How the Attack on Science Is Becoming a Global Contagion

Assaults on the science behind climate change research and conservation policies are spreading from the U.S. to Europe and beyond.  If this wave of “post-fact” thinking triumphs, the world will face a future dominated by pure ideology.

The last tweets that British Labor MP Jo Cox sent out into the world were about oceans, fishing, and trawler fleets.  The day before her assassination by a right-wing nationalist last June, she shared an article on Twitter about why scientific advice is so important for fisheries policy and how it helps replenish depleted fish stocks.  A further tweet showed Cox’s husband and their children in a rubber dinghy on the Thames, taking part in a bizarre symbolic "battle" about Britain's departure from the European Union.
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In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created with the express objective of keeping governments around the globe abreast of developments in climate research.  Hundreds of scientists from all over the world collaborate in the IPCC, among them some of the best minds in the field.  The IPCC warns of the grave consequences that will follow in the wake of unrestrained CO2 emissions.  By now, some 190 countries have accepted the findings of the IPCC, as demonstrated by their signing of the Paris climate change agreement reached last December. 

Most recently, however, new enemies have joined forces with traditional foes of the IPCC, such as the fossil fuel industry.  The continued skepticism about climate change is a repudiation of global and empirical thought.  Just as British opponents of the EU reject the findings of fisheries science, many other like-minded politicians — including, of course, Donald Trump; the neo-nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD); and other proponents of the new European Right, such as former Czech president Václav Klaus — flatly reject the findings of climate research. 

Ostensibly, they do so out of methodological doubt or economic interest.  At heart, however, the continued skepticism about climate change is a repudiation of global and empirical thought. Hostility toward science is on the rise.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a trained quantum chemist, recently warned that Western societies are faced with a "post-fact world" in which emotions and ideology threaten to suppress scientific knowledge and evidence. 

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