Industry and denial: climate change denialism via social epistemology of science

At Medsin's 2013 National Health Conference in Leeds, Ruth Laurence-King and I ran Healthy Planet's stream session on climate change, health and the fossil fuel industry's role in fuelling the climate change denial machine. This is the text of part of the stream, on the meaning of good and bad science in the context of the IPCC and NIPCC reports.

A few weeks ago, as most of you are probably aware, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released part I of its 5^th Assessment Report on climate change. The IPCC is a democratic body with participants from over 150 nations, which invites hundreds of scientists from across the globe to participate in constructing systematic reviews of the best evidence on issues of climate change in their area of expertise. The process by which these reports are constructed is laid bare for all to see on the IPCC’s websites, and the peer review process is entirely open – anyone can register to participate in the peer review process. The AR5 WGI report concluded that warming of the atmosphere and oceans was unequivocal, with it being more than 95% likely that human influence had been the dominant cause of observed warming since 1950.

With any luck, fewer of you will be aware of another report of climate change that was released in the past few months. Calling itself the second report of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), it details a list of grievances with the scientific consensus embodied in the IPCC reports, attempting to review evidence that weighs against the extent of anthropogenic climate change. This report was compiled by 47 authors (35 of them scientists from a variety of fields) working for the Heartland Institute, a libertarian think-tank bankrolled by tobacco, fossil fuel and pharmaceutical companies with a fine tradition of mounting ‘scientific’ resistance to evidence of the dangers of second-hand smoke, the existence of acid rain, and the growing depletion of the ozone layer  - ably assisted in many of these enterprises by Lead Author of the NIPCC report, former rocket physicist S Fred Singer. The NIPCC report finds, in contrast, that CO₂ is a mild greenhouse gas that may at most produce a fraction of a degree of global temperature increase, which in any case would probably be beneficial for the world overall.

On relevance, and defending the NHS

So I said I'd write something about the NHS 299 march at the Tory conference on Sunday to go on Sheffield Medsin's blog; this is the result.

Sheffield Medsin and Sheffield Save Our NHS joined over 50,000 people in Manchester on Sunday – including a zombie flashmob, a brass band, and a seven-year old girl with disproportionately large lungs who delivered the most rousing rendition of ‘When they say cut back…’ I’ve ever shouted reply to – to defend a universal health care system owned by the public and run for its health, and to stand in solidarity with health workers across the country facing job losses, and deteriorating working conditions. Those behind the compound perimeter of police and private G4S mercenaries could be left in little doubt that, as the thousands of voices raised in song outside reminded them, they were the 1%; and the 99% outside weren’t going to be ignored.

Not that they weren’t going to try their best to maintain such wilful ignorance. The lack of mainstream media coverage of recent changes to the NHS has been so predictable as to become a running joke amongst those aware of the impacts of cuts and privatisation on the nation’s health, so it’s hardly a surprise that Sunday’s demonstration was widely ignored in many venues – all the more so, since the tory-police-G4S triumvirate conspired to do their level best to prevent coverage. Where there was coverage, some worried that the diversity of people and issues on display served to ‘muddy the message’ of a march ostensibly publicised as campaigning to ‘save the NHS’. The idea, so the argument runs, is that campaigning against fracking, punitive welfare policies, or generally voicing opposition to austerity turns an actionable list of discrete demands into an inchoate expression of general discontent to which it is difficult to formulate a concrete response; these ‘non-NHS’-related demands then distract from the main opposition to the alterations to the organisational structure of the health system.