A half-century ago, when Science and Reason established the linkage between cigarettes and lung diseases, the tobacco industry hired actors, dressed them up as doctors, and paid them to look into television cameras and tell people that the linkage revealed in the Surgeon General's Report was not real at all. The show went on for decades, with more Americans killed each year by cigarettes than all of the U.S. soldiers killed in all of World War II.
This time, the scientific consensus is even stronger. It has been endorsed by every National Academy of science of every major country on the planet, every major professional scientific society related to the study of global warming and 98 percent of climate scientists throughout the world. In the latest and most authoritative study by 3,000 of the very best scientific experts in the world, the evidence was judged "unequivocal."
But wait! The good guys transgressed the rules of decorum, as evidenced in their private e-mails that were stolen and put on the Internet. The referee is all over it: Penalty! Go to your corner! And in their 3,000-page report, the scientists made some mistakes! Another penalty!
And if more of the audience is left confused about whether the climate crisis is real? Well, the show must go on. After all, it's entertainment. There are tickets to be sold, eyeballs to glue to the screen.
Part of the script for this show was leaked to The New York Times as early as 1991. In an internal document, a consortium of the largest global-warming polluters spelled out their principal strategy: "Reposition global warming as theory, rather than fact." Ever since, they have been sowing doubt even more effectively than the tobacco companies before them.
To sell their false narrative, the Polluters and Ideologues have found it essential to undermine the public's respect for Science and Reason by attacking the integrity of the climate scientists. That is why the scientists are regularly accused of falsifying evidence and exaggerating its implications in a greedy effort to win more research grants, or secretly pursuing a hidden political agenda to expand the power of government. Such slanderous insults are deeply ironic: extremist ideologues — many financed or employed by carbon polluters — accusing scientists of being greedy extremist ideologues.
After World War II, a philosopher studying the impact of organized propaganda on the quality of democratic debate wrote, "The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false."
AL Gore appears as a W.A.S.P..... and Thomas Paine? so setting a "tag-team" binary opposition between Science and Reason and "Polluters and Ideologues" leaves him open to being reconstructed as the Post-Modernists stereotyped villain .... this is great news for the 'Polluters and Ideologues' as they get many Feminists and various other Minorities on their 'side', and as the only way to make it through the day seem to be to hold onto a dream of some sort the rest join... as western civilisations 'real' dominant W.A.S.P.? ' the 'bus' (Gidden's Juggernaught) driven by the (republican congress) carrying the worlds children continues on its journey towards the cliff'. its multi billion pound public address system loudly denying the gravity of climate change in a family friendly way.... so though I agree with the empirical evidence about gravity and climate change more "affect" based (Massumi) argument is needed somehow, to give us hope of change as compared with simple denial) The more complex understanding and discussion of layered discourse though may bypass the majority? of a "democratic" population fed with stereotypes and dumbed down TV etc (which we cannot admit)... so Affect must be utilised by those aware of the threat somehow if there is to be hope in the present ground...whether or not it appears to be /is necessary to those 'floating in post-stuctural space'
No comments:
Post a Comment