The Long and the Short of It - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 350

given up trying to build a scientifically credible alternative explanation to counter a strong
scientific consensus. Instead, they favour a different approach that needs no scientific jus-
tification and no support from peer-reviewed science. This more useful method works by
delaying effective actions to address the issue in question. To do this, they focus on convin-
cing lawmakers that scientists are still debating the root cause of the issue or that the entire
scientific community is unethically creating an issue. It is an approach that can be traced
from fighting efforts to reduce tobacco smoking to those of toxic chemical regulation.
If we cannot win the battle of influence within our governments, our only hope for a
change in political direction lies in the electorate empowering our governments to act on
established truth.BackintheozoneandPOPschapters,wesawhowimportantpublicopin-
ion was in bringing about change in the use of chemicals. To help our governments become
more accountable, we need to:

· Succeed in explaining that present-day climate warming is real, serious, caused by

anthropogenic GHG emissions and is going to be much more pronounced if we ig-
nore the cause. This is the fundamental cumulative consensus of essentially the en-
tire scientific community. Contrary to rumour, there is no significant scientific de-
bate on these basic facts.

· Ensure that government climate scientists are allowed to present and explain their

results to the public without regulation by their employer.

In the words of Henry David Thoreau: “It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and
the other to hear.”

Future needs: science-based frameworks for international action on climate:
How can a world of competing economies set about dealing with cumulative GHG emis-
sions - the cause of our present climate warming? This would never be easy, but at the
present time, it is a particularly difficult question as countries pull themselves out of the
economic problems of the first decade of the twenty-first century.