How the Attack on Science Is Becoming a Global Contagion

[NickB79]

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/how_the_attack_on_science_is_becoming_global_contagion/3039/

Ostensibly, they do so out of methodological doubt or economic interest. At heart, however, the continued skepticism about climate change is a repudiation of global and empirical thought. Hostility toward science is on the rise. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a trained quantum chemist, recently warned that Western societies are faced with a "post-fact world" in which emotions and ideology threaten to suppress scientific knowledge and evidence.

The foreign policy expert Ulrich Speck of the Washington, D.C.-based Transatlantic Academy has dubbed this new camp “territorialists,” in contrast to “globalists.” Territorialists find climate change suspect, in part because it could mean that Europeans or Americans have to forego material wealth in order to help other people living in faraway lands, such as the inhabitants of Pacific Islands. The climate doesn’t have walls, and the science studying it is globalist by nature. The worldwide network of measuring stations that monitor temperature, water salinity, and air currents is the same kind of masterpiece of international cooperation as the retrieval of the hugely important Vostok and Dome C ice cores — with their invaluable climate data — from the Antarctic by European, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian scientists, among others.

[tonyt53]

1. So many countries are already owned by the ultrawealthy that they cannot fight back.

[kristopher]

2. The claim that a wave of anti-science is cascading over humanity ...

... shows a complete lack of knowledge of the human condition. If we've moved backward (the sense of the piece) from where we might have been 50 years ago it is directly related to the industrial and commercial misuse of "science" to sell things to the public. I mean really, what average person can afford to take the time to discriminate between tobacco/fossil fuel/nuclear industry science and real academic work that is usually as clear as mud.
Industry funding of academic research which is designed to produce only helpful results for said industry permeates academia. Should it be a surprise that distrust follows such betrayal?