‘The science is settled’ on ‘the debate’ of climate change? Says who?

It would be easy to mock the matric student who has decided to “put her education on hold” and bunk school every Friday to protest.

After all, do we not have original ideas in SA? Do we have to copy global megastar climate activist Greta Thunberg?

Yet this young South African is, undoubtedly, earnest in her beliefs that this planet is going to collapse – into mass extinction, floods, fires and famines – within her lifetime.

Millions of teenagers around the world have bought into the hysteria, fanned by older activists.

There is something deeply disturbing about the climate change story … I won’t call it a debate, because there is not one.

And that is what is so disturbing.

Merely by writing this, I am being classified as a denialist on the same scale as anyone who denies the Holocaust.

Anyone who questions the narrative about global warming (notice how it morphed into climate change some years ago, on the back of record cold spell events worldwide) is shamed, usually with the conclusion that “the science is settled” when it comes to global warming.

The idea that one can ask questions about the issue is treated in the same way as one would a person advocating for paedophilia.

It worries me that the people applying these fascist-like principles are not only scientists – who should conduct themselves on the principles of open inquiry – but also journalists, who are supposed to be impartial and balanced.

The response to that, normally, is “you can’t balance lunacy”, followed by some personal insult.

“The science is settled” mantra bothers me. Admittedly I am no scientist, but I have seen too many actual scientists asking relevant questions and being shouted down by the mob not to be bothered.

I always come back to the classic example of the evidence doesn’t lie in the case of the Katyn Forest massacres of thousands of Polish officers in 1940. For decades, the Nazis were blamed – and a number were hanged after the Nuremburg trials after evidence proved their involvement.

In 1990, when the collapsing Soviet Union opened up its secret files, it admitted the slaughter had been carried out by Soviet troops on the orders of Stalin.

There is a similar “the science is settled” argument when it comes to internationally accepted dietary guidelines.

These were laid down decades ago by scientists with an uncomfortably close link to major food companies, it has recently emerged.

And the incidence of obesity and lifestyle-related diseases has skyrocketed around the world since.

Promoting a low carb, high fat, or “Keto” diet, the opposite of the nutrition guidelines, saw an ugly attempt by senior medical people at the University of Cape Town to silence Professor Tim Noakes, one of this country’s highest-rated research scientists.

His whole approach has been science-based and open-minded, and when he has found evidence that goes against his previous views, he has changed. And, as that movement grows worldwide, I am seeing too many cases of people’s lives being turned around to believe it is all “quackery”, as some critics have labelled it.

All of these issues are vital to the health of individual human beings and the health of our planet.

There needs to be more discussion, more openness and less fascist silencing of dissent.

If that makes me a denialist, that says more about those levelling that accusation.

I am just happy that I am not a lemming.

Brendan Seery

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