Skeptical Science New Research for Week #44, 2019

It's normally the case that research scientists leave it to society to find the meaning and importance of their work to the world at large. Their activities are normally motivated by and confined to satisfaction of curiosity. Given that, the statement and evidence just published in Bioscience is quite notable, not least because the often fractious world of researchers has produced a declaration of urgency signed by some 11,258 practitioners from a wide diversity of domains. The World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency is open access and includes a plethora of supporting data.

Burning Paris

The conjunction of the Bioscience statement mentioned above with a newly confirmed development concerning governmental climate policy drips irony.

As the final net of this fishing trip bulging with new research results came inboard over the gunnels of the Skeptical Science research trawler, the Trump administration triggered the clock on the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement. In a year, the largest economy on the planet will not be cooperating or pulling its weight on repairing our originally accidental but now arguably willful destructive rampage through Earth's various surface systems. This decision is so at odds with the reality we face as occupants and members of a closed space that speculating on why such a choice would be made inevitably leads to unflattering conclusions.

Today's relatively few articles on the physical science and effects of our CO2 emissions and their web of supporting references alone seem amply galvanizing of attention and concern, but they're just a small school of fish from the enormous ocean of hard scientific research defining the urgent problem we're facing with climate. This fresh haul presents familiar proportions of species; there's an already-large and rapidly growing body of subsidiary research investigating how we might ameliorate our dilemma, how we can better understand and think about it, what it will cost to fix and how we can pay, and not least indicators of how all of this painstakingly accumulated intellectual mass and momentum might be synthesized and exploited to craft effective public policy to create a better future than what we're facing otherwise. Against all of that, we hear only "no, I don't believe it" with not-even-flimsy arguments in support of behaving and living as though we're more ignorant than we are. "Inadequate" hardly begins to describe the deficit of virtue and pride that could lead the US into such deviation.

The US could do better but the country's population is handicapped, inert beyond the norm. The country has been targeted by a prolonged, concerted stream of misinformation and disinformation promulgated by interests unable to see a horizon beyond the edges of a financial balance sheet. Thus the US has failed to develop the public awareness and public expression of urgency needed to foreclose such folly as just committed by the current administration. Deceit is costly as a matter of reality; misperceptions are not confined to the mental domain and as we see in this case may escape into the real world, to our peril.

Where's the remedy? When you hear something, say something. When you hear somebody repeating science fiction in place of science fact don't let them run aground— steer them to back toward reality. You're reading this, so you already know what course to set.

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The previous edition of Skeptical Science New Research may be found here.

Skeptical Science New Research for Week #44, 2019

OUP Bioscience statement on climate

Burning Paris

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