People frequently tell me, with an air of great authority, that climate scientists only believe in climate change because they gain personal benefit from it.
Thus many people claim that you simply put “climate change” into a research project, say about the nesting habits of squirrels, and lo and behold, the grant awarding offices will give you the money to research squirrels which you previously could not get. Its a sure money winner apparently.
They never say how they know these kinds of statement are true. I would doubt that many of those making these statements had ever put in a grant application to get money to research anything, and I doubt still more that these applications were suddenly accepted because they added a quick reference to climate change the next year.
They certainly never say who they got the grant money from.
They don’t seem to think about all the questions and work they would have to do to relate the squirrels (or whatever) to climate change, whether climate change affected the nesting habits in general and how, or whether any observed changes varied by place? Did climate change have an effect on forestation, and other parts of the ecology, or where the squirrels being affected more severely by human initiated deforestation, pollution, water loss to mines, or development, rather than climate change? What other fauna might be being affected by the same underlying factors, and how does that relate to the effects being noticed in squirrels?
Is there a long standing set of problems about the nesting habits of squirrels, or are they commenting on a set of known changes in squirrel nesting patterns? What does previous literature suggest and how are they reacting to it.
If you have written a grant, you will know that you have to do slightly more than use a few buzz words to get one, and indeed the buzz words may go against you. Various conservative governments have in my life time, decided not to award grants the Australian Research Council had approved, because they did not like the politics implied by the buzz words of the research.
Let us be clear: In reality, scientists seem to get more more or less no benefit at all from supporting climate change.
Not only will they not get special treatment in grant applications, but they can get silenced or sacked by Governments if they speak or give the politically wrong results. Experiments and data collections get shut down, or diverted elsewhere. They get attacked by journalists and internet trolls. They receive death threats, if they get noticed. They run the risk of their personal emails being subpoenaed by right wing think tanks looking for scandal. They have to fight against the almost bottomless funding of fossil fuel companies. They have to constantly refute material that has been refuted before. They have to face up to the massive disruption that is happening to the Earth, with the knowledge that effective action has been continually blocked for ‘economic’ reasons and special deals, and that in the US and Australia, effective action is completely improbable. They even have to watch as governments launch new permissions for business to pollute and destroy the environment, including vital water supplies. If they are biologists, they are looking at whole eco-systems collapsing or dying out, and they have an awareness of what is likely to come. Their favourite squirrels and everything that depends on them, might be dying out. This is depressing to put it mildly.
The only benefit I can think of is that scientists, and others who recognize climate change is real, get the sense that they are standing up for truth and reality. They are refusing to bow down to State and Corporate authority. And they get some support from other scientists, but that’s about it.
Tags: climate change, Disinformation
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