Scientist Or Activist? With Climate, It’s Often Hard To Tell The Difference
Last week, Nature magazine allotted space to a researcher who wrote about “the importance of distinguishing climate science from climate activism.” While surprising, it is nonetheless encouraging. It’s well past the time the zealots in white coats were outed for who they are.
Ulf Büntgen, affiliated with multiple universities, wrote that he is “concerned by climate scientists becoming climate activists,” and is also “worried about activists who pretend to be scientists,” because doing so “can be a misleading form of instrumentalization.”
That Nature would allow something bordering on blasphemy in the climate cult to appear in its pages is rather remarkable. We thought the publication had hopelessly and forever been lost to wokeness and global warming fanaticism, that objective science had been abandoned in exchange for following the progressive agenda.
Not that anyone would consider Büntgen to be a “climate denier,” an ugly label the media, activists and politicians attach to skeptics of the global warming narrative. He references “the many threats anthropogenic global warming is likely to pose on natural and societal systems” and seems troubled about “the continuous inability of an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to tackle global warming, despite an alarming recent rise in surface temperatures and associated hydroclimatic extremes.”
Yet he is evenhanded enough to point out a “quasi-religious belief” instead of an “understanding of the complex causes and consequences of climate and environmental changes undermines academic principles.” He suggests that “climate science and climate activism should be separated conceptually and practically,” and insists that “the latter should not be confused with science communication and public engagement.”
We hope the climate science community accepts the scolding it so richly deserves, as it is filled with researchers who are more activists than scholars. This has gone on for decades but we don’t need to reach back more than a week to cite a particularly egregious example – actually hundreds of them. It was just six days ago when the British Guardian, staffed by maybe the most shrill collection of media climate loons ever assembled, published a story in which 380 top – yes, “top” – climate scientists were asked “what they felt about the future.”
Turns out they’re “terrified, but determined to keep fighting.” The story led with the comments of climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who said “sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken.” She explained that “after all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”
Of course there have always been floods, fires and droughts, and it is irresponsible to directly link the scale and intensity of recent events to man’s combustion of fossil fuels. Honest scientists admit this. Activist scientists refuse to.
A common thread among those surveyed was the despair they felt about their inability to make everyone else live the way they want them to. So they clearly have zero doubts about their positions, which is doctrinaire thinking and incompatible with the open-mindedness necessary to conduct scientific research.
We’ve seen this in the emails traded in the Climategate scandal. They showed that, despite the whitewashing of their actions by probes in which “buddies found their buddies innocent,” researchers crafted a climate tale that was favorable to their scare-the-world claims.
We’ve seen it as well in the behavior of James Hansen, the former NASA scientist who helped kick off the global warming scare in 1988 and has been arrested during protests against fossil fuel.
These examples seem tame when compared to the musings of Bill McGuire, volcanologist and University College London ghoul. He tweeted over the weekend that “If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic #climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”
McGuire later deleted the statement, claiming “so many people out there have mistakenly, or intentionally, taken it the wrong way.” Which means the approval he expected from the like-minded was buried by those calling him out for being a monster.
We further note that the same day Nature published Büntgen’s work, it also posted a piece that said “scientists are increasingly joining environmental movements.” It’s sufficient to say that its authors were not happy that Büntgen would be so bold as to say that “unrestricted faith in scientific knowledge is, however, problematic because science is neither entitled to absolute truth nor ethical authority.”
Scientists who double as activists are not doing anyone any favors. They muddle topics and put themselves into positions they’re unable to retreat from when subsequent science casts doubt on the findings they cling to or just flat out shows they were in error. (For a very recent case of this, just look at the poor and often deceptive science behind the global COVID lockdowns, vaccines, masking and school closures).
It’s sad but true that in 2024 the skeptics and dissenters have a better track record than the practitioners of “the science,” and not just in questions of climate.
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