In 1988, Dr. James
Hansen, senior climate scientist at NASA, testified to the US Senate
that global warming caused by burning fossil fuels was a serious
threat. Yet for 28 years the world did practically nothing, and both
greenhouse gas emissions and global warming continued. Global
inactivity was largely due to successive US governments pretending
that the science of global warming was still uncertain and not worth
the expense of reducing coal, oil and gas use. The willful ignorance
of climate science on the part of the American politicians was
encouraged by a small group of right-wing scientists who were not
specialists in climate change, but were rather driven by ideological
opposition to the increased government regulation that would
obviously be required to tackle issues such as global warming.
Reluctance of US authorities to consider reducing fossil fuel use
resulted in all other countries refusing to to act as well. How this
happened is the subject of Merchants of Doubt: How a handful of
scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global
warming, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
Oreskes, a professor
of history of science at Harvard University, points out that a number
of the prominent scientific advisors of the US government (recurring
names are Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, Robert Jastrow and Bill
Nierenberg) started their careers in nuclear weapons and missile
research in the midst of Cold War conflicts with Russia. Thus these
scientists were reflexively anti-Communist and inclined to oppose any
scientific research that made a case for more government regulation;
they saw such regulations as a sign of the socialism which they had
opposed all their careers growing within the US. Hence this small but
influential group of senior scientific advisors continuously opposed
emerging scientific findings that tobacco caused cancer, that
industrial pollution caused acid rain, and finally that dangerous
climate change would be caused by burning coal, oil and gas.
Unfortunately, these anti-regulation/pro-market scientists found
support in the fossil fuel industry, various pro-market media and
think tanks, and various US politicians whose political campaigns
received money from coal/oil/gas companies. The result was that the
science of global warming and climate change was perceived by the
media, the government and the public as contested for decades after a
scientific consensus on these issues was in fact established. Due to
these manufactured doubts, government policy was slow to accept the
scientific evidence on the danger of man-made global warming.
Of the various
scientific issues discussed by Oreskes, climate change has by far the
biggest impact on humanity as a whole and thus also created the most
resistance amongst anti-regulation scientists, corporate lobby groups
and politicians. Reading Oreskes' book, one sees how naïve it is to
expect that worldwide government policies regarding global warming
would be simply be decided based on scientific evidence. The fact is
that the political systems which have been established to govern
democratic countries are not set up to make decisions based on
science. Rather they are set up to encourage politicians to make
decisions based on the likelihood of winning the next election.
Multinational coal, oil and gas companies have more than enough money
to make political donations big enough to legally “buy” political
support for their industries in spite of dire scientific warnings.
The public has largely been deceived by fake science produced by
non-specialists in climate change presenting themselves as 'experts'
and muddying up the waters with doubt.
The past 30 years
has shown that voters around the world, and especially in the US,
have not been sufficiently informed of the dangers of catastrophic
global warming which could cause worldwide water shortage, crop
failures and famines resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths if
left unchecked. Fossil fuel companies and anti-regulation scientists
and politicians have taken advantage of the lack of knowledge of
climate science among the public to deceive and endanger us all.
Hopefully this will change as the media and the public wake up to the
threat of global warming. Otherwise the world will continue getting
hotter, and our children might grow up to inherit a climate running
amok.
Copyright 2016 by Zeeshan Hasan. First published in Bangladesh on June 1, 2016 in Dhaka Tribune.
