Conway and I demonstrated in our book Merchants of Doubt, many of the groups that now question the reality or significance of human-made climate change previously questioned the scientific evidence of the dangers of tobacco.
Today, we know that millions of people have died from tobacco-related diseases. Do we really have to wait for people to die in similar numbers before we accept the evidence of climate change? (Skepticism used to be valued in the scientific community. But now because of the mixing of science with politics, all dissent must be ridiculed, mocked, and suppressed.
And note that because tobacco, climate change is real.)
Private Funding Creates a Hole in the Atmosphere
[...]
The point of all this, of course, is to confuse Americans and so delay action, which brings us to the crux of the matter when it comes to “politically motivated” science. (There we finally have it. Because climate change is a problem, the solution must be accepted. However, the solution is a political issue, not a scientific one. This is the crux of the matter. For some unknown reason, the author wants her solutions implemented in the form of government action. But there is no requirement that this must be the solution.)
[...]
Many Republicans resist accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand big government.
Perhaps most important, as is undoubtedly true with many of the funders of climate denial, the industry knew that the research it paid for was biased. By the 1950s, its executives were well aware that tobacco caused cancer; by the 1960s, they knew that it caused a host of other diseases; by the 1970s, they knew that it was addictive; and by the 1980s, they knew that secondhand smoke caused cancer in non-smokers and sudden infant death syndrome. Yet this industry-funded work was significantly less likely to find tobacco use damaging to health than research not funded by the industry. And so, of course, they funded more of it. (Again, because tobacco, climate change action is required.)
What lessons can be drawn from this experience? One is the importance of disclosing funding sources. In preparing for my Congressional testimony I was asked to disclose all sources of government funding for my own research. That was a reasonable request. But there was no comparable request for disclosure of any private funding I might have had — an unreasonable omission. To ask only about public funds and not private sources is like asking for safety inspections of just half an airplane.
Unnatural Disasters and the Nightmare of Denialism
Many Republicans resist accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change because they fear it will be used as an excuse to expand big government. Here’s what should give them pause: by delaying action on reducing global carbon emissions for more than two decades, we have already significantly increased the likelihood that disruptive global warming will lead to the kinds of government interventions they most fear and seek to avoid. Climate change is, in fact, already causing an increase in the sorts of extreme weather events — particularly floods, extreme droughts and heat waves — that almost always result in large-scale government responses. The longer we wait, the more massive the required intervention will be. (???? In other words, Republicans must accept massive interventions of government because if they don't, there will be massive interventions of government later.)
In the future, as the devastating effects of climate change unfold here in the United States, natural disasters will result in a greater reliance on government — especially the federal government. (Of course, our grandchildren will not call them “natural” disasters, because they will know all too well who caused them.) What this means is that the work climate deniers are now doing only helps ensure that we will be less ready for the full impact of climate change, which means greater government interventions to come. Put another way, climate deniers are now playing a crucial role in creating the nightmare they most fear. They are guaranteeing the very future they claim to want to avoid.
And not just at home. As climate change unfolds around the globe, climate disasters will give undemocratic forces the justification they seek to commandeer resources, declare martial law, interfere with the market economy and suspend democratic processes. (???? This is exactly what the author advocates!) This means that Americans who care about political freedom shouldn’t hold back when it comes to supporting climate scientists and acting to prevent the threats they have so clearly and fulsomely documented. (So give up your freedom now or later, your choice.)
To do otherwise can only increase the chances that authoritarian forms of governance will come out ahead in a future in which our children and grandchildren, including those of the climate deniers, will all be the losers, as will our planet and so many of the other species on it. Recognizing and emphasizing this aspect of the climate equation may offer some hope of enabling more moderate Republicans to step back from the brinkmanship of denial. (Can you imagine? Accept government oppression now, or it will be much worse later.
The thing is, government has already been heavily involved in the private sector regarding climate change. The author makes it seem like nothing is being done, but that's not true. We already have an authoritarian government telling us we must buy efficient water heaters, emission-controlled vehicles, certain levels of insulation for our homes, and all sorts of other things. Government is already enmeshed.
And despite all this government intervention, she cries wolf. It's a crisis. People will die. But why have past efforts not been effective? Why should we do even more of what's failed? Why is there only one solution for us to consider?
I'd also like to know, why does the author offer this specter of authoritarian Big Government? Is she really concerned about potential oppression? No, she wants it. Does it concern her that even more draconian measures will hurt commerce and affect peoples' lifestyles? No, she certainly believes that eeevil corporations must be reeled in, and that people live excessive lifestyles.
Like all Leftists, she loves government, the bigger the better. There has never been a problem government can't solve. She wants government to tell people what to do. She wants power wielded over people. This is a Leftist axiom.
And she hates dissent. She can't stand people having another opinion. She and her fellow luminaries are more capable to make these decisions because people aren't bright enough to do so.
People like Ms. Oreskes should not be trusted.)
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