Humanity now faces the existential threat of a leviathan with three heads: a steadily worsening climate crisis, increasingly deadly pandemics, and an unprecedented weaponization of antiscience that renders us helpless in our collective efforts to address any of the great challenges we face.
The ideologically-motivated assault on science threatens us all. Climate change is generating devastating heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods and superstorms. Last month, Philadelphia had code orange air quality alerts thanks to wildfires burning out of control in Canada. A month earlier, Texas experienced the deadliest floods in a generation thanks in substantial part to human-caused warming. And these were just two examples of the devastating weather extremes that are being made more extreme by human-caused climate change.
Then there’s the pandemics. Looking beyond COVID-19, we remain at imminent risk for catastrophic respiratory infections caused by avian or other zoonotic influenza viruses, Nipah and Hendra viruses, or new coronaviruses currently emerging in Asia. Lesser known is a significant expansion in South America of mosquito-transmitted viruses such as dengue and yellow fever, and what occurs in countries such as Brazil often winds up in Texas and Florida.
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Another force is lurking: a massive wave of social media weaponized by bots and troll armies, books, articles, podcasts, and cable news broadcasts which downplay or dismiss the warnings, portray the scientists as enemies or villains, harass them, and even make death threats. We know this because we’ve both been at the receiving end of threats against us and our families.
An entire ecosystem of antiscience has taken hold and turned deadly. COVID-19 killed an estimated 21 million people, many needlessly because they refused life-saving vaccines, while climate impacts are killing millions.
Too often, pandemic and climate denialism are ascribed to random misinformation or an “infodemic,” as though it arose by unforeseen or accidental circumstances. But it is far more pernicious.
The Koch Brothers—perhaps the canonical example—fund various think tanks, front groups, and “astroturf” organizations (corporate organized and funded groups that purport to be organic, grassroots uprisings of the people) to spread climate denial disinformation.
They also played an early role in undermining public health messaging on COVID-19, fearing that lockdowns and stay-home orders would decrease fossil fuel usage. As Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch of the Center for Media and Democracy put it, “Groups funded by the Kochs and their colleagues … turned to a more insidious form of combat adapted from Tea Party strategies: building an academic and intellectual network that would create and promote its own ‘science’ to attack COVID mitigation policies.”
Rupert Murdoch founded NewsCorp, which today includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, two of the most notorious spreaders of both COVID-19 and climate disinformation. Elon Musk, after his purchase of Twitter, turned the social media outlet into the much darker X, arguably today’s most formidable science denial operation. The site has been weaponized to magnify climate denial and vaccine denial messaging, while drowning out actual authoritative scientific sources and voices. In turn, the Koch brothers supported climate denial think tanks, while Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox News nightly broadcasts worked overtime to convince Americans that both climate change and COVID-19 were hoaxes or that vaccines were ineffective or unsafe.
Petrostates—state actors dependent on fossil fuels for their sovereign wealth, who also veer towards autocratic rule to maintain tight control of their population—play an equally important role in the manufacturing and spread of antiscience propaganda. Russia and Saudi Arabia, in particular, have engaged in online disinformation campaigns with bots and trolls to polarize the public and spread antiscience disinformation. Both have conspired to sabotage global climate agreements. Russia has also been a major promoter of online anti-vaccine rhetoric, seemingly in an effort to further destabilize western democracies.
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Sadly, the U.S. itself must now be considered an authoritarian petrostate. The Trump Administration has worked with congressional Republicans who are currently in power to defund climate and vaccine science, while staffing various agencies with climate and vaccine deniers. Look no further than U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who appears to relish his role as antivaxxer-in-chief, or to Department of Energy secretary Chris Wright, who parrots denialist rhetoric about wind turbines, while promoting an energy agenda that doubles down on fossil fuel extraction.
Antiscience has gone beyond U.S. borders to Europe, Australia, and Africa. Defeating it will require unprecedented commitment and international cooperation, not only between scientific organizations, but also their host governments.
We can, and must, stop it. The stakes are literally the future of our civilization.
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