The Political Contamination of Climate Science

Few scientific efforts have been so dramatically ruined by politics as climate science. For over 30 years, thousands of climate scientists have pushed the message that the world is in serious jeopardy because of human-caused climate change. They have signed manifestos saying we are in a “climate emergency” that will lead to “untold suffering,” that humanity is at “code red,” and that life as we know it is “under siege.”

It is curious, given all these scientists stating all these extreme warnings, that many Americans haven’t paid them a lot of attention. In fact, a Pew poll suggested that although most Americans showed concern about climate change, it is often viewed as comparatively unimportant.

In the words of the Pew survey authors, “[Climate change] is a lower priority than issues such as strengthening the economy and reducing health care costs.” This statement does not seem congruent with a “code red” emergency that suggests life is “under siege.” Why worry about mere health care costs when the world is ending via climate apocalypse?

This incongruent apathy isn’t just a conservative thing. That same Pew survey also found that although Republicans are more likely than Democrats to have negative attitudes towards climate change, climate science skepticism can nonetheless be found on both sides. What accounts for this bipartisan doubt? (READ MORE from Lucian G. Conway: Can We Please Give Philadelphia to New Jersey?)

The answer is easy: Climate science isn’t viewed as especially scientific. It is instead viewed as political.

Nothing makes people distrust sources of information like the belief that they are over-politicized. For example, recent research by Clark and colleagues shows that people distrust institutions they view as overly politicized, even when they agree with the political goals of the institutions. Even liberals distrust over-politicized liberal institutions.

No movement has cannibalized its own credibility with political contamination quite like climate science. Our lab’s research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology showed that a primary predictor of why people oppose climate change policies is that they think the claimed “97% scientific consensus” around climate change represents political agendas more than scientific fact. Americans began to suspect that the scientific consensus isn’t really a consensus about science at all.

Is this because the American public is anti-science? No. It is because climate scientists themselves insisted on blurring the lines between provable scientific facts and a far-left political agenda.

For example, in the original 1992 World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity — a document signed by over 1,700 academics that became a manifesto for climate science — scientists listed five things we “must” do. Number five is instructive: “We must ensure sexual equality, and guarantee women control over their own reproductive decisions.”

Whatever you think about those issues, it is noteworthy that on the surface they don’t have anything specific to do with the science of climate change. They don’t tell us facts or base conclusions on those facts. Instead, at least 20 percent of the recommendations signed by all those scientists were fundamentally political.

And it isn’t getting better. In the manifesto version updated in 2022, scientists claim that the original 1972 version was abhorrently too politically conservative, noting that the original “is a narrative rooted in colonialism and racism, and current-day unjust and inequitable socioeconomic systems.”

I’m not sure what that has to do with climate science — and that’s the point. Right now, this doesn’t strike me (or a lot of Americans) as especially about science, but rather about a giant political package that we’re required to accept whole or else be decried as heretics.

Science and Political Power

If climate scientists were only promoting an abstract political ideology, we could perhaps afford to dismiss this state of things with a sigh. But their political positions often push for extreme action. They want to make us use less fuel and eat less meat. They want to control the number of kids we have. They don’t want us to care about economic growth. Even if climate scientists prove to be right about some of the down-stream consequences of human activity — and I’m still open to that possibility — that uncertain outcome must be weighed against the costs of their proposed policies. (READ MORE: The Curious Case of Conservative Happiness)

Like the farmers protesting green policies in Europe, I see the costs of these policies with my own eyes in the present. Those costs seem far more certain than the vague uncertain outcomes pitched by the climate-science crowd. As a result, what we really need is a truly balanced discussion of climate policies that weighs the known real costs against the potential gains. With climate scientists, we generally get instead a lot of simple-minded political propaganda as a substitute for serious scientific thought.

Climate science should have provided us with facts on which we can debate policies. Instead, it took an axe to the scaffolding of scientific credibility that held it upright, and we’re all worse off as a result.

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