No, There’s No Scientific Conspiracy About Climate Change
Anyone who thinks otherwise has never met a real live academic. We can barely conspire about where to eat lunch.
Among the host of conspiracy theories out there, a perennial one depicts climate science as a global hoax perpetuated by scientists. There are thousands of climate scientists around the world, which is an awful lot of people for a secret conspiracy. But even if there were only forty or fifty, a successful conspiracy of any kind would probably be well outside their capabilities.
I speak as someone who, over the course of my career, has attended hundreds of faculty meetings and even more meetings of faculty committee. I once attended three very divisive two-hour meetings about whether to switch from a 14-week semester with 50-minute classes to a 13-week semester with 55-minute classes. Weeks later, some people still weren’t speaking to each other because feelings ran so high.
Folks, these are people who couldn’t conspire their way out of a paper bag. If someone had called a meeting thirty years ago to organize a climate conspiracy, the people at the meeting would still be there arguing with each other.
Of course, academics are by and large extremely intelligent people and contrary to rumor, many are very personable. But the hiring process is basically designed to weed out team players. We’re not looking for people who are inclined to accept someone else’s word for anything. We’re looking for people who question the conventional wisdom and seek out new ideas. That’s key to the whole enterprise. But it’s also prone to produce people whose first impulse, if asked to join a group effort, is to question whether it’s necessary and then endlessly debate how it should be defined and whether it wouldn’t be better to do something else entirely.
We’re also talking about people who aren’t terribly good at keeping secrets. After all, universities are looking to hire people who will feel compelled to share their views with students and publish their ideas for the whole world to see. Keeping quiet about something is not a prized professional trait.
So, no, there’s no conspiracy of scientists to cook up thousands of scientific papers about climate change. If anyone had ever actually organized one, it would have fallen apart in about two days.
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About Dan
Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he has al…
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I don’t know what is scarier, the number of people in denial or the number of people who believe Trump will make life better for them. In any event, we just do not know how to communicate:
“Richard Hofstadter’s [1963 book] Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.… He talked about how academics characterized themselves as pure. And he noted that one of the reasons, perhaps, why there were so few public intellectuals of note in America is not just because America is anti-intellectual—which of course it is—but also because so many intellectuals don’t want to take on the sort of complications and impurities that come with being public.” — as discussed by Nicholas Dirks in the Summer 2013 issue of California Magazine featuring Dirks.
And time is running out faster than we know.
P.S.The Power of Money destroys lives as watched on TV 24/7/365 while the UN, Nato and congressional republicans look the other way as Trump’s best friends Putin and Un slaughter children and innocent people in increasingly out of control numbers.
How long can the human race survive climate change when we have too many leaders and scams that fail to protect the race?
P.S. FINIS:
In conclusion, it is actually both intellectuals who don’t want to take on the sort of complications and impurities that come with being public,and cook up thousands of scientific papers about climate change that they never get implemented enough to save the human race.
As long as academics consider the public to be too impure to educate and motivate us to demand actions from our leaders, and fail to implement enough solutions to solve our climate change problems, then there will continue to be inadequate protection from the increasing destruction of the human race we are experiencing today.
Too bad I am not allowed to have conversations on the Berkeley Blog anymore because I am impure, but I still want to refer you to a recent post by Catherine Cronquist Browning:
“Climate Change as an Information Problem” where her concluding recommendation was “— better information dissemination online, better visualization of climate data that we already have, and better implementation of climate related technologies —“.
Thank You Very Much Catherine.
Apparently, Hofstadter strikes again, and now I am wondering if the human race has been sucked into a scam.