Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

Thank you Spencer Weart for the ammunition to fight the monied interests trying to silence the information on global warming!

Weart's article corrects the historical record which is consistently being promoted by the global warming deniers. He has also created a website towards the same end.

Here are some excerpts from the article.

History is often used in these arguments. Its role can be direct, as when global-warming denialists assert that not long ago scientists were "spectacularly wrong" in claiming that not warming but a new Ice Age threatened us. So writes, for example, the columnist George Will, quoting from news magazines of the early 1970s. However, when people checked the history they found that Will, following a practice common among denialists, "cherry-picked" a few items that served his purpose from a much larger body of evidence.1 Here's the real history. In the 1970s scientists discovered that climate can be catastrophically variable; they didn't agree on what would come next; but they all agreed that they knew too little at the time to make a confident prediction. Any resemblance to the current strong scientific consensus is a fantasy.

A subtler historical fantasy is that the warnings of climate change are a political plot of radical, anti-business environmentalists (so says Michael Crichton's recent best-selling thriller). In the actual history, concerns arose in the 1950s well before any environmentalist movement. These concerns spread among scientists who were either apolitical or supported by US military agencies. But the most important historical story that people should know is how the concern gave rise to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Reagan administration wanted to forestall pronouncements by self-appointed committees of scientists, fearing they would be "alarmist." Conservatives promoted the IPCC's clumsy structure, which consisted of representatives appointed by every government in the world and required to consult all the thousands of experts in repeated rounds of report-drafting in order to reach a consensus. Despite these impediments the IPCC has issued unequivocal statements on the urgent need to act.

The only way to fight a disinformation campaign is with real information. Spencer Weart has provided important tools in that struggle.