By Vijay Jayaraj
Climate change is real. Climate change is happening. Human activity contributes to it.
We all can agree on that.
Now, can we address a much larger issue that threatens to discredit science?
Political bias on climate change is well on its way to making scientific institutions propaganda tools.
Why?
The U.S. is one of the most powerful nations in the world. Its economic superiority enables it to influence domestic policies of other nations across the globe.
Climate change, which began as a scientific issue, has become almost entirely political. One side shouts constant doomsday warnings. Another denies the existence of any warming.
But why make such a big deal out of a scientific issue? Aren’t scientific issues the province of academia?
The answer lies in the consequences of implementing policies related to climate change.
Climate change’s mainstream narrative is that we humans, through our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, have caused global average temperature to rise to dangerous levels. And the CO2 comes primarily from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) to generate electricity and power transportation and industry.
So the doomsayers tell us to shut down coal plants and stop using gas-fueled vehicles, including fuel-guzzling airplanes. Instead, they recommend renewable technology for electricity, and electric vehicles.
This is where the political division on climate change surfaces: the choice of energy systems and the proposed radical transformation of fuel usage and lifestyle choices.
That is why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND) is so controversial. The GND proposes 100 percent dependence on renewable energy and even doing away with air travel. It recommends we change our diets to eliminate high-protein sources like beef because the cattle industry allegedly aggravates the climate crisis.
While the news media at both ends of the political spectrum are busy in the blame game, the political establishment has hijacked what was once a purely scientific issue, causing a deep wound that will leave the once apolitical academy in tatters.
For centuries, people have trusted empirical scientific methodology because it relied on public facts – things observable to people regardless of their prejudices – rather than on subjective, often mystical, experiences. In other words, every scientific hypothesis was tested against observed (empirical) data in nature or in laboratories before scientists accepted it.
But with the advent of climate politics, there has been a dangerous shift away from empirical science.
Why? Because global temperature refuses to rise to levels forecast by climate doomsayers and their computer climate models. Not once in the past 18 years have average model forecasts used by climate alarmists matched observed data.
In any other circumstances, academicians would have revised their hypotheses when observations contradicted their predictions.
But in the climate-change controversy, political institutions and academia are so dominated by doomsday-obsessed alarmists that they have done away with the empirical testing that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman famously called “the key to science.”
Instead, they urge all nations to make policy decisions based on model forecasts.
Anyone with graduate training in the principles of modeling would know that model forecasts are highly volatile and prone to inaccurate predictions, especially when dealing with something as complex as the earth’s climate system.
Blindly trusting climate model forecasts requires committing the fatal error of ignoring observed temperature data that consistently contradict model predictions..
Yet, climate activists and policymakers treat the forecasts as the only guideline needed to understand our climate system and its future.
And why is that? Because admitting systemic errors in model forecasts would put the climate doomsday narrative and its multi-billion dollar empire out of business.
In their desperate attempts to conceal data and promote their business enterprise, climate alarmists – scientists and politicians alike – have stabbed academic science in the heart. What we once relied on, properly, as independent, non-partisan scientific institutions are now political tools maneuvered by grants and funding.
The fallout is broader than the climate-change controversy. The alarmists’ misdeeds already fuel growing public mistrust of science and academia across the board. And that, because science and academic rigor are crucial to continued progress in our understanding of the world and its challenges, will have enormous costs stretching into the distant future.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Contributor for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Chennai, India.
