Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Those scientists failing to heed this advice were marginalised and ostracised as traitors
toscience, unsupportedbytheiracademies. Scepticism became intolerable, silence golden.
After Madrid, during the late 1990s, energy and chemical companies ran from the Carbon
Club to a fully green image. Emboldened, scientific institutions saw fit to break their
silence, standing up for virtuous science and the common good. Most significant
historically was when the president of the oldest state-sponsored empirical science
academy, the Royal Society, launched it into the new millennium with a declaration for the
theAmericanPhysicsSocietywasproclaimingglobalwarmingatruth'incontrovertible'.
47
Given that every physicist knows that in empirical science there is nothing beyond
challenge, their declaration was surely the clearest message of all that what was being
defended here was not science but dogma.
And so we have it. Starting with a handful of scientists in obscure fields sucked up into
the save-the-world politics of UNEP, we have now arrived, after only a few short decades,
with corruption spread across our great institutions of science. Whether knowingly or not,
and whatever their motivation, these scientists opened a gap for huge political forces to
overwhelm their principles and processes, and to empower those among them willing to
participate in the corruption.
