The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 by Ashley Hay

say? This kind of conversation is happening – or dying – at dinner tables, barbecues and pub bars around the country.
    Climate change has become dangerous social territory. It now surpasses religion, politics and sex as a taboo subject. It threatens to disturb polite conversation with anger, resentment and anxiety, and can hijack any serious attempt to discuss the worrying predicament of our grandchildren. It is only human to find ways to doubt or reject what is so difficult and frightening to confront.
    I will return to this common and disabling reflex of denial. But first let us acknowledge that there is a different kind ofdenialism – and it deserves the name – that is a strategic and knowing political act in the face of established facts. It is consciously fraudulent, motivated by malice aforethought, driven by cynical opportunism and greed, and frequently funded by the carbon-polluting industries. Sadly, there is nothing surprising about this cunning exertion of naked power for short-term self-interest. ‘Doubt is our product’ was the message of an infamous tobacco company memo in 1969, and the confection of doubt continues to be a successful corporate tactic. (Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Not every year is hotter than the last.) In their book Merchants of Doubt , Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway document how, from the 1950s, the tobacco industry poured money into manufacturing a phony ‘debate’ about the rapidly emerging scientific theory that smoking was a cause of lung cancer and other diseases. Having created an apparent debate, the industry then convinced the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present ‘both sides’ of it. Research funded by tobacco companies cherry-picked scientific data, focused on unexplained or anomalous details, and exploited ‘normal scientific honesty to spin unreasonable doubt’. The same tactics were used decades later by the carbon polluters, and Merchants of Doubt makes shockingly clear that sometimes it was even the same people orchestrating them. The Australian newspaper is an unashamed exponent of disinformation on this issue, and it is appropriate that its middle-back page is entitled ‘Weather and mind games’.
    In the 1960s and ’70s, people who knowingly conspired with the tobacco industry to delay popular understanding of the links between smoking and lung cancer seemed self-seeking and highly irresponsible. Looking back now, we judge them even more harshly. In 2004, in a landmark federal case in the United States, the tobacco industry was found guilty of fraud and corruption. But that was half a century after the verdict of scientistsbegan to emerge clearly. Those were decades of profits for a cynical few, pocketed through the merchandise of doubt. How, in 2050, will we judge those who, for personal gain, intentionally propagated misinformation about climate change science? How do we judge them today?
    The political denial of climate science gathered momentum in the late 1980s when NASA scientist James Hansen testified about global warming to a US Congressional hearing, the IPCC was formed, the Berlin Wall fell, and American conservatives began to look for a new enemy of the free market economy. But political denialism has strengthened, especially in the past few years, and it has succeeded in presenting science as ideology and in replacing evidence with opinion. Critics of climate change science often invoke the word ‘belief ’ as if the issue is one for personal decision. Former prime minister John Howard calls himself an ‘agnostic’ on climate change. And those who articulate the science and its implications are branded as ‘high priests’ of an ‘evangelical’ movement or ‘cult’. ‘Environmentalism’, which is a political stance, is depicted as ‘religious’, and climate science is portrayed as its core belief. In an