Status Quo vs. Disruptive Science
Harry Fuller writes a environmental blog for ZDNet.
The international conference on global warming is going on next week in Copenhagen. In every participant's mind will be the propaganda battle over the emails and documents hacked from the University of East Anglia and posted online. To proponents of "climategate" there's now proof climate science is rigged and corrupt. To many climatologists it's astounding that so much scientific data from so many differing studies around the globe can be dismissed as phony.
Last week a sincere scientist published his lament about having his East Anglia emails hacked and the increasingly strident politics around global warming research. History shows repeatedly that political opposition to scientific findings is as old as empiricism and power. Copernicus and Galileo boldly tested theories in the real world. That threatened kings and the Papacy. They ruled by divine right, right?
Historic conflicts between science and entrenched power are often long, bitter and often tragic. This is the Semmelweis Syndrome. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was a 19th Century Hungarian physician. He discovered doctors, nurses and hospitals were themselves passing along infection. Hospitals then (early 1800s) killed a majority of maternity patients, and their newborns. This was long before antibiotics. Semmelweis thought he should share this information. It could save lives, he reasoned.
What Semmelweis did, in fact, was challenge the entrenched "knowledge" and power of the medical establishment. He was dismissed, attacked and finally destroyed. Even if you're doing science to understand what's happening, you must measure your opponents and realize what they are defending. Power. Position. Money. Status and status quo.
What threat does global warming bring to the status quo? Take the Rocky Mountain Institute, which researches renewable energy. On the company's Web site it says they are "reinventing fire to drive the profitable transition from fossil fuels to efficiency and renewables." Transition? Sounds like a disruptive revolution if you run a fossil fuel company.
Earth revolves around the sun? DDT is dangerous to man and birds? Tobacco smoke is deadly? Asbestos can kill? Agent Orange makes soldiers sick? Each of these science discoveries met bitter opposition. Confront the comfortable and the profitable? Expect all the forces and propaganda skills of the status quo to come down upon you. Expect long, bitter, costly battles over every scientific finding that endangers current practice. It is always easier to hire a lawyer or a spinmeister than it is to reform an industry or Semmelweis's hospital.
Current global warming science goes much further than simply challenging hugely profitable industries in many nations. It says the "free market" is faced with a pending disaster that requires massive government action. This strikes at the heart of several existing power structures. And the doctrine of government de-regulation. Global warming may even force many humans to change their daily life. That's some serious economic disruption and those doing well right now always oppose disruption.
The scientists doing global warming research are smashing against a major source of wealth and power on this planet: the fossil fuel industries and the states and nations that feed off of it. Saudi Arabia with its oil. Canada with its tar sands. Russia with its oil. The U.S. with its coal.
In the U.S. there are 21 coal-producing states. That means 42 votes in the U.S. Senate from coal states. Over 30 states produce at least some crude oil. Of the top thirteen, only one is a blue state. That's California. Oil and conservative politics go together like oil and conservative politics. Those two now almost require global warming skepticism. Texas, BTW, leads the nation in oil and CO2 production.
Find a new product they can make from oil and sell at a profit and they'll support you. Tell them their multi-trillion dollar industry is endangering the planet and they inevitably fight you every way they can.
By Harry Fuller: