Epistemedia: the Role of Technology & Truth in Fact & Rumor (full text speech)

There is no evidence at all for this proposition. The climate is
always changing. By all the available long-term data series, such as
ice cores and the Sargasso Sea residues, confirmed by historical
accounts, temperatures are currently a little colder than the average
of the last 3000 years. It is warmer than the little ice age of the
1700s but around two degrees C colder than the Medieval Climate Optimum
around the turn of the millennium and other well documented warm
periods at 500 and 1000 BC.
 
But this empirical and historical record does not interest the
global warmers. They assert the fact of human caused global warming on
the basis of authority. Cited is an alleged “consensus of scientists.”
Since most actual scientists do not agree with the alleged consensus
(some 18 thousand of them signed a protest against it), the heretics
must be defrocked. These actual scientists are depicted as gullible or
vendible tools of a sinister conspiracy of oil executives at Exxon
Mobil or Halliburton, led by a diabolical horned figure—an all powerful
but possibly mythical beast—named Dick Cheney. The man behind the
petition of 18 thousand scientists is Arthur Robinson, the Caltech
protégé of double Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. Under the title Access
to
Energy, Robinson writes a monthly newsletter critique of spurious scientific “facts”.
 
A related “fact,” celebrated by the media, concerns the alleged
depletion of reserves of fossil fuel. As a practical matter, available
reserves are determined by technology. New technologies for extracting
oil from tar sands and shale render petroleum more abundant than ever
before in history. But if you don’t like these sources, coal and
natural gas are ubiquitous and can be readily converted into usable
energy liquids.
 
The global warming fabric of “fact,” however, condemns fossil fuels
and thus opposes their continued extraction. The false “fact” of human
caused climate change thus requires a complementary pseudo-fact of CO2
pollution and a further false fact of the exhaustion of fossil fuels.
 
Uranium, of course, remains abundant, but the media treats this form
of energy as dangerous, confusing power plants with bombs and
perpetuating the myth of widespread death and damage from the Soviet
nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. An elaborate government study reported
recently that no one outside the immediate area died as a result of the
Chernobyl incident.
 
The inversion of what I would call facticity (to differentiate it
from real factuality) began perhaps five decades ago when the media
similarly reported the “fact” of devastating environmental damage from
DDT. As has been rediscovered in recent times, DDT is by far the most
benign from of pesticide and its use succeeded in largely eliminating
the scourge of malaria, saving hundreds of millions of lives and
winning a well-deserved Nobel Prize for its inventor. Even the
scientific review board of the US Environmental Protection Agency that
launched the DDT ban found DDT to be entirely safe and environmentally
beneficial.